Block Island News

We've been going over to the Island for at least a couple of decades, generally in what's called "Shoulder Seasons", which translates to very early Spring and very late Autumn. Not so many silly tourists around. Turns out, the Native Block Islanders have been conducting an annual census for longer than we've been going over. To attempt to get a more or less accurate count, deep off season was chosen. Not too many day hopping mainlanders. Near as I can find, one doesn't have to show some form of Block Island (aka, New Shoreham, RI) ID to be counted. But, to discourage day hoppers from mucking up the count, said count is conducted after that last boat leaves.

Did I mention that the appointed day is Groundhog Day?? Well, yes it is. And, no, Block Island has no indigenous rodents of that description. Small detail. So, as one might expect of the Frequent and Enthusiastic Visitor, there is a yearning To Be Counted. We do "own" a small parcel of Block Island, but not enough to live in all year. So, it'd not be really cheating to Be Counted. OTOH, getting to the Island on 2 Feb. is dependent on the weather. Alas, pretty shitty this year. And all of the ones preceding. Or so I remember it. And one needs to find accommodation, of course. Not all that many open year round.

Not all years is the count published in the Block Island Times in a timely manner. But we mainlanders do get it timely this year: 1,014. The common wisdom is that the Island has a resident population of about 1,000. So it appears. No mention of how many were/are Frequent and Enthusiastic Visitors.

It's Rutting Season - part the second

It all began, IIRC, with that commie pinko professor from my undergraduate days: that Eccles was right. And, more to the point, that the USofA economy would not benefit from a morphing into the Switzerland of the Western Hemisphere. A number of essays here made such an assertion. Here is previous from 2013 (some go back to the beginning of this endeavor).

So, it was with some pride that I got here years before one of my more famous brethren. It must be noted that the author isn't of the tribe of commie pinko professors: he's "the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative economic think tank". But it is more true today than way back when. A few nuggets follow.

Since Mary Poppins's day, the financial sector as a whole — investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, cryptocurrency platforms and all the rest of it — has exploded as a share of the United States' gross domestic product. It now claims the highest share of corporate profits and attracts the highest share of top talent from top schools, in part by offering the highest compensation. But actual business investment has declined, to an average of 2.9 percent of G.D.P. over the past decade from 5.2 percent in the 1960s, when the film was released.

Yes, some of us took note of Blythe Masters folly at the time. Didn't stop the implosion from happening.

So, what do banks actually do these days, you might ask? Not much productive.

Less than 10 percent of Goldman's work in 2024, measured by revenue, was helping businesses raise capital. Loans of Goldman's own funds to operating businesses accounted for less than 2 percent of its assets. At JPMorgan Chase the figures were 4 and 5 percent; at Morgan Stanley, 7 and 2 percent. Even the efforts at helping to raise capital are misleading, because less than a tenth of it goes toward building anything new. The rest funds debt refinancing, balance sheet restructuring and mergers and acquisitions.

What's that Dire Straits line? "Money for nothing and chicks for free". And, of course, Jeffrey.

So few resources have gone toward new equipment, toward developing better ways to do things and toward hiring and training that productivity in America's manufacturing sector — the output generated per hour of labor — has been falling. More workers are now needed than in 2012 for the same result.

This should not be possible in a functional capitalist economy. In the past 20 years, the United States has gone from leading China in 60 of the 64 "frontier technologies" identified by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute to now trailing in all but seven.

Now, that's progress!! One might say: "oddly, no mention of Trump's pledge to restore American manufacturing??" Cass is, of course, still a card carrying member of the Right Wingnut/MAGA brigade, so I suppose he does have to mince words a bit.

I'll close with this tidbit, which I've long forgotten:

We should ban stock buybacks, which were illegal until the 1980s.

(It was 1982.)

More interesting, while that ends the graph, here's how it begins

We should reform our laws so that when companies go belly up, workers and their communities get to join the line for compensation ahead of the lenders who financed the mess.

Now, I don't know about you, but those are the words of a Traitor To His Tribe.

Almost 3

Well, another missed opportunity to catch up with Kent State. Here. American Stasi on parade. This is exactly what the Trump Base want.

By The Numbers - part the ninety eighth

Frosty the snowman...

The weathercritters are saying that much of Florida will have low temps at or below 32° over the weekend. So... is this the usual? Or has the freqency of freezing temps in Fla. lower than it used to be?

The star attraction is the 1894/95 Great Freeze. Some mentions elsewhere use this event(s) as proof that climate change is bogus!! While there have been ongoing freezes since then, some of which reside in my own long-term memory, this was a (so far) unique event. The wiki piece states that Orlando fell to a record 18°; my Google Weather app says that Orlando will bottom out at 26° on Sunday.

Here's a table for Orlando 32° days from 1892. Just from eyeballing, it's 'true' that the frequency (overall) has markedly decreased from 1892 to now. Who wooda thunk it? Although the volatility (by which I mean the range of 32° days for spans of years is now narrower), also from just eye-balling, appears greater now than way-back-when. That would conform to the results reported below. Here's the top ten years (5⁺ days in a year)

2010
1989
1985
1981
1977
1970
1958
1938
1935
1928
1927
1918
1908

1938 and earlier lead by a nose.

2010, oops, has the most at 12. May be we can find out why.

There's an old saying among the weather geeks: if you know where the jet stream is going, you know what the weather will be.

In general, may be. Here's a report from MIT (bastion of liberal bias), which describes how the northern jets are affected by climate change (global warming). In a nutshell: it's the historical overall temperature difference between polar air and mid-latitude air. The greater that difference, the jets move (more or less) in a circle around the North Pole at latitude well above the good old USofA. The jets don't fall south, allowing polar airmass to visit the lower 48. It's established that the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet. As the temperature difference narrows, the jets get hinky. The lower 48 gets uncomfortable. You can thank climate change.

NOAA's latest report. Why Ayatollah 49% Don^© forgot to scrub this, I don't know. Get it before it goes.

The last 10 years are the 10 warmest on record in the Arctic.

By The Numbers - part the ninety seventh

As many readers will know, I've grown accustomed to some of Dr. McElhone's adages, high among them: "it is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer." And, no, I don't attribute that to the Good Doctor. It's been around for ages; I just first heard it from him.

Which brings us to some obvious. Here is a report on MAHA and the attack on vaccination.

But a different way to think about it is this: as another attack on the country's threadbare social safety net by health libertarians whose strategy for making America healthy again appears straightforwardly to mean letting more of the country's weak and vulnerable suffer and die.

I've long since forgotten where it came from, but the gist of Trumpism is just this: cruelty is the point. And also The Rich damn sure ain't rich enough. Which bring us to the other bit of obvious

In some Southern states, such as Mississippi and Alabama, life expectancy is more than half a decade shorter than in Northeastern states, including Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York.

Look by county and the disparities are even starker, with life expectancy over a decade shorter in large swaths of Appalachia than in the upper Midwest. That's about the same as the life expectancy gap between Liechtenstein and Bangladesh.

So, the Rich plutocrats have convinced the victims of their evil that the problem is really the God hating Blue States. Stupid people just never learn. And that's also the point. Boeing has found out the hard way that assembling airplanes in North Carolina with marginally educated knuckledraggers is a lose-lose situation. And, of course, that's just the latest in a continuing saga of FUBAR, all in the name of union busting.

As has been written here a few times: who'll make the neat stuff if Trumpism drags the Blue States down to Shitholeville?

O Canada

Once again President Caligula and his horse faced wife are at it again. Yet again with Greenland, obviously part of the USofA. I mean, it's just 22 miles from Ellesmere Island, across the Nares Strait. It's almost in Canada, anyway. And President Caligula and his horse faced wife have proclaimed Canada as our 51^st state. Bank shot. Both are President Caligula and his horse faced wife's property. An all-weather, members only, golf club would be another feather in their caps.

Obituary - part the second

Well, once again: That Didn't Take Long.

Ayatollah 49% Don^© has managed to stir up Our Allies to the point that they're actively seeking to visit the USofA with (almost) financial ruin. Dumping a bunch of Treasuries, in and of itself wouldn't kill the USofA in a nano-second, but takes the Rest of The World one step closer to stripping the US Buck of Reserve Currency status. And that, as explained in Episode 1, puts USofA Debt into Zimbabwe Land. That's not good eats. Bretton Woods gave the USofA the luxury of paying its foreign debts by printing its own currency. No other country could/can do that. Think about that for an hour or two.

So far, European officials have signaled Greenland's sovereignty is a red line that's not up for compromise, while the Trump administration isn't budging either on its stance.

But the U.S. has a key vulnerability the EU can exploit, according to George Saravelos, head of FX research at Deutsche Bank.

"Europe owns Greenland, it also owns a lot of Treasuries," he wrote in a note on Sunday.

Holding those bonds helps balance America's massive external deficits, and Europe is the world's biggest lender to the U.S.

And, I'll bet, you thought that was China? Guess not.

The European hoard is said to be 12.6 Trillion Dollars worth. At least until it isn't.

According to the US Treasury, Japan is the largest single country holder, at $1,202,600,000,000 nominal last November. China is third with $682,600,000,000.

How difficult would it be to dump the US Buck as reserve currency and choose the Euro or Renminbi? General view is: will take more than Ayatollah Don^©'s infantile behavior. Me? I'm not so sure. He's clearly on a crusade to make America 19^th century again. Back when we were a third world country: a few Marie Antoinettes and the rest cake eaters. Only shitkickers would vote for such an idiot. And Batshit J. Moron means to intimidate all those Blue City Voters to stay home on Election Day. We'll see.

Don't believe Mammy Yokum? Go look at a county level vote map from 2020. See all those Blue Dots? That's what's had Batshit J. Moron going batshit since forever. Only stupid shitkickers want him. Discrete state/precinct maps, like this (haven't found a USofA one yet, but at least one dataset exists for the adventurous) show what Batshit J. Moron is up to in yet more detail.

He could just about end American Dominance just because he's so stupid. It ain't how many nukes ya got, it's whether you control international finance. But he's a failed (6 times that we know about) real estate knucklehead, and nothing more. It's a sure bet that he thinks Bretton Woods is a fine merlot. Only tyros drink merlot.

Kill All The Workers

There's that famous line from Shakespeare

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers

Capitalists follow a more inclusive motto

The only thing we do, is kill all the workers

So, may be that's the Achilles Heel of AI, as currently implemented. That's the conclusion, if you read between the lines.

Signaling the scale of capital that he believes he needs, OpenAI has committed to spending $1.4 trillion on data centers and related infrastructure.

The thing is: few if any of the pundits have grasped the import of even AI, as currently implemented. Throughout the history of the industrial revolution, capital has made money only by replacing labor. It has no intrinsic value. So, the $64,000 question - is there $1.4 trillion of labor up for redundancy? If you suck $1.4 trillion (plus profit on that expenditure) of buying power out of an economy, what are you left with? It would appear that AI, as currently implemented, proves at long last that the Luddites were right. After all, capitalists are in the labor rendundacy business. And, on the whole, they have no clue that the arithmetic has to add up if the economy/society is to survive.

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption; mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.
-- Marriner Eccles/1951

And just to add a bit of snark: Führer Trump is using the Fed renovation project to kneecap Powell. Part of that renovation is the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building.

Pollyana on LSD - part the third

Well, friend Tom Friedman has jumped the shark. Again. This recent essay is so ahistoric as not to be believed. After all, this is an educated almost geezer who should have his facts in hand. Apparantly not.

It evinces the sin of omission.

Because after talking to people in the U.S. oil industry, it is clear to me that if Trump wants to see U.S. companies invest billions of new dollars to repair Venezuela's oil infrastructure, the first thing they will tell him is that they need a return to the rule of law in Venezuela.

Like hell, that's what they want. They always want a benevolent (to them) dictator who'll keep wages at subsistence and the coveted resource at nada. Rule of law? Ha Ha. Only if the dictator and bidnezzmen get to make the law.

So, it seems, he's never heard of the original Banana Republic?

In 1911, Zemurray conspired with Manuel Bonilla, an ex-president of Honduras (1904-1907), and American mercenary Lee Christmas, to overthrow the civil government of Honduras and install a military government friendly to foreign businesses.

The mercenary army of the Cuyamel Fruit Company, led by Christmas, effected a coup d'état against President Miguel R. Dávila (1907-1911) and installed Bonilla (1912-1913). The United States ignored the deposition of the elected government of Honduras by a private army, justified by the U.S. State Department's misrepresenting Dávila as too politically liberal and a poor businessman whose management had indebted Honduras to Great Britain. This was a geopolitically unacceptable circumstance in light of the Monroe Doctrine.

United Fruit, et al, were happy.

Or the CIA's destruction of Mosaddegh in Iran? It was all about the oil, of course. So we got the Shah, a compliant dictator. The oil companies were happy.

On 19 August 1953, Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d'état orchestrated by the United States (CIA) and the United Kingdom (MI6). A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mossadegh nationalized and refused to concede to western oil demands. It was instigated by the United States (under the name TP-AJAX Project[8] or Operation Ajax) and the United Kingdom (under the name Operation Boot).

Fact is, bidnezzmen always would rather a compliant dictator, who keeps labor at subsistence wage and free access to the desired resource.

Obituary

It is just possible, though not welcome, that Führer Trump and his brown shirts will turn the USofA not great again, but a second or third rate country.

Understanding how that could happen depends on knowing how it is that the USofA became the biggest gorilla on Mother Earth. And, no, it isn't because of some assumed superior racial/ethnic identity.

It's because the USofA was the only developed country that exited WWII nearly entirely unscathed. These essays have mentioned Bretton Woods some times in the past.

The new economic system required an accepted vehicle for investment, trade, and payments. Unlike national economies, however, the international economy lacks a central government that can issue currency and manage its use. In the past this problem had been solved through the gold standard, but the architects of Bretton Woods did not consider this option feasible for the postwar political economy. Instead, they set up a system of fixed exchange rates managed by a series of newly created international institutions using the U.S. dollar (which was a gold standard currency for central banks) as a reserve currency.

If you read the whole page, you'll find that Bretton Woods agreement wasn't cast in stone, and changes have happened over the years. What remains the same, so far, is the Uncle Sam's Buck is still the international reserve currency. Trust me on this: that status is the ultimate global power. Nucular bombs aren't. Reserve currency is.

In 1973, OPEC decided it had had enough, and threw a bomb into the clubhouse. Still, Uncle Sam's Buck survived.

So: you'll know that the USofA is Just Another Country when the rest of the countries no longer recognize Uncle Sam's Buck as the international reserve currency. We'll be just like Zimbabwe.

There still must be some commonly accepted currency, after Uncle Sam's Buck leaves the stage. Might be the Euro, might be the Renminbi. In any case, it won't be Uncle Sam's Buck. With Führer Trump's and Miller's increasing bellicose actions, it won't take long for the Rest of the World to say Adios, Amigo to Uncle Sam. Go fuck yourself Sam.

The US Buck dies. RIP.

Sui Generis

Today's (dead trees) NYT has a clash betwixt Bruni and Stephens. As usual, the MAGAnaut lacks the insight to name the simple fact: countries/economies which run on extraction of natural resources are always Fascist. And not even countries, even right wingnut parts of countries.

And, of course, Stephens lays the condition in Venezuela to 'socialism', when the fact is Maduro was/is just another right wingnut tin pot dictator. Just like Führer Trump. Or Führer Trump's idol, Putin.

Walk back the BoM of any product, and there you will find some number of natural resources plucked from the belly of Mother Earth. The issue becomes a problem when most, if not all, of the state's GDP is that extraction. It then becomes a much more tractable problem for the dictator to control a single sector of the economy, and, as often as not, in a relatively small part of the state. Texas is the perfect example.

I expect that Führer Trump is planning to garrison the oil fields down there, and let the rest of the country go to Hell.

Of course, an economy highly, if not wholly, based on pulling stuff out of the belly of Mother Earth will die when the stuff runs out. And, of course, when the 'owners' of the extracted resource feel the heat as new technology makes the resource less profitable. Führer Trump has it in for any non-fossil fuel source of electricity. I wonder why? Could it be he intends, like any good dictator, to siphon off much of the oil revenue to TRO? It has at least 500 entities now. What's a couple more hidden in that deep state?

Windfall

For those campers licking their chops over the promise, implicit though it may be, that snagging all that Venezuelan oil for our own selves will appear as much lower prices at your local gas pump? Guess again.

There is a precedent in natural gas. The fossil fuel industry just ships it overseas for yet more moolah.

The new administration's plans to unleash American gas without restrictions would significantly hurt the economy here at home and expose U.S. residents to the volatility of the global gas market, the study shows. Natural gas prices could skyrocket by more than 30%. The average American household could see its energy bill rise by over $100 by 2050.

Of course, that study was done and released under Sleepy Joe (who hates the fossil fuel cabal, of course). Did they get the facts wrong? I doubt it. But Führer Trump will find some mindless RFK-nicks to claim that both LNG export and trans-shipping Venezuelan crude elsewhere (Russia? China?) Makes America Great Again. And the shitkickers who are his base will eat it up.

Deja Vu All Over Again - part the seventh

Does anyone recall when the USofA went into Haiti to "save it"? Didn't work. We left and paramilitary gangs have taken over.

Just saw headline on MSCommieNews "Paramilitary gangs patrolling streets in Caracas". I guess the MAGAthugs have no interest in learning from history.

Thought For The Day - 4 January 2026

Now that the cat is out of the bag: oil was the sole reason for invading Venezuela, how long until Führer Trump takes over Alberta, home of all that oil sands? May as well leave the other worthless provinces to those fags in Ottawa.

With proven reserves of 166 billion barrels, Alberta's oil sands, in the Fort McMurray region, possess the third-largest oil reserves in the world, behind Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.

Come to think of it, isn't Alberta trying to secede? Yes, yes it is. And this isn't a new contention!! Extractive economies hate, just HATE, any effort at conservation or progress. Hell, with all the Cowboy Esprit these days, makes one wonder when the horse and buggy will be mandated in Blue Cities? Give them all that horseshit to clean up.

Pollyanna on LSD - part the second

Stupid is as stupid does:

A 1994 U.S. military mission in Haiti that deposed a military junta and stabilized the country required some 25,000 personnel. Venezuela is about 33 times larger than Haiti, or roughly twice the size of California.

And, of course, Haiti has turned out to be such a perfect solution.