MikeM says the other thread is slow. This is a new one!
447 thoughts on “MidMay Open Thread”
The site has become very slow at loading, at least for me. Have others noticed that? If so, it might be time for a new thread.
Mike M.
Sorry for my misunderstanding on the step change. So a big drop all of the sudden in Jan. 2024, which was then pretty constant throughout 2024.
That does seem a little weird, and maybe the CDC is fudging the numbers. But again, if Narcan was made available to a bunch of first responders in Dec. 2023 or Jan. 2024 couldn’t that explain the sudden drop? I have no idea if Narcan is the answer – but just posit this as a possible explanation.
Ground News has been featured on a number of podcasts I listen to and YouTube shows I watch as a way to get both left- and right-leaning write-ups with an indicator of which way the source usually leans. In my short trial, I felt like Ground News’s “center” line was really a little left of center historically but it seems like a reasonable way to survey the coverage and try to pick through the various biases.
As far as benefits for illegal immigrants goes, I don’t pay taxes in California so don’t care if that state wants to go further into debt to pay benefits for non-citizens but federal funds spent FOR non-citizens — needy or not — is theft from future generations of American citizens who are presently voiceless. Past policies made some exceptions for people escaping from totalitarian regimes but these were relatively small in number — not the millions let in by the Obama and Biden administrations.
I will continue to support my local soup kitchens and food banks and have no issue with them helping out anyone regardless of citizenship status but that’s using MY money that I have and donate freely — not money that is being borrowed by the federal government placing liabilities on voiceless generations.
I don’t think there was a lot of ideological shift in the SC until the Burger court and I think documented jurisprudence played more of a role than ideology until the Bork nomination.
I honestly have been skeptical of the CDC for decades, ever since they tried to push a gun control “study” as an epdemiological one by treating gun violence as a disease. Their actions during the pandemic didn’t do anything to restore confidence in what was once a proud scientific and medical institution.
Mike M,
Maybe you need a better service provider. It loads for me in under 0.2 second. đ
I just tested: 700 Mb down, 40.5 Mb up.
RickA,
EMT’s have had Narcan forever. Cops have been carrying it for a number of years. Narcan was approved for OTC sale early in 2023. Of course. It would have taken time for that to fully work through the system from manufacturer’s to potential end users. But that would have resulted in a gradual reduction in fatalities, not a step function. A step function in such data has to be an artifact.
What probably happened was a change in either reporting procedures or in classification of deaths. CDC knows what changed and they know that the drop in fatalities is an artifact. But they are covering that up.
My provider speed (the evil Comcast) is on the order of a 2 hour video downloaded in about 2 minutes. Even if it were 4K, it would be not more than 8 minutes for a 2 hour video. Comcast has really upped their game in the last few years. Three years ago I was getting ~40 Mb down and ~5 Mb up.
I supposedly have 160 Mbps from Comcast, but I have not tested it. It seems to me that should be plenty fast for an all text page like this one. But it is Comcast, so maybe I am not getting what I am paying for.
MikeM,
Could be time for a new thread. That does speed loading. đ
Formatting a text page with a large number of comments using somewhat inefficient web code can take a lot of time if the local processor is slow, memory constrained, or using a different type of web browser. My iPhone / Chrome loads a long thread slower than my modern desktop / Windows / Chrome, probably 3X faster.
Mike M.
I think killing terrorists requires they be overseas.
The CDC was humbled by covid. I don’t think they performed well overall but did very well in certain areas. The basic info for the main covid page was well written, as in written clearly and concisely at an 8th grade level.
They did pretty well with tracking infection rates, vaccine effectiveness, monitoring for variants, and making the info public.
Some things such as not determining covid was airborne until late in the game was inexcusable. Their confusion on the efficacy of masks was also pretty bad. The politicians / management decisions to intentionally obfuscate things was a mistake. The initial testing rollout was a disaster. Once omicron got loose it was over for vaccines as far as slowing transmission, they knew everyone was going to get covid, and they basically just stopped talking about it.
The question is did they learn the right lessons? I don’t know.
The CDC should be kept around for a lot of good reasons, but they need to stop whining and start adapting for the next pandemic.
None of the legacy media has video of the incident over which the Congresswoman is being charged but X has at least 3 different angles so you can judge for yourself.
I doubt this is a conspiracy but more likely the legacy media can’t authenticate the videos and some outlets likely don’t try very hard. Regardless you can get useful info from X. https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1924616997096046888
Tom Scharf,
I’ll bet they get a change in venue, so depending on where the case is heard, she may well be convicted.
In any case, she looks to be certifiably nuts.
Russel, I think you will find this interview on Russian drones interesting . It starts out a bit jerky overview, but settles down to a fairly reasonably paced discussion.
I think the CDC did a terrible job with explaining the risk profile with age. A big part of the hysteria (and lack of public pushback against terrible policies) was that the CDC didn’t explain immediately and clearly that anyone under 60 in reasonable health was at very low risk of death, and those under 20 at near zero risk. They also hyped superspreader events, all the while not admitting that those events meant (for certain) transmission is airborne, meaning exposure to the virus is just about inevitable. There were so many things the CDC did wrong…. always adding hype…. that heads should long ago have rolled. They didn’t. The refusal to admit the virus would ultimately reach everyone made an already bad situation even worse, by encouraging terribly damaging public policies like school closures. Perhaps worst of all was the conspiracy among leaders at the CDC and elsewhere to discount the most likely source of the pandemic: sloppy, dangerous science likely created a new human pathogen….. one that killed ten+ million and cost many $trillions. The criminality they covered for is difficult to describe adequately.
Trump effect theoryâŚâŚ
Trump has been cozying up to Vladimir Putin in an effort to unite Europe for their own defense. That certainly has been the effect of Trumpâs interactions with Putin. Previously only Poland, and to some extent the UK, were gearing up to face off with Russia, but now France, Germany, the EU seem to have picked up the mantle. They have agreed to up defense spending from 2% to 5% of GDP. Germany in particular is on a spending tear and the entire of Europe are talking tough.
Maybe itâs the Trump effect
Like so many instruments of the federal government, the CDC has been increasingly political — and a willing tool of the politicians the bureaucracy likes — for the past 30-odd years. The pandemic simply made their actions more blatant.
I don’t know if the right solution is to disperse the bureaucracy away from DC like Kash Patel is trying to do with the FBI or to leave it all clustered inside the Beltway but then wall it off and ignore it like John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York”. I am firmly convinced that we DO need to starve the beast and cut it down to size.
Democratic capitalism has its faults and has made its share of missteps but there is precious little that an overpowering bureaucracy has done historically to correct any of that. I would rather rely on the power of openly shared information than bureaucracy and regulations. Why is it people who proclaim “the wisdom of the crowd” never think that the crowd can replace bureaucracy and governmental controls?
Mike M.:
Thanks for the explanation. Makes sense to me. Something to keep my eye on. I wonder if starting in Jan. 2025 the Trump administration will undo whatever change was made under Biden and there will be another step function up?
The new pope made his first personnel change by replacing the grand chancellor of the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences. The move was welcomed by the Pro-Life activists. Maybe we have a Conservative in sheepâs clothing.
âThe Vatican announced Monday the appointment of Cardinal Baldo Reina as grand chancellor of the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences, replacing Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia.â https://www.realclearreligion.org/2025/05/20/paglia_replaced_at_jpii_institute_1111388.html
Russia is making good on its threat to harden its border with Finland. There has been quite a bit of new military construction and relocation of personnel and hardware, details from Grok: https://x.com/i/grok/share/ETDvRmiA5w37U0w57ImH0xoXd
Finland is taking countermeasures.
DerekH,
The CDC can not be moved out of DC. It is in Atlanta. Which might be a cautionary tale as to the effectiveness of moving agencies out of DC.
Mike M,
Yes, chickens remain chickens, even if the hen house is moved. đ
Mike M,
I am aware the CDC was in Atlanta, I was making 3 separate comments to catch up to the various conversations. The comment about moving the bureaucracy (in general) was prompted by a recent news item on Patel’s comments regarding FBI HQ. You are correct however that the shenanigans at CDC show moving the location doesn’t always translate to changing the mentality.
Mostly unserious conspiracy thought for the day: I have half-seriously speculated in the past that Biden’s fairly obvious senility could all have been a ruse much like that practice by Vincent “The Chin” Gigante. What if the recent announcement of Biden’s prostate cancer is simply another ploy to avoid investigation and prosecution for his various misdeeds in office? After all, there’s no point in pursuing criminal charges against someone who could be months from dying. What if he has a miraculous recovery in a couple of years?
DerekH,
He will likely die within a couple of years, either from cancer or from dementia (or some of both). Not long destined for this world. The tragedy for the USA is that the guy ever was elected. It was obvious to me in 2020 he was suffering early stage dementia (I watched my dad go through it 15 years ago). The damage Biden did in office (or maybe more accurately, the damage his puppet masters did while he was in office) will hurt the country for many years to come. I believe he is unlikely to celebrate his 85th birthday.
SteveFeven
The thing that’s strange about the puppet masters is that they were not even cabinet members, apparently just closest staff.
I despised the guy which may have prevented me from detecting his decline as early as you did.
Did you pick it up because you’d seen the symptoms before and knew where they were leading?
Hillary Clinton is at it again. She insults motherhood. Later-in the interview she calls all Conservative women âHandmaidens to the Patriarchyâ. https://youtu.be/Ux4t9nVA3bo?si=9NO-jJSOI758TIyq
john ferguson,
Yes, Biden’s speech and his behavior both set off alarm bells. Inability to speak clearly…. combined with inability to really complete a thought…. were very different from Biden at 60 or 65. But it was his behavior and lack of self control (shouting matches with voters?!?!) which was even more convincing. That duplicated the changes in self-control that I had seen in my dad…. and at about the same age. The alarming thing was that Biden would, like my dad soon did, begin completely relying on me and a few others to ‘help him’ when he could not remember something or understand something. Not a great characteristic for a chief executive . When my dad was 78, still living on his own and still physically robust, we were concerned enough to have him tested for cognitive function…. which led to a diagnosis of “likely early stage dementia”. He died before he turned 84. As one of my brothers asked, “How can a once proud and fearless man be reduced to this?”
Yes, I guessed in 2020 what was coming, and I knew it wasn’t good.
SteveF,
Thanks for the detail. My dad’s decline could first have been detected in his checkbook. When I was trying to get the information I needed to calculate capital gain on their house, i went through the check-books. They went back to 1941 when they got married. The entries were written in a tiny form of engineering lettering. It didn’t dawn on me that the surprising consistency of his lettering over 70 years could reveal anything, but it did. It began to change in 2003; less precise, letter r could be slightlhy different in same entry, and different in another way in later entry same day.
Family hadn’t noticed anything at that point – I think subtle changes may not get picked up by people who are with someone continuously. By 2006, IIRC, there was some decay in the quality of his driving which had also been precise. He’d been a chaeffeur (hah, did you know how to spell it?) when he was 18 and had been trained for the job by a pro – basically “drive without apparent accelleration, decelleration, or detectable lateral force. Assume people in back have full martini glasses”
His decline was gentle. There was never any nastiness. He quit driving in 2008 when we discovered he couldn’t find his way if there was a detour.
He played sax and clarinet in a couple of swing bands on north shore. He continued to play and play well after he could no longer answer questions, able to improvise up to when he was forced to quit when he could no longer remeber how to put the clarinet together. But he smiles a lot, could be taken to the ususal cocktail parties, laughed at the right times. for the most part his dementia was undetectable unless you asked him a question when he’d sturggle but couldn’t come up with anything.
About 2010, he needed to be shown how to use table-ware at every meal, but once shown, fed himself. He did start to arrange food on plate before beginningn to eat, which he’d never done.
They moved out of house into assited living CCRC in Evanston in 2013. For reasons related to plumbing, Dad moved into Memory unit in early 2015 and died in September.
Sometime I’ll post some observations about how they ran the memory unit and a couple of stories about a guy who was perfectly ok who was staying in the memory unit to keep his wife company, said wife completely gone, couldn’t recognize him.
John Ferguson,
Sounds like your dad did pretty well into his late 80’s early 90’s…. which is very good for you. I may not be so lucky. I frequently converse in Portuguese, write code, design circuitry, and support customers with technical problems, but there’s no telling how long I will be able to do those kinds of things, since, like Biden, both my parents were in trouble before 80…. I’d prefer to die in the saddle, but there’s no way to know if that will be possible.
SteveF,
Dad departed at 95. his dad at 88, his dad’s father 77, and Grandfather at 64.
Grandfather who died at 77 was a locomotive engineer worked first for Milwaukke Road then the Soo. They wouldn’t let him go out on the road when he passed 70, so he became a hosteler, the guy who got up at 4 in the morning, got the fire going in the locomotives and supervises their inspection, then ran them out to where the trains were being assembled. He did this to the end.
Friend Herb Weiss is now 106 and except for walking is doing fine – still sharp.
I should add that Dad was still doing dance jobs at 93, when he couldn’t drive, couldn’t put the clarinet together unless someone in the band arranged the parts in a particular way on a table. It was a bit strange that he wouldn’t play it if someone elxe put it together. Apparently he could read music up to the end, but not anything else.
I don’t want to live that long.
There are a lot of vectors. There aren’t a lot of quick witted 90 year old’s out there, the few are the exception. The rate of decline is different and then there are plateaus and cliffs.
My Dad is 93 and is semi-there. He is riding a plateau but finally decided he needed to move to Florida to live with my sister after living alone for over 10 years. My sister and I find ourselves making decisions for him without asking his opinion lately. We just sold his house without a lot of input from him, something that would be unthinkable 20 years ago. He can feed and clothe himself fine but he can’t really process complicated subjects such as real estate transactions anymore.
The thing with Biden is his decline was obvious to * anyone * who had watched old age decline in a relative, and that turns out to be a large segment of the electorate. The political groupies had boxed themselves in by that point so denial was their only option, or else admit they were yanking everybody’s chain.
I do wonder what the people who were closest to Biden were thinking before that debate, remember that they challenged Trump to a debate! My thoughts were they could drug him up successfully for a couple hours. We may never know but I’m guessing they did and overdid it, got him so amped up that his mind blew up spectacularly.
I should add that this is why seniors are a prime target for scammers. People who target seniors are the worst scum out there.
Tom Scharf,
I buy your theory about the drug. I have no idea what it could have been, but do have some experience as a research assistant (1964-65) with drugs which were nearly impossible to associate results with dose. There was a narrow range in which their effect was the one desired and outside that range they either did nothing measurable or blew out the subject (mentally so to speak). And this sweet spot varied with individual and sometimes from day to day with same individual. We were being paid to develop a system for varying dosage and in 2 years couldn’t do it with the potions we were testing.
The thing that bothers me the most about this is that aides were running the country and possibly Jill. Als that the Dems seem to think he was a wonderful president, maybe one of the best. ?????
I can’t believe his cabinet didn’t figure out what was going on.
Tom Scharf,
“The thing with Biden is his decline was obvious to * anyone * who had watched old age decline in a relative, and that turns out to be a large segment of the electorate.”
For sure, and especially people over age 45 who more likely had responsibility to deal with that kind of decline in a relative.
With regard to Biden being drugged up for the debate: could be, but it could also have just been the stress that led to a total melt-down.
In any case, I find it almost unbelievable that the people around him 1) did not work to have him removed from office under the 25th, and 2) let him run for re-election in spite of knowing he was both demented and very likely to die from cancer long before serving out a second term, were he elected.
IMHO, these were very bad people doing very bad things.
Team Biden challenged Trump to debate, but with rules that were very favorable to Biden. I suspect they were shocked when Trump accepted without negotiating. Then they were stuck.
No doubt Biden’s staff were running things on a day-to-day basis. But I think that somebody had to be giving them direction. Jill was no doubt influencing things, but probably mostly by manipulating Joe. I doubt that staff were taking orders from her.
My nominee for the man behind the curtain is Obama. Remember that he bought a mansion in D.C. in contradiction of all precedent (Wilson doesn’t count). He was there frequently and there were reports of top White House staff making regular calls on the mansion, Maybe there was nothing to those reports or maybe they were just ignored.
Is is plausible that Obama might have actually done such a thing? Duh.
SteveF —
Agreed. I thought it was fairly obvious in 2020 that Biden was already suffering from diminished capacity although I had questions about whether it was real or an act to escape legal repercussions for his past misuse of official powers.
If it was real, it seemed to me they could only trot him out for 2-3 hours at a time and probably had to drug him up for even that so the pandemic was perfect timing for him to go into hiding that summer.
Continuing to run him in the election in that state was bad enough but continuing that for four years was — in my non-legal opinion — criminal.
I think the reason that Biden was handed the nomination in 2020 was that he would be pliable. He was probably more pliable than expected. And Harris got foisted on Biden because she would be pliable when she finally took over. She messed that up by being obviously inept.
Once you recognize that a not-very-capable President was intentional, the coverup, the refusal to use the 25th, and even the re-election “campaign” makes sense. They just got too arrogant about their ability to get a senile Biden over the finish line a second time.
Yes, there is some possibility the Democrat plan was to challenge Trump to a debate with unacceptable rules and hope Trump declined to participate. “Make my day”, ha ha. That will live in infamy.
Walter Russell Mead discovers that the elites define democracy as their side winning.
Why Democracy Is in Retreat https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-democracy-is-in-retreat-advocates-invert-its-meaning-to-claim-partisan-losses-as-undemocratic-22ceee2d?st=EPRgxP&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
“Under the second definition, it becomes the duty of democracy advocates to suppress their domestic opponents. The police should investigate citizens who post âantidemocraticâ tweets about trans people or migration. Governments can and should ban antidemocratic candidates or outlaw antidemocratic political parties for the crime of advocating âundemocraticâ ideas. It doesnât matter if these ideas are popular. The more popular an âantidemocraticâ idea becomes, the more necessary it is to suppress its supporters.
This approach is madnessâan unmitigated and total disaster for the democratic cause.
…
Democracy is about self-government, not good government. It is if anything a tool by which the majority can check the pretensions and the delusions of a self-regarding elite.”
Mike M.
Maybe not Obama. He has been reported more than once to not hold Biden in high regard, nor does Biden evidently have any use for him. Don’t forget Obama’s reported statement that Biden could be counted on to F__k it up. And I think he was right.
It doesn’t seem possible, but maybe there was no shadow-cabinet.
MikeM
Team Biden challenged Trump to debate, but with rules that were very favorable to Biden. I suspect they were shocked when Trump accepted without negotiating.
One wonders how or why they were surprised. Biden’s growing mental incapacity was pretty obvious to all but his fiercest supporters. Saying “shut up! shut up! shut up!” didn’t make Trump or Trump’s handlers become unaware of it.
MikeM
the refusal to use the 25th,
That wouldn’t have worked without Biden’s active cooperation. The 25th just isn’t really designed for a president who is not comatose. Biden was active enough to be able to thwart the first move. Then the entire process would become suicide for the Dems. The couldn’t use that.
The same will be true should Trump become mentally deficient enough for people to wish the 25th was useable.
President in a coma? 25th works. President toddling around 3rd base on the way to “totally babbling at home”? Not very useful.
Just concluded a one hour press conference between Trump and the president of South Africa in the oval office.âŚ.. I have never seen anything like it.
It was a bigger deal than the Zelenskyy brouhaha
Bravo
Tom Scharf:
Democracy is about self-government, not good government.
Best thing I’ve read in years.
It does help to be reminded of this as we wade through the transition Trump and associates are bringing us.
At one point, when Ramaphosa was downplaying the killing,Trump ambushed him:
âPresident Trump says to “turn down the lights” and then proceeds to show South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, videos of South African political leaders calling for the death of white South Afrikaners. Afterwards, he showed the president video of the 1,000 crosses that symbolize each white farmer MURDERED in South Africa.â
john a ferguson: “Maybe not Obama. He has been reported more than once to not hold Biden in high regard, nor does Biden evidently have any use for him.”
What I suggested is consistent with that. Obama and Biden were not working together. What I suggest is that Obama was subverting the Biden administration.
Many of Biden’s staff and top appointments had previously been part of the Obama administration. With Biden not on top of things, they could have easily been taking guidance from Obama. And Obama’s contempt for Biden might well have made him open to that even if he was not otherwise inclined to meddle.
Lucia,
You may be right about the utility of the 25th.
Still, there seems to me a good chance that if those around Biden would have resigned, all saying he shouldn’t be in office, he might himself resign, which is what he should have done, certainly no later than early 2023, if not before. Nixon resigned when his political position became untenable. That could have (should have!) happened to Biden…… but didn’t.
lucia wrote: “Bidenâs growing mental incapacity was pretty obvious to all but his fiercest supporters.”
It was not just Biden’s fiercest supporters who were oblivious. Almost the entire national news media (except Fox News) claimed to be oblivious until after the debate. Over 40% of voters approved of the job Biden was doing.
I suspect that team Biden was sufficiently arrogant and out of touch that they thought they were fooling pretty much everybody. And their contempt for Trump likely led them to believe that Trump would not debate unless he got his own way. So they were stunned when Trump called their bluff.
Mike M. I agree with your perception of how the Obama management of the Biden regime in his so-to-speak absence makes good sense. Thanks for explaining.
I especially like the idea the Biden’s team proposed the early debat never guessing that he would accept. I suspect that the Trump gang had a very clear pictures of Biden’s capabilities at that point.
lucia,
I think you are right about the 25th be unusable given two conditions. One is the President’s incapacity being sufficiently well hidden that partisans could plausibly deny it. The other is politics divided into two tribes who put tribe above country.
If Biden had been as exposed to public view as Trump has been and if the press had reported that honestly, then it would not been long before the public would have been clamoring for his removal. Political survival would have required the Dems in Congress to back the VP in a battle over the 25th.
Congress surely knew that all was not right with Biden. They could have pushed to know more. If Harris and the cabinet had invoked the 25th and if Congress put country first, then Congress would have backed sidelining Biden.
SteveF,
Nixon was smart, he could read the wrting on the wall.
Biden would have had to ask what it meant?
The solution to Presidential incapacity is not medical exams or cognitive tests. It is for the President to be in very frequent exposure to the press and the public. Not controlled, scripted events, but ones where the President has to take questions and defend himself. Then the public can make an informed judgement of Presidential capacity.
Even if Biden had stepped aside we wouldn’t have gotten much different from Harris. She seemed rather pliable to the WH consensus.
The Walter Russell Mead columns that Tom linked is good but the guy goes too easy on the “democracy advocates”.
Too many democracy advocates today argue that the ignorant and willful popular masses have failed the cause of democracy. This is a cop-out.
No. It is not a cop-out. It is the “democracy advocates” admitting that they are enemies of democracy.
Russell,
Anecdotally a person I know owned a factory in S. Africa and was attacked in their home and lost an eye and finger over the incident a few years back. They immigrated to the US. I’m inclined to believe there are real problems over there.
I say good riddance to USAID. It was clearly a money laundering operation with actual help being an unintended result.
âAt USAID, 12 cents of every dollar was reaching the recipient. That means that in order for us to get aid to somebody, we had to spend all this other money supporting this foreign aid industrial complex.â
Although I am generally not a fan of Trump personally, I thought he was brilliant at the Ramaphosa press conference. Between himself and the others there it brought a human perspective to what is happening in South Africa. SA is such an incredible basket case that I don’t know that anything can be done.
Will be interested in perspective of Serpentza a South African youtuber who moved to China for 10 years and mostly (negatively) comments on China. He has told the story of how his best friend was killed and people came very close to murdering his mother on their farm. In one of his videos he state that he hated SA.
JD Ohio,
I think there is a real possibility South Africa will descend into a lawless failed state, with all the murder and destruction that leads to. The safeguards against anarchy are being gradually dismantled; we can hope they turn it around, but I doubt this will turn out well.
South Africa has 8 times the murder rate of the USA. The US city with an even higher rate than South Africa? Washington DC.
NBC News:
“There were 12 murders on farms last year, The Associated Press reported, citing police statistics. One of the victims was a farmer, and the rest were farmworkers, none of whom were identified by race, according to the AP. ”
Something is not adding up, likely that police don’t normally cite “farm worker” or “farmer” on a murder statistic so absence of evidence = …
Beyond the typical reactionary “Trump must be wildly wrong about everything” take is the really odd narrative that politicians from a minority party specifically advocating killing white people is “not government policy” so should be dismissed … or something.
My BS meter is pegged for both sides right now.
Russel,
I think you will find this interview on Russian drones interesting . It starts out a bit jerky of an overview, but settles down to a fairly reasonably paced discussion.
Another post referencing some of the same in the above:
The interceptor drone is launched by hand after acquiring the target by sighting. Not much different than using a typical
MANPAD. I have seen vid of security carrying these for the latest Red Square events for drone defense.
âAnother interception of Ukrainian medium-altitude optical-electronic reconnaissance UAV âFuria-11SMâ by a “Yolka”.
This device is equipped with a bi-spectral thermal-television homing head, synchronized with an AI module loaded with algorithms for selecting optical and thermal-contrast aerial targets against open space and ground backgrounds, without the need for operator radio correction from a control terminal. According to the developer, the declared operational range of the device reaches 20 km, and its flight speed is 350 km/h, which is sufficient to intercept all Ukrainian Armed Forces gasoline-powered UAVs without exception, even when pursuing them.
These interceptor drones will become the main support for assault groups in forming an anti-drone barrier over sectors of offensive operations.â
Steve F “South Africa has 8 times the murder rate of the USA. The US city with an even higher rate than South Africa? Washington DC.”
I think there is about an 85% chance of South African failure because their electrical grid is failing and getting worse. Between crime and energy problems, it is hard to see who would invest in SA.
Listened to part of Ramaposa’s post meeting interview. In it he excused the crime as being part of unemployment and economic deprivation. If that is the case the State, which has been accused of stealing money from the electric company, is ultimately responsible for the crime.
I feel that all Trump can do is help a little and he did that well today.
Looks like Letitia James is toast in NY unless a very biased jury gives her a pass. She repeatedly falsely stated over 20 years that she owned a 4 unit bldg when it was a 5 unit to get a better mortgage. Electrical connections prove it is a 5 unit.
I would be shocked if a jury in NY or Maryland convicted Jame of anything. It’s an “unless caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl” situation. Trump is so loathed in those states that anyone who tried to ruin him or put him in jail will be protected….. worst possible outcome for James: a hung jury. OJ got away with it. So will James.
Ed Forbes,
Those drones are still pretty primitive, sort of like combat airplanes in WWI. I suspect they will develop into versions that render manned aircraft obsolete….. little more than pilot death traps. AI controlled hunter-killer drones are the next logical step. Skynet here we come.
The Wiki article on Brilliant Pebbles gives a very detailed review of a couple of earlier approaches to “golden dome”
One would think that nothing like the Israeli system would work in a country our size. or his nibs really is talking about golden domelets.
john ferguson,
I doubt any ABM system would be completely effective, and even if initially effective would likely be rendered ineffective in short order due to countermeasures. So considering the destructive potential of nuclear weapons, avoiding nuclear conflict seems to me the most sensible approach.
Out-migration of White citizens from South Africa has been reasonably steady at about 0.4% per year (about 20,000) for the last several years. I would look at that number as a better indicator of the political/social situation in South Africa than news reports, which are very likely to be biased.
As SteveF says, avoiding nuclear conflict is the most sensible approach.. An ABM system could help avoid a nuclear conflict.
North Korea would love to impose its will on South Korea. They can not do that now because the South is unlikely to be a pushover and the US will help the South. They could use nukes to threaten the South, but that would not work as long as we have the South’s backs.
But what if the North were to succeed in developing an ICBM that could reach the US? That would create an implied threat that US intervention would result in the destruction of one or more US cities. Would the North risk doing that? I don’t think that is the right question. The right question is whether WE would risk the North risking that. We probably wouldn’t. Then the North would be free to intimidate the South since the South would no longer be able to count on US support.
A decent ABM system would totally change the calculus. We could announce that an unsuccessful attempt to nuke a US city would be treated the same as a successful attempt and would bring a nuclear response. In that case, I think we could be confident that the Norks or Iranians would not dare try it.
Read up on Brilliant Pebbles. Friends at Lincoln Labs worked on the program.
“Read up on Brilliant Pebbles.”
Not unless you give me a good reason. I don’t why one proposal from 40 years ago would be especially relevant to Golden Dome.
Tom: “the really odd narrative that politicians from a minority party specifically advocating killing white people is ânot government policyâ so should be dismissed ⌠or something.”
It only seems odd because it’s an attempt to deflect from something worse that they canât just pretend isn’t happening any more.
The three steps of the media narrative:
1) it isn’t happening.
2) it’s happening but it’s isolated.
3) here’s why it’s a good thing!
The “Kill the Boers” song is apparently just a little historical ditty sung for purely nostalgic reasons…
Maybe these people should look up the “pyramid of white supremacy”. Change the title a little bit and take a look where SA are currently situated because it’s a hell of a lot closer to genocide than “looked at me the wrong way” they feel requires systemic “corrective” action before it’s too late over here.
I finally found some more reliable data on murder rates in South Africa. The overall rate is very high (near 40 per year per 100,000 population), but like in the USA most murders are young Black men killing other young Black men. The murder rate for White South Africans is about 12.5 per year per 100,000 population.
To put these numbers in perspective: the overall murder rate in the USA is ~6.9 per year per 100,000 population. Among White people in the USA, the rate is about 2.0 per year per 100,000 population. Among Black people in the USA, the rate is about 40 per year per 100,000 population (mostly young Black men killing young Black men).
By comparison, the murder rate in Haiti is about 60 per year per 100,000 population, and in Germany a bit under 1 per year per 100,000 population.
Mike,
A decent ABM system would totally change the calculus. We could announce that an unsuccessful attempt to nuke a US city would be treated the same as a successful attempt and would bring a nuclear response.
Yes. The system doesn’t have to work for hundreds or even dozens of engagements. It basically has to credibly shift the odds that the first limited attack will fail, in order to be an effective deterrent. The threat of retaliation does the rest of the work.
Setting such considerations aside and all other things held equal, I’d prefer having some chance of a U.S. city being spared due to a missile interception instead of zero chance. The argument (IMO) that because we can’t guarantee perfect success that the job isn’t worth undertaking always struck me as pretty dubious. There are losses in wars; shit happens. The problem may be that Americans have become used to feeling highly invulnerable and safe, which was probably never really justified anyway.
mark bofill: “Iâd prefer having some chance of a U.S. city being spared due to a missile interception instead of zero chance. The argument (IMO) that because we canât guarantee perfect success that the job isnât worth undertaking always struck me as pretty dubious. ”
Indeed. Perfect success is only needed if you want to hide behind the ABM system as a shield while you launch a first strike.
MAD is actually pretty stable, but if it fails it will be catastrophic. ABM’s should make it more stable since the aggressor will be unsure of success but will still be sure of a response. And it greatly reduces the chances that a mistake or one bad actor will trigger a catastrophic cascade.
We are pretty much wide open to a nuke missile strike. We would need to absorb it and then strike back.
Anti-missile systems could be effective against lesser foes such as Iran and North Korea. Even with an advanced foe such as Russia or China there might be a serious question on how effective the system really is to create some deterrence.
As I always say you can also just put the nuke on rubber dingy and then drive it in a minivan to downtown Miami.
It’s hard to say but my impression is that any system that actually achieved effectiveness could probably be countered with upgraded offensive systems faster and with less expense than this technically difficult defensive shield system. Sub launched cruise missiles are 6 minutes from DC.
As Mark says even a system that is 50% effective has real value. The bigger question is whether it is worth the cost. Probably not to stop Russia / China but probably so to keep low end Iran and North Korea at bay. Keep the capabilities secret to keep everyone guessing and pretend there is black magic space systems up there.
Phil Gramm, who is one of very few politicians for whom I have ever had some respect, coauthored an article pointing to the historical Republican election failures after pushing through tariff increases.
The article linked below lists the many times the US, and even before the US became the US, has repudiated increases in tariffs. I suspect. as in the current case, the past proponents were using âit will be different this timeâ argument.
I would think that the more astute Republican political long term strategists would at some point decide that acting on government reduction instead of paying it lip service might well require losing control of congress at least temporarily. Democrats have been successful with slim majorities in pushing through more government when in power that the Republicans are hesitant to attempt to roll back when they are in control. The big, beautiful bill is a prime example of this. The Republicans need to concentrate on the reverse of the Democrat strategy. If it turns out that the voting public prefers more government at least that will be revealed and those favoring less will know to concentrate on another path. Politicians will be guided by public opinion and the prevailing intelligentsia that influences that opinion.
The arms race in Europe is at full throttle.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte:
“Russia is at an enormous pace reconstituting itself. They are producing at this moment, ammunition at a level which has not been seen in recent decades. They produce four times as much ammunition as the whole of NATO is producing as we speak. They’re reconstituting their armies. Their whole economy is on a war footing.
We have had open sources saying, from intelligence services, that by 2027 or by 2030 or by 2032 they might be able to be at such a level of strength that they could try something silly.
What we have to do as NATO is to make sure that Putin knows that if he attacks now or in the near future, that our reaction will be devastating.”
Video: https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1925457136055730587
The new budget bill front loads tax cuts and back loads budget cuts until after Trump leaves office.
Big surprise. Nothing is more big and beautiful to a politician than his successor paying all his past due bills.
I find both parties to be near indistinguishable in this aspect. Very frustrating. Those are what the incentives reliably produce.
Russell,
Russia has to do this because of all their losses in Ukraine. Eventually the story will be “look how modern Russia’s armed forces are”. That’s because all their old stuff was destroyed.
Economically this is like bringing out pallets of money and setting them on fire. Imagine what Russia could have alternately done with all this revenue.
As for Europe all I see is infinite planning to plan. There is a 3 year old land war on their doorstep and they haven’t really done anything other than make promises to spend money later.
Russia can always choose to stay on a war footing and war economy for the long game against NATO but that isn’t exactly how economists would draw up an economic prosperity plan.
If Russia does choose this path then NATO will need to respond. The bigger problem is really China and their massive industrial advantage IMO. We aren’t very far away from them having a clear advantage in any conventional war.
Tom, your post:
âThere is a 3 year old land war on their doorstep and they havenât really done anything other than make promises to spend money later.
I agree for all except Poland:
âPoland Becomes a Defense Colossus
Poland has launched a huge and historic expansion of its military. What will the consequences be?â https://cepa.org/article/poland-becomes-a-defense-colossus
Tom : [Eventually the story will be âlook how modern Russiaâs armed forces areâ. Thatâs because all their old stuff was destroyed.]
Every country in Europe has had all of their old junk reduced to scrap in the Ukraine war. The problem for Western Europe is the Russians have rebuilt and expanded their production where the west hasnât.
Mike M. The Wiki article I suggested discussed the options which had been identified at the time on how to do this. Other than satellite laser attack systems which weren’t available then, the issues seem the same. Do we want to set up to destroy missiles right after they are launched or on their descent? Do we want to set up our defenses around likely targets or likely launch lcations? Which choice is more effective and maybe more economikcal?
Don’t you think these choices are still there? And worth thinking about?
I can remember the Nike Sites around Chicago when I was Kid in the ’50s. I can’t remember when they were finally shut down, but I think it was after 1960.
The arms race in Europe and Russia are deceptively built on the Keynesian notion that government spending will spike up the economy. That works well with keeping the citizenry feeling more contented when on a war footing. Eventually there will be a price to pay just as will happen with the Republican and Democrat profligate deficit spending.
Ed, Your post:
âThe problem for Western Europe is the Russians have rebuilt and expanded their production where the west hasnât.â
That is not true.
All of European NATO have increased their military spending by almost 100 % as a fraction of GDP: https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2025/number/1/article/boosting-the-european-defence-industry-in-a-hostile-world.html
For example, Rheinmetall has been making armaments for Germany since the time of the US Civil War; they make the Leopard main battle tank. They have been on an expansion tear.
âSoaring demand and orders
Ammunition boom: Rheinmetallâs annual production of artillery shells has increased tenfold and is expected to reach 1.1 million rounds by 2027, up from 750,000 today.
New facilities: The company is expanding production capabilities across Germany, Lithuania, Romania, and Ukraine to meet regional demand.
Landmark contracts: In 2024, Rheinmetall secured an âŹ8.5 billion artillery contract with the German government, one of the largest in its history.
Backlog strength: The companyâs order book now exceeds âŹ30 billion, reflecting multi-year revenue visibility.â
âBeyond traditional hardware, Rheinmetall is investing in:
Drone and counter-drone systems
AI-powered battlefield software
Mobile air defence solutionsâ https://www.home.saxo/content/articles/equities/rheinmetall-the-nvidia-of-defence-21032025
Nukes can be delivered by a competent foe by land, air, and sea. The nuclear triad.
Hypersonic maneuverable missiles have obsoleted pure ballistic defense systems but there are not many hypersonic missiles in production but there easily could be by the time a defense system was deployed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFNa-7e5Z7o
What I saw in the Iran attack on Israel was somewhat encouraging (slow flying cruise missiles all taken out) but even with low numbers of ballistic missiles many made it through and landed “intact enough” even after interception for a nuke to be plenty effective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gURxYqfHNLk
Targeting the ICBM’s on ascent requires a space based system. This is probably the easiest targeting exercise but those defense satellites would be the prime target before the ICBM launch and are likely very vulnerable.
Even in the 1980’s both sides had plans to deploy decoys on descent making it a difficult detection and numbers game.
Personally I think it is still worthy of study but not worthy of large scale production and deployment. MAD will have to do for China and Russia.
Yes, the Polish seem to be ready to storm Moscow tomorrow, ha ha.
I still maintain if the war comes down to who can shovel more money in a furnace then the west will easily win that race.
john ferguson,
Those questions are definitely worth thinking about. By the decision makers and engineers. Any thinking I might do about them would be just idle speculation.
The big thing that has changed in the last 40 years is computing power. I would think that might very well turn an impractical system into a workable one.
Mike M.
I have very great respect for the observations of our colleagues on this site including the things I don’t initially agree with.
I try very hard to coninually expose myself to views I would never have thought of myself.
Russell : âAll of European NATO have increased their military spending by almost 100 % as a fraction of GDPâ
Your linked article doesnât seem to say what you imply. Note that 100% of a very small number is still a very small number
from your linked article:
âYet, ordered quantities remain small, especially when compared to Russian output or to lost capabilities in the last few decades (Wolff et al., 2024). Ordered quantities are also relatively low in France and other key European countries.â
.
âEuropean production remains low while prices are among the highest, possibly indicating the lack of scale.â
For example, western heavy artillery shells cost about 3 times more than Russian heavy artillery shells. The same with the cost of tank and artillery production. Russia gets MUCH more âbang for the buckâ for military $ spent than the west.
.
.
If it could reliably intercept a handful of ICBM’s, then an ABM system could make sense, assuming the cost is not astronomical. Of course, for a lesser price, you might be able to convince the crazies in N Korea and Iran to forget about IBMs and nuclear weapons. Tom Scharf’s suggestion of a van with a big nuclear weapon driving to New York still presents big problem considering the nut-cakes running N Korea and Iran.
But stopping hundreds of ICBM’s from Russia or China? No. They are going to get past whatever defense you might imagine. MAD lives.
I don’t see why one would conclude that Golden Dome can’t work. Iron Dome deals with a large number of very small projectiles with a flight time of a minute or two. And it shoots down nearly 90% of the ones deemed a threat.
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/israels-missile-defense-performance-views-gulf
“Based on open-source analysis, around fifty of Iranâs missiles wound up hitting Israel, including as many as thirty-three at Nevatim Air Base alone. Although some of these impacts could be debris from interceptions, most of the impact videos and visible craters indicate explosive missile impacts.”
Steve F: “I would be shocked if a jury in NY or Maryland convicted Jame of anything. ”
Marilyn Mosby the Leftie Baltimore prosecutor was convicted of mortgage fraud and perjury in a situation similar to James. Andrew McCarthy of the National Review has said that juries in the federal Southern District of NY are not horrible because the jury pool includes Westchester County. I think there is a respectable chance that she can be convicted but of course with a good jury draw she will be acquitted.
Apparently, she is also a slumlord because 2 of her tenants are complaining of flaking paint in their apartments and lack of maintenance. If this becomes widely known it won’t help her.
Woohoo!
â Michael Mannâs Legal Costs Now Climbing Past $1.1 Million
3 hours ago Charles Rotter 5 Comments
The Washington, D.C. Superior Courtâs May 22, 2025 ruling against Michael Mann is the latest in a series of defeats for the climate scientistâs prolonged legal offensive against his critics. Judge Alfred S. Irving ordered Mann to pay $477,350.80 in attorneyâs fees and related costs to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Rand Simberg, following their successful partial dismissal of claims under the Districtâs Anti-SLAPP Act.â https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/05/22/michael-manns-legal-costs-now-climbing-past-1-1-million/
lucia,
from a reliable Ukrainian source:
â Lavrov called the suggestion to hold the talks between Russia and Ukraine in Vatican an “inelegant one.”
Earlier, Bloomberg also reported that Russia is not keen on holding talks in the Vatican:
Italy is a signatory to the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant for Putin in March 2023 for war crimes in Ukraine. In principle, at least, it would be obliged to arrest him if he came to Rome.
The issue is complicated further by relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church led by Patriarch Kirill, a vocal supporter of Putin and the war in Ukraine. The Russian Church opposes the Vaticanâs involvement in the peace talks, people with knowledge of the issue said. â https://x.com/gerashchenko_en/status/1925860635776074191?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
Ukrainian Golden Dome in actionâŚ.
âVideo shows a Ukrainian MIM-23 I-HAWK surface-to-air missile striking a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile midair over western Ukraine.â
Video: https://x.com/polymarketintel/status/1925895320531026217?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
The 40-year-old US SAM system, built to face a Soviet threat and now fighting a Russian one.
I have only been following this OSINT site for a few weeks. So far they have been reliable.
I’m sure Mann has financial benefactors that will foot the bill. At least he did when all this started. It is an extraordinary waste of resources, a very DC type of outcome.
Far too much environmental donations are spent on lawyers nowadays. I can’t recall a single article on how environmentalists actually did something useful like cleaning up garbage. It’s all spent on legal activism and the crazies go sit in front of traffic.
Stephen Moore has a WSJ article that points to the CBOâs estimates of the revenue lost and gained by tax increases and cuts favoring tax increases by not considering the dynamics of these actions. Historically these estimates have made some large errors in overestimating revenue from tax increases and overestimated the losses in revenues from tax cutting. The CBOâs estimates are then used by the media as the gospel truth with no references to their failed past performances.
Joseph Sternberg points to the similarities of the media wrongly blaming proposed tax cuts by the short lived British Prime Minister, Liz Truss, âwho still gets blamed for Britainâs economic problems today, even though her tax cuts were never implemented and bond yields now have settled higher than they were immediately after her budgetâ and media blaming the Big Beautiful Bill tax measures for long bond rates increasing.
The problem as I see it is that those more conservative parties attempting to cut taxes do a terrible job of attempting to explain the facts of the matter. They are too weak kneed or ignorant or both to refute what media puts out in always arguing for more government. It is certainly not the case that media and most of the intelligentsia understands the economic fundamentals operating.
Yes, and once borrowing costs go up then the sh** hits the fan and there is no easy fix. It’s a long term problem and it’s obvious.
You can grow your way out of a debt problem but that isn’t really a great plan.
Tom Scharf,
Growth could be significantly increased by eliminating many of the (nutty) regulations that add cost and time to almost anything you want to do. Unfortunately, like all of Trump’s other proposals, reducing regulations and red tape will be fought vigorously in the courts by the usual suspects.
The Supreme Court could help by allowing the administration more wiggle room on regulations (and stopping all the crazy nationwide injunctions!), but so far 5 on the court have been pretty consistently hostile to the administration, so I doubt they will be any more accommodating.
I was reading about type 1 diabetes. Those diagnosed before age 10 have a life expectancy that is about 13 years lower than someone without diabetes. For women, that puts the average age at death somewhere around 69. Sotomayor, diagnosed with type 1 diabetes before age 8, is already 69, and travels with a medic. She likely has a 15%+ chance of death during Trump’s term in office. Dems had better hope she outlasts Trump, because with another vote like Kavanaugh’s, there would not be many contentious cases before the court that the liberal position could win.
Of course, Alito (75) and Thomas (76) present the same kind of risk for Republicans as Sotomayor presents for Dems, since I doubt either of them will retire during Trump’s term.
Tom Scharf wrote: “You can grow your way out of a debt problem but that isnât really a great plan.”
So far as I know, it is the only plan that works. After the 2009 financial crisis, Greece tried to get out of its debt hole by means of budget cuts. Great pain was inflicted and by 2016 their debt-to-GDP ratio increased from 127% to 179%. Debt went up a little, but GDP tanked.
Of course we should try to bring some sense to government spending. But not in a way that kills economic growth.
I compared the responses of Chat GPT and Grok in a subject area I know very well (particle size measurement). No contest. Grok is much better, with only a couple slight errors…. I’d guess more than 98% accurate. Chat GPT was way wrong on multiple points.
If you believed Chat GPT, you would be badly misinformed. Grok would actually help you.
Mike M,
But the increase of expenditures by politicians is essentially without an upper bound. I think at a minimum the % increases in government expenditures have to be held to significantly less than the % growth in GDP. There is no other way out.
SteveF: “I think at a minimum the % increases in government expenditures have to be held to significantly less than the % growth in GDP.”
I completely agree. Budget restraint is needed; to get out of the hole, spending must increase more slowly than GDP. Strong economic growth makes that much easier.
Long article in NYT by Stephen Pinker on Trump vs Harvard :
It’s pretty well rounded with a mix of cheerleading and criticism (link gets past the paywall(?)). Trump is definitely overdoing it here but it’s not like Harvard hasn’t been asking for it for a decade.
There is nothing sacred going on at Harvard that couldn’t happen at other schools if they got all that money instead. There is also no reason Harvard can’t try a little harder to not bite the hand that feeds it. I sense zero humility from them.
Tom Scharf,
Harvard (along with a host of others) has been asking for it for at least 4 decades. It has been DEI by other names for that long, and likely longer. Hard core socialism, and little else, has been their guiding philosophy, for as long as I can remember. They should be defunded for violating Federal laws against racial discrimination.
Trump’s seemingly whimsical calls for tariff increases as he did recently on the EU may be called bargaining by his supporters, but in fact the uncertainty those actions cause will have lasting long term negative effects on business decisions for investment and thus the economy. Trump as a business person should know better, but obviously he does not,
Oh oh, local weatherman:
âWater temperature at Key West just hit 90°! Lots of sunshine and a dry May resulting in above normal water temps off #Floridaâ
I better start boarding up the windows.
Map of water temps in the eastern Gulf of America: https://x.com/paulfox13/status/1926042128280420783?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
Kenneth,
Trump’s tariff announcements are certainly not whimsical and certainly are part of the bargaining process. The question is whether they are a wise way to go about it. I am inclined to trust Trump’s instincts but I get why people are doubtful.
I agree that the uncertainty is harmful, but it is unavoidable if we are going to get other countries to lower their trade barriers. There are surely ways to go about it that produce less acute uncertainty than what Trump is doing. But with less pressure brought to bear on other countries, the process will take much longer. That will quite possibly produce more net damage than Trump’s approach.
Trump is opting to rip off the bandage rather than prolonging the pain. Economically, that might or might not be the better option. Politically, it is Trump’s only option other than maintaining the status quo.
Kenneth, the US potentially changing economic imperatives every four years creates “lasting long term negative effects on business decisions for investment”. Drill/don’t drill. Build/don’t build etc etc. Somehow business copes because that is the nature of the beast the world over. Both sides agreeing on a common direction for the country would do far more for reducing business uncertainty, but that isn’t going to happen.
Business, like government, exists to serve the social needs of the people. It has no other reason to exist except for that. Once you lose sight of that goal, and start to treat it like some sort of independent entity, it’s only a matter of time before, like government, it becomes parasitic, either destroying its own existence or turning the people into slaves in service to itself.
Businesses like any other entity exist in a free society because through private property and voluntary decisions they satisfied the needs of customers. Governments on the other hand operate through coercion. When this difference is not understood there exists the inclination towards an authoritarian state were government and private entity operations become indistinguishable, but with the state’s coercive power always putting it in charge. Fascism defines this condition well.
If one agrees that uncertainty from government actions is detrimental to business and the economy why would one want to add the great uncertainty that tariffs present. Further there are many observers who judge that tariffs, certain or not, are detrimental to the economy just as are other government interference in the economy. The detrimental effects of high tariffs will be felt by the voting public in the immediate future and thus explains the historical and immediate negative electoral results of those doing the imposition.
from a very reliable source:
â US Intelligence: Putin remains committed to victory in Ukraine. A new assessment says Moscow is betting on a war of attritionâaiming to wear down Ukraineâs resistance, demoralize its population, and wait out Western support. Despite slow advances, Russia likely sees the pace as acceptable.â https://x.com/noelreports/status/1926298346232205475?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
Business is not a passive player, Kenneth, and the factors that enable it to subvert your priors for its own ends exist. You are arguing from a purely fictional perspective of what might be the case if certain criteria were met, and pesky human beings weren’t so pesky.
Business in China, for example, does not exist in a free society. It exists to serve the power of the most populous, anti-libertarian, state on the planet. It is a predatory beast in your idyllic pasture and libertarianism seems to have no answer except to insist on giving it more power because principles. IMO, libertarianism is doomed to failure because it cannot defend itself from predators without rejecting its principles.
Tariffs do not create uncertainty for business.The possibility of imposing or removing tariffs, if plausible, does create uncertainty.
The 10% tariffs now in place and likely to remain in place are not high and will have little noticeable effect on the consumer. They should have a positive effect on the economy overall, especially since they will be offset by income tax cuts.
If Russia wants a war of attrition then I say let’s give it to them as long as Ukraine is willing to make the sacrifices. The west may grow weary of funding the war but the Russian people may also grow weary of piling up dead soldiers. I don’t see any sign of that yet but I’m not sure we have good visibility there. I wouldn’t want my son sent off to the Ukraine front line.
Trump is making tariff threats because the EU is dragging their feet in a bureaucratic malaise. That’s how the EU does everything. I think the US government is dysfunctional but I always remind myself at least we aren’t the EU.
Mike M.
Search on “schedule 301 tariffs china”
The amount of tariff can vary significantly depending on what the thing is and the effect that the Chinese base price might have on our domestic manufacuturers or as punishments for various Chinese activities which we feel are unfair, ip theft for example.
I suspect the sellers keep up with the continuing changes some of which have been almost weekly in the last two months. What makes it difficult is as a buyer I don’t have a good grasp of where the tariffs are when I order and whether they’ll change when purchse shows up here in US.
In addition, the tariff is applied on arrival in the US, not when shipped. So the purchaser and an EU supplier have no idea what the tariff is going to be two weeks from now, and depending on the possible impact of this on the total cost of the import, it may or may not continue to be attractive, so by agreement purchaser and supplier agree to wait and see what happens, which will inevitably increase costs for both buyer and seller no matter what happens.
I’m pretty confident that Trump either doesn’t understand this or more likely couldn’t care less. I’m sure he thinks that the EU folks have been screwing us all along and that they are the only ones which will suffer through the uncerainty.
If you are making long term investments in manufacturing in China et. al. then tariff whiplash every administration creates a lot of uncertainty. Doubling the price of an iPhone for 4 years will put quite a dent in Apple sales.
Whether that is a good or bad thing is debatable but I see restricting trade as an overall bad thing. Doing your manufacturing in the US would always be a safe haven. Too bad that has become economically not feasible in many instances. That is what needs fixed and it is very hard.
I see that there is often confusion about business as the bad guy when it can only be the bad guy with aid of government’s coercive powers. Otherwise we are dealing with voluntary transactions. The solution for the confused is to give the government more coercive powers and without evidence or reasonable arguments attempt to wave off opposing arguments as too idealistic.
Tariff rates have never been permanent.
Trump threatening huge tariffs on and off certainly creates uncertainty and when there is not a predictable basis for his threats, business decisions based on them would require a Trump mind reader. Since that reader does not exist and even if one did he might yet be confused, business investment will come to a standstill.
Republican legislators must iniate taking back control of tariff decisions or better the Supreme Court needs to rule on the constitutionality of what Trump is doing. It could be called saving Trump from Trump.
Kenneth,
IMHO, idealized libertarian countries have never existed…… and never will. I doubt that is because we terrible humans are just not good enough to live up to libertarian ideals. The heavy hand of communism is the opposite extreme of unrealistic libertarianism….. and nearly as impractical.
As to “voluntary business transactions”……. how about addictive products like cigarettes? Do you think it was OK for tobacco companies to suggest smoking is good for you? Do you think it was OK for them to work diligently to generate bogus research to hide the terrible effects of smoking and discount the strongly addictive effects of nicotine? Should companies be free to lace consumables with fentanyl, so they have happy (addicted) repeat customers? Not rhetorical questions.
Kenneth Fritsch wrote: ” business … can only be the bad guy with aid of governmentâs coercive powers.”
Nonsense. SteveF gave some good examples. Another problem with complete laissez faire is that it tends to lead to monopolies and cartels, as Adam Smith understood two and a half centuries ago.
And of course there are the issues of environmental damage and product safety.
Government regulation initially comes about for good reasons. The problem is that it keeps expanding beyond what is actually needed.
Mike M,
“The problem is that it keeps expanding beyond what is actually needed.”
Yup. The EPA was needed in 1970, when raw sewage and used condoms floated down the Hudson River (saw it myself), and air pollution in many places was terrible. Now? The EPA is a lot closer to an out-of-control parasitic infection that saps the economy of growth than a needed regulatory organization.
The problem is that all such regulatory organizations have too much incentive to become perpetual…. and that implies ever more regulations….and attract people who honestly, in their bones, believe ever more onerous regulations are an unmitigated public good. The inherent incentives in regulatory organizations are simply perverse. I think all regulatory bodies should be sunsetted automatically after 25 years.
SteveF,
It might be interesting to see if in the period between 1968 and 2024, regulatory agency staff grew in both Republican and Democratic Administrations. Also how growth in pages of regulations tracked on the same basis, and maybe also by which party controlled congress.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if there wasn’t a lot of difference.
john ferguson,
You could be right, after all Nixon supported the creation of the EPA. But ever increasing regulation is not easy to stop (in courts or in Congress; Chevron deference, filibuster) and most budgeting by Congress involves automatic increases year on year. Honestly, what regulatory agency has ever said “We finished our work, the problem has been resolved” ? As Mike M suggested, many times regulation really was needed….. later things go side-ways, and regulatory agencies become self perpetuating.
SteveF wrote: “what regulatory agency has ever said âWe finished our work, the problem has been resolvedâ ? ”
The Rubber Board during WW2. Probably the only one.
I stand corrected. The members of the Rubber Board should probably have their own memorial in Washington DC. đ
I think, IIRC, development of synthetic styrene butadiene rubber (SBR) made concerns about availability of natural rubber moot. Maybe that was part of it. I could be mistaken.
BTW, in my first research job, I regularly made, at laboratory scale (1.5 liters) batches of synthetic rubber (SBR) and related rubber polymers. These were used in paper coating applications (glossy paper for color magazine printing), interior water based wall paints, fabric adhesives for automotive interiors, and adhesive coatings for polyester tire cord. Interesting work, and I learned a lot about a lot. And I began to think about how I might measure particles far smaller than visible with an optical microscope.
Yes, the Rubber Board made itself superfluous by leading the development of synthetic rubber. As I understand it, they had two jobs: organizing the recycling of natural rubber and organizing the development of synthetic rubber. The success of the second made the first unnecessary and the board ceased to operate in 1944 (if memory serves).
I love the idea of a monument to the Rubber Board. I’d even contribute to the cost of its construction.
I am in good company:
Scott Adams: I Grok several times per day. I Google zero.
Elon Musk: AI will obviate search, @grok
Grok is replacing Google in my searches. Google is still better at some things (like find Chinese take-away near me), but for anything needing nuance, Grok wins hands down.
In a free society it is wrong to defraud and it is punishable and victims can be compensated. Even in a semi free society private entities are eventually held accountable for doing wrong. When government gets it wrong on a massive scale through deception the supposed accountability is often merely facing elections.
I find it curious that some point to tragedies, occurring under non libertarian regimes, that are used as arguments against libertarianism and that government interference like regulation is warranted under some idealistic view of it, but that it in the end it does not work as expected under that view.
In any society there are going to be people and organizations that do wrong by other individuals no matter how free that society is. When those doing wrong have the unique coercive power of government the wrongs are not handled the same as in the private sector.
In any society there are going to be people and organizations that do wrong by other individuals no matter how free that society is. When those doing wrong have the unique coercive power of government the wrongs are not handled the same as in the private sector.
This is exactly my complaint. We cannot handle China the way we would handle an individual who is doing wrong. Governments can only be effectively reckoned with by the action of other governments. Last time I pointed this out, I think you told me to stop ‘moralizing’.
Whatever.
Well, by the actions of other governments or by revolution of their citizenry. But there is no necessity that dictates a society can’t keep a plurality, maybe even a majority of their people as slaves. Again, ground we have fruitlessly already covered; libertarians seem to think the best thing to do here is ignore the slavery and do free trade with the slavers, and think only of warfare as a last resort if the slavers attack.
[I got sidetracked and maybe my initial point wasn’t clear. Slaves have a heck of a lot of disadvantages in trying to do revolutions, obviously. Systems tend to already be in place to keep them in bondage, otherwise they wouldn’t still be slaves. So there’s no particular reason to expect China for example or North Korea to eventually become free.]
Kenneth Fritsch,
I do not understand your post on “doing wrong”. It is almost certainly your fault, not mine.
What the heck do you mean by “doing wrong”? That term can me many different things. Some examples:
Criminal acts
Torts
Negligence
Accidents
Errors
Bad judgement
Doing something that another disagrees with
If you want to make sense, you must not mix those together and shift the meaning from one sentence to the next.
You wrote: “When those doing wrong have the unique coercive power of government the wrongs are not handled the same as in the private sector.”
Off hand, I can’t think of an example, other than ones that are very specific to particular acts by particular actors. But that applies within the private sector as well.
Mike M.
Would imprisoning Japanese Americans in WW2 be an example of a wrong done by a government.
I must be missing your point, because I can think of plenty of others.
john ferguson,
I did not say that the government never does anything wrong. The internment of Japanese Americans has no analogy in the private sector. So it sheds no light on what Kenneth meant by âWhen those doing wrong have the unique coercive power of government the wrongs are not handled the same as in the private sector.â
Government is, in theory, an extension of the will of “the people”. Removing government from the equation merely passes power onto the next, most powerful, entity.
It’s fine to argue that “the people” represent the biggest threat to themselves in the form of government, it seems self evident, but that doesn’t solve the problem of how to deal with powerful business interests conspiring to exploit the people. without some kind of equal, or more powerful, entity getting involved, and now the cycle is complete.
Libertarians cannot wish the human base trait to conquer and rule (i.e. protect and serve) out of existence. It must be dealt with.
It is ironic that when other countries see you arming yourself for self defense they respond in kind and it causes as many problems as it allegedly solves.
I’d be more than happy to disarm if I believed the world was full of benevolent do-gooders with a libertarian non-expansionist bent. This just isn’t the case IMO.
The Russians would be a bit less than kind in dealing with concorded Carthage. That is not the exception it is the rule.
Connecting that to the situation in Ukraine? Complicated.
What is clear: any suggestion that the Russians are just going to give up hard won territory is delusional. People who suggest otherwise are IMHO quite crazy.
Roger Kimball:
“Courage, Aristotle once observed, is the most important virtue because without courage we are unable to practice the other virtues. The life of freedom requires the courage to recognize and to name the realities that impinge upon us. Day is Night. Peace is War. Love is Hate. Out of such linguistic capitulations, as Orwell showed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, totalitarian tyranny is born. Weâve all read the book. But have we learned that hard lesson?
Free speech, it turns out, is like other freedoms: its victory is never permanent. It is a melancholy truth that the right of free speech, like other civilizational achievements, must constantly be renewed to survive.
That was one of Edmund Burkeâs central insights. But it is an insight that is regularly forgottenâuntil reality intrudes upon our reverie to remind us. Every generation finds that it must work anew to win or at least to maintain the freedoms bequeathed to it by earlier generations.
What was argued for and won yesterday is today once again up for grabs. Which moves patience and perseverance to the head of the queue of political virtues. You already made the argument. But it always turns out that you must make it again.”
Kimball is, perhaps, more than a bit too verbose, but I think mainly correct: We ignore the many assaults on our personal liberty at our peril.
I found dialog enhancing audio for movies that actually works.
Overnight I binge watched a murder show on Amazon Prime and it had a digital enhancement for dialog that really worked. It’s called âdialog boostâ.
It uses AI to bring out dialog in movies that are full of distracting sounds.
Here’s how Grok explains it: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_5420452a-4d25-4899-ac60-7a8691fefc8b
If anyone is interested the show I was binge watching was âBosch Legacyâ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch:_Legacy
edit, In the past I have tried two different sound bars with very limited [and not successful] dialog enhancement features.
HI Russell,
Janet has trouble with tv dialog so we use sub-titles wherever we can even when lnaguage is English.
We have closed captioning but don’t use it because it’s so frequently nuts. I’ve thought about filtering the audio to the frequency range of the old dial-up telephones.
Janet frequently uses a bluetooth headset we have which can help.
I have a very high-end graphic analyzer I inherited from my dad, which might make improving the sound a lot easier, but I’m running out of space on our tv-hifi setup. And there is also the possibility that this whole thing will get so complicated that I cannot remember what I did.
John,
We tried a number of gadgets because both of us had trouble deciphering dialogue. This new approach from Amazon prime Video really works. Itâs simple to use, and there are several levels of amplification to choose from. Itâs as easy to use as turning on CC.
This proves somebody on his staff is thinking. Good politics.
My solution has been closed captions or headphones. I’ve been wearing headphones at night to not disturb others and find I don’t need closed captions.
A good center channel speaker and an audio system that properly decodes Dolby Digital 5.1 also makes a big difference. Dolby Digital is only broadcast by some providers, YouTube TV started streaming this audio format a few years ago finally. Most audio systems let you increase center channel volume. Audio producers send almost all dialog through the center channel, it is the main reason for its existence. Over invest in the center channel.
And then there is your room. Highly reflective surfaces (tile, windows, hard wood floors, etc) will cause “echoy” problems.
And finally there is your old aging brain, good luck fixing that.
Russel
I found dialog enhancing audio for movies that actually works.
Now I need to find dialog boost for Netflix? We watched Kraven (which is so-so). We had the audio volume at a reasonable level for dialog. Then a music only section came on an blasted our ears out! This is ridiculous. (And I know it isn’t just us. There are widespread complaints about this. )
Lucia,
âNow I need to find dialog boost for Netflix?â
I canât help you with Netflix. I donât have an account.
If itâs of any help, my wife had significant difficulties with movie dialogues for several years. We tried several types of sound bars that advertised dialogue features, and they offered very little help. I do not recommend them.
This Amazon Prime Video dialogue boost is the first Iâve seen it on a streaming service, but I will check out the others that I belong to just in case theyâve have also added this feature.
Starship test 9 may happen tomorrow, 6:30 pm CT! Fingers crossed.
Mark Bofill,
I’ll bet there are a lot of very nervous engineers at SpaceX.
Steve, I’d think so, yes.
Excitement guaranteed.
Apparently they won’t try a booster catch this time because they are going to test one of the inner ring landing engines failing and an outer ring engine kicking in as a substitute.
Also I believe this booster is being reused for the first time ever. I think most of the engines have been replaced though.
Starship is where all the problems are though, we shall see how much progress they made there. They said the last two failures were completely unrelated to each other.
WSJ: How Student-Loan Crisis Will Show Up in the Economy
Millions of Americans suddenly owe billions of dollars in student debt after years of forbearance https://www.wsj.com/economy/student-loans-economy-f6a11598?st=eMSoWc&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
“The Trump administration began collections for defaulted loans, a shock for many, especially those new to repayment.
…
For borrowers, this means that every month, money that they presumably used to spend elsewhere is going to pay off debt instead. Many who arenât paying are now considered delinquent or defaulted, a status that sinks credit scores.
…
That will strain personal finances.
…
Yannelis also worries that, as a result of former President Joe Bidenâs attempts to forgive swaths of student debt, many borrowers didnât really expect they would need to start paying again and built their budgets around that belief.”
Suddenly? Shock? I am so sick of this narrative that people defaulting on student loans are victims somehow. Why can’t these effing journalists ask a student why they think they shouldn’t have to repay a loan? I want to know the answer.
According to SpaceX, 29 of 33 engines on the booster were flown before. 4 new. Maybe that is another reason to not attempt a booster catch.
Tom Scharf,
Suddenly? Shock? I am so sick of this narrative that people defaulting on student loans are victims somehow.
I’m skeptical when I read stories where the person with loans claims they had no idea until they saw their credit score drop because the missed payments they didn’t know where due.
This story has been in the news. They knew they had loans. I’m sure they quickly heard when they didn’t have to pay! It’s hard to believe the overwhelming majority haven’t been talking to each other about it.
I’d believe someone who said, “Yeah. I’ve been worrying about how to restart payments since November when Trump was elected!” But having no idea?! Lots of them having no idea? Color me skeptical.
As for “the cause”?
This month, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that the student loan delinquency rate jumped from 0.7% in the fourth quarter to 8% in the first quarter, back to around where it was before the pandemic.
So there were delinquencies before. And they are back to the level that existed before repayment was excused. That should hardly be surprising!
His worry is that so many people went so long without paying that they will have a hard time paying now.
I suspect this may end up being the case. Some took out car loans because they could get credit. Or got somewhat nicer apartments– because they could. Now they have those monthly obligations which don’t vanish.
said the people who get into trouble with their student-loan payments often are those who can least afford it.,
Sadly true. But also, not surprising.
The inflation of the past 4 years has effectively discounted 19% of what peopled owed. Deadbeats will be deadbeats, of course, but they don’t deserve much sympathy after making bad financial, educational, and career choices.
The inflation of the past 4 years has effectively discounted 19% of what peopled owed. Deadbeats will be deadbeats, of course, but they donât deserve much sympathy after making bad financial, educational, and career choices.
Years ago, 60 Minutes did a piece on balloon mortgages. The couple du jour (likely in their early 30’s) were standing in their driveway with the two BMW’s behind them and their starter mansion a bit farther back.
Their whine was that they had enjoyed mortgage payments under the pre-balloon phase of $1,200/month. It was four years on and the payments now included both interest and principal and were over $4,500.
They were at a loss as to what to do. Wife offered to space her hair and nails sessions out to every two weeks. Maybe they could return one of the BMW.s, but alas, nothing they could think of could be done without a serious reduction in the style of their lives.
60 Minutes offerred no suggestions.
I think there’s an opportunity here to put the yuppy whine above to song along the lines of the C&W lament about pick-up’s wrecked, girl friend has the clap, dog died, train doesn’t come here any more, and the revenuers have sealed the still, etc.
john ferguson
…. without a serious reduction in the style of their lives.
Yeah. A WAPO article I read had a woman complaining she might have to borrow against her house to repay her loan.
I think many people should aspire to become homeowners. But. Clearly. . .
When you read these stories and see the reporters picked these people, you really have to wonder. Surely they can find people who didn’t make mortgage payments while not paying off their student loan. (Of if they weren’t making mortgage payments, perhaps inherited a whole house? )
john ferguson,
A sister-in-law faced a mini-version of the same balloon mortgage nightmare. She and husband had re-financed their house multiple times, pocketing ~$120K tax-free cash from the refinanced mortgages over several years. In parallel, her husband’s grandfather, who had been giving his grandson a gift of $10K per year (again, tax free) died, and they learned that the “grandfather well” had gone dry….. he had pretty much zeroed out his assets with gifts to grandchildren before he died… so no inheritance windfall.
Anyway, in 2009, the market crashed, house values fell, and they couldn’t possibly make the balloon payments. They fought, divorced, declared bankruptcy, and “walked away” from their house, stiffing the bank for about $150 K.
I have had to “help” her financially multiple times since…. maybe totaling $10K in “gifts”. You can only choose your friends.
I can vaguely remember a cartoon which might have been in Playboy showing this kid with a guitar whining about a list of things similar to what I suggested above.
Friends’ son married a valley girl some years ago. Yep, the real McCoy. Every sentence has “totally” somewhere near the beginning.
He’s a demo jock for Oracle and has been for many years. Compensation is a combination of salary and commission which means some years are fat and others lean.
The valley girl has some sympathy for their straits in lean years.
She doesn’t need a new BMW every year after all, nor toenails done weekly, but hair and fingernails mandatory, cannot be seen in public, or at least by her freinds, wearing the same thing twice, etc. etc.
Since his gigs almost always involve flying, and he has no need to be in the office, he moved family from Palo Alto to New Hampshire, thinking that getting her away from her clique might save money It didn’t. She now flies out to the left coast for a week every other month – cannot lose touch.
Our friends are both from New England, college classes of 1962, so you can guess how this flies. It is sad.
But she does have at least two of the aspects of a trophy wife. Even Trump has figured out that marrying one might not be a great idea after all.
John Ferguson,
With regard to that couple on “60 Minutes”…
More precisely, it’s not a “balloon payment” if there are new monthly payments due with interest and principal. A balloon payment involves having the entire amount due; for example, a loan with the payment calculated for, say, a 30-year repayment schedule, but with the entire balance due after 5 years. More likely, they got a below-market “teaser rate” of interest, for the first year, or few years, after which the interest rate climbed to market rates, and the monthly payment increased commensurately. [Or perhaps they were only required to pay interest, and not principal, for the first year or more, and now their grace period is over.]
I’ve had both a balloon payment setup on a rental property, and “teaser” rates on adjustable mortgages on my house. It may require a little bit of applied math to figure out if those deals are more advantageous to you than a standard, fixed-term mortgage, but it isn’t at all difficult to anticipate that after the initial term is over, one has to deal with a higher monthly payment. I think some people don’t plan at all; others may expect (hope!) that their income will have increased enough to suffice when the time comes; perhaps some just figure that they can later refinance and again defer the time when they have to pay the price. As long as home values keep rising, that last may be possible, I suppose. But I would never put myself in a position where that’s necessary to keep the financial boat afloat.
HaroldW.
You are correct, it was a teaser with only interest for first four years when principal came in. And of course their accumulated interest must have included the cost of floating the entire principal for the four years.
It’s also possible that the interest wasn’t fixed rate either.
John Ferguson,
Even my dual-citizen youngest daughter ‘totally’ makes fun of how many young American girls in her school talk. She imitates them frequently……. between bursts of laughter.
John Ferguson,
Even my dual-citizen youngest daughter âtotallyâ makes fun of how many young American girls in her school talk. She imitates them frequentlyâŚâŚ. between bursts of laughter.
SteveF
Was part of your assertion that the tariffs would not be inflationary based on assumption (probability) that increased costs would lower consumption and that most things subject to the tariffs were discretionary purchases?
Maybe Iphones are not discretionary, at least to some people.
On the face of it, unless there’s something like the abive at work here, it’s hard to believe that an increase in price wouldn’t ressult in some level of inflation.
My daughter-in-law was a Valley Girl. Her dad was an architect for Universal Studios. She told me when he got transferred to Orlando she considered it a fate worse than death.
Right, the choice of student loan martyrs is very odd.
How about an academic low performer pushed by school advisers being accepted into a school they can’t handle (a DEI acceptance!) and they drop out after two years and have no degree, a boatload of debt, two kids, no father, and few prospects.
Instead you seem to get friends of reporters who have graduate school debt and summer in the Hamptons.
john a ferguson,
You forgot the “mom’s in prison” part of the ballad.
Russell Klier,
I’ve been following that case for years. What’s very interesting is how she got caught. Her Excel spreadsheets had some very obvious evidence of manipulation. She tried to claim others did it. https://datacolada.org/109
Data Colada got sued by the professor for their effort of exposing her. That case was thrown out.
The EU has OK’d strikes deep into Russia with their weapons.
Sounds like Trump may be ready to OK some more punishment for Russia. We still limit the range of stuff we supplyâŚ.. I wonder if the F-16s might finally play a roleâŚ. There is talk of sanctioning anyone buying Russian oil, that would hurt, I think.
Putin doesn’t want a ceasefire. Ball is in the EU and Trump’s court now.
john a ferguson,
Moderate tariffs should not cause significant inflation, even if you define inflation as an increase in the consumer price index. Imports are 10-12 percent of GDP. Trump’s baseline tarii\ff is 10%. Only a fraction of that will be passed on to the customer. So overall, prices should go up my maybe a few tenths of a percent. And that will be a one time blip.
If you think that vendors can just boost their prices by 10%, then I have a question for you. If they could sell their product for 10% more than they are asking, then why aren’t they asking for the higher price already?
Tomâs post:
âPutin doesnât want a ceasefire. Ball is in the EU and Trumpâs court now.â
I am still of the mind that the EU doesnât want a cease-fire either. I think they are content with the status quo. As long as Ukraine is fighting Russia with American arms, the EU has no worries of a Russian invasion.
Mike,
âIf they could sell their product for 10% more than they are asking, then why arenât they asking for the higher price already?â
I suppose the old capitalist theory applies⌠someone would undercut their price.
Mike M.
Raising a price has to reduce sales. Of course. And this was where I expected price increases due to tariffs to not necessarily have an inflationary effect. I agree with Mark. wjhen everyone’s cost basis increases, you can still be competitve with a higher price.
Hah, Tom Scharf,
“Mom’s in prison.”
John Ferguson,
Inflation is a rise in money relative to the supply of goods/services.
If you take money away from individuals, and give it to the Federal government, then the Federal government will spend that money on whatever their priorities are and individuals will spend less. Government purchases will not be of the same things as an individual, for sure, but spend the same money they will. Demands will shift with higher taxes, of any kind (import duties, sales taxes, real estate taxes, or income taxes), meaning the money is spent on a nuclear submarine, or maybe spent subsidizing rich people buying electric vehicles, vs a new pair of shoes from China or a new TV from Korea… but total financial demand remains unchanged.
If the government imposes a duty on iPhones, then the higher net cost for the iPhone means the government spends that money on something else. Or maybe, in my wildest dreams, reduces deficit spending. That is just a wild dream, of course.
Short version: Taxes have nothing to do with inflation. Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Government can (and routinely does!) raise the cost of living for most individuals by taking more individual income as taxes (all forms of taxes!). That is unrelated to inflation.
John Ferguson,
I should add: inflation is also theft of saved monetary value. Debtors love inflation. Savers? Not so much. And who is the biggest debtor in the known universe? The US Federal government, of course. Every bit of inflation reduces federal government debt. Theft by another name is still theft.
john ferguson,
Sure, Some prices may incease by an amount close to the tariff. Some will have little or no increase, Others will be somewhere in between. Overall, a 10% tariff will have little effect on prices.
Mike M.
I’m looking at 30% or 54% tariffs depending on how object is shipped which are the lowest for the things I buy from China.
Imports from China are something like 1.5% of GDP. So tariffs of 30-50% would contribute about 0.6% to inflation if they are fully passed on. But they won’t be. There will be some effect on inflation, but it will be modest and it will be a one-time blip.
Of course, if you adopt the Friedman position that inflation is not about increasing money supply rather than prices, tariffs will produce no inflation at all.
Starship launch.. ⌠T minus 50 minutes and counting
MikeM
WRT to inflation due to tariffs: To some extent, substitutions to “made in china” will occur. To some extent, a fair number of discretionary things won’t be bought. This may be particularly true of “trinket” like or “fun” items. Do I need more decorative barettes? Do I need another kitchen gadget? Usually, no and no.
So certainly the effect on inflation isn’t equal to the amount of tarriff if applied to everything we bought last year.
Alright. Here we go in a few minutes.
Cats on a hot tin roof.
They will not launch. More and more like NASA. Not a good sign.
I think the booster crash landed into the ocean, but so far Starship hasn’t undergone RUD.
[Edit: They were testing an ‘extreme’ angle of attack on booster re-entry for some reason. Maybe that had something to do with the booster’s apparent hard landing.]
Live video and telemetry via Starlink. So far so good on Ship.
T plus 15:50
Whatâs all that white stuff floating inside?
mark bofill,
All explanations of goals exactly as clear as mud.
Good they didn’t try a catch…. probably would have destroyed much of the launch complex.
Steve,
Yup! It would have been a spectacular mess.
At least ship didn’t RUD this time. Can’t wait to see video of booster hitting ocean at a bazillion MPH.
Can’t open the payload door was a big fail.
We shall see if it can handle re-entry this time.
No simulated launch of Star Link satellites. Hummm… looking less like success every minute. Let’s hope it doesn’t burn up entering the atmosphere.
Nice videos at least. NASA sucked at that kind of thing.
Starship didn’t explode like it did the past two times. That’s progress. Doesn’t mean they don’t have a ways to go of course.
SpaceX broadcast calling a grand success! My definition of success must be outdated.
Looks like ship has lost stability … again. There’s going to be criticism this time around. Engineers, prepare for your floggings.
Pretty awesome video transmission during an uncontrolled spin though!
Big fail today. Booster reuse though. Ship is currently a disaster. Space = hard, tough day tomorrow for the engineers.
Live plasma views from onboard ! Amazing
One SpaceX Talking Head claimed the problem started with an internal leak. Perhaps that was the white stuff floating inside that I saw at 15;50.
I still call that progress. They apparently got past the last causes of failure and have run headfirst into the next one. They’ll get there eventually. I’m curious to hear what Musk has to say about it tonight.
Almost everything failed. Return booster to a controlled landing: fail. Deploy fake satellites: fail. Re-ignite rocket motor: fail. controlled reentry at targeted landing: fail. They are going backwards?
I am guessing tomorrow and Thursday are going to be stressful at SpaceX.
Hey, it didn’t blowup on the pad!
AFAICT right after ship main engine cutoff I noticed a lot of outgassing / venting from the live view that shouldn’t be there. SpaceX said this was a fuel leak. They tried to fight it with control thrusters but eventually ran out of fuel for the thrusters and then it was in an uncontrolled spin.
My guess is all the vibration on launch is causing havoc on ship. That’s at least the second major leak and then an engine blew up last time taking out 3 other engines.
Whoever is in charge of the internal plumbing on ship is going to get DOGE’d.
The good news: after some people are fired, SpaceX has a chance to succeed. But really, it sounds like they are letting things get way too complicated. KISS is the key.
SteveF wrote: “after some people are fired, SpaceX has a chance to succeed.”
Um, they have been putting people in space for a number of years now. And they dominate commercial satellite launches.
They are trying something very, very hard. Maybe too hard? Maybe 33 small engines is not the way to go. But I would not bet against them.
Whoâs paying for all these successful failures?
Mike M,
Yes, they are trying something that is very hard. Their successes are with a rocket that is much more conventional in size and design (save for the booster return and re-use). Will they succeed in developing a giant rocket that is ‘rapidly and completely re-usable’? Maybe, but if so, it looks like a much longer and more expensive development program than they were counting on. SpaceX is private, and completely controlled by Musk, but at some point even Musk will start worrying about the development cost.
The most concerning issue is the ‘move fast, blow things up, and learn quickly’ approach doesn’t seem to be working with Starship. They are still blowing things up, but learning quickly? Not so obvious.
The other issue SpaceX faces is FAA approval; the more spectacular “pseudo-successes” they have with Starship, the more the FAA is going to get in their way. They will need help from heaven should a starship launch lead to a crash on land…. like in southern Florida. There would then be “an abundance of caution” at every step in the approval process, and SpaceX would be forced to proceed more like NASA.
Is it possible that Musk and company have so much money they can design iteratively?
I haven’t followed this at all, but suspect that they instrument the daylights out of each shot with the result, they have extensive information on what went wrong, when and in what sequence and following what other faillure.
My own experience with my naive projects is this method doesn’t protect you from the thing which was going to fail but didn’t get a chance because the flight was truncated (term of art)
John,
My own experience with my naive projects is this method doesnât protect you from the thing which was going to fail but didnât get a chance because the flight was truncated
Yeah. I’ve explained this to several managers over the years. I can’t tell them how long it will take to fix their broken system, because the current defect obscures God only knows how many other defects that manifest sequentially. Some of them get this.
They’re doing fine IMO. They might not make it to Mars on the schedule Elon Musk was hoping for, but they’ll get there if they keep at it. That or they’ll thoroughly explore whatever technical barriers make this impossible.
john ferguson, mark bofill,
One thing I have observed (too many times!) is an attempt (especially under time pressure) to fix one problem introduces unexpected consequent problems…. and trying to fix those introduces even more problems. The expression “spiraling up your own asshole” comes to mind. Getting out of that kind of mess often requires backing up and doing a series of “sanity checks” to confirm you really understand what is happening.
I hope that is not what is going on with the Starship project.
I think Muskl said that they are doing something really hard. It is probably comforting to work in a place where the guy at the top understands. I spent too many years woirking for guys who had no idea, nor when the majical solution was discovered didn;’t appreciate that it wasn’t all that obvious.
I’m sure you can all aprreciate my favorite Dilbert cartoon, to wit:
“Marketing told them we could do WHAT?”
PS: I just discovered that the reason my worms and pinions didn’t work was that the tooth on the downloaded from supplier’s CAD models worm was not actually helical. I’d even printed a couple of them. Dumb Me.
Not being able to test reentry on ship is definitely a problem for now, this is probably the hardest part. The space shuttle got held up for years with the ceramic heat tiles.
I agree with the rapid test and iterate formula but it does have its drawbacks. It worked for Falcon 9 and now SpaceX delivered over 90% of all mass to orbit last year. They won’t be giving up on that too easily.
It is notable that the Saturn V was expendable so in some sense SpaceX has already exceeded that with a reusable super heavy booster.
They now have 450 landings of the Falcon 9 booster
One of the tragic excesses of the PC era was the cancellation of Dilbert.
john Ferguson,
“âMarketing told them we could do WHAT?â
I had a fellow who sold my company’s products in North Americal for about 10 years. Nice enough fellow, diligent and organized, but far from a technical guru. He told a potential customer that we could “for certain” measure particles which float (lighter than the fluid surrounding them). We couldn’t. After I made sure he clarified with the customer what was and wasn’t possible, I started thinking about possible ways to actually do what he had imprudently promised that customer. A couple months later I had figured out a practical way to do it, and then filed for a patent… granted in 1998 (5,786,898). So sometimes marketing bluster can actually motivate development. đ
SteveF
I worked for a wonderful guy in late ’70s. He was a genral contractor who hired me so he could do design_build.
He used to say that construction was led by its dumbest participants. Thes guys would get the jobs with the lowest bids, bids which had missed something the contract required, and then would invent the way out of the hole.
Congratulations on the solution to over-promising.
Steve,
When I was younger, all someone had to do was tell me something couldn’t be done. Of course I don’t mean I ever did the actual impossible or even advanced the state of the art as you did, but you might be surprised how often people casually pronounce fairly trivial things undoable.
I had a surpervisor once I didn’t get along with who was fond of saying this about things he simply didn’t want to do. People quickly learned that I’d be glad to do it (whatever it was that got rejected) for them just to spite the guy. [Over the weekend!]
And it’s said I’m not a people person. Hah!
Mark,
I assume you always knew what you were doing.
Pretty often, I had no real idea which worried me a lot because i was sort of doing engineering without being an engineer.
John,
I don’t know that I’d say I always knew what I was doing. Like many computer science guys, I’m an ‘engineer’ by virtue of my job title. One can argue software engineering isn’t really engineering I guess. I don’t have a strong opinion about it. I solve problems for my company like the other sorts of engineers and follow the same sorts of processes. Same sorts of paperwork… So.
Shrug.
I suppose SpaceX would have a lot less FAA oversight if they were launching from Florida and not Texas. The safe zone over the Atlantic ocean is one reason why Cape Canaveral was chosen for missile testing:
âOn May 11, 1949 President Harry S. Truman signed legislation entitled Public Law 60 establishing the Joint Long Range Proving Ground at Cape Canaveral. â
âA suitable facility would need to be relatively isolated from centers of population, provide a large expanse of unpopulated area over which missiles could fly and accommodate the installation of several downrange tracking stations. A base for military operational headquarters would also be required.â https://www.spaceline.org/history-cape-canaveral/history-cape-canaveral-chapter-2/
Not wishing to pick a fight here, just providing information.
The NSPE [National Society of Professional Engineers] has a position statement on this topic:
âIt is the position of the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) that the title âengineerâ should only be used by qualified individuals.
Background: NSPE defines âqualified individualâ as: 1. An individual who is licensed under a jurisdiction engineering licensure law; or 2. An individual who has graduated from an ABET/EAC program; or 3. An individual whose degree has been evaluated as equivalent to an ABET/EAC program or one which has been approved by the National Council of Examiners for Engineers and Surveyors (NCEES) or a state or territorial engineering licensing board. The indiscriminate utilization of the title âengineerâ by individuals who are not clearly professionally qualified as set forth in this position statement serves only to confuse the public. NSPE encourages the use of titles such as âengineering aide/assistantâ and âengineering technician/technologistâ, as appropriate, to designate individuals/positions that clearly are not those which are appropriately licensed, educated, or legally defined but are part of the engineering team. â https://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/sites/default/files/resources/PSdownloadables/EmploymentPracticesUseofEngineeringTitles.pdf
LOL.
It’s not me who insists on the title. I couldn’t care less about that, I care about the work and the pay. You’d have to take that up with the company I contract with. Indeed, you’d have to take it up with most defense contractors and subcontractors in Huntsville, I’m sure.
Although the internet tells me software engineering programs can be ABET accredited.
I was more questioning the idea that ‘software engineering’ is really ‘engineering’, FWIW. [As in, ever, regardless of accreditation.]
mark bofill,
I’ve done some of both… and often all mixed together (like over the past 8 weeks… both software and hardware design in a single smallish project). I don’t get too worked up about what you call it. If your efforts are evaluated against the requirement of actually working (AKA consistent with reality), then it matters not at all what it is called. If what you produce has to work, then it is not ‘fluff’.
Formal credentials don’t matter much either. I have a nephew who formally studied philosophy (OMG, what fluff!) but he works as a programmer, and seems quite good at it.
Steve,
Yep. Computers are notorious for rudely ignoring the qualifications of their designers and programmers and stubbornly insisting on doing what they are actually programmed to do regardless. đ
I’m old enough to have worked with some exceptional developers who didn’t have formal software training. It’s as you say.
F*** the NSPE, ha ha.
They try to legally limit companies who can use the term engineering in their business name. I understand why they want to do this but who died and left them God?
I had a couple very off putting discussions with people who consider themselves the “engineer police”. I graduated from an accredited university and have been working professionally in the field for 40 years, don’t tell me I need to pay your fees to call myself an engineer.
When I went to school there was only computer science and those guys didn’t get within a million miles of hardware concepts. Even in EE I only had one class in programming and it was pretty lame. Now software is most of what I do.
When I worked in the defense contractor world they had separate salary structures for “real” engineers and talented self learners. I look back at that now as credentialism. There are tons of self taught programmers out there that are very good, and tons that are not.
I would say “software engineering” does not gain a lot in the first two years of base engineering. Chemistry, physics, calculus, mechanical, etc. It is arguable they deserve to be a separate field as it was with computer science.
Tom,
Yes to all of that. My degree was computer science, although ‘scientist’ describes me even more poorly than ‘engineer’ for sure. I’m a code monkey and a systems guy mostly.
Mark,
I think when I was an undergrad, the distinction between “computer engineer” vs “computer something” was working on hardware vs software. The former might be designing the actual computer. The demand for software exploded since the 80s.
We now do have words to describe distinctions: developer, web design, yada, yada….
I don’t think people really worry too much about the ‘words’ anymore. (Though they might if they are hiring for a particular job.)
Lucia,
I agree, I think that’s what the distinction was back in the day. With the advent of FPGAs among other things the EE/SE line got blurry, although as you say people still specialize.
I have seen a lot of euphemisms applied to engineers including:
Domestic engineer referring to a housewife
Sanitation engineer referring to a garbage man
Transportation engineer referring to a bus driver
Agricultural engineer referring to a farmer
I therefore think some new updated euphemisms are in order:
Softwear engineer referring to someone who washes clothes
Hardwear engineer referring to someone who makes steel toed boots
There actually are two Professions refered to as engineers that are not recognized by NSPE but are licensed by state, local or federal regulations:
Locomotive Engineers referring to someone who drives a train
Stationary engineers referring to someone who operates a boiler in a power plant.
I have experience working with stationary engineers and they have truly impressive credentials. They are masters of the Mollier Diagram, something that always challenged me.
Link: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/mollier-diagram-water-d_308.html
John, Your post:
âPretty often, I had no real idea which worried me a lot because i was sort of doing engineering without being an engineer.â
How did your projects get permits without signed and sealed construction documents?
Gaza fighting continues, and what remains of Hamas appears unwilling to cede control and flee (or just flee)…. so their virgins await them.
Russia shows little inclination to start substantive negotiations, perhaps because they think Ukraine will effectively give up on the Russian demands of neutrality for Ukraine and loss of the eastern provinces and Crimea. Trump says he will walk away soon, and the Europeans (save for the Poles, who are arming themselves) are busy writing another angry statement about how evil the Russians are. “You must stop this because we are right and you are wrong!” sounds a lot like progressives talking to people who voted for Trump. And just as effective when applied to Russia.
Ukraine is going to end up with much worse terms than were available a month after Russia invaded. Elections have consequences, and the consequences of Joe Biden’s election were terrible for the Ukrainians.
Russell,
Generally all we needed was my architectural seal. We always had civil, structural, mechanical, and electrical engineers who did their respective parts of the job but seldom needed to seal anything. Sometimes Civil work needed a seal. This was all more than 20 years ago. I have no idea what’s done today.
An example of what confronted me was the need to steam out railroad propane tank cars so they would be safe to work on. It would be a production reqjuirement and they needed to be brought up to 192F. How much steam?
For some reason, we couldn’t find anyone who knew. I guessed a 125hp Cleaver Brooks boiler would be enough and called them to see if they could tell us who they’d sold them to. An outfit in Montana had one and they were using it for the same thing, but not production so they left it running 24 hours per car.
Propane cars get a residue “log” in the bottom which offgasses and needs to be “evaporated”.
Our mechanical engineer turned out to have all of his work designed by vendors and had no idea. He was a PE, too. ??
I got a book on black body thermodynamics, got some grasp of the theory, modeled a 57 foot black tank car in Houston, and came up with anywhere from 100hp to 250hp. Not so good.
We told client that we weren’t sure about the number but suggested that we’d put in the feedwater system, breechilng, and pads for two 125hp steam generators and install one, and if it wasn’t enough, they’d just have to buy the additional one they would have needed anyway.
They laughed and I guess were a bit embarrassed that they hadn’t been able to tell us what to do, and agreed. The single 125hp worked fine. We did find out that the steam needed to run into the car through an orifice smaller than the hose or there would be too great a pressure drop at the boiler. Don’t ask me how this was discovered.
I have dozens of other stories like this one, but in most of those cases there weren’t any real engineers involved in the particular problem.
I should add to the above, with no thought of slamming engineers as a profession, design of construction does not seem to attract people who are good at figuring out how to do something they’ve never seen before. My guess is that the best of them guess that construction design will be mostly turning the crank and they choose other careers that they hope will be more interesting.
Both Jan’s and my dads were EEs and neither ever needed a PE license. Dad worked for equipment manufacuturer and Jan’s dad Bell Labs. Dad;s outfit did have a PE who occasionally needed to seal paperwork needed by the utilities they sold to.
As for architects, we couldn’t blow our noses without sealing it.
john ferguson,
I ran the process engineering group at a good size chemical plant. The plant received raw material (vinyl chloride monomer, atmospheric pressure boiling point -14F) in pressurized tank cars, about 5 per day. At ambient temperatures the full cars had internal pressures from about 30 PSI to 80 PSI depending on season. We unloaded rapidly by boiling the same monomer in a steam heat exchanger, sending the resulting gas to the top of a full car to increase pressure, and withdrawing liquid monomer from the bottom…. no pumps needed. When the car was empty, we pulled the pressure down to about 30 PSI, disconnected everything, and sent the empty car back to a production plant in the midwest, always arriving under some pressure…. usually 10 to 30 PSI. This had been done for more than 30 years.
All went well until a new supply contract switched us to a plant in Texas that had never before sold in rail cars, only via pipe-lines to local plants…. and they had not a clue what they were doing, chemical engineers all. They had determined that a car returning under pressure was not enough proof of no leaks, so they began “pressure testing” each car to 100 PSI with nitrogen….. then filled the car with VCM liquid (dissolving the nitrogen) and sent it to us, arriving with well over 100 PSI internal pressure (itself a terrible safety issue!). When we unloaded the first few cars, the nitrogen entered our (closed) system … pressurizing everything with nitrogen. Result: our production stopped.
Some heated telephone calls with the engineers responsible for this FUBAR accomplished nothing…. profoundly stupid along with profoundly certain is a very bad combination, especially in an engineer. Only a threat of voiding the supply contract and a lawsuit got the engineers overruled. Cost us a fortune in lost production and all the hoops we had to jump through to remove the nitrogen from our system.
Morals of the story: humility is best when you are very new at something, and always talk to your customers if you are going to change something.
SteveF
That’s a terrific story.
At some point I started to ask prospective employees, ether architects or engineers what the dumbest thing they’d done since they’d been in their profession, what happened, and what they did about it.
I was reluctant to hire anyone who didn’t have a story. And I definitely never hired anyone who told me that he didn’t make mistakes.
john ferguson,
Don’t worry, I have made some terrible mistakes. I’m not proud of them, but I own up.
Usually my mistakes have been when I believed I understood a process completely…. but didn’t.
The diagrams are called “Standard Respecting Railway Clearances”
Thy are transverse sections of the right of way showing a profile through which nothing can protrude in the direction of the track. In general this clearance can be assumed everywhere there isn’t a special condition which may be accompanied by a notice and slow-order that alerts Engineers to pay attention.
In 1995 while I was at Amtrak, the “company” purchased a batch of new locomotives from EMD (GM in La Grange,IL).
The delivery to Philadelphi of the first one was interrupted in the middle of a tunnel in Eastern Pennsylvania by a loud noise which was followed by suddenly rising coolant temperatures.
The engineer reduced speed to dead slow and was able to creep through the rest of the tunnel to a place where there was a set-out track where he could park and have a look.
This model of locomotive, a new design, had been equipped with a heat exchanger which rose about a foot above the top of the locomotive. And Yes, it fit within the Standard Clearance profile. What had been forgotten by the designer was that the standard profile references top of rail and center of track and because of this the voulme swept by it will go up and down with the track.
The locomotive has wheels on each end and the passage of it will be better described as a chord moving through an arched or dipped section. In this case, the 3 inch clearance allowed by the design was not enough to clear the ceiling of the tunnel which dipped along with the dip in the track at that location.
Since the locomotives were already built and could have been delivered by another route not involving this tunnel one would have thought the soultion obvious. But, alas, it wasn’t.
They’d been purchased specifically for the Philadelphia to Chicago run.
They stayed in service in the midwest.
Mandatory regulating businesses makes sense sometimes. You can’t put up a pool cage in Pinellas county without county review and signed drawings (we waited three months for this!). This is probably an instance where you shouldn’t tolerate amateurs just winging it on the job site.
The county engineer might be incompetent but more likely he sees 1000 of these every year and knows when something is off.
If you want to put up solar panels on your roof the installation must be signed off by a PE or you can’t tie it to the grid. There are places on the net you can get somebody to sign them virtually. No clue how competent that is. My guess though is the the power utility is just inserting regulation to slow down consumer solar installations, not to suggest they don’t see their fair share of horror stories.
One of the ways clever leaders in a market limit competition is by ghost writing legislation to introduce barriers to the market.
Regulating nail salons and such? Nope.
This is the Florida regulation that I worked under requiring an engineerâs signature and seal:
61G15-23.001 Signature, Date and Seal Shall Be Affixed. (1) A professional engineer shall sign, date and seal: (a) All final plans, prints, specifications, reports, or other documents prepared or issued by the licensee and being filed for public record; (b) All final documents provided to the owner or the ownerâs representative. (2) Additional Final and Non-Final Documents. (a) A professional engineer may sign, date and seal documents required by any public entity or any provision of contract which requires the signing, dating and sealing of additional original documents. https://fbpe.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/61G15-as-of-05-26-2025.pdf
Florida Board of Professional Engineers [FBPE] guidance document: https://fbpe.org/legal/signing-and-sealing-engineering-documents/
Russell,
I interpret what you;ve quoted to apply to efforts which must include documents ubmitted to public entitites, but not necessarily to documents prepared for private use or uses not otherwise requiring permits?
Do you read it this way?
I think this regulation was precisely why S&C Electric, my dad’s outfit kept a PE on staff, namely to provide paperwork signed and sealed for thier sales to public utilities. My memory was that utilities like FPL didn’t need them.
John,
I think what you may mean is covered in item [2] above:
“2) Additional Final and Non-Final Documents. (a) A professional engineer may sign, date and seal documents required by any public entity or any provision of contract which requires the signing, dating and sealing of additional original documents.”
I think it was Adam Smith who wrote that
“No meeting of a professional society can be held without the creation of conspiracies against the public interest.”
The Florida fees for PE are $180 initially and then renewal is $49 (including a $5 fee to combat unlicensed activity). You can’t even buy HVAC equipment in some places without an appropriate license. You can guess who benefits from that.
The main question I have is where is the line between our benevolent overlords making sure nothing ever goes wrong by requiring endless paperwork and fees to read the paperwork and letting the consumer decide for themselves if “licensed” is worth the extra cost?
It’s one thing to install a brand new A/C unit in new construction with all the ventilation and another to replace the zillionth dead capacitor in an outdoor A/C unit or drop in another equivalent unit to the existing one.
John, your comment:
âI think this regulation was precisely why S&C Electric, my dadâs outfit kept a PE on staff, namely to provide paperwork signed and sealed for thier sales to public utilities. My memory was that utilities like FPL didnât need them.â
When I first got out of college I worked for Procter and Gamble in their Ivordale factory.
I was a graduate Chemical Engineer but had no need to sign or seal documents there and the company offered no support for taking even the fundamentals exam.
When I started working for Sarasota County obtaining a licence was a requirement of employment. I had to scramble to take both exams , but I made it.
FBPE:
âExaminations
Pass the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam; and
Pass the Principles & Practice of Engineering (PE) examâ https://fbpe.org/licensure/licensure-process/
Example: R-410A refrigerant is phasing out starting in January 1, 2025 to use refrigerants with a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 750 or less. Every quote we got recently said to get your unit installed before this took effect. Another installer told us new units were required to detect any refrigerant leak and then shut down immediately if detected, previously they could just keep running and alert the user (or just not cool).
I am going to way out on a limb and speculate the impact on planetary warming for all this is near zero. A building full of EPA regulators is not going to decide that the status quo is OK, they are just going to keep turning the screws because that is what they believe their jobs are.
Russell,
Yes, just an example of the industrial regulatory complex, ha ha.
Medical professions also require continuing education. Somehow this happens a lot on cruises and Vegas trips so the vacations can be written off for the family.
The problem is the momentum and incentives are always toward more regulations. Don’t even get me started on these professional societies lecturing the public on policy outside their domain.
Engineers are also governed by their professional ethics.
The NSPE first cannon:
âFundamental Canons Engineers, in the fulfillment of their professional duties, shall:
1. Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.â
I occasionally had to argue this point with my clientâs lawyers when I was providing expert witness testimony. Lawyers are under no such restriction.
“Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.â
No. We wouldn’t allow people to drive cars on roads if this were literally true. There are economic tradeoffs and also allowing people to live their lives free from government oppression to consider. There are warning labels on bleach containers but they still sell bleach directly to the public without a required license, government fee, and ongoing classes that tell you not to drink it.
This model, similar to public health agencies, tends to not consider these other options enough IMO and the incentives are for CYA through over regulation.
In addition to State statutes, Engineers are also governed by their professional ethics.
It is the first canon under NSPE code of ethics:
âRules of Practice
1.Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.
a. If engineersâ judgment is overruled under circumstances that endanger life or property, they shall notify their employer or client and such other authority as may be appropriate.â
I occasionally had to argue this point with a clientâs lawyers when I was providing expert witness testimony. Lawyers are under no such restriction. https://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/Ethics/CodeofEthics/NSPECodeofEthicsforEngineers.pdf
Tom Scharf,
Eventually I suspect all the halocarbon refrigerants will be replaced by simple compounds like propylene. Very cheap and no global warming potential. Flammable? Yes, very, but a house-size heat pump AC system is not likely to use more than 6 -7 pounds, and any leaks that develop are almost always very slow (over weeks/months), so a release which could cause a fire or explosion is extremely unlikely. You can move the entire compressor condenser/evaporator assembly outside (and even away from) the house and just circulate chilled water or water/glycol inside the house; no possibility of fire or explosion in the house. A flammable gas sensor (commonly available) could shut the whole thing down if a leak is detected.
Avoids the eye-watering prices for non-flammable alternatives to R410A.
Example 2: SC limits environmental review today in unanimous decision. https://www.axios.com/2025/05/29/supreme-court-narrows-nepa-scope
“At issue in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County was whether the federal Surface Transportation Board should assess climate change impacts when authorizing a railway seeking to connect Utah’s crude oil to the national rail network and on to Gulf Coast refineries.
Justices determined that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit went too far in requiring regulators to look at potential effects on Gulf Coast communities.
…
“Seven County shows the many ways that the administrative state and activist courts have created a massive industry of litigation over minor omissions in environmental impact statements, though Congress intended no such thing,” Mario Loyola, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote in a blog post last year.”
Even the left is fed up with environmental red tape from activists, see the recent book Abundance. The reason they can’t build high speed rail in CA is not because nobody knows how to build a train track.
Russell,
Getting an architectural license in Illinois in 1969 was a 5 day exam. The only part of it that I was apprensive about was structural which was multiple choice. Generally, 2 of each question’s choices were answers which you would get if you harbored some common misunderstanding. I had studied for this part for 9 months using two different text books. There was a truss design problem which was one I had studied and so knew I only had to design one member and the rest could be proportioned.
I passed the entire thing first time. What a relief.
When the continuing education bit surfaced and we were all forced to take 3 courses every two years to keep our licenses active, I quickly ran through the ones that interested me, and soon found myself sitting in classes I imagined I could teach better than the guy that was up there.
I hated it.
Tom Scharf,
“Even the left is fed up with environmental red tape from activists, see the recent book Abundance. ”
Yes. The fundamental problem is that every nutty-left advocacy group closes ranks with every other nutty-left advocacy group, no matter how illogical that becomes. Example: LGBQLMNOPXYZ+ closes ranks with the “river-to-the-sea” oppressed/oppressor theory lunatics… meaning gay (and other complicated sexualities) organizations support the same people who would love nothing more than to throw them to their deaths from rooftops. It is madness. But that is the loony-left today.
NYT Hit piece today on Elon Musk:
âMr. Muskâs drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.â https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/elon-musk-drugs-children-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LE8.YA7T.1z0vkogrzeCV&smid=url-share
CNN: Trump can end deportation protections for half million immigrants https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/30/politics/supreme-court-trump-deportations-parole
“The Supreme Court on Friday allowed President Donald Trumpâs administration to suspend a Biden-era parole program that allowed a half million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to temporarily live and work in the United States.
It was the second time this month that the high court sided with Trumpâs efforts to revoke temporary legal status for immigrants.”
Shocking! I really don’t get this legacy media narrative where executive orders by one President cannot or should not be reversed by another President. I don’t even get why any court would rule otherwise. What happens is partisan courts micro-analyze the technical procedures for undoing actions and then the SC has to step in.
Asylum and other temporary protection has been massively abused.
I think the jury is still out on DOGE. What you need to kill is * recurring * waste, fraud, and abuse. DOGE sending people home with pay doesn’t have initial cost savings but may pay future dividends.
Ultimately it is Congress that has the big financial stick, and they still aren’t using it.
DOGE was especially useful for identifying who are the fans of endless government spending. The legacy media couldn’t find inefficiency in government if it was presented to them on a silver platter, and it was.
According to the DOGE website they’ve saved an estimated 175 billion dollars. It’s not shocking to me that people view that as a failure, but it does reinforce my general misanthropy. That doesn’t seem like a failure to me.
Also, they [DOGE] aren’t done yet.
I think that mark is correct, DOGE is not done. Musk has returned to the private sector since his 130 days as a special government employee are up. But DOGE continues.
A big part of what DOGE has been doing seems to be reforming procedures so that waste, fraud, and abuse can be identified and rooted out. Fully realizing the benefits of that will take time.
Tom wrote: “DOGE sending people home with pay doesnât have initial cost savings but may pay future dividends.”
Exactly. The legacy media use a two pronged approach: bolster resistance and demoralize opponents.
The biggest clear failure so far has been the Epstein list, The second biggest failure, which I cannot really call a failure yet, is the claim that Epstein did kill himself.
IMO. a lot of the other stuff is going to take time and hindsight. To expect the establishment, assembled over decades, to crumble in 5 months seems ridiculously optimistic by any standards. I believe the attempt is being made, however, despite attempts to convince me otherwise.
Unfortunately, many of the absurd expenditures that DOGE identified have strong supporters in Congress and the MSM. It is unlikely all the expenditures DOGE identified as wasteful will be defunded beyond Trump’s term in office… and with all the court orders blocking Trump, the expenditures Trump can stop will be limited, even during his time in office.
It is, of course, up to Congress to stop the crazy stuff in the long term. I just doubt they ever will, especially since after the 2026 midterms Dems will likely control the House…. and it will be impeachment 24/7 for two years. Should Republicans maintain control of the Senate, they should make it clear (publicly and loudly!) that Dems are wasting their time with impeachment efforts, and the Trump administration should make clear they will refuse to cooperate in any way. We have seen this movie twice before, and it as stupid and ugly as Nancy Pelosi.
Congress will get one more chance with reconciliation next year to undo most of the insane Biden era expenditures. I hope they don’t waste it; but I’m not optimistic. Too many RINOs to make the needed cuts.
Congress hasnât passed a proper budget since 1997. They have been using the stopgap, shortcut method of âcontinuing resolutionsâ since then to keep the government operating. I think we need to face up to the fact that the United States Congress is a failed institution.
It is possible to cut spending without either a reconciliation bill or overcoming a filibuster.
A rescission bill is a type of bill in the United States that rescinds funding that was previously included in an appropriations bill. Rescission bills proposed by the President of the United States are considered under an expedited process that cannot be filibustered in the Senate, allowing it to pass with 51 votes instead of 60.
Mike M.
Optimist indeed. I hope you are right, but I will believe it when the recission bill has been signed. I fear there will be too many RINOs in the Senate for it to actually happen. Too much the “uniparty” to allow real cuts in spending.
The usual suspects will file lawsuits even if Congress cuts funding. It will be way harder though.
Historically it has been very hard to remove benefits once they are granted because of political considerations. Maybe times have changed, maybe not.
Apparently, reconciliation can not be used on discretionary spending. That would explain the disappointing fact that the DOGE cuts were not included in the “big beautiful bill”. Instead, it seems that the plan really is to deal with those by means of rescission, with most of that waiting until after the reconciliation bill is passed.
We shall see.
âRescissionâ is just another workaround to limp through while avoiding passing an actual budget. It is further proof that the US Congress is broken. 1997 was the last actual budget year.
Definition:
A rescission is the cancellation of previously appropriated budget authority before it is obligated or spent. Itâs a way to reduce or eliminate funding that Congress has already approved.
My own governmental budgeting experience was limited to local government, but I expect the same principles apply to big government.
The budget process involves starting at zero and predicting the funds needed to implement the programs that were mandated for the following fiscal year, and also predicting the expenditure for those programs through their lifecycle for a minimum of 10 years.
The next step was to identify funding sources for that program also through their lifecycle with a minimum of 10 years. The programs I was responsible for implementing were mostly funded by user fees and municipal bonds, with only about 20% coming from property tax revenues.
The US Congress has been avoiding matching up mandates, expenditures and revenues because the answer is a disaster.
So itâs been an endless cycle of continuing resolutions living off of the 1997 budget, all the while sticking their head in the sand about the long-term effect of the expenditures.
The country is spiraling down the drain and the Congress is shirking its fiduciary responsibility.
All three major credit rating agenciesâMoody’s, Standard & Poor’s (S&P), and Fitchâhave downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating from their top-tier AAA status.
Moodyâs report for their recent downgrading of the US bond rating is an indictment of the US Congress:
âOver more than a decade, US federal debt has risen sharply due to continuous fiscal deficits. During that time, federal spending has increased while tax cuts have reduced government revenues. As deficits and debt have grown, and interest rates have risen, interest payments on government debt have increased markedly.
Without adjustments to taxation and spending, we expect budget flexibility to remain limited, with mandatory spending, including interest expense, projected to rise to around 78% of total spending by 2035 from about 73% in 2024. If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case, it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade.
As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, Â rising entitlement spending, and relatively low revenue generation. We anticipate that the federal debt burden will rise to about 134% of GDP by 2035, compared to 98% in 2024.
Despite high demand for US Treasury assets, higher Treasury yields since 2021 have contributed to a decline in debt affordability. Federal interest payments are likely to absorb around 30% of revenue by 2035, up from about 18% in 2024 and 9% in 2021. Â The US general government interest burden, which takes into account federal, state and local debt, absorbed 12% of revenue in 2024, compared to 1.6% for Aaa-rated sovereigns. Â
While we recognize the US’ significant economic and financial strengths, we believe these no longer fully counterbalance the decline in fiscal metrics.â https://ratings.moodys.com/ratings-news/443154
Russell,
You won’t get any argument, at least not from me, about your claim that Congress is broken. As an optimist, I hold out hope that it is not irreparable, but I have little confidence that it will change for the better.
I am somewhat puzzled by the recent downgrades in the federal governments credit rating. Why now? It seems unbelievable that they only just noticed the situation. And it seems strange that they waited for a President who seems to be actually trying to come to grips with the problem and a Congress controlled by a party containing a large contingent who are demanding action.
It remains to be seen if the current government will actually make a difference on the debt and deficit problem. There is certainly reason to be skeptical. But the chances of meaningful action are infinitely better (not zero vs zero) under the current government than under the previous one.
Note: “Why now?” is not a rhetorical question. But it could be regarded as such with an obvious answer: Orange Man Bad. But I am not at all sure that it is the answer.
Mark, I suppose it may be against the rules at your shop, or you don’t think you’d get useful help, but have you looked at AI, maybe Claude review of your code?
I ask because I have a fairly complex (for amateur me) routine that reads signals from 6 sources some of which need only be polled and others which output at different rates and doesn’t seem to be able to handle recording complete sentences coming from some of the sources. They output at different rates and I’ve all but one under control. It is not vital that information be synched finer that 10 Hz, although 100 Hz would be better.
My idea was to try Claude’s code analyzer and see how it does.
So my question is, have you tried this?
Anyone else?
Mike, your post:
“Why now? ”
Moodys addresses the mitigating factors that explain their hesitancy to downgrade:
“RATIONALE FOR THE STABLE OUTLOOK
The US economy is unique among the sovereigns we rate. It combines very large scale, high average incomes, strong growth potential and a track-record of innovation that supports productivity and GDP growth. While GDP growth is likely to slow in the short term as the economy adjusts to higher tariffs, we do not expect that the US’ long-term growth will be significantly affected.
In addition, the US dollar’s status as the world’s dominant reserve currency provides significant credit support to the sovereign. The credit benefits of the dollar are wide-ranging and provide the extraordinary funding capacity that helps the government finance large annual fiscal deficits and refinance its large debt burden at moderate and relatively predictable costs. Despite reserve diversification by central banks globally over the past twenty years, we expect the US dollar to remain the dominant global reserve currency for the foreseeable future.”
Regarding “Why now?”, it should be noted that S&P downgraded US debt in 2011, and Fitch in 2023. Those would be during the Obama & Biden administrations respectively. So, no, I don’t think it’s “Orange Man Bad” syndrome in this case.
Model Collapse via what seems to be to be runaway “believing its own BS.”
My own experience, so far with only Google’s AI, is that it reports what is generally thought or known aboiut a subject even if the consensus is wrong. And I don’t mean esoteric things like Climate Change, simple things like Unix functions.
It’s Feinmann again. “First, don’t fool yourself”
Moody’s, quoted by Russell: “Over more than a decade … tax cuts have reduced government revenues.”
That decrease, amounting to about $75B a year, is not the cause of the current problem.
There are some ups and downs within that decade. The low was 15.78% for fiscal 2020 and there was a spike of $18.64% in 2022. I am guessing that the spike was due to indexing lagging behind actual inflation.
Russell: Moody’s reason for not wanting to downgrade our credit rating does not answer the question of “why now?”.
Mike M.
Might “Why now?” be political?
Mike, your comment:
âAs an optimist, I hold out hope that it is not irreparableâ
I am a pessimist on this issue. The solutions as I see them have a snowballâs chance in hell of ever being enacted.. Governor DeSantis has laid out a comprehensive program for fixing Congress:
âDeSantis listed the four amendments his effort will be promoting:
Term limits for members of Congress.
A requirement for a balanced budget at the federal level
A line item veto for the president
An amendment that Congress shall make no law respecting the citizens of the United States that does not also apply to members of Congress.â https://www.wgcu.org/government-politics/2024-01-29/desantis-urges-four-amendments-including-to-balance-u-s-budget-set-term-limits-for-congress
He has begun implementation of a constitutional change on term limits: https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desantis-advocates-constitutional-amendment-congressional-term-limits
While I think the balanced budget amendment should be a higher priority than term limits. I agree that implementing both would go a long way towards fixing the problem.
I repeat my skepticism that any of DeSantisâ proposals will ever come to pass.
Mike and John, whatever the answer to your question âwhy nowâ is not nearly as important as the fact that all three agencies have downgraded the credit rating of the United States.
Even if the timing was based on politics, do you disagree that Credit of United States is spiraling downward?
John,
Strangely enough I have not. I say strangely because I have been trying to harness AI for various business tasks, however, now that I think about it I realize mostly I have been trying to get AI to take care of things I don’t personally like to do. Coding and debugging is dessert for me, so to speak. The reports and documents and some of the more tedious testing I’d just as soon delegate to AI. Although actually I’ve been swamped by the tedium recently and haven’t made any new progress in this direction for some weeks now.
John,
My own experience, so far with only Googleâs AI, is that it reports what is generally thought or known aboiut a subject even if the consensus is wrong.
Absolutely. Most AIs will give you the conventional wisdom.
I think that our irresponsible national fiscal situation can only be fixed by a cultural shift whereby most of our citizens come to understand that the borrowing and spending is irresponsible. Sure, people will pay lip service to this, but they don’t really believe it. Until (unless) that happens, reform will be (rightly?) labeled as tyranny. In other words, the government overspends because we the people want it to. It’s primarily a reflection of the sad state of our aggregate viewpoint IMO.
[Edit: I should add, I don’t think this is ever going to happen. If we get to Mars and it becomes routine business as usual going there, or if other advances come to pass (AI, robotics, fusion, whatever) we might enjoy enough of an economic boom to forestall our day of reckoning a few more lifetimes. That’s about as good as it’ll get.]
It didn’t matter, the markets shrugged it off because the markets didn’t need credit rating agencies to tell them about that problem. The rating agencies lost a lot of credibility during the 2008 financial crisis.
“Despite high demand for US Treasury assets”
When this changes it will be a huge problem and this will very likely eventually change. Because China buys and holds a lot of debt this makes me especially nervous.
I don’t think you need to have a balanced budget if you can print your own money, have a growing economy, and other people are willing to buy your debt (invest in you) at rates that make taking it a wise choice economically.
Imagine a world where all those debt sales were turned around and invested wisely in infrastructure and other smart long term considerations. Imagine if they had just dumped all that money into a SP500 index fund for the last 40 years.
It’s like a public company generating new stock (or existing stock) out of thin air, selling it, and using it for R&D expenditures.
It’s a lot more complicated then this but one point I am making is that the debt sales are not necessarily the problem, it is how we are using that money unwisely.
“…it is how we are using that money unwisely.”
Sure, we are taking on debt to spend far more (mostly on public benefits/wealth transfer/Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare) than collected in taxes. Not to mention all the crazy stuff DOGE identified early on.
Congress makes drunken sailors on port leave look responsible in their spending choices.
mark bofill wrote: “I think that our irresponsible national fiscal situation can only be fixed by a cultural shift whereby most of our citizens come to understand that the borrowing and spending is irresponsible.”
There is much truth in that. But part of the reason that representative democracy has got us this far is that the people’s representatives are supposed to be better informed with better judgement and more foresight than the public at large. That mostly no longer seems to be the case.
To put it differently, we are suffering from a lack of leadership. We need leaders who can see what needs to be done and can make a convincing case to the public. Without that, I see no chance that the cultural shift to which mark refers will come about.
Except for Trump, most of the leadership in our society has been dedicated to leading us off a cliff by promoting leftist nonsense. That and attempting to block any attempts to deal with actual problems. It is almost like they want our current system of government to fail.
Russell,
Regarding the DeSantis amendments, which you list as:
(1) Term limits for members of Congress.
(2) A requirement for a balanced budget at the federal level
(3) A line item veto for the president
(4) An amendment that Congress shall make no law respecting the citizens of the United States that does not also apply to members of Congress.
First off, they aren’t going to happen, so they are not a solution to anything. As to whether they should happen:
(1) won’t solve anything and might make things worse. Yes, term limits will force empty suits out of office. But they will easily be replaced by other empty suits. Term limits will also force actual useful people out of office, to be replaced by empty suits.
(2) sounds good in principle, but it will force spending to be cut during a recession. That is almost surely bad economics.
(3) transfers too much power to the President and undermines compromise in Congress.
(4) Huh? What the heck is that about?
Tom is right that the reduction in credit rating did not really matter. The markets were ahead of the rating agencies. The reduction probably says more about the raters than about the government.
China holds something like 2-3% of our debt. That is probably enough for them to screw up the U.S. government bond market, but only at the cost of making it obvious that is what they are doing. I very much doubt they dare try it.
Here is a better idea than term limits, no constitutional amendment required. Make it illegal for officeholders to solicit campaign contributions other than having a web site to accept small contributions. Soliciting contributions would be the same as soliciting bribes.
That will have multiple good effects. One is that officeholders will be able to focus on doing their jobs rather than raising money. That will encourage good people to seek office. After all, who would want a job that requires them to spend most of their time asking people for money in exchange for nothing? Crooks and people who just want the job to satisfy their egos.
Another good effect is that is will greatly reduce the advantage of incumbency. It might even make it a disadvantage. Effective office holders should still be able to get reelected, but the empty suits will be much more easily replaced.
Third, it will make it hard to climb the political ladder without ever leaving office. Seeking higher will likely first require leaving office so that you can be free to raise money.
Finally, it will make it much harder to buy politicians.
Here is a better alternative to line item veto, no amendment required: Line item rescission. The President gets an appropriation bill, vetoes it, and send it back to Congress with a list of things he wants removed. Congress than takes an up or down vote, no filibuster, on each individual item. So they have to individually go on record for every line item to which the President objects. The revised bill then goes back to the President, who can still veto it if he thinks it does not measure up.
Dang, five straight longish posts. I fear that I am turning into Joshua. đ
Mike M,
Nah. You try to distill/simplify, Joshua only looked for ways to complicate, so that no change of anything could be justified…. save for maybe ever more government control by lefty ‘experts’ qualified to judge the incredible complexities. And institute policies Joshua likes.
â I fear that I am turning into Joshua.â
âŚ.. now add some arrogant incomprehensible babble and you will be there
Mockery. He’d mock us contemptuously. Not letting go of that is the hill he died on here.
mark bofill,
Combined with constant gratuitous insults.
All bad faith, all the time.
Russell Klier wrote: “Congress has passed laws that they have exempted themselves from, lots of them.”
If Congress passes a law regulating trucking, it would be silly to say either that the law applies to Congress or that Congress has exempted themselves from it. Laws pertaining to the judiciary pertain to the judiciary, not Congress. Laws that pertain to executive departments do not apply to Congress. Etc.
It only makes sense to say that Congress has exempted themselves from a law if the law is generally applicable. So far as I know, there are no examples of that.
Thanks guys. Nice to know that I am not turning into Joshua.
Mike M,
Just stay away from gratuitous insults and arrogant mockery and you’ll be safe.
One moment we have computer programs and algorithms.
The next we have a thought bubble called AI which seems ryo have overtaken the advertising world and catchphrase world.
Depending on how one feels comfortable with one’s semantics people will argue that AI exists when it is apparent that this is not correct.
Supercomputers yes
AI?
A long, long way to go.
Mike, your comment:
âIt only makes sense to say that Congress has exempted themselves from a law if the law is generally applicable. So far as I know, there are no examples of that.â
Here are a few examples for you:
The Freedom of Information Act.
Investigatory subpoenas to obtain information for safety and health probes.
Protections against retaliation for whistleblowers.
Having to post notices of worker rights in offices.
Prosecution for retaliating against employees who report safety and health hazards.
Having to train employees about workplace rights and legal remedies.
From: https://www.foxnews.com/us/congress-exempt-from-several-federal-laws
I asked Grok:
âList examples of laws that Congress has exempted itself fromâ
Answer: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_8ad99155-3ce9-4f55-9181-fe28360d8850
Further reading:
Do As We Say, Congress Says, Then Does What It Wants https://www.propublica.org/article/do-as-we-say-congress-says-then-does-what-it-wants
Mike M.
Add the bit about no laws which apply to citizens and to which congress people are exempt and you’ve got a great list. the non-solicitation law might be tricky to administer. We might get the idiotic letter i get from Chuck Schumer’s desk. There may be a simple way to limit solicitations maybe by media and or number of requests.
But again, those are wonderful ideas.
Russell,
Your list dos not convince me. It has the character of a Gish Gallup, with easily stated claims that take a lot of work to refute. The first item on your list is nonsense. FOIA applies to certain parts of the executive branch of the federal government. It is not even remotely a generally applicable law.
Mike and John,
Your solution to the mess is for the fox to guard the chickens. I agree your proposals are solid and would go a long way to solve the problem. My issue is you are expecting Congress to pass laws to fix Congress. Assuming they did that, it wouldn’t be very long until they undid that. No, the only solution is for a higher authority to fix Congress. As far as I know that is by constitutional amendment just as Governor Desantis has proposed.
Mike,
â The first item on your list is nonsense. FOIA applies to certain parts of the executive branch of the federal government. It is not even remotely a generally applicable law.â
This is exactly the problem. FOIA is wonderful, except that Congress exempted themselves from it. It proves my point.
Russell,
There are NO generally applicable laws from which Congress is exempt. A list of phony claims does nothing to prove that statement wrong, no matter how long the list. What can prove that wrong is one well substantiated counterexample.
There may well be laws that are not generally applicable and ought to be applicable to Congress. FOIA might be one, but I am skeptical. The proposed amendment does nothing to change that.
Yes, getting Congress to reform itself is a heavy lift, requiring a majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate. It is a much lighter lift than a constitutional amendment which requires a 2/3 vote in both House and Senate followed by ratification by 38 states.
Congress and phone / text solicitation
“The TCPA and Political Calls/Texts:
The TCPA regulates phone calls and text messages, particularly those using autodialers or prerecorded messages (robocalls and robotexts).
Political campaigns are NOT entirely exempt from the TCPA.
Political calls/texts are treated differently than commercial solicitations.
Landline Calls: Generally, political calls to landlines are allowed without prior consent.
Wireless Calls/Texts: The TCPA requires prior express consent for autodialed or prerecorded political calls and texts to cell phones.
2. Do Not Call Registry and Political Calls:
Political campaign calls are generally exempt from the National Do Not Call Registry requirements.
This means even if someone is on the Do Not Call Registry, they may still receive political calls and texts.
3. Key Points Regarding TCPA Compliance for Political Campaigns:
Prior Express Consent: While not requiring “written” consent like commercial messages, political campaigns still need prior express consent to send autodialed or prerecorded calls/texts to wireless numbers.
Identification: Political robocalls must identify the organization initiating the call and provide a phone number.
Time Restrictions: Text messages are generally prohibited before 8 am and after 9 pm in the recipient’s time zone.”
I never gave “consent” to solicitation and was bombarded with political texts for months. I reported * every single one * of them and they continued for at least 6 weeks until they finally stopped.
Mike, Your post:
âIt is a much lighter lift than a constitutional amendment which requires a 2/3 vote in both House and Senate followed by ratification by 38 states.â
That is only one way to amend the constitution, from Grok:
âArticle V of the U.S. Constitution provides two methods for proposing amendments: one through Congress (requiring a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate) and the other through a convention called by the legislatures of two-thirds of the states (34 out of 50 states).
DeSantis advocates for the latter approach, where state legislatures apply to Congress to call a “convention of the states” for the purpose of proposing amendments. This method bypasses Congress’s direct approval, focusing instead on state-driven action.â
More detail: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_96691a6f-03c5-4c8f-9738-4e0ce6aecef8
Men’s bodies in women’s sports.
CA comes up with an interesting compromise after the backlash causes them problems. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/31/us/ab-hernandez-california-championships-trump
“Following criticism from some in the community who said A.B.âs participation prevented lower-ranked competitors from advancing to the championships this weekend, the high school sports governing body allowed more cisgender girls, whose gender identity conforms with their sex assigned at birth, to compete.
The California Interscholastic Federation also said if a transgender athlete earned medals in an event, their ranking wouldnât prevent a âbiological femaleâ from medaling as well, the Associated Press reported. That means A.B. shared her top spot with two co-winners in the high jump and one co-winner in the triple jump.”
Tom Scharf,
Proving yet again that the government in California at all levels is utterly nuts. What can’t continue for ever will stop…. and includes California’s various social insanities. No idea when the madness will end, but end it will.
CNN:
“Research on trans peopleâs athletic performance is scarce, and there have been no large-scale scientific studies on the topic or on how hormone therapies may affect their performance in specific sport categories, such as running or wrestling.”
Yes, and Joe Biden is perfectly fine. It is notable how these sciency euphemisms are getting increasingly qualified beyond comprehension.
CA trans’s person’s sport medals:
High jump:
The world records in high jump are 2.45 meters (8 ft 1/4 in) for men and 2.10 meters (6 ft 10/12 in) for women.
Triple jump:
The men’s triple jump world record is 18.29 meters, set by Jonathan Edwards of the United Kingdom in 1995. The women’s world record is 15.74 meters, set by Yulimar Rojas of Venezuela in 2022.
Long jump:
The world records for the men’s and women’s long jump are 8.95 meters by Mike Powell (1991) and 7.52 meters by Galina Chistyakova (1988)
Mike M,
“…followed by ratification by 38 states.”
i rather suspect that if Congress ever passed a constitutional amendment limiting what Congress (or Congress critters individually) can do, getting 38 states to agee would be, by comparison, very easy.
( this is a developing story so Iâm not sure all parts of it are true but Iâm sure some of it is)
Ukraine has carried out a drone attack on a Russian strategic bomber airfield. The claim is that $1 billion EURO worth of Russian air assets have been destroyed. The videos of damaged aircraft are very convincing.
There is also a video of Ukrainian and drones, taking off from inside a tractor trailer near the airfield.
What a coup!
There are a number of OSINT sources reporting this; one reliable source with videos follows: https://x.com/a_shekh0vts0v/status/1929151812512227619?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
“Washingtonâs never going to reform itself,” DeSantis said in the conference. “Itâs going to require us working in our individual states using the tools that the Founding Fathers gave us to be able to take power away from D.C. and return it back to the American people.”
âThe alternative method DeSantis advocates is also spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, which says:
“The Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which ⌠shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof.” https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/feb/01/explaining-ron-desantis-effort-to-call-a-conventio/
Russell,
I would not put much stock in a convention. That route has never been used to propose an amendment, the legislative route has been used to propose 33 amendments of which 27 were ratified. The rules for such a convention have never been established so any attempt to use that route will end up in the courts. And then there is still the matter of ratification by 38 states.
I don’t think there is a fundamental problem with getting line item rescission through Congress. Restricting fund raising by incumbents would be much harder, but might not be impossible. It would have to be done gradually, with an initial version that would not disadvantage incumbents too much. Then Congress Critters might vote for it rather than handing an opponent an effective campaign issue.
But an amendment would be hopeless for implementing that sort of reform. The details will be devilish and will be subject to change as new strategies and technologies are developed. So an amendment would have to leave details to Congress and we will be back to where we are now.
It is possible that the threat of a convention could be used to get Congress to act, as happened with the 17th Amendment.
Legacy news media are now reporting on the attack on Russian airbases.
Axios:
âUkraine launches massive drone strike on air bases deep inside Russiaâ
âThe official said intelligence officers launched attack drones from trucks that have been covertly placed near Russian air bases â sone of them in Siberia â thousands of kilometers from Ukraine.
Around 40 Russian military planes â among them strategic bombers â were reportedly hit in the attack.â https://www.axios.com/2025/06/01/ukraine-drone-strikes-russia
The â40 aircraft destroyedâ is widely reported, but thus far I have only seen video evidence of five.
The destruction of part of Russiaâs strategic bomber fleet would certainly be good news to Europe and the United States. I have seen video of strategic bombers in flames.
Mike, your post:
âI would not put much stock in a convention.â
I donât. I see it as a long shot, but DeSantis has started the process.
you also posted:
âI donât think there is a fundamental problem with getting line item rescission through Congress.â
The problem I have with your approach is you are depending on Congress to fix Congress. Congress is responsible for breaking Congress and I donât see them passing meaningful and lasting legislation that restricts Congress. if they did, it could quickly be undone by a future Congress.
To me the only way is a constitutional amendment.
Russell,
I reject your defeatist position. But then, I am a cockeyed optimist.
“Congress is responsible for breaking Congress”.
The voting public is ultimately responsible. Things are as they are because the voters have permitted, or even demanded, it. A convention might seem like the easy way out, but the easy way is not usually the right way.
Mike, your post:
âRussell, I reject your defeatist position.â
My position is to attack the problem with definitive, long-term solutions.
Your position is to keep the current congressional morass and implement gimmicks and workarounds to avoid dealing with the fundamental problem.
You have surrendered without even trying.
Don’t park expensive aircraft out in the open. I expect most of the destroyed aircraft was old stuff unless the Russians are incompetent. They might be far away from the border.
This story keeps getting better.
The Ukrainian drones were launched from containers on semi trucks that were positioned near airfields.
It was a coordinated attack on between 4 to 6 Russian airfields
One air field was as far away as Siberia
The Ukrainians are still claiming 40 aircraft were destroyed, but the actual number is yet to be verified
there is a lot of speculation about what the Russian reaction will be. Tomorrow negotiations are supposed to start in Turkey.
This story keeps getting better.
The Ukrainian drones were launched from containers on semi trucks, supposedly done autonomously.
It was a coordinated attack on between 4 to 6 Russian airfields.
One air field thousands of miles away in Siberia
The Ukrainians are still claiming 40 aircraft were destroyed, but the actual number is yet to be verified.
There is much speculation about retaliation by the Russians will take. Peace negotiations are supposed to start in Turkey tomorrow.
Video of drone launch from a truck: https://x.com/evgen1232007/status/1929149781055529094?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
the mood on âXâ right nowâŚ..
â We’ve reached the point where Ukraine needs to consider very hard whether it’s willing to extend a Ukrainian security guarantee to NATO.â
Tom, Your post:
âI canât tell but looks like a TU-95 or a variant? I vaguely see propellers. Vintage 1956â
Good eye! Yes, the same vintage as the USAF B-52. NATO calls it âThe Bearâ. And itâs still a mainstay in the Russian strategic bomber force; just like the B-52 is in the USAF. The TU-95 is expected to remain in service until at least 2040.
Specifications from GROK:
Weapons:
Kh-55 (AS-15 Kent): Subsonic, nuclear or conventional cruise missiles with a range of ~2,500â3,000 km (1,550â1,860 miles).
Kh-101/Kh-102: Modern conventional (Kh-101) and nuclear (Kh-102) stealth cruise missiles, with ranges up to 4,500â5,500 km (2,800â3,400 miles).
Capacity: Up to 16 missiles (6 on internal rotary launchers, 10 on external pylons in some configurations).
Performance and Role
Strategic Reach: Its long range allows it to strike targets across continents, often without leaving Russian airspace, especially when launching cruise missiles.
Endurance: Capable of flights lasting over 12 hours, often with mid-air refueling to extend missions.
Current Use: Part of Russiaâs nuclear triad, it serves as a deterrent and a platform for both nuclear and conventional strikes. In the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Tu-95MS bombers have been used to launch cruise missiles at Ukrainian infrastructure from standoff distances.
OSINT sites have been identifying the Russian aircraft destroyed from videos taken by the drones and posted on social media. Russian civilians are also posting cell phone videos I will list what I have seen or read so far but consider these preliminary and unverified:
2 Tu-22M3 bombers,
6 Tu-95MS bombers,
1 An-12 military transport aircraft,
1 A-50 radar plane
The Ukraine military is still claiming 41 Russian planes were destroyed, including 34% of the Russian strategic missile carrying fleet. I doubt that there will be video evidence to confirm all of these. In a few days we can expect a more complete picture after satellite photographs have been analyzed.
I expect a lot of Russian generals will be falling out of windows.
Operation Spiderweb:
âOne driver, 55-year-old Alexander Z. from Chelyabinsk, told investigators he was working for a vehicle owned by 37-year-old Artem, who had been contracted by a businessman in Murmansk to transport four modular homes from Chelyabinsk to the Kola district. After agreeing on a price, Alexander loaded the cargo and began the trip. Along the route, he received instructions by phone from an unidentified man who told him when and where to stop. His final stop was near a Rosneft gas station close to a military airfield in Murmansk regionâthe site from which drones were ultimately launched.
A similar account came from 61-year-old Andrey M., also driving a truck owned by Artem. He said he was instructed to deliver prefabricated homes to the Irkutsk region. But after parking near a cafĂŠ in Usolye-Sibirskoye, drones unexpectedly began launching from the back of his vehicle.â
So an Egyptian illegal alien (overstayed visa) Mohamed Sabry Soliman yelling “Free Palestine” uses a makeshift flamethrower to burn a bunch of senior citizen Jews in an uber-liberal self professed sanctuary city.
Quite the non-preferred narrative mashup. Must be a hard Monday morning for the legacy media. You just know they are trying so, so, hard to type out “unknown motive” with gritted teeth. I’m guessing this one won’t get the blanket “news analysis” and opinion column coverage.
For the record I think they are just fringe mentally ill people hurting their own cause. Since this is the second “Free Palestine” terror event in the past couple weeks I’m guessing that phrase will now exit the allowable protest lexicon for polite company.
A gift to Trump.
Iâm still taking a lot of of the information at face value and have little confirmation on most of it. Please remember the things Iâm posting are still preliminary.
Reports are that Volkswagen sized crates weâre loaded onto tractor trailers for delivery to various parts of Russia. The crates had sliding roofs and they purportedly contained pre-fab sheds. At âHâ hour, the roofs of the containers slid open, and the drones launched for their targets.
images: https://x.com/battle_bees/status/1929160352115175542?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
Wow Russell, the Trojan Horse crates were a wonderful idea. Almost as good as the exploding pagers.
I wonder if our guys are as clever as theirs. My suspicion is that great ideas like these would be suppressed by management.
John, your post:
âMy suspicion is that great ideas like these would be suppressed by management.â
I share your suspicion about our military’s ability to both think up these kind of plans and to combat them if if they are deployed against us.
DARPA is known for making things bigger, more complex and more expensive.
The Ukrainian drone drones that have been used in this case cost less than $1000 each. [I think!]
Inspecting every semi with a shipping container is nearly impossible. Making everything short range attack drone proof is also nearly impossible, but high value assets like planes can (should have been) be protected. Drones have changed warfare. I would also suggest drones are also going to change terror attacks / assassination attempts.
Overall I would say this type of tech is something we are going to wish never came into existence. Armies of autonomous AI driven hunter killer drones are well within reach. Physics are still limiting them, carrying capacity, communications, range, etc. They also make a lot of noise.
Tom, it’s just as you suggested:
“Truck phobia in russia. russian intelligence agencies have apparently decided to monitor all trucks. There are traffic jams stretching for miles on the roads.”
Video: https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1929446820188438774
Some guy musing on âXâ today:
âA reminder, given today’s Ukrainian drone strikes, that it is becoming borderline-insane that we routinely allow ships owned and operated by DoD-designated Chinese military companies to sit in our ports with thousands of containers onboard and under their control.â
These same ports are where the U S Navy docks their warships. https://x.com/tshugart3/status/1826597525492523466
The Military Summary commentator says that nuclear capable strategic bombers must be visible from satellites. The USA and their allies should not attack them. What may Russia do to NATO bombers?
The US already knows this. 35,000 trucks cross the Mexican border every day, 28,000 across the Canadian border. Try to prevent drug smuggling with that, good luck. In another twist the cartels have been using drones to drop fentanyl across the border at predetermined GPS points for later pickup. I suppose the people picking them up could also use drones.
Running an open society with free trade has a lot of exposure. You mostly just have to absorb the hits and hope it doesn’t get out of control.
A guy on an overstayed tourist visa got a work permit? How does this even happen? Shameless lawlessness caused by an utter lack of accountability. You sign off on these visas, you take responsibility for their actions.
Men’s bodies in women’s sports.
The infamous Algerian Olympic gold medal boxer had “their” 2023 genetic tests leaked and it shows “they” are a biological male. World boxing will not allow “them” to compete again until they pass this now required test.
“No numerical or chromosomal anomalies detected at 450-550 banding resolution” allegedly means that they don’t have any of the rare crossover gender types.
So not even a genetic abnormality, just a growth defect? I feel like I’m in an unethical harvard psych experiment.
Russell, I worked on Westinghouse’s JSTAR proposal in 1985-86. The procurement competition techincal development was run ba an Air Force major who was blazingly smart. No matter how complex or screwy a question might be as our proposal was developed, he alway understood and nothing needed to be repeated or expanded. And the quuality of the discussion was very high. It was a lot of fun.
Turned out he had an ScD from MIT which I understand had been at the AirForce’s expense. I’m sure that if there was any resistance to innovation it would have been in the ranks above him.
JSTARS was used successfully in the Gulf War. Useful for identifying convoys at night / all weather conditions. Synthetic aperture radar, or SAR.
Of course flying around with a high powered radar also makes you quite discoverable in all weather conditions. I wouldn’t want to be in one near a competent air defense.
They can also do this from space now but I don’t know the resolution.
Tom Scharf,
I believe, as with telescopes, the best possible radar resolution is proportional to the receiver aperture and inversely proportional to the wavelength being received. Since radar wavelength is very large compared to visible light, the best possible resolution will be terrible (at least compared to spy satellite resolution). There may be ways around this (eg two receivers on satellites spaced far apart have their signals combined to create an effective “giant aperture”), but this is not simple in to do in practice.
Non?Interference with National Technical Means (NTM) The treaty permits the use of national technical means of verification (e.g. satellites) in a manner consistent with international law, and contains explicit provisions that prohibit interference with NTM and the use of concealment measures that may impede monitoring by NTM.
The US and Russia have committed to not hiding strategic nuclear platforms. This is why both the US and Russia have not dispersed and hidden their nuclear capable bombers.
As the US is complicit in the targeting of Russian strategic nuclear assets by providing targeting information to Ukraine for strikes on these assets, the US is in direct violation of the treaty.
Though the destruction of these assets by Ukraine is not in of itself crippling the Russian nuclear triad, the abrogation of the terms of the treaty will lead to Russia dispersing and hiding their bombers. This raises the uncertainty of the nuclear intent and capabilities of the nuclear powers which can lead to escalation.
The Ukraine attack will have little to no effect on the Ukraine/Russian war but does raise the risk of nuclear war between the US and Russia.
Ed Forbes,
I think it is difficult to say for certain where Ukraine got detailed targeting information for Russian strategic bombers. They could have just used Google Earth or some other satellite data source.
That said: Yes, I agree that the Russians will now almost certainly disperse and hide their strategic bombers, even if that means a formal withdrawal from the existing START treaty.
I also expect that Russia will, to the extent they can, target Ukrainian political leaders, even if that means lots of Ukrainian civilians will also be killed.
Steve
I still contend that Russia will not target Ukraine leadership. Itâs in their best interest not to.
If targeted they become martyrs and new leadership gets a honeymoon for a time. Current leadership is discredited both internally and internationally.
I still believe Russia has its own security apparatus overseeing the Ukraine presidents location to ensure nothing bad happens to him from Russian air strikes. Very much in their interest for him to stay healthy and in charge.
But I bet it is going to cause colleges and universities (not to mention a host of other organizations that receive Federal funds) a lot of headaches. Of course, they could just stop all DEI based racial discrimination in hiring/admission/promotion/etc, but I doubt that will happen any time soon (Harvard has gone even more into racially biased admissions after the Supreme Court told them to stop discriminating). So it is very likely to be be ugly.
I was wondering whyâŚ..
FROM âXâ:
âWhy did Ukraine publicly disclose so much info about Operation âSpiderwebâ?
Thatâs a very good question â and the answer reveals how modern warfare now goes far beyond the battlefield.
Now, every russian cargo truck becomes a potential weapon.
Every driver is a potential saboteur.
Every highway â a threat vector.
Result? Paranoia, friction, and skyrocketing internal costs.
russia will now be forced to:
â Inspect every suspicious truck
â Monitor internal roads with military resources
â Distrust their own private drivers
â Slow down all logistics, civilian and military alike
This strains infrastructure. Chokes supply chains. Erodes trust.
Ukraine didnât just hit planes â it weaponized uncertainty. It turned russiaâs vast territory into a battlefield of doubt.
BDA OSINT current, including some satellite images:
(Still preliminary)
7x Tu-95 Destroyed
2x Tu-95 Damaged
4x Tu-22M3 Destroyed
1x A-50 or Il-76 Damaged
1x An-12 Destroyed
Trump, on Truth Social, overnight:
âBecause of tariffs, our economy is BOOMING.â
Russell,
“weaponize uncertainty” Great!
But maybe also “spreading uncertainty”
Russia’s interface (border too strong a term?) with Ukrain must be pretty porous if they could get this thing organized, provisioned, and turned loose all in-country.
Amur is a very long way from Ukraine. Bravo
john,
yes, I canât figure out all the logistics of it. Some components must have been smuggled in, like the drones and warheads.
Some supplies had to be acquired inside of Russia, like the construction materials for the crates. They also had to coordinate with Russian truck drivers and they also had to have buildings for receiving, shipping and assembly.
I am impressed.
To what extent are containers inspected at the port of entry? Maybe the containers were loaded outside of Russia and arrived by ship in, say, Vladivostok with a false invoice. They could have been loaded so that goods matching the invoice would have been seen when opening the normal door. The drones behind those goods would have still been able to launch using the hidden door on top of the container.
Russia has an enormous border. I suspect smuggling stuff in is about as easy as it is in the US. Russia has it’s own drug trade no doubt and they may just use whatever techniques the current smugglers use.
Drug smuggling in the US is a numbers game, some percentage will get caught. The Russians may have even intercepted one of these crates and couldn’t figure out what it was for.
Ukraine appears to have done this with a lot of thought. It’s likely this vector of attack will get shutoff so they were patient and did it all at once.
See the picture here. The libertarians have no party to back. And of course the NYT’s is currently running articles on how the deficit matters now. Aaaargghhh.
Ed Forbes
Ukraine for strikes on these assets, the US is in direct violation of the treaty.
Can you point to the provision? A country being in violation for providing information about where things are does not follow from a provision that says countries can’t hide things. To some extent, having provisions that say these can’t be hidden suggests precisely the opposite: that where these things are is supposed to be knowable– and so there would be nothing wrong with sharing information on where they are.
Maybe there there is a provision that says these things can’t be hidden but also, no one who knows where they are can tell anyone. If such a thing exists, you should be able to link to that.
And of course, besides that, Ukraine may not have gotten their info from the US. People have been tracking the bombers as they fly toward the Ukraine. If you can track flying bombers you can likely infer where they come from. And if people talk, you could probably figure out where many actually are sitting entirely not hidden on the ground. Under the circumstances, it might not require satellite information.
But I’d still be interested in the provision in any treaty. So if you can link it, that would be nice.
the abrogation of the terms of the treaty will lead to Russia dispersing and hiding their bombers.
Of course, it would be nice if you point to the provision that shows the terms you claim. But sure… whether or not this abrogates the treaty, this might lead to Russian hiding whatever they have left.
How many do functional bombers does Russia have left?
This raises the uncertainty of the nuclear intent and capabilities of the nuclear powers which can lead to escalation.
Sure. Like it or not, whether or not it violated a treaty agreement, Putin rolling into Ukraine in the first place raised “uncertainty” and could lead to escalation. Escalation of various types often happens after wars.
lucia is correct that Ukraine need not have gotten their info from US intelligence. It is easy to do a search of where US nukes are based. Sure, it might not be accurate at any moment. But Ukraine did not need to info to be perfectly accurate. They only needed it to be good enough to allow for significant damage.
The basic idea is that by showing restraint and taking the high road, Conservatives do NOT preserve institutions. That only allows the Left to continue to destroy those institutions. Retaliation in kind might not restore norms, but it is the only hope of restoring norms.
The point is not to glorify revenge or abandon the ideal of impartial justice. The point is that justice cannot exist in an asymmetrical system. Only when progressives feel the sting of their own tactics will they have an incentive to return to rules-based governance. Only when the costs of betrayal exceed the gains will cooperation reemerge as the rational strategy.
Tom Scharf
Ukraine appears to have done this with a lot of thought. Itâs likely this vector of attack will get shutoff so they were patient and did it all at once.
Yep. Well planned, patient. Also, I’m sure when this was proposed someone in the room said “This could never work.” They would give very intelligent sounding reasons it couldn’t work.
The Ukrainian leadership is clearly willing to decide to try things that sound like they could never work.
Ed Forbes
If targeted they become martyrs and new leadership gets a honeymoon for a time. Current leadership is discredited both internally and internationally.
I would suggest that however discredited Ukraine leadership may have been last week, it’s significantly less discredited today.
Everyone has to be impressed by the balls, the planning and the outcome of this. Even Putin who doesn’t like it has got to give a lot of credit to the small, not bombastic Zelensky for pulling this off. Zelensky may not bloviate like Trump, but he pulled off something pretty darn big.
Of course Ukraine could get targeting information from many sources. Where they got the information is kind of irrelevant, since Russia’s likely response is to withdraw from the treaty and then disperse and hide their bombers.
On a dreary note, the ‘lists of conditions’ Russia and Ukraine produced before today’s negotiations are reported to be mutually exclusive on many key points, meaning neither is likely willing to significantly compromise to reach a ceasefire agreement. The killing will continue.
SteveF
since Russiaâs likely response is to withdraw from the treaty and then disperse and hide their bombers.
Agreed.
Nevertheless, I’m interested in Ed’s claim about the treaty.
On a dreary note, the âlists of conditionsâ Russia and Ukraine produced before todayâs negotiations are reported to be mutually exclusive on many key points,
Well… I mostly avoid discussing the “peace” efforts. But I expected this. I remain pretty sure that Putin always wanted all of Ukraine, still wants it and prefers war over not getting that. He’ll pretend to negotiate until the cows come home, especially as long as the war is conducted over Ukrainian soil.
And Ukraine does not want to cease to be Ukraine and would like their territory back. Yes, they may not want to die. But they don’t see living under the jack boot of Russia as a better alternative.
It seems Trump never liked Zelensky, but may have finally figured out that Putin is not really seeking peace. Putin has been playing Trump. Go. Figure.
Lucia,
“And Ukraine does not want to cease to be Ukraine and would like their territory back. Yes, they may not want to die. But they donât see living under the jack boot of Russia as a better alternative.”
I expect there is a wide range of public opinion in Ukraine. Of course, what we hear reported is mostly from the western part of Ukraine, where there is indeed a strong reluctance to give in to Russia’s demands of neutrality (etc). I doubt it is that way everywhere. But more importantly, I just do not see there is an alternative to some acquiescence to Russia’s demands in exchange for peace; at some point the Ukrainians will have had enough of their soldiers being killed.
The USA is not going to send troops. If the Europeans do, that will almost certainly lead to a nuclear exchange; the Russians have stated clearly, and multiple times, that European troops in Ukraine would be considered a declaration of war by NATO.
Fortunately, despite their bluster, I doubt the Europeans have the stomach for war, and especially not nuclear war in Europe (just think of the environmental damage! đ ). So it seems to me very unlikely they will actually send troops to Ukraine. In a war of attrition, Ukraine has little chance of prevailing.
I do not pretend to be able to read Putin’s mind, but as a practical matter, I suspect administering the Eastern part of Ukraine would be very difficult with a hostile population. Maybe not worth the effort. The current massing of Russian troops at the boarder between Kiev and Karkiv looks like an effort to split the country roughly in half, trapping Ukrainian troops in the east.
Unfortunately, many more will die before the fighting ends.
Mike,
It’s not that I think there’s a better answer, because I’m pretty sure there isn’t, but:
Only when progressives feel the sting of their own tactics will they have an incentive to return to rules-based governance. Only when the costs of betrayal exceed the gains will cooperation reemerge as the rational strategy.
What constitutes a ‘rational strategy’ depends on the objective. If your adversary’s objective is explicitly to wreck civilization, it isn’t going to matter what costs you impose; they aren’t going to cooperate while they cling to their objective.
For those who are skeptical that progressives want to wreck civilization, I refer you to the immortal words of yoavgo on X. Not all progressives want to wreck civilization of course, but there’s some subset who certainly do.
At a minimum the US has plausible deniability that it didn’t provide the bomber location information to Ukraine. AFAICT only in Ed’s corners of the internet is this assertion being made, as they say, without evidence. There are plenty of commercial satellite imagery providers that can easily spot gigantic bombers sitting on a runway at a well know air force base. I bet you can also see them with commercial drones locally!
If there is some treaty provision to have them sitting out in the open or verifiable from space in some way then Russia would be justified in putting them in hangers now and working something else out.
mark bofill wrote: ” If your adversaryâs objective is explicitly to wreck civilization, it isnât going to matter what costs you impose; they arenât going to cooperate while they cling to their objective.”
True. And there are those on the left who do want to wreck our civilization. The only thing to be done with them is to destroy them.
But I suspect that most politicians on the left, and others with power, are just trying to get as much power, wealth, prestige, etc. as they can for themselves. They will respond to retaliatory lawfare and weaponization.
mark bofill,
I think it comes down to many ‘progressives’ (not sure that is even a fair description, ‘authoritarian socialists’ is probably more accurate) being absolutely convinced they are right, and nothing in the longstanding structure of “liberal democracy” is worth saving. They don’t think they are wrecking civilization, they think they are wrecking a “racist/sexist patriarchy” that is profoundly evil to be replaced by a socialist paradise of equity.
You can see this in how European progressives have ever increasing censorship, and ever more ruthless, authoritarian refusal to honor the will of voters…. “unacceptable” candidates and parties are simply not allowed, by extra-legal means, to take power, no matter what the voters want. This may not end well for Europe.
The Constitution presents many hurtles for that kind of authoritarian political action in the USA. Which does mean ‘progressive’ justices would not undermine the Constitution if in the majority. They would jump at the chance.
Bottom line: I agree that the “progressive left” in the USA is never going to relent, even if they suffer some consequences for tearing down long standing norms. It is not that they are unprincipled, it is that their principles are completely incompatible with personal liberty and a constitutional republic controlled by citizens at large.
Sorry, left out a key word:
“Which does not mean âprogressiveâ justices would not undermine the Constitution if in the majority.”
The Trump lawfare campaign backfired spectacularly and that should be enough to dampen this behavior. Not only did Trump get an immediate boost in polling every time this happened, he won the election, and then proceeded to use the levers of government power against all his antagonists.
I don’t know but I also predict this behavior will backfire on Trump even though it is retaliatory in many voter’s minds. Trump doesn’t have reelection to worry about. Many people including myself want all this behavior to just stop.
I understand the point though that sometimes you must fight fire with fire to make opponents understand it is a two way street (see censorship and free speech). Perhaps lessons will be learned and things will get better, or not.
Thanks all. I agree with all of the points you raised.
Retaliation need not be all or nothing. I don’t want to see Republicans pushing ludicrous, made up charges against Dems. They should retaliate in kind, but perhaps not quite to the same degree. That is, they should avoid escalating. So they should not hesitate to push charges where they are justified. Examples would be the Letitia James mortgage fraud in Virginia and the Dem Congress Critter who assaulted law enforcement in NJ.
Mike M,
I agree, better to prosecute the obvious cases, not the stretches.
James is just too easy a case to not go after. She may not get convicted (depends on venue, of course), but she is absolutely more guilty of fraud than Trump ever was… she should be disbarred and removed from office. I doubt she will spend time in prison, not matter how deserving.
Tom Scharf,
I doubt Trump winning election in spite of the lawfare would ever give the loony left even a second thought about the wisdom of that tactic. The left never relents and never compromises; they are true believers in their cause, like the most dedicated fundamentalist Christian, and will never admit error or poor judgement.
They would do it all again in a second, and will….. prediction: should Dems control the House in January 2027, it will be all impeachment of Trump all the time, no matter how futile, and no matter if it means Vance is more likely to be elected in November 2028. Should a Dem win the White House in 2028, they will prosecute Trump after he is out of office, for a multitude of ‘crimes’. Bad people doing bad things, but utterly blind to their own evil.
Ed Forbes — I don’t agree that Putin thinks it’s in his best interests to NOT target Ukrainian leadership. Putin is at heart a thug, I rather suspect he thinks a decapitation strike would undermine Ukrainian will to continue their fight. Of course, to do it, he would have to find the Ukrainian leadership in areas he could strike freely.
Whatever happens, the Ukrainian strike complicated the lives of everyone involved in or responsible for force protection planning.
Why would any of “those on the left” want to destroy civilization?
It’s true that there are nihilists among us but I don’t see them tied to one side or the other
John,
Do I need to link passages from the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital where Karl Marx advocated communist revolution and the overthrow of existing capitalist systems? Surely not.
In his book The Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon characterized decolonization as an inherently and fundamentally violent process (to his credit IMO, since I think this is clearly so). Decolonization is a leftist idea to begin with.
Various radical environmental movements are fundamentally leftist and anticapitalist and hold that humans should die, more or less, such as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
I could go on, but does this not suffice for starters at least?
Further:
Nihilism is rooted in the ‘death of God’. This was Nietzsche’s observation. I think it is fair to say faith and religious belief is the province of the right? Although there are certainly atheists on the right as well.
I am often curious what differentiates atheists on the right from leftists. Wisdom, I’d like to think. But I’m sure I don’t really know.
There are plenty on the left who want to tear down western civilization. Also many who advocate policies that will undermine technological civilization. And large numbers who want to destroy liberal democracy and the rule of law.
Mark,
Conservatives tend to be supportive of preserving traditions and institutions. So although some might be atheists, they still support much of what religion has given us.
A progressive atheist has no guardrails.
Mike,
There is that.
Mark,
My thought was they have a different version of civilization, not no civilization.
Drone attack update:
OSINT reports that satellite photos show âThe destruction of at least 11 Russian strategic bombers is visible – 7 Tu-95 (and one, probably, damaged), 4 Tu-22 M3 and one An-12 cargo plane, which does not belong to strategic aviation.â
Image: [you need imaging hardware to properly analyse the photo] https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1929954014566793525
OSINT reports that satellite photos confirm at least one A-50, maybe two, sophisticated AEW&C [Airborne Early Warning and Control] planes were hit. Ukraine downed two of these last year At that time Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR), said that Moscow only had six A-50s left in its arsenal.
Image: [you need imaging hardware to properly analyse the photo] https://x.com/Hurin92/status/1929526403113836753
From NYT:
âThe New York Times, which cited satellite imagery and drone footage to report seven strategic bombers destroyed at Belaya airbase, including four Tu-22M and three Tu-95 bombers, with additional damage at Olenya. Additionally, American and European security officials were cited as estimating up to 20 aircraft destroyed or severely damaged across the attacked airbases.â
Grok:
Russian military blogger Rybar claimed 13 Russian aircraft were damaged, including up to 12 strategic bombers, in the Ukrainian drone attack on June 1, 2025.
I am still baffled by the logistics of the drone attack. I am continuing to research it and present information I think is reliable below. Bear in mind all the information on logistics so far comes from inside the Ukrainian government so it may be factual and it may be PSYOPS.
Kyiv Independant:
âAccording to the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine], the drones were smuggled into Russia where they were then hidden in the roofs of wooden cabins, which were then transported by truck to the air bases being targeted.
When they reached their destinations, the roofs were retracted remotely and the drones simply flew off towards the Russian bombers.â
Zelensky: “Whatâs most interesting, and this can now be stated publicly, is that the ‘office’ of our operation on Russian territory was located directly next to FSB headquarters in one of their regions,” https://kyivindependent.com/operation-spiderweb-everything-we-know-about-ukraines-audacious-attack-on-russias-heavy-bombers/
From Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), A US think tank:
âUkrainian operatives smuggled around 150 small strike drones, modular launch systems, and 300 explosive payloads into Russia through covert logistical routes.
As part of the operationâs deception strategy, the SSU reportedly recruited Russian truck drivers to deliver the mobile drone launchers camouflaged as standard cargo loads. These drivers were instructed to arrive at specific times and park at predesignated locations in the vicinity of Russian strategic air bases, including fuel stations and isolated roadside areas.
After all the drones were launched, the trucks exploded, indicating that they were equipped with a self-destruction mechanism.
all personnel involved in the operation were successfully moved from Russian territory to Ukraine prior to drone launch.
The first-person-view (FPV) drones used in the operation were remotely controlled through Russian mobile telecommunications networks, including 4G and LTE connections. These networks provided sufficient bandwidth to support real-time video transmission and command inputs across vast distances, allowing Ukrainian operators to manage drone flights from outside Russian territory. This setup avoided the need for any physical ground control stations or nearby operators.â
A lot more detail: https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-ukraines-spider-web-operation-redefines-asymmetric-warfare
john ferguson,
“My thought was they have a different version of civilization, not no civilization.”
Sure. Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, and Che’ all had visions of what civilization should be. The results speak for themselves.
John,
I’m sure they do. It doesn’t change the fact that some of them want to violently destroy what civilization we have today, does it?
.
[Edit: My contention was never that leftists are anarchists. Some are, but it wasn’t what I was saying. ]
Result is not the same as intention. I just finished the Ken Burns Vietnam series and was astonished that once the North had conquered the whole place, they implemented communism across the board and it failed disasterously.
You can then say that whatever the intent might be, the impact of adopting communism to run a state is very likely to be disasterous, and put that way, you could say that civilization as we enjoy it is unlikely to survive a communist takeover.
You can then say that whatever the intent might be, the impact of adopting communism to run a state is very likely to be disasterous, and put that way, you could say that civilization as we enjoy it is unlikely to survive a communist takeover.
I can’t decide if I am picking nits, but FWIW this isn’t really what I was saying. You seem to be talking about the ruin wrought by the system that gets installed after the revolution. I’m just talking about the destruction caused by the revolution in the first place. Maybe it’s a distinction without relevance, since we’re done with the subject.
Last night on Jake Tapper’s prime time news program on CNN I detected a change in reporting on American anti-Semitism. He had an in depth report on the effect the recent attacks on Americaâs Jews was having on our Jewish population. It was quite sympathetic and had no pro-palestinian rhetoric.
Now if only the Democrats and universities would stop spewing their hatred.
Mark,
I found the threat of socialism posed by our left more insidious but not specifically aimed at destroying civilization, although I was prepared to agree that the result should they succeed might be that.
FYI: Some of those satellite photos from Russell are from commercial space based SAR. They have probably been enhanced but they have useable resolution. Apparently there has been a lot of cloud cover over the target sites.
Tom
Apparently there has been a lot of cloud cover over the target sites.
Do you mean since the attack?
The right refuses to acknowledge the societal damage from over the top capitalism and the left refuses to acknowledge that socialism / communism has been tried and failed in practice everywhere.
So yeah, the pure strain of each has unacceptable results * overall * for society, but in different ways. China has better results now because they finally embraced economic capitalism combined with their authoritarian control. The US may be the most capitalistic country out there but they also have plenty of social safety net systems. The pure strain of capitalism would be voted out quickly in the US IMO, no social safety net.
My main problem with the leftist utopian vision is they just assume economic dynamism that drives the capitalist economy will be unaffected by a massive government with a heavy hand, combined with the IMO inevitable corruption that comes with unfettered government control. See almost all leftish run cities in the US currently.
The pure libertarian view is that government itself is the enemy, not which flavor, and I fall closer to that view although I acknowledge the need for government services even if that is only the government collecting taxes and paying private companies to provide the services.
“Do you mean since the attack?”
Yes, allegedly that is why there aren’t visible satellite photos of the damage.
john ferguson wrote: “My thought was they have a different version of civilization, not no civilization.”
Sure. The Egyptian Old Kingdom was a civilization. But I doubt that many of us would find life as the ordinary people lived it to be very civilized. In many ways, we would not find life in 18th century America to be very civilized.
john ferguson: “Result is not the same as intention.”
There is a large and influential contingent on the Left who have the intention of destroying much of civilization as we know it, in terms of both intellectual and material goods. Among their goals are dispensing with most of Western culture, forcing people to live in tiny apartments, drastically reducing the availability and reliability of energy, greatly restricting our diets, and eliminating personal liberty.
I don’t know how numerous such people are, but that have enormous influence. The result is deliberately disastrous policies such as defund the police, open borders, DEI, trans ideology, woke DA’s, etc. The point of such policies is destruction, although the Left’s useful idiots probably don’t realize that.
Tom,
Also, the fact that a commercial satellite that can even see things through clouds and with companies that advertise their capabilities commercially can be used to view what’s at the attack sites clearly supports Ed Forbes claim that the US “provid[ed] targeting information to Ukraine for strikes on these assets” . After all, if how else could the Ukrainians know the location of things that are visible by commercial sattelite? And whose images are now appearing on the intertube?. [/sarc]
They have probably been enhanced but they have useable resolution. Apparently there has been a lot of cloud cover over the target sites.
Also: the air craft likely weren’t moved from base to base on a daily, weekly basis. So the Ukrainians wouldn’t have needed to see much through clouds to plan their attack.
The SAR is useful for seeing the outcome of the attack right now because there is cloud cover right now. But surely the airbases aren’t covered by clouds 24/7.
Jake Tapper is Jewish so that might make a difference.
Tom Scharf wrote: “The right refuses to acknowledge the societal damage from over the top capitalism”.
Iam puzzled by that. Just what is this “over the top capitalism” that the Right supposedly advocates? So called “free trade”? But that has plenty of advocates across the pre-Trump political spectrum.
John,
Communism is only one of the examples I raised, but it’s certainly not the only one. It doesn’t surprise me that you think that. The Democratic party is blind to this, and it’s one of the reasons they are lost in the wilderness now. They don’t understand that the radical progressives who wield strong influence in their party are enemies of civilization, but the rest of the country has caught on. This suits me, although I’m sure sooner or later your party will puzzle this out and make a comeback.
You can see aircraft that large sitting on runways with binoculars. I don’t think finding those planes was the hard part of the plan.
Supposedly the Chinese have been buying a lot of private land around US military bases lately and the US is trying to restrict this practice.
People like to make up ill defined terms when advocating various policies.
Heck, the like to make up terms when discussing anything. One guy on a dance forum likes to describe moves he disapproves of as “flash and trash” and suggest that’s somehow uniquely bad. (In fact, he dislikes all flash.)
Well… “trash”– which would be things not done well is not so great. Obviously. But “boring trash” is also not so great. And “boring” and done pretty well? Well, it’s boring. What one should strive for is a matter of taste, values, ideas of how one manages to improve, yada yada.
(For reference, he gets annoyed at moves like this after second 13 or so. . He doesn’t seem merely annoyed when jumps are done badly. He seems to wish they would go away altogether. Jim and I think: Well… ok. But then who’d want to watch quickstep? )
âFlash and trashâ cool expression, I may steal it.
Pure capitalism wouldn’t have a social safety net, other forms of income redistribution, subsidized medial care, equal funding for schools, etc.
If you combine too strong income inequality with democracy then once the losers in this equation form over 50% of the electorate then it will eventually get voted out. Like governments a cadre of insular capitalists will become corrupt as well.
The tricky part is more capitalist societies create more wealth that funds a better social safety net, thus if you are poor then you want to be poor in the US instead of poor in Somalia. Not only are you better off absolutely but your opportunity to get out of poverty is stronger in the US.
One thing lost in US poverty statistics is many/most people are only in poverty for short periods of time.
The point being is that activists for both sides tend to argue against strawmen that are the pure form of the opposing economic policy. Pure capitalism has faults.
I should have stated it as: âThe right refuses to acknowledge the * potential * societal damage from over the top capitalismâ … and how its policy would avoid this. I’m not stating that there is currently a lot of damage, but there is some if you go looking.
Tom Scharf wrote: “Pure capitalism wouldnât have a social safety net, other forms of income redistribution, subsidized medial care, equal funding for schools, etc.”
OK, but that is a strawman since nobody of any real influence advocates for that. And it does not make sense to say that the Right does not recognize the obvious flaws in that since such advocacy is limited to extreme libertarians who have no power and no significant influence. That is very different from the crazies on the Left who actually have gained a great deal of power and influence since Obama’s second term.
People on the right with power and influence are advocates of a mixed economy, not pure capitalism. Because they recognize the problems with the latter.
The activist argument style is pointing out flaws in the opposing policy with the hidden summary … your policy has proven flaws therefore my policy is superior.
This combative debate style has its place such as in a courtroom but is pretty boring, repetitive, and tiring in informal or online debate.
Never give an inch peacocks strutting about with memorized talking points. Snore. Never has so much energy been expended for so little.
I do agree that where the debate should be more substantive, in academia/legacy media, has also recently fallen to the same worthless sniping style. They allowed their institutions to be captured.
FYI these articles I post from WSJ are free from paywall.
mark bofill,
“.. Iâm sure sooner or later your party will puzzle this out and make a comeback.”
For sure, but with the Dem ‘base’ (which wields a lot of power) holding the view that Dems lost because they didn’t go far enough left, it may be a while to recognize a need to move away from the crazy policies. Of course, there is a greater than 50:50 chance the House will be under Dem control in January 2027…. they can sleep-walk into power in the House because without the ability to do anything, voters can’t blame them for much. And besides, in midterm elections, only the most dedicated tend to vote, and that group does not include many of the voters who put Trump in office.
Should Dems control the House in 2027, and the 24/7 impeachment efforts go forward as often promised, I think Dems could be in the wilderness for a long while. The LAST thing most voters want is a replay of 2019 and 2020 in the House, but that is exactly what the Dem ‘base’ wants.
Steve,
Yes. I don’t know how widespread the belief among the base is that they didn’t go far enough left, but I think there is at least a chunk or plurality that think that. That makes changing directions difficult for them.
I agree with your projections. Dems will probably win the House. Republicans will probably hold the Senate. I don’t know what point there’d be in this scenario to the House impeaching Trump, but that might not stop them from taking a crack at it.
I think the Dems “didn’t go far enough left” contingent isn’t holding a lot of sway at the moment.
This doesn’t mean that AOC or Sanders won’t win the nomination anyway. We have the Trump precedent.
The left will probably retake the House because of the normal overreach and failure to keep promises. If the center wins the war on the left then I think they will not partake on another round of Trump persecution, or at least wait until he truly deserves it.
Tom Scharf,
“This doesnât mean that AOC or Sanders wonât win the nomination anyway. ”
Bernie will be too old…. even according to him.
Were I a religious person, I would pray daily that AOC is the Dem candidate in 2028…. Bernie is unelectable anywhere that the majority of voters are not insane, but AOC is unelectable virtually everywhere! There is nothing that would be better for the country that the complete rejection of a flaky, mindless communist; she is so far out in crazy-land on every important issue that it would result in a Reagan-like landslide election, with a slaughter of Dems in the House to go with it.
Please Democrats, please… I am begging…. choose AOC in 2028!!!
Alas, I am sure they will choose someone else.
I’m not so sure. Who else could they nominate? Buttigieg? Newsom? Maybe it’ll be one of them. Maybe it’ll be AOC. It’s far enough off that anything could happen.
I am more confident that it’ll be Vance for the Rs of course; that’s pretty much a no-brainer AFAICT.
Mark Bofill,
I think Newson is damaged goods; nobody will believe him if his views “evolve’ from what he has long supported in California; baggage that makes him unelectable. Buttigieg? Even less electable.
I expect it will be someone like Klobuchar or Whitmer.
I would caution that the left celebrated when Trump became the nominee in 2015, ha ha.
Tom,
IKR? Out of the five names mentioned (I’m not counting Bernie, he IS too old and won’t be nominated), I think AOC would have the best chance, honestly.
[I ought to add, I’m not really worried about it. I don’t think there’s anything Dems can do to win 2028 unless Trump really effs up bigly.]
Tom Scharf,
Trump got lucky in 2016. He had the good fortune to run against someone both profoundly corrupt and remarkably unlikable.
But AOC? She is remarkably unlikable, AND supports crazy policies, AND is a dedicated “socialist” (AKA communist). Worse yet, she knows very little about anything; just listen to her talk! Mindless is the only description I can come up with. IMHO, she is never going to president. YMMV
Steve,
Like hope, the grievance entitlement message resonates eternally. But you may be right. We will eventually see.
Mark,
I hope you are right. I fear you are wrong.
Yes, there is always going to be the envy/grievance/entitlement vote, but that doesn’t win national elections. Clinton and Obama won national elections by convincing voters they were not going to ‘go after the rich’. They both lied, of course.
Clinton’s tax hikes (and the concurrent removal of deductions/exemptions) were terrible for me… the first time in my life that I earned more that a typical employee salary I was crushed by taxes…. at the time I was living in a high tax state, on top of the increased Federal rates. My marginal rates overall were well above 45%. I was not smart enough then to learn to not to believe Democrats who disclaim ‘going after the rich’, but after Obama’s first term, I was cured of my naivete: I usually don’t believe leftist politicians.
But AOC is an exception: I believe her. She thinks top marginal rates should be north of 90%. I have no doubt: she is a communist.
If the Dems have competitive primaries in 2028, they might find a surprise candidate who can do well in the general. Like Trump in 2016, Clinton in 1992, and Carter in 1976. But the Dems have not really let a competitive primary process play out since 2008. And if they do, the far left might well carry the day.
The Free Press is a respected online news publication that was founded by, and is still led by, a Jewish lesbian. Image my surprise when I saw the following an article:
âHow Catholicism Got Coolâ
âYoung Americans and people around the world are flocking to the Catholic Church. The Free Press spoke to them to find out why.â
A couple more surprises:
âAmerica is not alone. The Catholic boom is also happening in Franceâwhich saw a 45 percent increase in the number of adult baptisms this yearâand in Englandâwhere, due to a surge in Mass attendance, Catholics are on track to outnumber Anglicans for the first time since the Church of England was born.â
More Catholics in England than Anglicans!
Also:
âIf Americaâs Catholic boom is being driven by young people, itâs being driven particularly by young men.â https://www.thefp.com/p/meet-americas-newest-catholics?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=organic-social
Mike M,
I am hoping the far left carries the day in the Dem primaries, leading to a slaughter in the general election. The USA is a center-slight-right country, not a far-left country.
I have been advocating ever since the Left adopted the title “progressive” that anyone with any sense should require truth-in-advertising and refer to them as what they are: regressive Maoists or Stalinists. They were rewriting history like Mao or Stalin and had “teachers” leading elementary school kids in chants of “Oh Bah Mah” like the hordes under the thumb of Kim Jong Il.
I think the misuse of government institutions to persecute political opponents was the last straw for centrist voters in 2024 but the American public is fickle and has short memories so we will see what transpires in 2028. Until then the best thing Republicans could do is carry through with Sen Kennedy’s joke about Operation LET HER SPEAK (referring to AOC). Package AOC’s many misstatements and over-the-top pushes for Maoist-style government into short (5-10 minute) bites and post them without editorial comment on YouTube.
The site has become very slow at loading, at least for me. Have others noticed that? If so, it might be time for a new thread.
Mike M.
Sorry for my misunderstanding on the step change. So a big drop all of the sudden in Jan. 2024, which was then pretty constant throughout 2024.
That does seem a little weird, and maybe the CDC is fudging the numbers. But again, if Narcan was made available to a bunch of first responders in Dec. 2023 or Jan. 2024 couldn’t that explain the sudden drop? I have no idea if Narcan is the answer – but just posit this as a possible explanation.
Ground News has been featured on a number of podcasts I listen to and YouTube shows I watch as a way to get both left- and right-leaning write-ups with an indicator of which way the source usually leans. In my short trial, I felt like Ground News’s “center” line was really a little left of center historically but it seems like a reasonable way to survey the coverage and try to pick through the various biases.
As far as benefits for illegal immigrants goes, I don’t pay taxes in California so don’t care if that state wants to go further into debt to pay benefits for non-citizens but federal funds spent FOR non-citizens — needy or not — is theft from future generations of American citizens who are presently voiceless. Past policies made some exceptions for people escaping from totalitarian regimes but these were relatively small in number — not the millions let in by the Obama and Biden administrations.
I will continue to support my local soup kitchens and food banks and have no issue with them helping out anyone regardless of citizenship status but that’s using MY money that I have and donate freely — not money that is being borrowed by the federal government placing liabilities on voiceless generations.
I don’t think there was a lot of ideological shift in the SC until the Burger court and I think documented jurisprudence played more of a role than ideology until the Bork nomination.
I honestly have been skeptical of the CDC for decades, ever since they tried to push a gun control “study” as an epdemiological one by treating gun violence as a disease. Their actions during the pandemic didn’t do anything to restore confidence in what was once a proud scientific and medical institution.
Mike M,
Maybe you need a better service provider. It loads for me in under 0.2 second. đ
I just tested: 700 Mb down, 40.5 Mb up.
RickA,
EMT’s have had Narcan forever. Cops have been carrying it for a number of years. Narcan was approved for OTC sale early in 2023. Of course. It would have taken time for that to fully work through the system from manufacturer’s to potential end users. But that would have resulted in a gradual reduction in fatalities, not a step function. A step function in such data has to be an artifact.
What probably happened was a change in either reporting procedures or in classification of deaths. CDC knows what changed and they know that the drop in fatalities is an artifact. But they are covering that up.
My provider speed (the evil Comcast) is on the order of a 2 hour video downloaded in about 2 minutes. Even if it were 4K, it would be not more than 8 minutes for a 2 hour video. Comcast has really upped their game in the last few years. Three years ago I was getting ~40 Mb down and ~5 Mb up.
I supposedly have 160 Mbps from Comcast, but I have not tested it. It seems to me that should be plenty fast for an all text page like this one. But it is Comcast, so maybe I am not getting what I am paying for.
MikeM,
Could be time for a new thread. That does speed loading. đ
Formatting a text page with a large number of comments using somewhat inefficient web code can take a lot of time if the local processor is slow, memory constrained, or using a different type of web browser. My iPhone / Chrome loads a long thread slower than my modern desktop / Windows / Chrome, probably 3X faster.
Mike M.
I think killing terrorists requires they be overseas.
The CDC was humbled by covid. I don’t think they performed well overall but did very well in certain areas. The basic info for the main covid page was well written, as in written clearly and concisely at an 8th grade level.
They did pretty well with tracking infection rates, vaccine effectiveness, monitoring for variants, and making the info public.
Some things such as not determining covid was airborne until late in the game was inexcusable. Their confusion on the efficacy of masks was also pretty bad. The politicians / management decisions to intentionally obfuscate things was a mistake. The initial testing rollout was a disaster. Once omicron got loose it was over for vaccines as far as slowing transmission, they knew everyone was going to get covid, and they basically just stopped talking about it.
The question is did they learn the right lessons? I don’t know.
The CDC should be kept around for a lot of good reasons, but they need to stop whining and start adapting for the next pandemic.
Why X is sometimes better.
DOJ Charges Democratic Congresswoman Over Newark ICE Facility Incident
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/doj-charges-democratic-congresswoman-over-newark-ice-facility-incident-b3cb1c1b?st=LXccJE&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
None of the legacy media has video of the incident over which the Congresswoman is being charged but X has at least 3 different angles so you can judge for yourself.
I doubt this is a conspiracy but more likely the legacy media can’t authenticate the videos and some outlets likely don’t try very hard. Regardless you can get useful info from X.
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1924616997096046888
Tom Scharf,
I’ll bet they get a change in venue, so depending on where the case is heard, she may well be convicted.
In any case, she looks to be certifiably nuts.
Russel, I think you will find this interview on Russian drones interesting . It starts out a bit jerky overview, but settles down to a fairly reasonably paced discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM
I think the CDC did a terrible job with explaining the risk profile with age. A big part of the hysteria (and lack of public pushback against terrible policies) was that the CDC didn’t explain immediately and clearly that anyone under 60 in reasonable health was at very low risk of death, and those under 20 at near zero risk. They also hyped superspreader events, all the while not admitting that those events meant (for certain) transmission is airborne, meaning exposure to the virus is just about inevitable. There were so many things the CDC did wrong…. always adding hype…. that heads should long ago have rolled. They didn’t. The refusal to admit the virus would ultimately reach everyone made an already bad situation even worse, by encouraging terribly damaging public policies like school closures. Perhaps worst of all was the conspiracy among leaders at the CDC and elsewhere to discount the most likely source of the pandemic: sloppy, dangerous science likely created a new human pathogen….. one that killed ten+ million and cost many $trillions. The criminality they covered for is difficult to describe adequately.
Trump effect theoryâŚâŚ
Trump has been cozying up to Vladimir Putin in an effort to unite Europe for their own defense. That certainly has been the effect of Trumpâs interactions with Putin. Previously only Poland, and to some extent the UK, were gearing up to face off with Russia, but now France, Germany, the EU seem to have picked up the mantle. They have agreed to up defense spending from 2% to 5% of GDP. Germany in particular is on a spending tear and the entire of Europe are talking tough.
Maybe itâs the Trump effect
thank you, Ed
And hereâs one for you, a Ukrainian robot flamethrower:
https://x.com/scottadamssays/status/1924809876104155154?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
Like so many instruments of the federal government, the CDC has been increasingly political — and a willing tool of the politicians the bureaucracy likes — for the past 30-odd years. The pandemic simply made their actions more blatant.
I don’t know if the right solution is to disperse the bureaucracy away from DC like Kash Patel is trying to do with the FBI or to leave it all clustered inside the Beltway but then wall it off and ignore it like John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York”. I am firmly convinced that we DO need to starve the beast and cut it down to size.
Democratic capitalism has its faults and has made its share of missteps but there is precious little that an overpowering bureaucracy has done historically to correct any of that. I would rather rely on the power of openly shared information than bureaucracy and regulations. Why is it people who proclaim “the wisdom of the crowd” never think that the crowd can replace bureaucracy and governmental controls?
Mike M.:
Thanks for the explanation. Makes sense to me. Something to keep my eye on. I wonder if starting in Jan. 2025 the Trump administration will undo whatever change was made under Biden and there will be another step function up?
The new pope made his first personnel change by replacing the grand chancellor of the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences. The move was welcomed by the Pro-Life activists. Maybe we have a Conservative in sheepâs clothing.
âThe Vatican announced Monday the appointment of Cardinal Baldo Reina as grand chancellor of the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences, replacing Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia.â
https://www.realclearreligion.org/2025/05/20/paglia_replaced_at_jpii_institute_1111388.html
Russia is making good on its threat to harden its border with Finland. There has been quite a bit of new military construction and relocation of personnel and hardware, details from Grok:
https://x.com/i/grok/share/ETDvRmiA5w37U0w57ImH0xoXd
Finland is taking countermeasures.
DerekH,
The CDC can not be moved out of DC. It is in Atlanta. Which might be a cautionary tale as to the effectiveness of moving agencies out of DC.
Mike M,
Yes, chickens remain chickens, even if the hen house is moved. đ
Mike M,
I am aware the CDC was in Atlanta, I was making 3 separate comments to catch up to the various conversations. The comment about moving the bureaucracy (in general) was prompted by a recent news item on Patel’s comments regarding FBI HQ. You are correct however that the shenanigans at CDC show moving the location doesn’t always translate to changing the mentality.
Mostly unserious conspiracy thought for the day: I have half-seriously speculated in the past that Biden’s fairly obvious senility could all have been a ruse much like that practice by Vincent “The Chin” Gigante. What if the recent announcement of Biden’s prostate cancer is simply another ploy to avoid investigation and prosecution for his various misdeeds in office? After all, there’s no point in pursuing criminal charges against someone who could be months from dying. What if he has a miraculous recovery in a couple of years?
DerekH,
He will likely die within a couple of years, either from cancer or from dementia (or some of both). Not long destined for this world. The tragedy for the USA is that the guy ever was elected. It was obvious to me in 2020 he was suffering early stage dementia (I watched my dad go through it 15 years ago). The damage Biden did in office (or maybe more accurately, the damage his puppet masters did while he was in office) will hurt the country for many years to come. I believe he is unlikely to celebrate his 85th birthday.
SteveFeven
The thing that’s strange about the puppet masters is that they were not even cabinet members, apparently just closest staff.
I despised the guy which may have prevented me from detecting his decline as early as you did.
Did you pick it up because you’d seen the symptoms before and knew where they were leading?
Hillary Clinton is at it again. She insults motherhood. Later-in the interview she calls all Conservative women âHandmaidens to the Patriarchyâ.
https://youtu.be/Ux4t9nVA3bo?si=9NO-jJSOI758TIyq
john ferguson,
Yes, Biden’s speech and his behavior both set off alarm bells. Inability to speak clearly…. combined with inability to really complete a thought…. were very different from Biden at 60 or 65. But it was his behavior and lack of self control (shouting matches with voters?!?!) which was even more convincing. That duplicated the changes in self-control that I had seen in my dad…. and at about the same age. The alarming thing was that Biden would, like my dad soon did, begin completely relying on me and a few others to ‘help him’ when he could not remember something or understand something. Not a great characteristic for a chief executive . When my dad was 78, still living on his own and still physically robust, we were concerned enough to have him tested for cognitive function…. which led to a diagnosis of “likely early stage dementia”. He died before he turned 84. As one of my brothers asked, “How can a once proud and fearless man be reduced to this?”
Yes, I guessed in 2020 what was coming, and I knew it wasn’t good.
SteveF,
Thanks for the detail. My dad’s decline could first have been detected in his checkbook. When I was trying to get the information I needed to calculate capital gain on their house, i went through the check-books. They went back to 1941 when they got married. The entries were written in a tiny form of engineering lettering. It didn’t dawn on me that the surprising consistency of his lettering over 70 years could reveal anything, but it did. It began to change in 2003; less precise, letter r could be slightlhy different in same entry, and different in another way in later entry same day.
Family hadn’t noticed anything at that point – I think subtle changes may not get picked up by people who are with someone continuously. By 2006, IIRC, there was some decay in the quality of his driving which had also been precise. He’d been a chaeffeur (hah, did you know how to spell it?) when he was 18 and had been trained for the job by a pro – basically “drive without apparent accelleration, decelleration, or detectable lateral force. Assume people in back have full martini glasses”
His decline was gentle. There was never any nastiness. He quit driving in 2008 when we discovered he couldn’t find his way if there was a detour.
He played sax and clarinet in a couple of swing bands on north shore. He continued to play and play well after he could no longer answer questions, able to improvise up to when he was forced to quit when he could no longer remeber how to put the clarinet together. But he smiles a lot, could be taken to the ususal cocktail parties, laughed at the right times. for the most part his dementia was undetectable unless you asked him a question when he’d sturggle but couldn’t come up with anything.
About 2010, he needed to be shown how to use table-ware at every meal, but once shown, fed himself. He did start to arrange food on plate before beginningn to eat, which he’d never done.
They moved out of house into assited living CCRC in Evanston in 2013. For reasons related to plumbing, Dad moved into Memory unit in early 2015 and died in September.
Sometime I’ll post some observations about how they ran the memory unit and a couple of stories about a guy who was perfectly ok who was staying in the memory unit to keep his wife company, said wife completely gone, couldn’t recognize him.
⌠and awaaaay we go!
âFirst tropical wave of 2025 Atlantic hurricane season formsâ
https://www.fox13news.com/news/weather-news-published-may-20-2025-225pm-edt-first-tropical-wave-2025-atlantic-hurricane-season-forms-off
(this one isnât aimed at me)
John Ferguson,
Sounds like your dad did pretty well into his late 80’s early 90’s…. which is very good for you. I may not be so lucky. I frequently converse in Portuguese, write code, design circuitry, and support customers with technical problems, but there’s no telling how long I will be able to do those kinds of things, since, like Biden, both my parents were in trouble before 80…. I’d prefer to die in the saddle, but there’s no way to know if that will be possible.
SteveF,
Dad departed at 95. his dad at 88, his dad’s father 77, and Grandfather at 64.
Grandfather who died at 77 was a locomotive engineer worked first for Milwaukke Road then the Soo. They wouldn’t let him go out on the road when he passed 70, so he became a hosteler, the guy who got up at 4 in the morning, got the fire going in the locomotives and supervises their inspection, then ran them out to where the trains were being assembled. He did this to the end.
Friend Herb Weiss is now 106 and except for walking is doing fine – still sharp.
I should add that Dad was still doing dance jobs at 93, when he couldn’t drive, couldn’t put the clarinet together unless someone in the band arranged the parts in a particular way on a table. It was a bit strange that he wouldn’t play it if someone elxe put it together. Apparently he could read music up to the end, but not anything else.
I don’t want to live that long.
There are a lot of vectors. There aren’t a lot of quick witted 90 year old’s out there, the few are the exception. The rate of decline is different and then there are plateaus and cliffs.
My Dad is 93 and is semi-there. He is riding a plateau but finally decided he needed to move to Florida to live with my sister after living alone for over 10 years. My sister and I find ourselves making decisions for him without asking his opinion lately. We just sold his house without a lot of input from him, something that would be unthinkable 20 years ago. He can feed and clothe himself fine but he can’t really process complicated subjects such as real estate transactions anymore.
The thing with Biden is his decline was obvious to * anyone * who had watched old age decline in a relative, and that turns out to be a large segment of the electorate. The political groupies had boxed themselves in by that point so denial was their only option, or else admit they were yanking everybody’s chain.
I do wonder what the people who were closest to Biden were thinking before that debate, remember that they challenged Trump to a debate! My thoughts were they could drug him up successfully for a couple hours. We may never know but I’m guessing they did and overdid it, got him so amped up that his mind blew up spectacularly.
I should add that this is why seniors are a prime target for scammers. People who target seniors are the worst scum out there.
Tom Scharf,
I buy your theory about the drug. I have no idea what it could have been, but do have some experience as a research assistant (1964-65) with drugs which were nearly impossible to associate results with dose. There was a narrow range in which their effect was the one desired and outside that range they either did nothing measurable or blew out the subject (mentally so to speak). And this sweet spot varied with individual and sometimes from day to day with same individual. We were being paid to develop a system for varying dosage and in 2 years couldn’t do it with the potions we were testing.
The thing that bothers me the most about this is that aides were running the country and possibly Jill. Als that the Dems seem to think he was a wonderful president, maybe one of the best. ?????
I can’t believe his cabinet didn’t figure out what was going on.
Tom Scharf,
“The thing with Biden is his decline was obvious to * anyone * who had watched old age decline in a relative, and that turns out to be a large segment of the electorate.”
For sure, and especially people over age 45 who more likely had responsibility to deal with that kind of decline in a relative.
With regard to Biden being drugged up for the debate: could be, but it could also have just been the stress that led to a total melt-down.
In any case, I find it almost unbelievable that the people around him 1) did not work to have him removed from office under the 25th, and 2) let him run for re-election in spite of knowing he was both demented and very likely to die from cancer long before serving out a second term, were he elected.
IMHO, these were very bad people doing very bad things.
Team Biden challenged Trump to debate, but with rules that were very favorable to Biden. I suspect they were shocked when Trump accepted without negotiating. Then they were stuck.
No doubt Biden’s staff were running things on a day-to-day basis. But I think that somebody had to be giving them direction. Jill was no doubt influencing things, but probably mostly by manipulating Joe. I doubt that staff were taking orders from her.
My nominee for the man behind the curtain is Obama. Remember that he bought a mansion in D.C. in contradiction of all precedent (Wilson doesn’t count). He was there frequently and there were reports of top White House staff making regular calls on the mansion, Maybe there was nothing to those reports or maybe they were just ignored.
Is is plausible that Obama might have actually done such a thing? Duh.
SteveF —
Agreed. I thought it was fairly obvious in 2020 that Biden was already suffering from diminished capacity although I had questions about whether it was real or an act to escape legal repercussions for his past misuse of official powers.
If it was real, it seemed to me they could only trot him out for 2-3 hours at a time and probably had to drug him up for even that so the pandemic was perfect timing for him to go into hiding that summer.
Continuing to run him in the election in that state was bad enough but continuing that for four years was — in my non-legal opinion — criminal.
I think the reason that Biden was handed the nomination in 2020 was that he would be pliable. He was probably more pliable than expected. And Harris got foisted on Biden because she would be pliable when she finally took over. She messed that up by being obviously inept.
Once you recognize that a not-very-capable President was intentional, the coverup, the refusal to use the 25th, and even the re-election “campaign” makes sense. They just got too arrogant about their ability to get a senile Biden over the finish line a second time.
Yes, there is some possibility the Democrat plan was to challenge Trump to a debate with unacceptable rules and hope Trump declined to participate. “Make my day”, ha ha. That will live in infamy.
Walter Russell Mead discovers that the elites define democracy as their side winning.
Why Democracy Is in Retreat
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-democracy-is-in-retreat-advocates-invert-its-meaning-to-claim-partisan-losses-as-undemocratic-22ceee2d?st=EPRgxP&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
“Under the second definition, it becomes the duty of democracy advocates to suppress their domestic opponents. The police should investigate citizens who post âantidemocraticâ tweets about trans people or migration. Governments can and should ban antidemocratic candidates or outlaw antidemocratic political parties for the crime of advocating âundemocraticâ ideas. It doesnât matter if these ideas are popular. The more popular an âantidemocraticâ idea becomes, the more necessary it is to suppress its supporters.
This approach is madnessâan unmitigated and total disaster for the democratic cause.
…
Democracy is about self-government, not good government. It is if anything a tool by which the majority can check the pretensions and the delusions of a self-regarding elite.”
Mike M.
Maybe not Obama. He has been reported more than once to not hold Biden in high regard, nor does Biden evidently have any use for him. Don’t forget Obama’s reported statement that Biden could be counted on to F__k it up. And I think he was right.
It doesn’t seem possible, but maybe there was no shadow-cabinet.
MikeM
One wonders how or why they were surprised. Biden’s growing mental incapacity was pretty obvious to all but his fiercest supporters. Saying “shut up! shut up! shut up!” didn’t make Trump or Trump’s handlers become unaware of it.
MikeM
That wouldn’t have worked without Biden’s active cooperation. The 25th just isn’t really designed for a president who is not comatose. Biden was active enough to be able to thwart the first move. Then the entire process would become suicide for the Dems. The couldn’t use that.
The same will be true should Trump become mentally deficient enough for people to wish the 25th was useable.
President in a coma? 25th works. President toddling around 3rd base on the way to “totally babbling at home”? Not very useful.
Just concluded a one hour press conference between Trump and the president of South Africa in the oval office.âŚ.. I have never seen anything like it.
It was a bigger deal than the Zelenskyy brouhaha
Bravo
Tom Scharf:
Democracy is about self-government, not good government.
Best thing I’ve read in years.
It does help to be reminded of this as we wade through the transition Trump and associates are bringing us.
At one point, when Ramaphosa was downplaying the killing,Trump ambushed him:
âPresident Trump says to “turn down the lights” and then proceeds to show South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, videos of South African political leaders calling for the death of white South Afrikaners. Afterwards, he showed the president video of the 1,000 crosses that symbolize each white farmer MURDERED in South Africa.â
john a ferguson: “Maybe not Obama. He has been reported more than once to not hold Biden in high regard, nor does Biden evidently have any use for him.”
What I suggested is consistent with that. Obama and Biden were not working together. What I suggest is that Obama was subverting the Biden administration.
Many of Biden’s staff and top appointments had previously been part of the Obama administration. With Biden not on top of things, they could have easily been taking guidance from Obama. And Obama’s contempt for Biden might well have made him open to that even if he was not otherwise inclined to meddle.
Lucia,
You may be right about the utility of the 25th.
Still, there seems to me a good chance that if those around Biden would have resigned, all saying he shouldn’t be in office, he might himself resign, which is what he should have done, certainly no later than early 2023, if not before. Nixon resigned when his political position became untenable. That could have (should have!) happened to Biden…… but didn’t.
lucia wrote: “Bidenâs growing mental incapacity was pretty obvious to all but his fiercest supporters.”
It was not just Biden’s fiercest supporters who were oblivious. Almost the entire national news media (except Fox News) claimed to be oblivious until after the debate. Over 40% of voters approved of the job Biden was doing.
I suspect that team Biden was sufficiently arrogant and out of touch that they thought they were fooling pretty much everybody. And their contempt for Trump likely led them to believe that Trump would not debate unless he got his own way. So they were stunned when Trump called their bluff.
Mike M. I agree with your perception of how the Obama management of the Biden regime in his so-to-speak absence makes good sense. Thanks for explaining.
I especially like the idea the Biden’s team proposed the early debat never guessing that he would accept. I suspect that the Trump gang had a very clear pictures of Biden’s capabilities at that point.
lucia,
I think you are right about the 25th be unusable given two conditions. One is the President’s incapacity being sufficiently well hidden that partisans could plausibly deny it. The other is politics divided into two tribes who put tribe above country.
If Biden had been as exposed to public view as Trump has been and if the press had reported that honestly, then it would not been long before the public would have been clamoring for his removal. Political survival would have required the Dems in Congress to back the VP in a battle over the 25th.
Congress surely knew that all was not right with Biden. They could have pushed to know more. If Harris and the cabinet had invoked the 25th and if Congress put country first, then Congress would have backed sidelining Biden.
SteveF,
Nixon was smart, he could read the wrting on the wall.
Biden would have had to ask what it meant?
The solution to Presidential incapacity is not medical exams or cognitive tests. It is for the President to be in very frequent exposure to the press and the public. Not controlled, scripted events, but ones where the President has to take questions and defend himself. Then the public can make an informed judgement of Presidential capacity.
Even if Biden had stepped aside we wouldn’t have gotten much different from Harris. She seemed rather pliable to the WH consensus.
The Walter Russell Mead columns that Tom linked is good but the guy goes too easy on the “democracy advocates”.
No. It is not a cop-out. It is the “democracy advocates” admitting that they are enemies of democracy.
Russell,
Anecdotally a person I know owned a factory in S. Africa and was attacked in their home and lost an eye and finger over the incident a few years back. They immigrated to the US. I’m inclined to believe there are real problems over there.
I say good riddance to USAID. It was clearly a money laundering operation with actual help being an unintended result.
âAt USAID, 12 cents of every dollar was reaching the recipient. That means that in order for us to get aid to somebody, we had to spend all this other money supporting this foreign aid industrial complex.â
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/05/21/secretary_rubio_at_usaid_only_12_cents_of_every_dollar_was_real_humanitarian_aid.html
Although I am generally not a fan of Trump personally, I thought he was brilliant at the Ramaphosa press conference. Between himself and the others there it brought a human perspective to what is happening in South Africa. SA is such an incredible basket case that I don’t know that anything can be done.
Will be interested in perspective of Serpentza a South African youtuber who moved to China for 10 years and mostly (negatively) comments on China. He has told the story of how his best friend was killed and people came very close to murdering his mother on their farm. In one of his videos he state that he hated SA.
JD Ohio,
I think there is a real possibility South Africa will descend into a lawless failed state, with all the murder and destruction that leads to. The safeguards against anarchy are being gradually dismantled; we can hope they turn it around, but I doubt this will turn out well.
South Africa has 8 times the murder rate of the USA. The US city with an even higher rate than South Africa? Washington DC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_South_Africa
“During the last 3 months of 2023, around 85 people were murdered in South Africa every day”
NBC News:
“There were 12 murders on farms last year, The Associated Press reported, citing police statistics. One of the victims was a farmer, and the rest were farmworkers, none of whom were identified by race, according to the AP. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_South_Africa
“Agriculture in South Africa contributes around 5% of formal employment”
(85 murders / day) * (365 days) * (5% farm employment) = 1551 farm workers murdered per year.
Something is not adding up, likely that police don’t normally cite “farm worker” or “farmer” on a murder statistic so absence of evidence = …
Beyond the typical reactionary “Trump must be wildly wrong about everything” take is the really odd narrative that politicians from a minority party specifically advocating killing white people is “not government policy” so should be dismissed … or something.
My BS meter is pegged for both sides right now.
Russel,
I think you will find this interview on Russian drones interesting . It starts out a bit jerky of an overview, but settles down to a fairly reasonably paced discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM
Another post referencing some of the same in the above:
The interceptor drone is launched by hand after acquiring the target by sighting. Not much different than using a typical
MANPAD. I have seen vid of security carrying these for the latest Red Square events for drone defense.
âAnother interception of Ukrainian medium-altitude optical-electronic reconnaissance UAV âFuria-11SMâ by a “Yolka”.
This device is equipped with a bi-spectral thermal-television homing head, synchronized with an AI module loaded with algorithms for selecting optical and thermal-contrast aerial targets against open space and ground backgrounds, without the need for operator radio correction from a control terminal. According to the developer, the declared operational range of the device reaches 20 km, and its flight speed is 350 km/h, which is sufficient to intercept all Ukrainian Armed Forces gasoline-powered UAVs without exception, even when pursuing them.
These interceptor drones will become the main support for assault groups in forming an anti-drone barrier over sectors of offensive operations.â
Steve F “South Africa has 8 times the murder rate of the USA. The US city with an even higher rate than South Africa? Washington DC.”
I think there is about an 85% chance of South African failure because their electrical grid is failing and getting worse. Between crime and energy problems, it is hard to see who would invest in SA.
Listened to part of Ramaposa’s post meeting interview. In it he excused the crime as being part of unemployment and economic deprivation. If that is the case the State, which has been accused of stealing money from the electric company, is ultimately responsible for the crime.
I feel that all Trump can do is help a little and he did that well today.
Looks like Letitia James is toast in NY unless a very biased jury gives her a pass. She repeatedly falsely stated over 20 years that she owned a 4 unit bldg when it was a 5 unit to get a better mortgage. Electrical connections prove it is a 5 unit.
Also, after emailing a loan broker that she didn’t live in Virginia she filed a false power of attorney stating that Virginia was to be her primary residence. Sam Antar documents these facts here.
https://whitecollarfraud.com/2025/05/20/deflect-and-deny-letitia-james-dodges-doj-probe-with-more-deception/
It is amazing how little shame Dems have.
JD Ohio,
I would be shocked if a jury in NY or Maryland convicted Jame of anything. It’s an “unless caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl” situation. Trump is so loathed in those states that anyone who tried to ruin him or put him in jail will be protected….. worst possible outcome for James: a hung jury. OJ got away with it. So will James.
Ed Forbes,
Those drones are still pretty primitive, sort of like combat airplanes in WWI. I suspect they will develop into versions that render manned aircraft obsolete….. little more than pilot death traps. AI controlled hunter-killer drones are the next logical step. Skynet here we come.
The Wiki article on Brilliant Pebbles gives a very detailed review of a couple of earlier approaches to “golden dome”
One would think that nothing like the Israeli system would work in a country our size. or his nibs really is talking about golden domelets.
john ferguson,
I doubt any ABM system would be completely effective, and even if initially effective would likely be rendered ineffective in short order due to countermeasures. So considering the destructive potential of nuclear weapons, avoiding nuclear conflict seems to me the most sensible approach.
Out-migration of White citizens from South Africa has been reasonably steady at about 0.4% per year (about 20,000) for the last several years. I would look at that number as a better indicator of the political/social situation in South Africa than news reports, which are very likely to be biased.
As SteveF says, avoiding nuclear conflict is the most sensible approach.. An ABM system could help avoid a nuclear conflict.
North Korea would love to impose its will on South Korea. They can not do that now because the South is unlikely to be a pushover and the US will help the South. They could use nukes to threaten the South, but that would not work as long as we have the South’s backs.
But what if the North were to succeed in developing an ICBM that could reach the US? That would create an implied threat that US intervention would result in the destruction of one or more US cities. Would the North risk doing that? I don’t think that is the right question. The right question is whether WE would risk the North risking that. We probably wouldn’t. Then the North would be free to intimidate the South since the South would no longer be able to count on US support.
A decent ABM system would totally change the calculus. We could announce that an unsuccessful attempt to nuke a US city would be treated the same as a successful attempt and would bring a nuclear response. In that case, I think we could be confident that the Norks or Iranians would not dare try it.
Read up on Brilliant Pebbles. Friends at Lincoln Labs worked on the program.
“Read up on Brilliant Pebbles.”
Not unless you give me a good reason. I don’t why one proposal from 40 years ago would be especially relevant to Golden Dome.
Tom: “the really odd narrative that politicians from a minority party specifically advocating killing white people is ânot government policyâ so should be dismissed ⌠or something.”
It only seems odd because it’s an attempt to deflect from something worse that they canât just pretend isn’t happening any more.
The three steps of the media narrative:
1) it isn’t happening.
2) it’s happening but it’s isolated.
3) here’s why it’s a good thing!
The “Kill the Boers” song is apparently just a little historical ditty sung for purely nostalgic reasons…
Maybe these people should look up the “pyramid of white supremacy”. Change the title a little bit and take a look where SA are currently situated because it’s a hell of a lot closer to genocide than “looked at me the wrong way” they feel requires systemic “corrective” action before it’s too late over here.
I finally found some more reliable data on murder rates in South Africa. The overall rate is very high (near 40 per year per 100,000 population), but like in the USA most murders are young Black men killing other young Black men. The murder rate for White South Africans is about 12.5 per year per 100,000 population.
To put these numbers in perspective: the overall murder rate in the USA is ~6.9 per year per 100,000 population. Among White people in the USA, the rate is about 2.0 per year per 100,000 population. Among Black people in the USA, the rate is about 40 per year per 100,000 population (mostly young Black men killing young Black men).
By comparison, the murder rate in Haiti is about 60 per year per 100,000 population, and in Germany a bit under 1 per year per 100,000 population.
Mike,
Yes. The system doesn’t have to work for hundreds or even dozens of engagements. It basically has to credibly shift the odds that the first limited attack will fail, in order to be an effective deterrent. The threat of retaliation does the rest of the work.
Setting such considerations aside and all other things held equal, I’d prefer having some chance of a U.S. city being spared due to a missile interception instead of zero chance. The argument (IMO) that because we can’t guarantee perfect success that the job isn’t worth undertaking always struck me as pretty dubious. There are losses in wars; shit happens. The problem may be that Americans have become used to feeling highly invulnerable and safe, which was probably never really justified anyway.
mark bofill: “Iâd prefer having some chance of a U.S. city being spared due to a missile interception instead of zero chance. The argument (IMO) that because we canât guarantee perfect success that the job isnât worth undertaking always struck me as pretty dubious. ”
Indeed. Perfect success is only needed if you want to hide behind the ABM system as a shield while you launch a first strike.
MAD is actually pretty stable, but if it fails it will be catastrophic. ABM’s should make it more stable since the aggressor will be unsure of success but will still be sure of a response. And it greatly reduces the chances that a mistake or one bad actor will trigger a catastrophic cascade.
We are pretty much wide open to a nuke missile strike. We would need to absorb it and then strike back.
Anti-missile systems could be effective against lesser foes such as Iran and North Korea. Even with an advanced foe such as Russia or China there might be a serious question on how effective the system really is to create some deterrence.
As I always say you can also just put the nuke on rubber dingy and then drive it in a minivan to downtown Miami.
It’s hard to say but my impression is that any system that actually achieved effectiveness could probably be countered with upgraded offensive systems faster and with less expense than this technically difficult defensive shield system. Sub launched cruise missiles are 6 minutes from DC.
As Mark says even a system that is 50% effective has real value. The bigger question is whether it is worth the cost. Probably not to stop Russia / China but probably so to keep low end Iran and North Korea at bay. Keep the capabilities secret to keep everyone guessing and pretend there is black magic space systems up there.
Phil Gramm, who is one of very few politicians for whom I have ever had some respect, coauthored an article pointing to the historical Republican election failures after pushing through tariff increases.
The article linked below lists the many times the US, and even before the US became the US, has repudiated increases in tariffs. I suspect. as in the current case, the past proponents were using âit will be different this timeâ argument.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/tariffs-mean-electoral-defeat-for-the-gop-american-history-republican-losses-ee637c44?mod=commentary_article_pos6
I would think that the more astute Republican political long term strategists would at some point decide that acting on government reduction instead of paying it lip service might well require losing control of congress at least temporarily. Democrats have been successful with slim majorities in pushing through more government when in power that the Republicans are hesitant to attempt to roll back when they are in control. The big, beautiful bill is a prime example of this. The Republicans need to concentrate on the reverse of the Democrat strategy. If it turns out that the voting public prefers more government at least that will be revealed and those favoring less will know to concentrate on another path. Politicians will be guided by public opinion and the prevailing intelligentsia that influences that opinion.
The arms race in Europe is at full throttle.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte:
“Russia is at an enormous pace reconstituting itself. They are producing at this moment, ammunition at a level which has not been seen in recent decades. They produce four times as much ammunition as the whole of NATO is producing as we speak. They’re reconstituting their armies. Their whole economy is on a war footing.
We have had open sources saying, from intelligence services, that by 2027 or by 2030 or by 2032 they might be able to be at such a level of strength that they could try something silly.
What we have to do as NATO is to make sure that Putin knows that if he attacks now or in the near future, that our reaction will be devastating.”
Video:
https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1925457136055730587
The new budget bill front loads tax cuts and back loads budget cuts until after Trump leaves office.
Big surprise. Nothing is more big and beautiful to a politician than his successor paying all his past due bills.
I find both parties to be near indistinguishable in this aspect. Very frustrating. Those are what the incentives reliably produce.
Russell,
Russia has to do this because of all their losses in Ukraine. Eventually the story will be “look how modern Russia’s armed forces are”. That’s because all their old stuff was destroyed.
Economically this is like bringing out pallets of money and setting them on fire. Imagine what Russia could have alternately done with all this revenue.
As for Europe all I see is infinite planning to plan. There is a 3 year old land war on their doorstep and they haven’t really done anything other than make promises to spend money later.
Russia can always choose to stay on a war footing and war economy for the long game against NATO but that isn’t exactly how economists would draw up an economic prosperity plan.
If Russia does choose this path then NATO will need to respond. The bigger problem is really China and their massive industrial advantage IMO. We aren’t very far away from them having a clear advantage in any conventional war.
This embarrassment will not go unpunished:
âSatellite imagery from Airbus Defence and Space captured today by @osc_london shows the latest Choe Hyon-class guided-missile destroyer of the Korean People’s Navy partially sunk at the Chongjin Shipyard in North Korea, following yesterdayâs failed launch attended by Kim Jong Un.â
OSINT source:
https://x.com/sentdefender/status/1925561852164989142?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
One of these failures in the past resulted in the responsible officer and his family being tied up in an open field and used for artillery practice.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/02/27/report-n-korea-executes-officials-enraging-kim-jong-un/98468748/
Tom, your post:
âThere is a 3 year old land war on their doorstep and they havenât really done anything other than make promises to spend money later.
I agree for all except Poland:
âPoland Becomes a Defense Colossus
Poland has launched a huge and historic expansion of its military. What will the consequences be?â
https://cepa.org/article/poland-becomes-a-defense-colossus
Tom : [Eventually the story will be âlook how modern Russiaâs armed forces areâ. Thatâs because all their old stuff was destroyed.]
Every country in Europe has had all of their old junk reduced to scrap in the Ukraine war. The problem for Western Europe is the Russians have rebuilt and expanded their production where the west hasnât.
Mike M. The Wiki article I suggested discussed the options which had been identified at the time on how to do this. Other than satellite laser attack systems which weren’t available then, the issues seem the same. Do we want to set up to destroy missiles right after they are launched or on their descent? Do we want to set up our defenses around likely targets or likely launch lcations? Which choice is more effective and maybe more economikcal?
Don’t you think these choices are still there? And worth thinking about?
I can remember the Nike Sites around Chicago when I was Kid in the ’50s. I can’t remember when they were finally shut down, but I think it was after 1960.
The arms race in Europe and Russia are deceptively built on the Keynesian notion that government spending will spike up the economy. That works well with keeping the citizenry feeling more contented when on a war footing. Eventually there will be a price to pay just as will happen with the Republican and Democrat profligate deficit spending.
Ed, Your post:
âThe problem for Western Europe is the Russians have rebuilt and expanded their production where the west hasnât.â
That is not true.
All of European NATO have increased their military spending by almost 100 % as a fraction of GDP:
https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2025/number/1/article/boosting-the-european-defence-industry-in-a-hostile-world.html
For example, Rheinmetall has been making armaments for Germany since the time of the US Civil War; they make the Leopard main battle tank. They have been on an expansion tear.
âSoaring demand and orders
Ammunition boom: Rheinmetallâs annual production of artillery shells has increased tenfold and is expected to reach 1.1 million rounds by 2027, up from 750,000 today.
New facilities: The company is expanding production capabilities across Germany, Lithuania, Romania, and Ukraine to meet regional demand.
Landmark contracts: In 2024, Rheinmetall secured an âŹ8.5 billion artillery contract with the German government, one of the largest in its history.
Backlog strength: The companyâs order book now exceeds âŹ30 billion, reflecting multi-year revenue visibility.â
âBeyond traditional hardware, Rheinmetall is investing in:
Drone and counter-drone systems
AI-powered battlefield software
Mobile air defence solutionsâ
https://www.home.saxo/content/articles/equities/rheinmetall-the-nvidia-of-defence-21032025
Nukes can be delivered by a competent foe by land, air, and sea. The nuclear triad.
It’s just really hard to defend against allowing even a single 600 lb anything from making it through a defense system.
https://minutemanmissile.com/nuclearwarheads.html
Hypersonic maneuverable missiles have obsoleted pure ballistic defense systems but there are not many hypersonic missiles in production but there easily could be by the time a defense system was deployed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFNa-7e5Z7o
What I saw in the Iran attack on Israel was somewhat encouraging (slow flying cruise missiles all taken out) but even with low numbers of ballistic missiles many made it through and landed “intact enough” even after interception for a nuke to be plenty effective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gURxYqfHNLk
Targeting the ICBM’s on ascent requires a space based system. This is probably the easiest targeting exercise but those defense satellites would be the prime target before the ICBM launch and are likely very vulnerable.
Even in the 1980’s both sides had plans to deploy decoys on descent making it a difficult detection and numbers game.
Personally I think it is still worthy of study but not worthy of large scale production and deployment. MAD will have to do for China and Russia.
Yes, the Polish seem to be ready to storm Moscow tomorrow, ha ha.
I still maintain if the war comes down to who can shovel more money in a furnace then the west will easily win that race.
john ferguson,
Those questions are definitely worth thinking about. By the decision makers and engineers. Any thinking I might do about them would be just idle speculation.
The big thing that has changed in the last 40 years is computing power. I would think that might very well turn an impractical system into a workable one.
Mike M.
I have very great respect for the observations of our colleagues on this site including the things I don’t initially agree with.
I try very hard to coninually expose myself to views I would never have thought of myself.
Russell : âAll of European NATO have increased their military spending by almost 100 % as a fraction of GDPâ
Your linked article doesnât seem to say what you imply. Note that 100% of a very small number is still a very small number
from your linked article:
âYet, ordered quantities remain small, especially when compared to Russian output or to lost capabilities in the last few decades (Wolff et al., 2024). Ordered quantities are also relatively low in France and other key European countries.â
.
âEuropean production remains low while prices are among the highest, possibly indicating the lack of scale.â
For example, western heavy artillery shells cost about 3 times more than Russian heavy artillery shells. The same with the cost of tank and artillery production. Russia gets MUCH more âbang for the buckâ for military $ spent than the west.
.
.
If it could reliably intercept a handful of ICBM’s, then an ABM system could make sense, assuming the cost is not astronomical. Of course, for a lesser price, you might be able to convince the crazies in N Korea and Iran to forget about IBMs and nuclear weapons. Tom Scharf’s suggestion of a van with a big nuclear weapon driving to New York still presents big problem considering the nut-cakes running N Korea and Iran.
But stopping hundreds of ICBM’s from Russia or China? No. They are going to get past whatever defense you might imagine. MAD lives.
I don’t see why one would conclude that Golden Dome can’t work. Iron Dome deals with a large number of very small projectiles with a flight time of a minute or two. And it shoots down nearly 90% of the ones deemed a threat.
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/israels-missile-defense-performance-views-gulf
“Based on open-source analysis, around fifty of Iranâs missiles wound up hitting Israel, including as many as thirty-three at Nevatim Air Base alone. Although some of these impacts could be debris from interceptions, most of the impact videos and visible craters indicate explosive missile impacts.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpFo5sdQq60
Israel has been quiet about what happened here, probably because the performance wasn’t so great.
Israel apparently hit a bunch of Hamas leaders at once.
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israeli-airstrike-that-killed-top-hamas-leader-in-gaza-hit-meeting-of-top-militants-1573fc00?st=Dkm7ih&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
“The leaders of the U.S.-designated terrorist group had gathered in a tunnel in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis to discuss matters including their approach to cease-fire talks with Israel when they were hit, the officials said. The meeting went against Hamasâs wartime security protocols and created an opening for Israel to hit several high-value targets at once.”
This was in a tunnel under a hospital.
Steve F: “I would be shocked if a jury in NY or Maryland convicted Jame of anything. ”
Marilyn Mosby the Leftie Baltimore prosecutor was convicted of mortgage fraud and perjury in a situation similar to James. Andrew McCarthy of the National Review has said that juries in the federal Southern District of NY are not horrible because the jury pool includes Westchester County. I think there is a respectable chance that she can be convicted but of course with a good jury draw she will be acquitted.
Apparently, she is also a slumlord because 2 of her tenants are complaining of flaking paint in their apartments and lack of maintenance. If this becomes widely known it won’t help her.
Woohoo!
â Michael Mannâs Legal Costs Now Climbing Past $1.1 Million
3 hours ago Charles Rotter 5 Comments
The Washington, D.C. Superior Courtâs May 22, 2025 ruling against Michael Mann is the latest in a series of defeats for the climate scientistâs prolonged legal offensive against his critics. Judge Alfred S. Irving ordered Mann to pay $477,350.80 in attorneyâs fees and related costs to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Rand Simberg, following their successful partial dismissal of claims under the Districtâs Anti-SLAPP Act.â
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/05/22/michael-manns-legal-costs-now-climbing-past-1-1-million/
Mannâs new hockey stick, image from Charles Rotter:
https://x.com/crotter8/status/1925751518067634392?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
lucia,
from a reliable Ukrainian source:
â Lavrov called the suggestion to hold the talks between Russia and Ukraine in Vatican an “inelegant one.”
Earlier, Bloomberg also reported that Russia is not keen on holding talks in the Vatican:
Italy is a signatory to the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant for Putin in March 2023 for war crimes in Ukraine. In principle, at least, it would be obliged to arrest him if he came to Rome.
The issue is complicated further by relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church led by Patriarch Kirill, a vocal supporter of Putin and the war in Ukraine. The Russian Church opposes the Vaticanâs involvement in the peace talks, people with knowledge of the issue said. â
https://x.com/gerashchenko_en/status/1925860635776074191?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
Ukrainian Golden Dome in actionâŚ.
âVideo shows a Ukrainian MIM-23 I-HAWK surface-to-air missile striking a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile midair over western Ukraine.â
Video:
https://x.com/polymarketintel/status/1925895320531026217?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
The 40-year-old US SAM system, built to face a Soviet threat and now fighting a Russian one.
I have only been following this OSINT site for a few weeks. So far they have been reliable.
I’m sure Mann has financial benefactors that will foot the bill. At least he did when all this started. It is an extraordinary waste of resources, a very DC type of outcome.
Far too much environmental donations are spent on lawyers nowadays. I can’t recall a single article on how environmentalists actually did something useful like cleaning up garbage. It’s all spent on legal activism and the crazies go sit in front of traffic.
There’s a few hilarious videos of citizens getting frustrated and dragging these people off the road, mostly in the EU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTCbE8Jr5WU
I get a very strong feeling who most people are rooting for here. These type of protesters should be prosecuted.
âPresident Donald Trump is expected to sign executive orders as early as Friday to boost the nuclear energy industry by streamlining reactor approvals and reinforcing fuel supply chainsâ
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/nuclear-stocks-soar-after-report-trump-streamline-reactor-approvals-early-friday
Stephen Moore has a WSJ article that points to the CBOâs estimates of the revenue lost and gained by tax increases and cuts favoring tax increases by not considering the dynamics of these actions. Historically these estimates have made some large errors in overestimating revenue from tax increases and overestimated the losses in revenues from tax cutting. The CBOâs estimates are then used by the media as the gospel truth with no references to their failed past performances.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/save-us-from-the-cbo-9b1f27da?mod=commentary_article_pos2
Joseph Sternberg points to the similarities of the media wrongly blaming proposed tax cuts by the short lived British Prime Minister, Liz Truss, âwho still gets blamed for Britainâs economic problems today, even though her tax cuts were never implemented and bond yields now have settled higher than they were immediately after her budgetâ and media blaming the Big Beautiful Bill tax measures for long bond rates increasing.
The problem as I see it is that those more conservative parties attempting to cut taxes do a terrible job of attempting to explain the facts of the matter. They are too weak kneed or ignorant or both to refute what media puts out in always arguing for more government. It is certainly not the case that media and most of the intelligentsia understands the economic fundamentals operating.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-big-beautiful-bill-isnt-whats-driving-bond-yields-up-69943471?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1
Yes, and once borrowing costs go up then the sh** hits the fan and there is no easy fix. It’s a long term problem and it’s obvious.
You can grow your way out of a debt problem but that isn’t really a great plan.
Tom Scharf,
Growth could be significantly increased by eliminating many of the (nutty) regulations that add cost and time to almost anything you want to do. Unfortunately, like all of Trump’s other proposals, reducing regulations and red tape will be fought vigorously in the courts by the usual suspects.
The Supreme Court could help by allowing the administration more wiggle room on regulations (and stopping all the crazy nationwide injunctions!), but so far 5 on the court have been pretty consistently hostile to the administration, so I doubt they will be any more accommodating.
I was reading about type 1 diabetes. Those diagnosed before age 10 have a life expectancy that is about 13 years lower than someone without diabetes. For women, that puts the average age at death somewhere around 69. Sotomayor, diagnosed with type 1 diabetes before age 8, is already 69, and travels with a medic. She likely has a 15%+ chance of death during Trump’s term in office. Dems had better hope she outlasts Trump, because with another vote like Kavanaugh’s, there would not be many contentious cases before the court that the liberal position could win.
Of course, Alito (75) and Thomas (76) present the same kind of risk for Republicans as Sotomayor presents for Dems, since I doubt either of them will retire during Trump’s term.
Tom Scharf wrote: “You can grow your way out of a debt problem but that isnât really a great plan.”
So far as I know, it is the only plan that works. After the 2009 financial crisis, Greece tried to get out of its debt hole by means of budget cuts. Great pain was inflicted and by 2016 their debt-to-GDP ratio increased from 127% to 179%. Debt went up a little, but GDP tanked.
Of course we should try to bring some sense to government spending. But not in a way that kills economic growth.
I compared the responses of Chat GPT and Grok in a subject area I know very well (particle size measurement). No contest. Grok is much better, with only a couple slight errors…. I’d guess more than 98% accurate. Chat GPT was way wrong on multiple points.
If you believed Chat GPT, you would be badly misinformed. Grok would actually help you.
Mike M,
But the increase of expenditures by politicians is essentially without an upper bound. I think at a minimum the % increases in government expenditures have to be held to significantly less than the % growth in GDP. There is no other way out.
SteveF: “I think at a minimum the % increases in government expenditures have to be held to significantly less than the % growth in GDP.”
I completely agree. Budget restraint is needed; to get out of the hole, spending must increase more slowly than GDP. Strong economic growth makes that much easier.
Long article in NYT by Stephen Pinker on Trump vs Harvard :
Harvard Derangement Syndrome
https://t.co/0xI5EsbYA6
It’s pretty well rounded with a mix of cheerleading and criticism (link gets past the paywall(?)). Trump is definitely overdoing it here but it’s not like Harvard hasn’t been asking for it for a decade.
There is nothing sacred going on at Harvard that couldn’t happen at other schools if they got all that money instead. There is also no reason Harvard can’t try a little harder to not bite the hand that feeds it. I sense zero humility from them.
Tom Scharf,
Harvard (along with a host of others) has been asking for it for at least 4 decades. It has been DEI by other names for that long, and likely longer. Hard core socialism, and little else, has been their guiding philosophy, for as long as I can remember. They should be defunded for violating Federal laws against racial discrimination.
Trump’s seemingly whimsical calls for tariff increases as he did recently on the EU may be called bargaining by his supporters, but in fact the uncertainty those actions cause will have lasting long term negative effects on business decisions for investment and thus the economy. Trump as a business person should know better, but obviously he does not,
Oh oh, local weatherman:
âWater temperature at Key West just hit 90°! Lots of sunshine and a dry May resulting in above normal water temps off #Floridaâ
I better start boarding up the windows.
Map of water temps in the eastern Gulf of America:
https://x.com/paulfox13/status/1926042128280420783?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
Kenneth,
Trump’s tariff announcements are certainly not whimsical and certainly are part of the bargaining process. The question is whether they are a wise way to go about it. I am inclined to trust Trump’s instincts but I get why people are doubtful.
I agree that the uncertainty is harmful, but it is unavoidable if we are going to get other countries to lower their trade barriers. There are surely ways to go about it that produce less acute uncertainty than what Trump is doing. But with less pressure brought to bear on other countries, the process will take much longer. That will quite possibly produce more net damage than Trump’s approach.
Trump is opting to rip off the bandage rather than prolonging the pain. Economically, that might or might not be the better option. Politically, it is Trump’s only option other than maintaining the status quo.
Kenneth, the US potentially changing economic imperatives every four years creates “lasting long term negative effects on business decisions for investment”. Drill/don’t drill. Build/don’t build etc etc. Somehow business copes because that is the nature of the beast the world over. Both sides agreeing on a common direction for the country would do far more for reducing business uncertainty, but that isn’t going to happen.
Business, like government, exists to serve the social needs of the people. It has no other reason to exist except for that. Once you lose sight of that goal, and start to treat it like some sort of independent entity, it’s only a matter of time before, like government, it becomes parasitic, either destroying its own existence or turning the people into slaves in service to itself.
Businesses like any other entity exist in a free society because through private property and voluntary decisions they satisfied the needs of customers. Governments on the other hand operate through coercion. When this difference is not understood there exists the inclination towards an authoritarian state were government and private entity operations become indistinguishable, but with the state’s coercive power always putting it in charge. Fascism defines this condition well.
If one agrees that uncertainty from government actions is detrimental to business and the economy why would one want to add the great uncertainty that tariffs present. Further there are many observers who judge that tariffs, certain or not, are detrimental to the economy just as are other government interference in the economy. The detrimental effects of high tariffs will be felt by the voting public in the immediate future and thus explains the historical and immediate negative electoral results of those doing the imposition.
from a very reliable source:
â US Intelligence: Putin remains committed to victory in Ukraine. A new assessment says Moscow is betting on a war of attritionâaiming to wear down Ukraineâs resistance, demoralize its population, and wait out Western support. Despite slow advances, Russia likely sees the pace as acceptable.â
https://x.com/noelreports/status/1926298346232205475?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
Business is not a passive player, Kenneth, and the factors that enable it to subvert your priors for its own ends exist. You are arguing from a purely fictional perspective of what might be the case if certain criteria were met, and pesky human beings weren’t so pesky.
Business in China, for example, does not exist in a free society. It exists to serve the power of the most populous, anti-libertarian, state on the planet. It is a predatory beast in your idyllic pasture and libertarianism seems to have no answer except to insist on giving it more power because principles. IMO, libertarianism is doomed to failure because it cannot defend itself from predators without rejecting its principles.
The US Army Joint Task Force-Southern Border has authority for the Southern Border Mission. They post regular news updates (with pics).
For example:
https://x.com/jointtfsb/status/1925580008946639134?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
Kenneth,
Tariffs do not create uncertainty for business.The possibility of imposing or removing tariffs, if plausible, does create uncertainty.
The 10% tariffs now in place and likely to remain in place are not high and will have little noticeable effect on the consumer. They should have a positive effect on the economy overall, especially since they will be offset by income tax cuts.
If Russia wants a war of attrition then I say let’s give it to them as long as Ukraine is willing to make the sacrifices. The west may grow weary of funding the war but the Russian people may also grow weary of piling up dead soldiers. I don’t see any sign of that yet but I’m not sure we have good visibility there. I wouldn’t want my son sent off to the Ukraine front line.
Trump is making tariff threats because the EU is dragging their feet in a bureaucratic malaise. That’s how the EU does everything. I think the US government is dysfunctional but I always remind myself at least we aren’t the EU.
Mike M.
Search on “schedule 301 tariffs china”
The amount of tariff can vary significantly depending on what the thing is and the effect that the Chinese base price might have on our domestic manufacuturers or as punishments for various Chinese activities which we feel are unfair, ip theft for example.
I suspect the sellers keep up with the continuing changes some of which have been almost weekly in the last two months. What makes it difficult is as a buyer I don’t have a good grasp of where the tariffs are when I order and whether they’ll change when purchse shows up here in US.
In addition, the tariff is applied on arrival in the US, not when shipped. So the purchaser and an EU supplier have no idea what the tariff is going to be two weeks from now, and depending on the possible impact of this on the total cost of the import, it may or may not continue to be attractive, so by agreement purchaser and supplier agree to wait and see what happens, which will inevitably increase costs for both buyer and seller no matter what happens.
I’m pretty confident that Trump either doesn’t understand this or more likely couldn’t care less. I’m sure he thinks that the EU folks have been screwing us all along and that they are the only ones which will suffer through the uncerainty.
If you are making long term investments in manufacturing in China et. al. then tariff whiplash every administration creates a lot of uncertainty. Doubling the price of an iPhone for 4 years will put quite a dent in Apple sales.
Whether that is a good or bad thing is debatable but I see restricting trade as an overall bad thing. Doing your manufacturing in the US would always be a safe haven. Too bad that has become economically not feasible in many instances. That is what needs fixed and it is very hard.
I see that there is often confusion about business as the bad guy when it can only be the bad guy with aid of government’s coercive powers. Otherwise we are dealing with voluntary transactions. The solution for the confused is to give the government more coercive powers and without evidence or reasonable arguments attempt to wave off opposing arguments as too idealistic.
Tariff rates have never been permanent.
Trump threatening huge tariffs on and off certainly creates uncertainty and when there is not a predictable basis for his threats, business decisions based on them would require a Trump mind reader. Since that reader does not exist and even if one did he might yet be confused, business investment will come to a standstill.
Republican legislators must iniate taking back control of tariff decisions or better the Supreme Court needs to rule on the constitutionality of what Trump is doing. It could be called saving Trump from Trump.
Kenneth,
IMHO, idealized libertarian countries have never existed…… and never will. I doubt that is because we terrible humans are just not good enough to live up to libertarian ideals. The heavy hand of communism is the opposite extreme of unrealistic libertarianism….. and nearly as impractical.
As to “voluntary business transactions”……. how about addictive products like cigarettes? Do you think it was OK for tobacco companies to suggest smoking is good for you? Do you think it was OK for them to work diligently to generate bogus research to hide the terrible effects of smoking and discount the strongly addictive effects of nicotine? Should companies be free to lace consumables with fentanyl, so they have happy (addicted) repeat customers? Not rhetorical questions.
Kenneth Fritsch wrote: ” business … can only be the bad guy with aid of governmentâs coercive powers.”
Nonsense. SteveF gave some good examples. Another problem with complete laissez faire is that it tends to lead to monopolies and cartels, as Adam Smith understood two and a half centuries ago.
And of course there are the issues of environmental damage and product safety.
Government regulation initially comes about for good reasons. The problem is that it keeps expanding beyond what is actually needed.
Mike M,
“The problem is that it keeps expanding beyond what is actually needed.”
Yup. The EPA was needed in 1970, when raw sewage and used condoms floated down the Hudson River (saw it myself), and air pollution in many places was terrible. Now? The EPA is a lot closer to an out-of-control parasitic infection that saps the economy of growth than a needed regulatory organization.
The problem is that all such regulatory organizations have too much incentive to become perpetual…. and that implies ever more regulations….and attract people who honestly, in their bones, believe ever more onerous regulations are an unmitigated public good. The inherent incentives in regulatory organizations are simply perverse. I think all regulatory bodies should be sunsetted automatically after 25 years.
SteveF,
It might be interesting to see if in the period between 1968 and 2024, regulatory agency staff grew in both Republican and Democratic Administrations. Also how growth in pages of regulations tracked on the same basis, and maybe also by which party controlled congress.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if there wasn’t a lot of difference.
john ferguson,
You could be right, after all Nixon supported the creation of the EPA. But ever increasing regulation is not easy to stop (in courts or in Congress; Chevron deference, filibuster) and most budgeting by Congress involves automatic increases year on year. Honestly, what regulatory agency has ever said “We finished our work, the problem has been resolved” ? As Mike M suggested, many times regulation really was needed….. later things go side-ways, and regulatory agencies become self perpetuating.
SteveF wrote: “what regulatory agency has ever said âWe finished our work, the problem has been resolvedâ ? ”
The Rubber Board during WW2. Probably the only one.
I stand corrected. The members of the Rubber Board should probably have their own memorial in Washington DC. đ
I think, IIRC, development of synthetic styrene butadiene rubber (SBR) made concerns about availability of natural rubber moot. Maybe that was part of it. I could be mistaken.
BTW, in my first research job, I regularly made, at laboratory scale (1.5 liters) batches of synthetic rubber (SBR) and related rubber polymers. These were used in paper coating applications (glossy paper for color magazine printing), interior water based wall paints, fabric adhesives for automotive interiors, and adhesive coatings for polyester tire cord. Interesting work, and I learned a lot about a lot. And I began to think about how I might measure particles far smaller than visible with an optical microscope.
EPA workforce trend. It peaked in 1999.
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/unions/2023/02/epa-employees-voice-concerns-about-low-pay-understaffing-burnout/
SteveF,
Yes, the Rubber Board made itself superfluous by leading the development of synthetic rubber. As I understand it, they had two jobs: organizing the recycling of natural rubber and organizing the development of synthetic rubber. The success of the second made the first unnecessary and the board ceased to operate in 1944 (if memory serves).
I love the idea of a monument to the Rubber Board. I’d even contribute to the cost of its construction.
I am in good company:
Scott Adams: I Grok several times per day. I Google zero.
Elon Musk: AI will obviate search, @grok
Grok is replacing Google in my searches. Google is still better at some things (like find Chinese take-away near me), but for anything needing nuance, Grok wins hands down.
In a free society it is wrong to defraud and it is punishable and victims can be compensated. Even in a semi free society private entities are eventually held accountable for doing wrong. When government gets it wrong on a massive scale through deception the supposed accountability is often merely facing elections.
I find it curious that some point to tragedies, occurring under non libertarian regimes, that are used as arguments against libertarianism and that government interference like regulation is warranted under some idealistic view of it, but that it in the end it does not work as expected under that view.
In any society there are going to be people and organizations that do wrong by other individuals no matter how free that society is. When those doing wrong have the unique coercive power of government the wrongs are not handled the same as in the private sector.
This is exactly my complaint. We cannot handle China the way we would handle an individual who is doing wrong. Governments can only be effectively reckoned with by the action of other governments. Last time I pointed this out, I think you told me to stop ‘moralizing’.
Whatever.
Well, by the actions of other governments or by revolution of their citizenry. But there is no necessity that dictates a society can’t keep a plurality, maybe even a majority of their people as slaves. Again, ground we have fruitlessly already covered; libertarians seem to think the best thing to do here is ignore the slavery and do free trade with the slavers, and think only of warfare as a last resort if the slavers attack.
[I got sidetracked and maybe my initial point wasn’t clear. Slaves have a heck of a lot of disadvantages in trying to do revolutions, obviously. Systems tend to already be in place to keep them in bondage, otherwise they wouldn’t still be slaves. So there’s no particular reason to expect China for example or North Korea to eventually become free.]
Kenneth Fritsch,
I do not understand your post on “doing wrong”. It is almost certainly your fault, not mine.
What the heck do you mean by “doing wrong”? That term can me many different things. Some examples:
Criminal acts
Torts
Negligence
Accidents
Errors
Bad judgement
Doing something that another disagrees with
If you want to make sense, you must not mix those together and shift the meaning from one sentence to the next.
You wrote: “When those doing wrong have the unique coercive power of government the wrongs are not handled the same as in the private sector.”
Off hand, I can’t think of an example, other than ones that are very specific to particular acts by particular actors. But that applies within the private sector as well.
Mike M.
Would imprisoning Japanese Americans in WW2 be an example of a wrong done by a government.
I must be missing your point, because I can think of plenty of others.
john ferguson,
I did not say that the government never does anything wrong. The internment of Japanese Americans has no analogy in the private sector. So it sheds no light on what Kenneth meant by âWhen those doing wrong have the unique coercive power of government the wrongs are not handled the same as in the private sector.â
Government is, in theory, an extension of the will of “the people”. Removing government from the equation merely passes power onto the next, most powerful, entity.
It’s fine to argue that “the people” represent the biggest threat to themselves in the form of government, it seems self evident, but that doesn’t solve the problem of how to deal with powerful business interests conspiring to exploit the people. without some kind of equal, or more powerful, entity getting involved, and now the cycle is complete.
Libertarians cannot wish the human base trait to conquer and rule (i.e. protect and serve) out of existence. It must be dealt with.
It is ironic that when other countries see you arming yourself for self defense they respond in kind and it causes as many problems as it allegedly solves.
I’d be more than happy to disarm if I believed the world was full of benevolent do-gooders with a libertarian non-expansionist bent. This just isn’t the case IMO.
The Russians would be a bit less than kind in dealing with concorded Carthage. That is not the exception it is the rule.
Connecting that to the situation in Ukraine? Complicated.
What is clear: any suggestion that the Russians are just going to give up hard won territory is delusional. People who suggest otherwise are IMHO quite crazy.
Roger Kimball:
“Courage, Aristotle once observed, is the most important virtue because without courage we are unable to practice the other virtues. The life of freedom requires the courage to recognize and to name the realities that impinge upon us. Day is Night. Peace is War. Love is Hate. Out of such linguistic capitulations, as Orwell showed in Nineteen Eighty-Four, totalitarian tyranny is born. Weâve all read the book. But have we learned that hard lesson?
Free speech, it turns out, is like other freedoms: its victory is never permanent. It is a melancholy truth that the right of free speech, like other civilizational achievements, must constantly be renewed to survive.
That was one of Edmund Burkeâs central insights. But it is an insight that is regularly forgottenâuntil reality intrudes upon our reverie to remind us. Every generation finds that it must work anew to win or at least to maintain the freedoms bequeathed to it by earlier generations.
What was argued for and won yesterday is today once again up for grabs. Which moves patience and perseverance to the head of the queue of political virtues. You already made the argument. But it always turns out that you must make it again.”
Kimball is, perhaps, more than a bit too verbose, but I think mainly correct: We ignore the many assaults on our personal liberty at our peril.
I found dialog enhancing audio for movies that actually works.
Overnight I binge watched a murder show on Amazon Prime and it had a digital enhancement for dialog that really worked. It’s called âdialog boostâ.
It uses AI to bring out dialog in movies that are full of distracting sounds.
Here’s how Grok explains it:
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_5420452a-4d25-4899-ac60-7a8691fefc8b
If anyone is interested the show I was binge watching was âBosch Legacyâ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch:_Legacy
edit, In the past I have tried two different sound bars with very limited [and not successful] dialog enhancement features.
HI Russell,
Janet has trouble with tv dialog so we use sub-titles wherever we can even when lnaguage is English.
We have closed captioning but don’t use it because it’s so frequently nuts. I’ve thought about filtering the audio to the frequency range of the old dial-up telephones.
Janet frequently uses a bluetooth headset we have which can help.
I have a very high-end graphic analyzer I inherited from my dad, which might make improving the sound a lot easier, but I’m running out of space on our tv-hifi setup. And there is also the possibility that this whole thing will get so complicated that I cannot remember what I did.
John,
We tried a number of gadgets because both of us had trouble deciphering dialogue. This new approach from Amazon prime Video really works. Itâs simple to use, and there are several levels of amplification to choose from. Itâs as easy to use as turning on CC.
Russell,
Sounds good. We’ll try it.
Trump Threatens to Redistribute $3 Billion in Harvard Grants to Trade Schools
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/trump-threatens-to-redistribute-3-billion-in-harvard-grants-to-trade-schools-a4ebc64c?st=rFHCmR&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
This proves somebody on his staff is thinking. Good politics.
My solution has been closed captions or headphones. I’ve been wearing headphones at night to not disturb others and find I don’t need closed captions.
A good center channel speaker and an audio system that properly decodes Dolby Digital 5.1 also makes a big difference. Dolby Digital is only broadcast by some providers, YouTube TV started streaming this audio format a few years ago finally. Most audio systems let you increase center channel volume. Audio producers send almost all dialog through the center channel, it is the main reason for its existence. Over invest in the center channel.
And then there is your room. Highly reflective surfaces (tile, windows, hard wood floors, etc) will cause “echoy” problems.
And finally there is your old aging brain, good luck fixing that.
Russel
Now I need to find dialog boost for Netflix? We watched Kraven (which is so-so). We had the audio volume at a reasonable level for dialog. Then a music only section came on an blasted our ears out! This is ridiculous. (And I know it isn’t just us. There are widespread complaints about this. )
Lucia,
âNow I need to find dialog boost for Netflix?â
I canât help you with Netflix. I donât have an account.
If itâs of any help, my wife had significant difficulties with movie dialogues for several years. We tried several types of sound bars that advertised dialogue features, and they offered very little help. I do not recommend them.
This Amazon Prime Video dialogue boost is the first Iâve seen it on a streaming service, but I will check out the others that I belong to just in case theyâve have also added this feature.
Starship test 9 may happen tomorrow, 6:30 pm CT! Fingers crossed.
Mark Bofill,
I’ll bet there are a lot of very nervous engineers at SpaceX.
Steve, I’d think so, yes.
Excitement guaranteed.
Apparently they won’t try a booster catch this time because they are going to test one of the inner ring landing engines failing and an outer ring engine kicking in as a substitute.
Also I believe this booster is being reused for the first time ever. I think most of the engines have been replaced though.
Starship is where all the problems are though, we shall see how much progress they made there. They said the last two failures were completely unrelated to each other.
WSJ: How Student-Loan Crisis Will Show Up in the Economy
Millions of Americans suddenly owe billions of dollars in student debt after years of forbearance
https://www.wsj.com/economy/student-loans-economy-f6a11598?st=eMSoWc&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
“The Trump administration began collections for defaulted loans, a shock for many, especially those new to repayment.
…
For borrowers, this means that every month, money that they presumably used to spend elsewhere is going to pay off debt instead. Many who arenât paying are now considered delinquent or defaulted, a status that sinks credit scores.
…
That will strain personal finances.
…
Yannelis also worries that, as a result of former President Joe Bidenâs attempts to forgive swaths of student debt, many borrowers didnât really expect they would need to start paying again and built their budgets around that belief.”
Suddenly? Shock? I am so sick of this narrative that people defaulting on student loans are victims somehow. Why can’t these effing journalists ask a student why they think they shouldn’t have to repay a loan? I want to know the answer.
According to SpaceX, 29 of 33 engines on the booster were flown before. 4 new. Maybe that is another reason to not attempt a booster catch.
Tom Scharf,
I’m skeptical when I read stories where the person with loans claims they had no idea until they saw their credit score drop because the missed payments they didn’t know where due.
This story has been in the news. They knew they had loans. I’m sure they quickly heard when they didn’t have to pay! It’s hard to believe the overwhelming majority haven’t been talking to each other about it.
I’d believe someone who said, “Yeah. I’ve been worrying about how to restart payments since November when Trump was elected!” But having no idea?! Lots of them having no idea? Color me skeptical.
As for “the cause”?
So there were delinquencies before. And they are back to the level that existed before repayment was excused. That should hardly be surprising!
I suspect this may end up being the case. Some took out car loans because they could get credit. Or got somewhat nicer apartments– because they could. Now they have those monthly obligations which don’t vanish.
Sadly true. But also, not surprising.
The inflation of the past 4 years has effectively discounted 19% of what peopled owed. Deadbeats will be deadbeats, of course, but they don’t deserve much sympathy after making bad financial, educational, and career choices.
The inflation of the past 4 years has effectively discounted 19% of what peopled owed. Deadbeats will be deadbeats, of course, but they donât deserve much sympathy after making bad financial, educational, and career choices.
Years ago, 60 Minutes did a piece on balloon mortgages. The couple du jour (likely in their early 30’s) were standing in their driveway with the two BMW’s behind them and their starter mansion a bit farther back.
Their whine was that they had enjoyed mortgage payments under the pre-balloon phase of $1,200/month. It was four years on and the payments now included both interest and principal and were over $4,500.
They were at a loss as to what to do. Wife offered to space her hair and nails sessions out to every two weeks. Maybe they could return one of the BMW.s, but alas, nothing they could think of could be done without a serious reduction in the style of their lives.
60 Minutes offerred no suggestions.
I think there’s an opportunity here to put the yuppy whine above to song along the lines of the C&W lament about pick-up’s wrecked, girl friend has the clap, dog died, train doesn’t come here any more, and the revenuers have sealed the still, etc.
john ferguson
Yeah. A WAPO article I read had a woman complaining she might have to borrow against her house to repay her loan.
I think many people should aspire to become homeowners. But. Clearly. . .
When you read these stories and see the reporters picked these people, you really have to wonder. Surely they can find people who didn’t make mortgage payments while not paying off their student loan. (Of if they weren’t making mortgage payments, perhaps inherited a whole house? )
john ferguson,
A sister-in-law faced a mini-version of the same balloon mortgage nightmare. She and husband had re-financed their house multiple times, pocketing ~$120K tax-free cash from the refinanced mortgages over several years. In parallel, her husband’s grandfather, who had been giving his grandson a gift of $10K per year (again, tax free) died, and they learned that the “grandfather well” had gone dry….. he had pretty much zeroed out his assets with gifts to grandchildren before he died… so no inheritance windfall.
Anyway, in 2009, the market crashed, house values fell, and they couldn’t possibly make the balloon payments. They fought, divorced, declared bankruptcy, and “walked away” from their house, stiffing the bank for about $150 K.
I have had to “help” her financially multiple times since…. maybe totaling $10K in “gifts”. You can only choose your friends.
I can vaguely remember a cartoon which might have been in Playboy showing this kid with a guitar whining about a list of things similar to what I suggested above.
Friends’ son married a valley girl some years ago. Yep, the real McCoy. Every sentence has “totally” somewhere near the beginning.
He’s a demo jock for Oracle and has been for many years. Compensation is a combination of salary and commission which means some years are fat and others lean.
The valley girl has some sympathy for their straits in lean years.
She doesn’t need a new BMW every year after all, nor toenails done weekly, but hair and fingernails mandatory, cannot be seen in public, or at least by her freinds, wearing the same thing twice, etc. etc.
Since his gigs almost always involve flying, and he has no need to be in the office, he moved family from Palo Alto to New Hampshire, thinking that getting her away from her clique might save money It didn’t. She now flies out to the left coast for a week every other month – cannot lose touch.
Our friends are both from New England, college classes of 1962, so you can guess how this flies. It is sad.
But she does have at least two of the aspects of a trophy wife. Even Trump has figured out that marrying one might not be a great idea after all.
John Ferguson,
With regard to that couple on “60 Minutes”…
More precisely, it’s not a “balloon payment” if there are new monthly payments due with interest and principal. A balloon payment involves having the entire amount due; for example, a loan with the payment calculated for, say, a 30-year repayment schedule, but with the entire balance due after 5 years. More likely, they got a below-market “teaser rate” of interest, for the first year, or few years, after which the interest rate climbed to market rates, and the monthly payment increased commensurately. [Or perhaps they were only required to pay interest, and not principal, for the first year or more, and now their grace period is over.]
I’ve had both a balloon payment setup on a rental property, and “teaser” rates on adjustable mortgages on my house. It may require a little bit of applied math to figure out if those deals are more advantageous to you than a standard, fixed-term mortgage, but it isn’t at all difficult to anticipate that after the initial term is over, one has to deal with a higher monthly payment. I think some people don’t plan at all; others may expect (hope!) that their income will have increased enough to suffice when the time comes; perhaps some just figure that they can later refinance and again defer the time when they have to pay the price. As long as home values keep rising, that last may be possible, I suppose. But I would never put myself in a position where that’s necessary to keep the financial boat afloat.
HaroldW.
You are correct, it was a teaser with only interest for first four years when principal came in. And of course their accumulated interest must have included the cost of floating the entire principal for the four years.
It’s also possible that the interest wasn’t fixed rate either.
John Ferguson,
Even my dual-citizen youngest daughter ‘totally’ makes fun of how many young American girls in her school talk. She imitates them frequently……. between bursts of laughter.
John Ferguson,
Even my dual-citizen youngest daughter âtotallyâ makes fun of how many young American girls in her school talk. She imitates them frequentlyâŚâŚ. between bursts of laughter.
SteveF
Was part of your assertion that the tariffs would not be inflationary based on assumption (probability) that increased costs would lower consumption and that most things subject to the tariffs were discretionary purchases?
Maybe Iphones are not discretionary, at least to some people.
On the face of it, unless there’s something like the abive at work here, it’s hard to believe that an increase in price wouldn’t ressult in some level of inflation.
This is hilarious!
âA renowned Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired after an investigation found she fabricated data on multiple studies focused on dishonesty.â
She was dishonest in studies about dishonesty!
https://nypost.com/2025/05/27/us-news/harvard-professor-of-honesty-stripped-of-tenure-fired-for-manipulating-data-in-studies/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=nypost&utm_medium=social
My daughter-in-law was a Valley Girl. Her dad was an architect for Universal Studios. She told me when he got transferred to Orlando she considered it a fate worse than death.
Right, the choice of student loan martyrs is very odd.
How about an academic low performer pushed by school advisers being accepted into a school they can’t handle (a DEI acceptance!) and they drop out after two years and have no degree, a boatload of debt, two kids, no father, and few prospects.
Instead you seem to get friends of reporters who have graduate school debt and summer in the Hamptons.
Trump, an hour ago:
â What Vladimir Putin doesnât realize is that if it werenât for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. Heâs playing with fire!â
https://x.com/trumpdailyposts/status/1927402905620844600?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
john a ferguson,
You forgot the “mom’s in prison” part of the ballad.
Russell Klier,
I’ve been following that case for years. What’s very interesting is how she got caught. Her Excel spreadsheets had some very obvious evidence of manipulation. She tried to claim others did it.
https://datacolada.org/109
Data Colada got sued by the professor for their effort of exposing her. That case was thrown out.
The EU has OK’d strikes deep into Russia with their weapons.
Sounds like Trump may be ready to OK some more punishment for Russia. We still limit the range of stuff we supplyâŚ.. I wonder if the F-16s might finally play a roleâŚ. There is talk of sanctioning anyone buying Russian oil, that would hurt, I think.
Putin doesn’t want a ceasefire. Ball is in the EU and Trump’s court now.
john a ferguson,
Moderate tariffs should not cause significant inflation, even if you define inflation as an increase in the consumer price index. Imports are 10-12 percent of GDP. Trump’s baseline tarii\ff is 10%. Only a fraction of that will be passed on to the customer. So overall, prices should go up my maybe a few tenths of a percent. And that will be a one time blip.
If you think that vendors can just boost their prices by 10%, then I have a question for you. If they could sell their product for 10% more than they are asking, then why aren’t they asking for the higher price already?
Tomâs post:
âPutin doesnât want a ceasefire. Ball is in the EU and Trumpâs court now.â
I am still of the mind that the EU doesnât want a cease-fire either. I think they are content with the status quo. As long as Ukraine is fighting Russia with American arms, the EU has no worries of a Russian invasion.
Mike,
âIf they could sell their product for 10% more than they are asking, then why arenât they asking for the higher price already?â
I suppose the old capitalist theory applies⌠someone would undercut their price.
Mike M.
Raising a price has to reduce sales. Of course. And this was where I expected price increases due to tariffs to not necessarily have an inflationary effect. I agree with Mark. wjhen everyone’s cost basis increases, you can still be competitve with a higher price.
Hah, Tom Scharf,
“Mom’s in prison.”
John Ferguson,
Inflation is a rise in money relative to the supply of goods/services.
If you take money away from individuals, and give it to the Federal government, then the Federal government will spend that money on whatever their priorities are and individuals will spend less. Government purchases will not be of the same things as an individual, for sure, but spend the same money they will. Demands will shift with higher taxes, of any kind (import duties, sales taxes, real estate taxes, or income taxes), meaning the money is spent on a nuclear submarine, or maybe spent subsidizing rich people buying electric vehicles, vs a new pair of shoes from China or a new TV from Korea… but total financial demand remains unchanged.
If the government imposes a duty on iPhones, then the higher net cost for the iPhone means the government spends that money on something else. Or maybe, in my wildest dreams, reduces deficit spending. That is just a wild dream, of course.
Short version: Taxes have nothing to do with inflation. Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Government can (and routinely does!) raise the cost of living for most individuals by taking more individual income as taxes (all forms of taxes!). That is unrelated to inflation.
John Ferguson,
I should add: inflation is also theft of saved monetary value. Debtors love inflation. Savers? Not so much. And who is the biggest debtor in the known universe? The US Federal government, of course. Every bit of inflation reduces federal government debt. Theft by another name is still theft.
john ferguson,
Sure, Some prices may incease by an amount close to the tariff. Some will have little or no increase, Others will be somewhere in between. Overall, a 10% tariff will have little effect on prices.
Mike M.
I’m looking at 30% or 54% tariffs depending on how object is shipped which are the lowest for the things I buy from China.
Imports from China are something like 1.5% of GDP. So tariffs of 30-50% would contribute about 0.6% to inflation if they are fully passed on. But they won’t be. There will be some effect on inflation, but it will be modest and it will be a one-time blip.
Of course, if you adopt the Friedman position that inflation is not about increasing money supply rather than prices, tariffs will produce no inflation at all.
Starship launch.. ⌠T minus 50 minutes and counting
MikeM
WRT to inflation due to tariffs: To some extent, substitutions to “made in china” will occur. To some extent, a fair number of discretionary things won’t be bought. This may be particularly true of “trinket” like or “fun” items. Do I need more decorative barettes? Do I need another kitchen gadget? Usually, no and no.
So certainly the effect on inflation isn’t equal to the amount of tarriff if applied to everything we bought last year.
Alright. Here we go in a few minutes.
Cats on a hot tin roof.
They will not launch. More and more like NASA. Not a good sign.
I think the booster crash landed into the ocean, but so far Starship hasn’t undergone RUD.
[Edit: They were testing an ‘extreme’ angle of attack on booster re-entry for some reason. Maybe that had something to do with the booster’s apparent hard landing.]
Live video and telemetry via Starlink. So far so good on Ship.
T plus 15:50
Whatâs all that white stuff floating inside?
mark bofill,
All explanations of goals exactly as clear as mud.
Good they didn’t try a catch…. probably would have destroyed much of the launch complex.
Steve,
Yup! It would have been a spectacular mess.
At least ship didn’t RUD this time. Can’t wait to see video of booster hitting ocean at a bazillion MPH.
Can’t open the payload door was a big fail.
We shall see if it can handle re-entry this time.
No simulated launch of Star Link satellites. Hummm… looking less like success every minute. Let’s hope it doesn’t burn up entering the atmosphere.
Nice videos at least. NASA sucked at that kind of thing.
Starship didn’t explode like it did the past two times. That’s progress. Doesn’t mean they don’t have a ways to go of course.
SpaceX broadcast calling a grand success! My definition of success must be outdated.
Looks like ship has lost stability … again. There’s going to be criticism this time around. Engineers, prepare for your floggings.
Pretty awesome video transmission during an uncontrolled spin though!
Big fail today. Booster reuse though. Ship is currently a disaster. Space = hard, tough day tomorrow for the engineers.
Live plasma views from onboard ! Amazing
One SpaceX Talking Head claimed the problem started with an internal leak. Perhaps that was the white stuff floating inside that I saw at 15;50.
I still call that progress. They apparently got past the last causes of failure and have run headfirst into the next one. They’ll get there eventually. I’m curious to hear what Musk has to say about it tonight.
Almost everything failed. Return booster to a controlled landing: fail. Deploy fake satellites: fail. Re-ignite rocket motor: fail. controlled reentry at targeted landing: fail. They are going backwards?
I am guessing tomorrow and Thursday are going to be stressful at SpaceX.
Hey, it didn’t blowup on the pad!
AFAICT right after ship main engine cutoff I noticed a lot of outgassing / venting from the live view that shouldn’t be there. SpaceX said this was a fuel leak. They tried to fight it with control thrusters but eventually ran out of fuel for the thrusters and then it was in an uncontrolled spin.
My guess is all the vibration on launch is causing havoc on ship. That’s at least the second major leak and then an engine blew up last time taking out 3 other engines.
Whoever is in charge of the internal plumbing on ship is going to get DOGE’d.
The good news: after some people are fired, SpaceX has a chance to succeed. But really, it sounds like they are letting things get way too complicated. KISS is the key.
SteveF wrote: “after some people are fired, SpaceX has a chance to succeed.”
Um, they have been putting people in space for a number of years now. And they dominate commercial satellite launches.
They are trying something very, very hard. Maybe too hard? Maybe 33 small engines is not the way to go. But I would not bet against them.
Whoâs paying for all these successful failures?
Mike M,
Yes, they are trying something that is very hard. Their successes are with a rocket that is much more conventional in size and design (save for the booster return and re-use). Will they succeed in developing a giant rocket that is ‘rapidly and completely re-usable’? Maybe, but if so, it looks like a much longer and more expensive development program than they were counting on. SpaceX is private, and completely controlled by Musk, but at some point even Musk will start worrying about the development cost.
The most concerning issue is the ‘move fast, blow things up, and learn quickly’ approach doesn’t seem to be working with Starship. They are still blowing things up, but learning quickly? Not so obvious.
The other issue SpaceX faces is FAA approval; the more spectacular “pseudo-successes” they have with Starship, the more the FAA is going to get in their way. They will need help from heaven should a starship launch lead to a crash on land…. like in southern Florida. There would then be “an abundance of caution” at every step in the approval process, and SpaceX would be forced to proceed more like NASA.
Is it possible that Musk and company have so much money they can design iteratively?
I haven’t followed this at all, but suspect that they instrument the daylights out of each shot with the result, they have extensive information on what went wrong, when and in what sequence and following what other faillure.
My own experience with my naive projects is this method doesn’t protect you from the thing which was going to fail but didn’t get a chance because the flight was truncated (term of art)
John,
Yeah. I’ve explained this to several managers over the years. I can’t tell them how long it will take to fix their broken system, because the current defect obscures God only knows how many other defects that manifest sequentially. Some of them get this.
They’re doing fine IMO. They might not make it to Mars on the schedule Elon Musk was hoping for, but they’ll get there if they keep at it. That or they’ll thoroughly explore whatever technical barriers make this impossible.
john ferguson, mark bofill,
One thing I have observed (too many times!) is an attempt (especially under time pressure) to fix one problem introduces unexpected consequent problems…. and trying to fix those introduces even more problems. The expression “spiraling up your own asshole” comes to mind. Getting out of that kind of mess often requires backing up and doing a series of “sanity checks” to confirm you really understand what is happening.
I hope that is not what is going on with the Starship project.
I think Muskl said that they are doing something really hard. It is probably comforting to work in a place where the guy at the top understands. I spent too many years woirking for guys who had no idea, nor when the majical solution was discovered didn;’t appreciate that it wasn’t all that obvious.
I’m sure you can all aprreciate my favorite Dilbert cartoon, to wit:
“Marketing told them we could do WHAT?”
PS: I just discovered that the reason my worms and pinions didn’t work was that the tooth on the downloaded from supplier’s CAD models worm was not actually helical. I’d even printed a couple of them. Dumb Me.
Not being able to test reentry on ship is definitely a problem for now, this is probably the hardest part. The space shuttle got held up for years with the ceramic heat tiles.
I agree with the rapid test and iterate formula but it does have its drawbacks. It worked for Falcon 9 and now SpaceX delivered over 90% of all mass to orbit last year. They won’t be giving up on that too easily.
It is notable that the Saturn V was expendable so in some sense SpaceX has already exceeded that with a reusable super heavy booster.
Falcon 9 wasn’t exactly all success…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
They now have 450 landings of the Falcon 9 booster
One of the tragic excesses of the PC era was the cancellation of Dilbert.
john Ferguson,
“âMarketing told them we could do WHAT?â
I had a fellow who sold my company’s products in North Americal for about 10 years. Nice enough fellow, diligent and organized, but far from a technical guru. He told a potential customer that we could “for certain” measure particles which float (lighter than the fluid surrounding them). We couldn’t. After I made sure he clarified with the customer what was and wasn’t possible, I started thinking about possible ways to actually do what he had imprudently promised that customer. A couple months later I had figured out a practical way to do it, and then filed for a patent… granted in 1998 (5,786,898). So sometimes marketing bluster can actually motivate development. đ
SteveF
I worked for a wonderful guy in late ’70s. He was a genral contractor who hired me so he could do design_build.
He used to say that construction was led by its dumbest participants. Thes guys would get the jobs with the lowest bids, bids which had missed something the contract required, and then would invent the way out of the hole.
Congratulations on the solution to over-promising.
Steve,
When I was younger, all someone had to do was tell me something couldn’t be done. Of course I don’t mean I ever did the actual impossible or even advanced the state of the art as you did, but you might be surprised how often people casually pronounce fairly trivial things undoable.
I had a surpervisor once I didn’t get along with who was fond of saying this about things he simply didn’t want to do. People quickly learned that I’d be glad to do it (whatever it was that got rejected) for them just to spite the guy. [Over the weekend!]
And it’s said I’m not a people person. Hah!
Mark,
I assume you always knew what you were doing.
Pretty often, I had no real idea which worried me a lot because i was sort of doing engineering without being an engineer.
John,
I don’t know that I’d say I always knew what I was doing. Like many computer science guys, I’m an ‘engineer’ by virtue of my job title. One can argue software engineering isn’t really engineering I guess. I don’t have a strong opinion about it. I solve problems for my company like the other sorts of engineers and follow the same sorts of processes. Same sorts of paperwork… So.
Shrug.
The Starship program is a mix of US Government funding and private funding. According to Grok over half is private funding.
https://x.com/i/grok/share/N7c8aU1E5unDQ2NlcSOUKR2Br
I suppose SpaceX would have a lot less FAA oversight if they were launching from Florida and not Texas. The safe zone over the Atlantic ocean is one reason why Cape Canaveral was chosen for missile testing:
âOn May 11, 1949 President Harry S. Truman signed legislation entitled Public Law 60 establishing the Joint Long Range Proving Ground at Cape Canaveral. â
âA suitable facility would need to be relatively isolated from centers of population, provide a large expanse of unpopulated area over which missiles could fly and accommodate the installation of several downrange tracking stations. A base for military operational headquarters would also be required.â
https://www.spaceline.org/history-cape-canaveral/history-cape-canaveral-chapter-2/
Not wishing to pick a fight here, just providing information.
The NSPE [National Society of Professional Engineers] has a position statement on this topic:
âIt is the position of the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) that the title âengineerâ should only be used by qualified individuals.
Background: NSPE defines âqualified individualâ as: 1. An individual who is licensed under a jurisdiction engineering licensure law; or 2. An individual who has graduated from an ABET/EAC program; or 3. An individual whose degree has been evaluated as equivalent to an ABET/EAC program or one which has been approved by the National Council of Examiners for Engineers and Surveyors (NCEES) or a state or territorial engineering licensing board. The indiscriminate utilization of the title âengineerâ by individuals who are not clearly professionally qualified as set forth in this position statement serves only to confuse the public. NSPE encourages the use of titles such as âengineering aide/assistantâ and âengineering technician/technologistâ, as appropriate, to designate individuals/positions that clearly are not those which are appropriately licensed, educated, or legally defined but are part of the engineering team. â
https://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/sites/default/files/resources/PSdownloadables/EmploymentPracticesUseofEngineeringTitles.pdf
LOL.
It’s not me who insists on the title. I couldn’t care less about that, I care about the work and the pay. You’d have to take that up with the company I contract with. Indeed, you’d have to take it up with most defense contractors and subcontractors in Huntsville, I’m sure.
Although the internet tells me software engineering programs can be ABET accredited.
I was more questioning the idea that ‘software engineering’ is really ‘engineering’, FWIW. [As in, ever, regardless of accreditation.]
mark bofill,
I’ve done some of both… and often all mixed together (like over the past 8 weeks… both software and hardware design in a single smallish project). I don’t get too worked up about what you call it. If your efforts are evaluated against the requirement of actually working (AKA consistent with reality), then it matters not at all what it is called. If what you produce has to work, then it is not ‘fluff’.
Formal credentials don’t matter much either. I have a nephew who formally studied philosophy (OMG, what fluff!) but he works as a programmer, and seems quite good at it.
Steve,
Yep. Computers are notorious for rudely ignoring the qualifications of their designers and programmers and stubbornly insisting on doing what they are actually programmed to do regardless. đ
I’m old enough to have worked with some exceptional developers who didn’t have formal software training. It’s as you say.
F*** the NSPE, ha ha.
They try to legally limit companies who can use the term engineering in their business name. I understand why they want to do this but who died and left them God?
I had a couple very off putting discussions with people who consider themselves the “engineer police”. I graduated from an accredited university and have been working professionally in the field for 40 years, don’t tell me I need to pay your fees to call myself an engineer.
AFAICT they don’t really enforce this. However there was an infamous story out of Oregon where they tried to intimidate somebody over a street light case.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/oregon-man-fined-for-writing-i-am-an-engineer-temporarily-wins-the-right-to-call-himself-an-engineer/
“Rather than investigating those claims, however, the Oregon engineering board asked JärlstrĂśm to stop calling himself an engineer, and in January fined him $500 for the crime of âpracticing engineering without being registered.â”
That one struck a nerve for me.
When I went to school there was only computer science and those guys didn’t get within a million miles of hardware concepts. Even in EE I only had one class in programming and it was pretty lame. Now software is most of what I do.
When I worked in the defense contractor world they had separate salary structures for “real” engineers and talented self learners. I look back at that now as credentialism. There are tons of self taught programmers out there that are very good, and tons that are not.
I would say “software engineering” does not gain a lot in the first two years of base engineering. Chemistry, physics, calculus, mechanical, etc. It is arguable they deserve to be a separate field as it was with computer science.
Tom,
Yes to all of that. My degree was computer science, although ‘scientist’ describes me even more poorly than ‘engineer’ for sure. I’m a code monkey and a systems guy mostly.
Mark,
I think when I was an undergrad, the distinction between “computer engineer” vs “computer something” was working on hardware vs software. The former might be designing the actual computer. The demand for software exploded since the 80s.
We now do have words to describe distinctions: developer, web design, yada, yada….
I don’t think people really worry too much about the ‘words’ anymore. (Though they might if they are hiring for a particular job.)
Lucia,
I agree, I think that’s what the distinction was back in the day. With the advent of FPGAs among other things the EE/SE line got blurry, although as you say people still specialize.
I have seen a lot of euphemisms applied to engineers including:
Domestic engineer referring to a housewife
Sanitation engineer referring to a garbage man
Transportation engineer referring to a bus driver
Agricultural engineer referring to a farmer
I therefore think some new updated euphemisms are in order:
Softwear engineer referring to someone who washes clothes
Hardwear engineer referring to someone who makes steel toed boots
There actually are two Professions refered to as engineers that are not recognized by NSPE but are licensed by state, local or federal regulations:
Locomotive Engineers referring to someone who drives a train
Stationary engineers referring to someone who operates a boiler in a power plant.
I have experience working with stationary engineers and they have truly impressive credentials. They are masters of the Mollier Diagram, something that always challenged me.
Link:
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/mollier-diagram-water-d_308.html
John, Your post:
âPretty often, I had no real idea which worried me a lot because i was sort of doing engineering without being an engineer.â
How did your projects get permits without signed and sealed construction documents?
Gaza fighting continues, and what remains of Hamas appears unwilling to cede control and flee (or just flee)…. so their virgins await them.
Russia shows little inclination to start substantive negotiations, perhaps because they think Ukraine will effectively give up on the Russian demands of neutrality for Ukraine and loss of the eastern provinces and Crimea. Trump says he will walk away soon, and the Europeans (save for the Poles, who are arming themselves) are busy writing another angry statement about how evil the Russians are. “You must stop this because we are right and you are wrong!” sounds a lot like progressives talking to people who voted for Trump. And just as effective when applied to Russia.
Ukraine is going to end up with much worse terms than were available a month after Russia invaded. Elections have consequences, and the consequences of Joe Biden’s election were terrible for the Ukrainians.
Russell,
Generally all we needed was my architectural seal. We always had civil, structural, mechanical, and electrical engineers who did their respective parts of the job but seldom needed to seal anything. Sometimes Civil work needed a seal. This was all more than 20 years ago. I have no idea what’s done today.
An example of what confronted me was the need to steam out railroad propane tank cars so they would be safe to work on. It would be a production reqjuirement and they needed to be brought up to 192F. How much steam?
For some reason, we couldn’t find anyone who knew. I guessed a 125hp Cleaver Brooks boiler would be enough and called them to see if they could tell us who they’d sold them to. An outfit in Montana had one and they were using it for the same thing, but not production so they left it running 24 hours per car.
Propane cars get a residue “log” in the bottom which offgasses and needs to be “evaporated”.
Our mechanical engineer turned out to have all of his work designed by vendors and had no idea. He was a PE, too. ??
I got a book on black body thermodynamics, got some grasp of the theory, modeled a 57 foot black tank car in Houston, and came up with anywhere from 100hp to 250hp. Not so good.
We told client that we weren’t sure about the number but suggested that we’d put in the feedwater system, breechilng, and pads for two 125hp steam generators and install one, and if it wasn’t enough, they’d just have to buy the additional one they would have needed anyway.
They laughed and I guess were a bit embarrassed that they hadn’t been able to tell us what to do, and agreed. The single 125hp worked fine. We did find out that the steam needed to run into the car through an orifice smaller than the hose or there would be too great a pressure drop at the boiler. Don’t ask me how this was discovered.
I have dozens of other stories like this one, but in most of those cases there weren’t any real engineers involved in the particular problem.
I should add to the above, with no thought of slamming engineers as a profession, design of construction does not seem to attract people who are good at figuring out how to do something they’ve never seen before. My guess is that the best of them guess that construction design will be mostly turning the crank and they choose other careers that they hope will be more interesting.
Both Jan’s and my dads were EEs and neither ever needed a PE license. Dad worked for equipment manufacuturer and Jan’s dad Bell Labs. Dad;s outfit did have a PE who occasionally needed to seal paperwork needed by the utilities they sold to.
As for architects, we couldn’t blow our noses without sealing it.
john ferguson,
I ran the process engineering group at a good size chemical plant. The plant received raw material (vinyl chloride monomer, atmospheric pressure boiling point -14F) in pressurized tank cars, about 5 per day. At ambient temperatures the full cars had internal pressures from about 30 PSI to 80 PSI depending on season. We unloaded rapidly by boiling the same monomer in a steam heat exchanger, sending the resulting gas to the top of a full car to increase pressure, and withdrawing liquid monomer from the bottom…. no pumps needed. When the car was empty, we pulled the pressure down to about 30 PSI, disconnected everything, and sent the empty car back to a production plant in the midwest, always arriving under some pressure…. usually 10 to 30 PSI. This had been done for more than 30 years.
All went well until a new supply contract switched us to a plant in Texas that had never before sold in rail cars, only via pipe-lines to local plants…. and they had not a clue what they were doing, chemical engineers all. They had determined that a car returning under pressure was not enough proof of no leaks, so they began “pressure testing” each car to 100 PSI with nitrogen….. then filled the car with VCM liquid (dissolving the nitrogen) and sent it to us, arriving with well over 100 PSI internal pressure (itself a terrible safety issue!). When we unloaded the first few cars, the nitrogen entered our (closed) system … pressurizing everything with nitrogen. Result: our production stopped.
Some heated telephone calls with the engineers responsible for this FUBAR accomplished nothing…. profoundly stupid along with profoundly certain is a very bad combination, especially in an engineer. Only a threat of voiding the supply contract and a lawsuit got the engineers overruled. Cost us a fortune in lost production and all the hoops we had to jump through to remove the nitrogen from our system.
Morals of the story: humility is best when you are very new at something, and always talk to your customers if you are going to change something.
SteveF
That’s a terrific story.
At some point I started to ask prospective employees, ether architects or engineers what the dumbest thing they’d done since they’d been in their profession, what happened, and what they did about it.
I was reluctant to hire anyone who didn’t have a story. And I definitely never hired anyone who told me that he didn’t make mistakes.
john ferguson,
Don’t worry, I have made some terrible mistakes. I’m not proud of them, but I own up.
Usually my mistakes have been when I believed I understood a process completely…. but didn’t.
The diagrams are called “Standard Respecting Railway Clearances”
Thy are transverse sections of the right of way showing a profile through which nothing can protrude in the direction of the track. In general this clearance can be assumed everywhere there isn’t a special condition which may be accompanied by a notice and slow-order that alerts Engineers to pay attention.
In 1995 while I was at Amtrak, the “company” purchased a batch of new locomotives from EMD (GM in La Grange,IL).
The delivery to Philadelphi of the first one was interrupted in the middle of a tunnel in Eastern Pennsylvania by a loud noise which was followed by suddenly rising coolant temperatures.
The engineer reduced speed to dead slow and was able to creep through the rest of the tunnel to a place where there was a set-out track where he could park and have a look.
This model of locomotive, a new design, had been equipped with a heat exchanger which rose about a foot above the top of the locomotive. And Yes, it fit within the Standard Clearance profile. What had been forgotten by the designer was that the standard profile references top of rail and center of track and because of this the voulme swept by it will go up and down with the track.
The locomotive has wheels on each end and the passage of it will be better described as a chord moving through an arched or dipped section. In this case, the 3 inch clearance allowed by the design was not enough to clear the ceiling of the tunnel which dipped along with the dip in the track at that location.
Since the locomotives were already built and could have been delivered by another route not involving this tunnel one would have thought the soultion obvious. But, alas, it wasn’t.
They’d been purchased specifically for the Philadelphia to Chicago run.
They stayed in service in the midwest.
Mandatory regulating businesses makes sense sometimes. You can’t put up a pool cage in Pinellas county without county review and signed drawings (we waited three months for this!). This is probably an instance where you shouldn’t tolerate amateurs just winging it on the job site.
The county engineer might be incompetent but more likely he sees 1000 of these every year and knows when something is off.
If you want to put up solar panels on your roof the installation must be signed off by a PE or you can’t tie it to the grid. There are places on the net you can get somebody to sign them virtually. No clue how competent that is. My guess though is the the power utility is just inserting regulation to slow down consumer solar installations, not to suggest they don’t see their fair share of horror stories.
One of the ways clever leaders in a market limit competition is by ghost writing legislation to introduce barriers to the market.
Regulating nail salons and such? Nope.
This is the Florida regulation that I worked under requiring an engineerâs signature and seal:
61G15-23.001 Signature, Date and Seal Shall Be Affixed. (1) A professional engineer shall sign, date and seal: (a) All final plans, prints, specifications, reports, or other documents prepared or issued by the licensee and being filed for public record; (b) All final documents provided to the owner or the ownerâs representative. (2) Additional Final and Non-Final Documents. (a) A professional engineer may sign, date and seal documents required by any public entity or any provision of contract which requires the signing, dating and sealing of additional original documents.
https://fbpe.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/61G15-as-of-05-26-2025.pdf
Florida Board of Professional Engineers [FBPE] guidance document:
https://fbpe.org/legal/signing-and-sealing-engineering-documents/
Russell,
I interpret what you;ve quoted to apply to efforts which must include documents ubmitted to public entitites, but not necessarily to documents prepared for private use or uses not otherwise requiring permits?
Do you read it this way?
I think this regulation was precisely why S&C Electric, my dad’s outfit kept a PE on staff, namely to provide paperwork signed and sealed for thier sales to public utilities. My memory was that utilities like FPL didn’t need them.
John,
I think what you may mean is covered in item [2] above:
“2) Additional Final and Non-Final Documents. (a) A professional engineer may sign, date and seal documents required by any public entity or any provision of contract which requires the signing, dating and sealing of additional original documents.”
I think it was Adam Smith who wrote that
“No meeting of a professional society can be held without the creation of conspiracies against the public interest.”
The Florida fees for PE are $180 initially and then renewal is $49 (including a $5 fee to combat unlicensed activity). You can’t even buy HVAC equipment in some places without an appropriate license. You can guess who benefits from that.
The main question I have is where is the line between our benevolent overlords making sure nothing ever goes wrong by requiring endless paperwork and fees to read the paperwork and letting the consumer decide for themselves if “licensed” is worth the extra cost?
It’s one thing to install a brand new A/C unit in new construction with all the ventilation and another to replace the zillionth dead capacitor in an outdoor A/C unit or drop in another equivalent unit to the existing one.
John, your comment:
âI think this regulation was precisely why S&C Electric, my dadâs outfit kept a PE on staff, namely to provide paperwork signed and sealed for thier sales to public utilities. My memory was that utilities like FPL didnât need them.â
When I first got out of college I worked for Procter and Gamble in their Ivordale factory.
I was a graduate Chemical Engineer but had no need to sign or seal documents there and the company offered no support for taking even the fundamentals exam.
When I started working for Sarasota County obtaining a licence was a requirement of employment. I had to scramble to take both exams , but I made it.
FBPE:
âExaminations
Pass the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam; and
Pass the Principles & Practice of Engineering (PE) examâ
https://fbpe.org/licensure/licensure-process/
Tom, your comment:
âThe Florida fees for PE are $180 initially and then renewal is $49 (including a $5 fee to combat unlicensed activity). You canât even buy HVAC equipment in some places without an appropriate license.â
FBPE does not licence HVAC installers, only professional engineers.
Also, Florida requires continuing education certifications for engineering licence renewal:
https://fbpe.org/continuing-education/continuing-education-requirements/#:~:text=Professional%20Engineers%20licensed%20in%20Florida,during%20the%20upcoming%20renewal%20period.
Example: R-410A refrigerant is phasing out starting in January 1, 2025 to use refrigerants with a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 750 or less. Every quote we got recently said to get your unit installed before this took effect. Another installer told us new units were required to detect any refrigerant leak and then shut down immediately if detected, previously they could just keep running and alert the user (or just not cool).
I am going to way out on a limb and speculate the impact on planetary warming for all this is near zero. A building full of EPA regulators is not going to decide that the status quo is OK, they are just going to keep turning the screws because that is what they believe their jobs are.
Russell,
Yes, just an example of the industrial regulatory complex, ha ha.
Medical professions also require continuing education. Somehow this happens a lot on cruises and Vegas trips so the vacations can be written off for the family.
The problem is the momentum and incentives are always toward more regulations. Don’t even get me started on these professional societies lecturing the public on policy outside their domain.
Engineers are also governed by their professional ethics.
The NSPE first cannon:
âFundamental Canons Engineers, in the fulfillment of their professional duties, shall:
1. Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.â
I occasionally had to argue this point with my clientâs lawyers when I was providing expert witness testimony. Lawyers are under no such restriction.
“Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.â
No. We wouldn’t allow people to drive cars on roads if this were literally true. There are economic tradeoffs and also allowing people to live their lives free from government oppression to consider. There are warning labels on bleach containers but they still sell bleach directly to the public without a required license, government fee, and ongoing classes that tell you not to drink it.
This model, similar to public health agencies, tends to not consider these other options enough IMO and the incentives are for CYA through over regulation.
In addition to State statutes, Engineers are also governed by their professional ethics.
It is the first canon under NSPE code of ethics:
âRules of Practice
1.Engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.
a. If engineersâ judgment is overruled under circumstances that endanger life or property, they shall notify their employer or client and such other authority as may be appropriate.â
I occasionally had to argue this point with a clientâs lawyers when I was providing expert witness testimony. Lawyers are under no such restriction.
https://www.nspe.org/sites/default/files/resources/pdfs/Ethics/CodeofEthics/NSPECodeofEthicsforEngineers.pdf
Tom Scharf,
Eventually I suspect all the halocarbon refrigerants will be replaced by simple compounds like propylene. Very cheap and no global warming potential. Flammable? Yes, very, but a house-size heat pump AC system is not likely to use more than 6 -7 pounds, and any leaks that develop are almost always very slow (over weeks/months), so a release which could cause a fire or explosion is extremely unlikely. You can move the entire compressor condenser/evaporator assembly outside (and even away from) the house and just circulate chilled water or water/glycol inside the house; no possibility of fire or explosion in the house. A flammable gas sensor (commonly available) could shut the whole thing down if a leak is detected.
Avoids the eye-watering prices for non-flammable alternatives to R410A.
Example 2: SC limits environmental review today in unanimous decision.
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/29/supreme-court-narrows-nepa-scope
“At issue in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County was whether the federal Surface Transportation Board should assess climate change impacts when authorizing a railway seeking to connect Utah’s crude oil to the national rail network and on to Gulf Coast refineries.
Justices determined that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit went too far in requiring regulators to look at potential effects on Gulf Coast communities.
…
“Seven County shows the many ways that the administrative state and activist courts have created a massive industry of litigation over minor omissions in environmental impact statements, though Congress intended no such thing,” Mario Loyola, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote in a blog post last year.”
Even the left is fed up with environmental red tape from activists, see the recent book Abundance. The reason they can’t build high speed rail in CA is not because nobody knows how to build a train track.
Russell,
Getting an architectural license in Illinois in 1969 was a 5 day exam. The only part of it that I was apprensive about was structural which was multiple choice. Generally, 2 of each question’s choices were answers which you would get if you harbored some common misunderstanding. I had studied for this part for 9 months using two different text books. There was a truss design problem which was one I had studied and so knew I only had to design one member and the rest could be proportioned.
I passed the entire thing first time. What a relief.
When the continuing education bit surfaced and we were all forced to take 3 courses every two years to keep our licenses active, I quickly ran through the ones that interested me, and soon found myself sitting in classes I imagined I could teach better than the guy that was up there.
I hated it.
Tom Scharf,
“Even the left is fed up with environmental red tape from activists, see the recent book Abundance. ”
Yes. The fundamental problem is that every nutty-left advocacy group closes ranks with every other nutty-left advocacy group, no matter how illogical that becomes. Example: LGBQLMNOPXYZ+ closes ranks with the “river-to-the-sea” oppressed/oppressor theory lunatics… meaning gay (and other complicated sexualities) organizations support the same people who would love nothing more than to throw them to their deaths from rooftops. It is madness. But that is the loony-left today.
NYT Hit piece today on Elon Musk:
âMr. Muskâs drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.â
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/elon-musk-drugs-children-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LE8.YA7T.1z0vkogrzeCV&smid=url-share
CNN: Trump can end deportation protections for half million immigrants
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/30/politics/supreme-court-trump-deportations-parole
“The Supreme Court on Friday allowed President Donald Trumpâs administration to suspend a Biden-era parole program that allowed a half million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to temporarily live and work in the United States.
It was the second time this month that the high court sided with Trumpâs efforts to revoke temporary legal status for immigrants.”
Shocking! I really don’t get this legacy media narrative where executive orders by one President cannot or should not be reversed by another President. I don’t even get why any court would rule otherwise. What happens is partisan courts micro-analyze the technical procedures for undoing actions and then the SC has to step in.
Asylum and other temporary protection has been massively abused.
Russell,
The WSJ has also been good for at least one Musk hit piece every week for at least 6 months. He definitely likes his recreational drugs but that is old news.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/silicon-valley-microdosing-ketamine-lsd-magic-mushrooms-d381e214?st=eJYvv4&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Postmortem on DOGE from The Free Press:
https://www.thefp.com/p/why-doge-failed?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I think the jury is still out on DOGE. What you need to kill is * recurring * waste, fraud, and abuse. DOGE sending people home with pay doesn’t have initial cost savings but may pay future dividends.
Ultimately it is Congress that has the big financial stick, and they still aren’t using it.
DOGE was especially useful for identifying who are the fans of endless government spending. The legacy media couldn’t find inefficiency in government if it was presented to them on a silver platter, and it was.
According to the DOGE website they’ve saved an estimated 175 billion dollars. It’s not shocking to me that people view that as a failure, but it does reinforce my general misanthropy. That doesn’t seem like a failure to me.
Also, they [DOGE] aren’t done yet.
I think that mark is correct, DOGE is not done. Musk has returned to the private sector since his 130 days as a special government employee are up. But DOGE continues.
A big part of what DOGE has been doing seems to be reforming procedures so that waste, fraud, and abuse can be identified and rooted out. Fully realizing the benefits of that will take time.
Tom wrote: “DOGE sending people home with pay doesnât have initial cost savings but may pay future dividends.”
Exactly. The legacy media use a two pronged approach: bolster resistance and demoralize opponents.
The biggest clear failure so far has been the Epstein list, The second biggest failure, which I cannot really call a failure yet, is the claim that Epstein did kill himself.
IMO. a lot of the other stuff is going to take time and hindsight. To expect the establishment, assembled over decades, to crumble in 5 months seems ridiculously optimistic by any standards. I believe the attempt is being made, however, despite attempts to convince me otherwise.
Unfortunately, many of the absurd expenditures that DOGE identified have strong supporters in Congress and the MSM. It is unlikely all the expenditures DOGE identified as wasteful will be defunded beyond Trump’s term in office… and with all the court orders blocking Trump, the expenditures Trump can stop will be limited, even during his time in office.
It is, of course, up to Congress to stop the crazy stuff in the long term. I just doubt they ever will, especially since after the 2026 midterms Dems will likely control the House…. and it will be impeachment 24/7 for two years. Should Republicans maintain control of the Senate, they should make it clear (publicly and loudly!) that Dems are wasting their time with impeachment efforts, and the Trump administration should make clear they will refuse to cooperate in any way. We have seen this movie twice before, and it as stupid and ugly as Nancy Pelosi.
Congress will get one more chance with reconciliation next year to undo most of the insane Biden era expenditures. I hope they don’t waste it; but I’m not optimistic. Too many RINOs to make the needed cuts.
Congress hasnât passed a proper budget since 1997. They have been using the stopgap, shortcut method of âcontinuing resolutionsâ since then to keep the government operating. I think we need to face up to the fact that the United States Congress is a failed institution.
It is possible to cut spending without either a reconciliation bill or overcoming a filibuster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescission_bill
Maybe that is the plan.
Have I mentioned that I am a cockeyed optimist?
Mike,
It looks like that might be the case.
Mike M.
Optimist indeed. I hope you are right, but I will believe it when the recission bill has been signed. I fear there will be too many RINOs in the Senate for it to actually happen. Too much the “uniparty” to allow real cuts in spending.
The usual suspects will file lawsuits even if Congress cuts funding. It will be way harder though.
Historically it has been very hard to remove benefits once they are granted because of political considerations. Maybe times have changed, maybe not.
Apparently, reconciliation can not be used on discretionary spending. That would explain the disappointing fact that the DOGE cuts were not included in the “big beautiful bill”. Instead, it seems that the plan really is to deal with those by means of rescission, with most of that waiting until after the reconciliation bill is passed.
We shall see.
âRescissionâ is just another workaround to limp through while avoiding passing an actual budget. It is further proof that the US Congress is broken. 1997 was the last actual budget year.
Definition:
A rescission is the cancellation of previously appropriated budget authority before it is obligated or spent. Itâs a way to reduce or eliminate funding that Congress has already approved.
My own governmental budgeting experience was limited to local government, but I expect the same principles apply to big government.
The budget process involves starting at zero and predicting the funds needed to implement the programs that were mandated for the following fiscal year, and also predicting the expenditure for those programs through their lifecycle for a minimum of 10 years.
The next step was to identify funding sources for that program also through their lifecycle with a minimum of 10 years. The programs I was responsible for implementing were mostly funded by user fees and municipal bonds, with only about 20% coming from property tax revenues.
The US Congress has been avoiding matching up mandates, expenditures and revenues because the answer is a disaster.
So itâs been an endless cycle of continuing resolutions living off of the 1997 budget, all the while sticking their head in the sand about the long-term effect of the expenditures.
The country is spiraling down the drain and the Congress is shirking its fiduciary responsibility.
All three major credit rating agenciesâMoody’s, Standard & Poor’s (S&P), and Fitchâhave downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating from their top-tier AAA status.
Moodyâs report for their recent downgrading of the US bond rating is an indictment of the US Congress:
âOver more than a decade, US federal debt has risen sharply due to continuous fiscal deficits. During that time, federal spending has increased while tax cuts have reduced government revenues. As deficits and debt have grown, and interest rates have risen, interest payments on government debt have increased markedly.
Without adjustments to taxation and spending, we expect budget flexibility to remain limited, with mandatory spending, including interest expense, projected to rise to around 78% of total spending by 2035 from about 73% in 2024. If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case, it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade.
As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, Â rising entitlement spending, and relatively low revenue generation. We anticipate that the federal debt burden will rise to about 134% of GDP by 2035, compared to 98% in 2024.
Despite high demand for US Treasury assets, higher Treasury yields since 2021 have contributed to a decline in debt affordability. Federal interest payments are likely to absorb around 30% of revenue by 2035, up from about 18% in 2024 and 9% in 2021. Â The US general government interest burden, which takes into account federal, state and local debt, absorbed 12% of revenue in 2024, compared to 1.6% for Aaa-rated sovereigns. Â
While we recognize the US’ significant economic and financial strengths, we believe these no longer fully counterbalance the decline in fiscal metrics.â
https://ratings.moodys.com/ratings-news/443154
Russell,
You won’t get any argument, at least not from me, about your claim that Congress is broken. As an optimist, I hold out hope that it is not irreparable, but I have little confidence that it will change for the better.
I am somewhat puzzled by the recent downgrades in the federal governments credit rating. Why now? It seems unbelievable that they only just noticed the situation. And it seems strange that they waited for a President who seems to be actually trying to come to grips with the problem and a Congress controlled by a party containing a large contingent who are demanding action.
It remains to be seen if the current government will actually make a difference on the debt and deficit problem. There is certainly reason to be skeptical. But the chances of meaningful action are infinitely better (not zero vs zero) under the current government than under the previous one.
Note: “Why now?” is not a rhetorical question. But it could be regarded as such with an obvious answer: Orange Man Bad. But I am not at all sure that it is the answer.
Mark, I suppose it may be against the rules at your shop, or you don’t think you’d get useful help, but have you looked at AI, maybe Claude review of your code?
I ask because I have a fairly complex (for amateur me) routine that reads signals from 6 sources some of which need only be polled and others which output at different rates and doesn’t seem to be able to handle recording complete sentences coming from some of the sources. They output at different rates and I’ve all but one under control. It is not vital that information be synched finer that 10 Hz, although 100 Hz would be better.
My idea was to try Claude’s code analyzer and see how it does.
So my question is, have you tried this?
Anyone else?
Mike, your post:
“Why now? ”
Moodys addresses the mitigating factors that explain their hesitancy to downgrade:
“RATIONALE FOR THE STABLE OUTLOOK
The US economy is unique among the sovereigns we rate. It combines very large scale, high average incomes, strong growth potential and a track-record of innovation that supports productivity and GDP growth. While GDP growth is likely to slow in the short term as the economy adjusts to higher tariffs, we do not expect that the US’ long-term growth will be significantly affected.
In addition, the US dollar’s status as the world’s dominant reserve currency provides significant credit support to the sovereign. The credit benefits of the dollar are wide-ranging and provide the extraordinary funding capacity that helps the government finance large annual fiscal deficits and refinance its large debt burden at moderate and relatively predictable costs. Despite reserve diversification by central banks globally over the past twenty years, we expect the US dollar to remain the dominant global reserve currency for the foreseeable future.”
Regarding “Why now?”, it should be noted that S&P downgraded US debt in 2011, and Fitch in 2023. Those would be during the Obama & Biden administrations respectively. So, no, I don’t think it’s “Orange Man Bad” syndrome in this case.
And then there’s this:
https://futurism.com/ai-models-falling-apart
Model Collapse via what seems to be to be runaway “believing its own BS.”
My own experience, so far with only Google’s AI, is that it reports what is generally thought or known aboiut a subject even if the consensus is wrong. And I don’t mean esoteric things like Climate Change, simple things like Unix functions.
It’s Feinmann again. “First, don’t fool yourself”
Moody’s, quoted by Russell: “Over more than a decade … tax cuts have reduced government revenues.”
Really? Here are federal revenues as a percentage of GDP:
2014 16.97
2017 16.84 ended before Trump’s tax cuts
2021 16.92 ended during Biden’s first year
2024 16.74 most recent complete fiscal year
Source: https://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/revenue_chart_2014_2024USp_26s1li111mcny_F0f
That decrease, amounting to about $75B a year, is not the cause of the current problem.
There are some ups and downs within that decade. The low was 15.78% for fiscal 2020 and there was a spike of $18.64% in 2022. I am guessing that the spike was due to indexing lagging behind actual inflation.
Russell: Moody’s reason for not wanting to downgrade our credit rating does not answer the question of “why now?”.
Mike M.
Might “Why now?” be political?
Mike, your comment:
âAs an optimist, I hold out hope that it is not irreparableâ
I am a pessimist on this issue. The solutions as I see them have a snowballâs chance in hell of ever being enacted.. Governor DeSantis has laid out a comprehensive program for fixing Congress:
âDeSantis listed the four amendments his effort will be promoting:
Term limits for members of Congress.
A requirement for a balanced budget at the federal level
A line item veto for the president
An amendment that Congress shall make no law respecting the citizens of the United States that does not also apply to members of Congress.â
https://www.wgcu.org/government-politics/2024-01-29/desantis-urges-four-amendments-including-to-balance-u-s-budget-set-term-limits-for-congress
He has begun implementation of a constitutional change on term limits:
https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desantis-advocates-constitutional-amendment-congressional-term-limits
While I think the balanced budget amendment should be a higher priority than term limits. I agree that implementing both would go a long way towards fixing the problem.
I repeat my skepticism that any of DeSantisâ proposals will ever come to pass.
Mike and John, whatever the answer to your question âwhy nowâ is not nearly as important as the fact that all three agencies have downgraded the credit rating of the United States.
Even if the timing was based on politics, do you disagree that Credit of United States is spiraling downward?
John,
Strangely enough I have not. I say strangely because I have been trying to harness AI for various business tasks, however, now that I think about it I realize mostly I have been trying to get AI to take care of things I don’t personally like to do. Coding and debugging is dessert for me, so to speak. The reports and documents and some of the more tedious testing I’d just as soon delegate to AI. Although actually I’ve been swamped by the tedium recently and haven’t made any new progress in this direction for some weeks now.
John,
Absolutely. Most AIs will give you the conventional wisdom.
I think that our irresponsible national fiscal situation can only be fixed by a cultural shift whereby most of our citizens come to understand that the borrowing and spending is irresponsible. Sure, people will pay lip service to this, but they don’t really believe it. Until (unless) that happens, reform will be (rightly?) labeled as tyranny. In other words, the government overspends because we the people want it to. It’s primarily a reflection of the sad state of our aggregate viewpoint IMO.
[Edit: I should add, I don’t think this is ever going to happen. If we get to Mars and it becomes routine business as usual going there, or if other advances come to pass (AI, robotics, fusion, whatever) we might enjoy enough of an economic boom to forestall our day of reckoning a few more lifetimes. That’s about as good as it’ll get.]
On the global stage, the US credit rating has sunk to number 17 behind such Liberal bastions as Norway and Canada.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_credit_rating
“Why Now?”
It didn’t matter, the markets shrugged it off because the markets didn’t need credit rating agencies to tell them about that problem. The rating agencies lost a lot of credibility during the 2008 financial crisis.
“Despite high demand for US Treasury assets”
When this changes it will be a huge problem and this will very likely eventually change. Because China buys and holds a lot of debt this makes me especially nervous.
I don’t think you need to have a balanced budget if you can print your own money, have a growing economy, and other people are willing to buy your debt (invest in you) at rates that make taking it a wise choice economically.
Imagine a world where all those debt sales were turned around and invested wisely in infrastructure and other smart long term considerations. Imagine if they had just dumped all that money into a SP500 index fund for the last 40 years.
It’s like a public company generating new stock (or existing stock) out of thin air, selling it, and using it for R&D expenditures.
It’s a lot more complicated then this but one point I am making is that the debt sales are not necessarily the problem, it is how we are using that money unwisely.
“…it is how we are using that money unwisely.”
Sure, we are taking on debt to spend far more (mostly on public benefits/wealth transfer/Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare) than collected in taxes. Not to mention all the crazy stuff DOGE identified early on.
Congress makes drunken sailors on port leave look responsible in their spending choices.
mark bofill wrote: “I think that our irresponsible national fiscal situation can only be fixed by a cultural shift whereby most of our citizens come to understand that the borrowing and spending is irresponsible.”
There is much truth in that. But part of the reason that representative democracy has got us this far is that the people’s representatives are supposed to be better informed with better judgement and more foresight than the public at large. That mostly no longer seems to be the case.
To put it differently, we are suffering from a lack of leadership. We need leaders who can see what needs to be done and can make a convincing case to the public. Without that, I see no chance that the cultural shift to which mark refers will come about.
Except for Trump, most of the leadership in our society has been dedicated to leading us off a cliff by promoting leftist nonsense. That and attempting to block any attempts to deal with actual problems. It is almost like they want our current system of government to fail.
Russell,
Regarding the DeSantis amendments, which you list as:
(1) Term limits for members of Congress.
(2) A requirement for a balanced budget at the federal level
(3) A line item veto for the president
(4) An amendment that Congress shall make no law respecting the citizens of the United States that does not also apply to members of Congress.
First off, they aren’t going to happen, so they are not a solution to anything. As to whether they should happen:
(1) won’t solve anything and might make things worse. Yes, term limits will force empty suits out of office. But they will easily be replaced by other empty suits. Term limits will also force actual useful people out of office, to be replaced by empty suits.
(2) sounds good in principle, but it will force spending to be cut during a recession. That is almost surely bad economics.
(3) transfers too much power to the President and undermines compromise in Congress.
(4) Huh? What the heck is that about?
Tom is right that the reduction in credit rating did not really matter. The markets were ahead of the rating agencies. The reduction probably says more about the raters than about the government.
China holds something like 2-3% of our debt. That is probably enough for them to screw up the U.S. government bond market, but only at the cost of making it obvious that is what they are doing. I very much doubt they dare try it.
Here is a better idea than term limits, no constitutional amendment required. Make it illegal for officeholders to solicit campaign contributions other than having a web site to accept small contributions. Soliciting contributions would be the same as soliciting bribes.
That will have multiple good effects. One is that officeholders will be able to focus on doing their jobs rather than raising money. That will encourage good people to seek office. After all, who would want a job that requires them to spend most of their time asking people for money in exchange for nothing? Crooks and people who just want the job to satisfy their egos.
Another good effect is that is will greatly reduce the advantage of incumbency. It might even make it a disadvantage. Effective office holders should still be able to get reelected, but the empty suits will be much more easily replaced.
Third, it will make it hard to climb the political ladder without ever leaving office. Seeking higher will likely first require leaving office so that you can be free to raise money.
Finally, it will make it much harder to buy politicians.
Here is a better alternative to line item veto, no amendment required: Line item rescission. The President gets an appropriation bill, vetoes it, and send it back to Congress with a list of things he wants removed. Congress than takes an up or down vote, no filibuster, on each individual item. So they have to individually go on record for every line item to which the President objects. The revised bill then goes back to the President, who can still veto it if he thinks it does not measure up.
Dang, five straight longish posts. I fear that I am turning into Joshua. đ
Mike M,
Nah. You try to distill/simplify, Joshua only looked for ways to complicate, so that no change of anything could be justified…. save for maybe ever more government control by lefty ‘experts’ qualified to judge the incredible complexities. And institute policies Joshua likes.
â I fear that I am turning into Joshua.â
âŚ.. now add some arrogant incomprehensible babble and you will be there
Mike,
â (4) Huh? What the heck is that about?â
Congress has passed laws that they have exempted themselves from, lots of them.
Some examples from Groc;
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_eba5a2f3-7195-499f-99d9-5e265392200d
Mockery. He’d mock us contemptuously. Not letting go of that is the hill he died on here.
mark bofill,
Combined with constant gratuitous insults.
All bad faith, all the time.
Russell Klier wrote: “Congress has passed laws that they have exempted themselves from, lots of them.”
If Congress passes a law regulating trucking, it would be silly to say either that the law applies to Congress or that Congress has exempted themselves from it. Laws pertaining to the judiciary pertain to the judiciary, not Congress. Laws that pertain to executive departments do not apply to Congress. Etc.
It only makes sense to say that Congress has exempted themselves from a law if the law is generally applicable. So far as I know, there are no examples of that.
Thanks guys. Nice to know that I am not turning into Joshua.
Mike M,
Just stay away from gratuitous insults and arrogant mockery and you’ll be safe.
One moment we have computer programs and algorithms.
The next we have a thought bubble called AI which seems ryo have overtaken the advertising world and catchphrase world.
Depending on how one feels comfortable with one’s semantics people will argue that AI exists when it is apparent that this is not correct.
Supercomputers yes
AI?
A long, long way to go.
Mike, your comment:
âIt only makes sense to say that Congress has exempted themselves from a law if the law is generally applicable. So far as I know, there are no examples of that.â
Here are a few examples for you:
The Freedom of Information Act.
Investigatory subpoenas to obtain information for safety and health probes.
Protections against retaliation for whistleblowers.
Having to post notices of worker rights in offices.
Prosecution for retaliating against employees who report safety and health hazards.
Having to train employees about workplace rights and legal remedies.
From:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/congress-exempt-from-several-federal-laws
I asked Grok:
âList examples of laws that Congress has exempted itself fromâ
Answer:
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_8ad99155-3ce9-4f55-9181-fe28360d8850
Further reading:
Do As We Say, Congress Says, Then Does What It Wants
https://www.propublica.org/article/do-as-we-say-congress-says-then-does-what-it-wants
Mike M.
Add the bit about no laws which apply to citizens and to which congress people are exempt and you’ve got a great list. the non-solicitation law might be tricky to administer. We might get the idiotic letter i get from Chuck Schumer’s desk. There may be a simple way to limit solicitations maybe by media and or number of requests.
But again, those are wonderful ideas.
Russell,
Your list dos not convince me. It has the character of a Gish Gallup, with easily stated claims that take a lot of work to refute. The first item on your list is nonsense. FOIA applies to certain parts of the executive branch of the federal government. It is not even remotely a generally applicable law.
I did a quick check of the whistleblower laws and they also do not appear to be generally applicable. See
https://www.dol.gov/general/topics/whistleblower
There are specific laws providing protection for specific types of whistle blowing. One might guess that the Fair Labor Standards Act is generally applicable, but it is not. See
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/14-flsa-coverage
Mike and John,
Your solution to the mess is for the fox to guard the chickens. I agree your proposals are solid and would go a long way to solve the problem. My issue is you are expecting Congress to pass laws to fix Congress. Assuming they did that, it wouldn’t be very long until they undid that. No, the only solution is for a higher authority to fix Congress. As far as I know that is by constitutional amendment just as Governor Desantis has proposed.
Mike,
â The first item on your list is nonsense. FOIA applies to certain parts of the executive branch of the federal government. It is not even remotely a generally applicable law.â
This is exactly the problem. FOIA is wonderful, except that Congress exempted themselves from it. It proves my point.
Russell,
There are NO generally applicable laws from which Congress is exempt. A list of phony claims does nothing to prove that statement wrong, no matter how long the list. What can prove that wrong is one well substantiated counterexample.
There may well be laws that are not generally applicable and ought to be applicable to Congress. FOIA might be one, but I am skeptical. The proposed amendment does nothing to change that.
Yes, getting Congress to reform itself is a heavy lift, requiring a majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate. It is a much lighter lift than a constitutional amendment which requires a 2/3 vote in both House and Senate followed by ratification by 38 states.
Congress and phone / text solicitation
“The TCPA and Political Calls/Texts:
The TCPA regulates phone calls and text messages, particularly those using autodialers or prerecorded messages (robocalls and robotexts).
Political campaigns are NOT entirely exempt from the TCPA.
Political calls/texts are treated differently than commercial solicitations.
Landline Calls: Generally, political calls to landlines are allowed without prior consent.
Wireless Calls/Texts: The TCPA requires prior express consent for autodialed or prerecorded political calls and texts to cell phones.
2. Do Not Call Registry and Political Calls:
Political campaign calls are generally exempt from the National Do Not Call Registry requirements.
This means even if someone is on the Do Not Call Registry, they may still receive political calls and texts.
3. Key Points Regarding TCPA Compliance for Political Campaigns:
Prior Express Consent: While not requiring “written” consent like commercial messages, political campaigns still need prior express consent to send autodialed or prerecorded calls/texts to wireless numbers.
Identification: Political robocalls must identify the organization initiating the call and provide a phone number.
Time Restrictions: Text messages are generally prohibited before 8 am and after 9 pm in the recipient’s time zone.”
I never gave “consent” to solicitation and was bombarded with political texts for months. I reported * every single one * of them and they continued for at least 6 weeks until they finally stopped.
Mike, Your post:
âIt is a much lighter lift than a constitutional amendment which requires a 2/3 vote in both House and Senate followed by ratification by 38 states.â
That is only one way to amend the constitution, from Grok:
âArticle V of the U.S. Constitution provides two methods for proposing amendments: one through Congress (requiring a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate) and the other through a convention called by the legislatures of two-thirds of the states (34 out of 50 states).
DeSantis advocates for the latter approach, where state legislatures apply to Congress to call a “convention of the states” for the purpose of proposing amendments. This method bypasses Congress’s direct approval, focusing instead on state-driven action.â
More detail:
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_96691a6f-03c5-4c8f-9738-4e0ce6aecef8
Men’s bodies in women’s sports.
CA comes up with an interesting compromise after the backlash causes them problems.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/31/us/ab-hernandez-california-championships-trump
“Following criticism from some in the community who said A.B.âs participation prevented lower-ranked competitors from advancing to the championships this weekend, the high school sports governing body allowed more cisgender girls, whose gender identity conforms with their sex assigned at birth, to compete.
The California Interscholastic Federation also said if a transgender athlete earned medals in an event, their ranking wouldnât prevent a âbiological femaleâ from medaling as well, the Associated Press reported. That means A.B. shared her top spot with two co-winners in the high jump and one co-winner in the triple jump.”
Tom Scharf,
Proving yet again that the government in California at all levels is utterly nuts. What can’t continue for ever will stop…. and includes California’s various social insanities. No idea when the madness will end, but end it will.
CNN:
“Research on trans peopleâs athletic performance is scarce, and there have been no large-scale scientific studies on the topic or on how hormone therapies may affect their performance in specific sport categories, such as running or wrestling.”
Yes, and Joe Biden is perfectly fine. It is notable how these sciency euphemisms are getting increasingly qualified beyond comprehension.
CA trans’s person’s sport medals:
High jump:
The world records in high jump are 2.45 meters (8 ft 1/4 in) for men and 2.10 meters (6 ft 10/12 in) for women.
Triple jump:
The men’s triple jump world record is 18.29 meters, set by Jonathan Edwards of the United Kingdom in 1995. The women’s world record is 15.74 meters, set by Yulimar Rojas of Venezuela in 2022.
Long jump:
The world records for the men’s and women’s long jump are 8.95 meters by Mike Powell (1991) and 7.52 meters by Galina Chistyakova (1988)
Mike M,
“…followed by ratification by 38 states.”
i rather suspect that if Congress ever passed a constitutional amendment limiting what Congress (or Congress critters individually) can do, getting 38 states to agee would be, by comparison, very easy.
( this is a developing story so Iâm not sure all parts of it are true but Iâm sure some of it is)
Ukraine has carried out a drone attack on a Russian strategic bomber airfield. The claim is that $1 billion EURO worth of Russian air assets have been destroyed. The videos of damaged aircraft are very convincing.
There is also a video of Ukrainian and drones, taking off from inside a tractor trailer near the airfield.
What a coup!
There are a number of OSINT sources reporting this; one reliable source with videos follows:
https://x.com/a_shekh0vts0v/status/1929151812512227619?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
“Washingtonâs never going to reform itself,” DeSantis said in the conference. “Itâs going to require us working in our individual states using the tools that the Founding Fathers gave us to be able to take power away from D.C. and return it back to the American people.”
âThe alternative method DeSantis advocates is also spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, which says:
“The Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which ⌠shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof.”
https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/feb/01/explaining-ron-desantis-effort-to-call-a-conventio/
Russell,
I would not put much stock in a convention. That route has never been used to propose an amendment, the legislative route has been used to propose 33 amendments of which 27 were ratified. The rules for such a convention have never been established so any attempt to use that route will end up in the courts. And then there is still the matter of ratification by 38 states.
I don’t think there is a fundamental problem with getting line item rescission through Congress. Restricting fund raising by incumbents would be much harder, but might not be impossible. It would have to be done gradually, with an initial version that would not disadvantage incumbents too much. Then Congress Critters might vote for it rather than handing an opponent an effective campaign issue.
But an amendment would be hopeless for implementing that sort of reform. The details will be devilish and will be subject to change as new strategies and technologies are developed. So an amendment would have to leave details to Congress and we will be back to where we are now.
It is possible that the threat of a convention could be used to get Congress to act, as happened with the 17th Amendment.
Legacy news media are now reporting on the attack on Russian airbases.
Axios:
âUkraine launches massive drone strike on air bases deep inside Russiaâ
âThe official said intelligence officers launched attack drones from trucks that have been covertly placed near Russian air bases â sone of them in Siberia â thousands of kilometers from Ukraine.
Around 40 Russian military planes â among them strategic bombers â were reportedly hit in the attack.â
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/01/ukraine-drone-strikes-russia
The â40 aircraft destroyedâ is widely reported, but thus far I have only seen video evidence of five.
The destruction of part of Russiaâs strategic bomber fleet would certainly be good news to Europe and the United States. I have seen video of strategic bombers in flames.
Mike, your post:
âI would not put much stock in a convention.â
I donât. I see it as a long shot, but DeSantis has started the process.
you also posted:
âI donât think there is a fundamental problem with getting line item rescission through Congress.â
The problem I have with your approach is you are depending on Congress to fix Congress. Congress is responsible for breaking Congress and I donât see them passing meaningful and lasting legislation that restricts Congress. if they did, it could quickly be undone by a future Congress.
To me the only way is a constitutional amendment.
Russell,
I reject your defeatist position. But then, I am a cockeyed optimist.
“Congress is responsible for breaking Congress”.
The voting public is ultimately responsible. Things are as they are because the voters have permitted, or even demanded, it. A convention might seem like the easy way out, but the easy way is not usually the right way.
Mike, your post:
âRussell, I reject your defeatist position.â
My position is to attack the problem with definitive, long-term solutions.
Your position is to keep the current congressional morass and implement gimmicks and workarounds to avoid dealing with the fundamental problem.
You have surrendered without even trying.
Don’t park expensive aircraft out in the open. I expect most of the destroyed aircraft was old stuff unless the Russians are incompetent. They might be far away from the border.
This story keeps getting better.
The Ukrainian drones were launched from containers on semi trucks that were positioned near airfields.
It was a coordinated attack on between 4 to 6 Russian airfields
One air field was as far away as Siberia
The Ukrainians are still claiming 40 aircraft were destroyed, but the actual number is yet to be verified
there is a lot of speculation about what the Russian reaction will be. Tomorrow negotiations are supposed to start in Turkey.
This story keeps getting better.
The Ukrainian drones were launched from containers on semi trucks, supposedly done autonomously.
It was a coordinated attack on between 4 to 6 Russian airfields.
One air field thousands of miles away in Siberia
The Ukrainians are still claiming 40 aircraft were destroyed, but the actual number is yet to be verified.
There is much speculation about retaliation by the Russians will take. Peace negotiations are supposed to start in Turkey tomorrow.
Video of drone launch from a truck:
https://x.com/evgen1232007/status/1929149781055529094?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
Tom, your comment:
âI expect most of the destroyed aircraft was old stuff unless the Russians are incompetent.â
There are two videos of multiple, top-of-the-line, strategic bombers burning on tarmac.
https://x.com/a_shekh0vts0v/status/1929151812512227619?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
the mood on âXâ right nowâŚ..
â We’ve reached the point where Ukraine needs to consider very hard whether it’s willing to extend a Ukrainian security guarantee to NATO.â
I can’t tell but looks like a TU-95 or a variant? I vaguely see propellers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95
Vintage 1956
Not to downplay the big success it was.
Tom, Your post:
âI canât tell but looks like a TU-95 or a variant? I vaguely see propellers. Vintage 1956â
Good eye! Yes, the same vintage as the USAF B-52. NATO calls it âThe Bearâ. And itâs still a mainstay in the Russian strategic bomber force; just like the B-52 is in the USAF. The TU-95 is expected to remain in service until at least 2040.
Specifications from GROK:
Weapons:
Kh-55 (AS-15 Kent): Subsonic, nuclear or conventional cruise missiles with a range of ~2,500â3,000 km (1,550â1,860 miles).
Kh-101/Kh-102: Modern conventional (Kh-101) and nuclear (Kh-102) stealth cruise missiles, with ranges up to 4,500â5,500 km (2,800â3,400 miles).
Capacity: Up to 16 missiles (6 on internal rotary launchers, 10 on external pylons in some configurations).
Performance and Role
Strategic Reach: Its long range allows it to strike targets across continents, often without leaving Russian airspace, especially when launching cruise missiles.
Endurance: Capable of flights lasting over 12 hours, often with mid-air refueling to extend missions.
Current Use: Part of Russiaâs nuclear triad, it serves as a deterrent and a platform for both nuclear and conventional strikes. In the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Tu-95MS bombers have been used to launch cruise missiles at Ukrainian infrastructure from standoff distances.
OSINT sites have been identifying the Russian aircraft destroyed from videos taken by the drones and posted on social media. Russian civilians are also posting cell phone videos I will list what I have seen or read so far but consider these preliminary and unverified:
2 Tu-22M3 bombers,
6 Tu-95MS bombers,
1 An-12 military transport aircraft,
1 A-50 radar plane
The Ukraine military is still claiming 41 Russian planes were destroyed, including 34% of the Russian strategic missile carrying fleet. I doubt that there will be video evidence to confirm all of these. In a few days we can expect a more complete picture after satellite photographs have been analyzed.
I expect a lot of Russian generals will be falling out of windows.
Operation Spiderweb:
âOne driver, 55-year-old Alexander Z. from Chelyabinsk, told investigators he was working for a vehicle owned by 37-year-old Artem, who had been contracted by a businessman in Murmansk to transport four modular homes from Chelyabinsk to the Kola district. After agreeing on a price, Alexander loaded the cargo and began the trip. Along the route, he received instructions by phone from an unidentified man who told him when and where to stop. His final stop was near a Rosneft gas station close to a military airfield in Murmansk regionâthe site from which drones were ultimately launched.
A similar account came from 61-year-old Andrey M., also driving a truck owned by Artem. He said he was instructed to deliver prefabricated homes to the Irkutsk region. But after parking near a cafĂŠ in Usolye-Sibirskoye, drones unexpectedly began launching from the back of his vehicle.â
So an Egyptian illegal alien (overstayed visa) Mohamed Sabry Soliman yelling “Free Palestine” uses a makeshift flamethrower to burn a bunch of senior citizen Jews in an uber-liberal self professed sanctuary city.
Quite the non-preferred narrative mashup. Must be a hard Monday morning for the legacy media. You just know they are trying so, so, hard to type out “unknown motive” with gritted teeth. I’m guessing this one won’t get the blanket “news analysis” and opinion column coverage.
For the record I think they are just fringe mentally ill people hurting their own cause. Since this is the second “Free Palestine” terror event in the past couple weeks I’m guessing that phrase will now exit the allowable protest lexicon for polite company.
A gift to Trump.
Iâm still taking a lot of of the information at face value and have little confirmation on most of it. Please remember the things Iâm posting are still preliminary.
Reports are that Volkswagen sized crates weâre loaded onto tractor trailers for delivery to various parts of Russia. The crates had sliding roofs and they purportedly contained pre-fab sheds. At âHâ hour, the roofs of the containers slid open, and the drones launched for their targets.
images:
https://x.com/battle_bees/status/1929160352115175542?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
Wow Russell, the Trojan Horse crates were a wonderful idea. Almost as good as the exploding pagers.
I wonder if our guys are as clever as theirs. My suspicion is that great ideas like these would be suppressed by management.
John, your post:
âMy suspicion is that great ideas like these would be suppressed by management.â
I share your suspicion about our military’s ability to both think up these kind of plans and to combat them if if they are deployed against us.
DARPA is known for making things bigger, more complex and more expensive.
The Ukrainian drone drones that have been used in this case cost less than $1000 each. [I think!]
Inspecting every semi with a shipping container is nearly impossible. Making everything short range attack drone proof is also nearly impossible, but high value assets like planes can (should have been) be protected. Drones have changed warfare. I would also suggest drones are also going to change terror attacks / assassination attempts.
Overall I would say this type of tech is something we are going to wish never came into existence. Armies of autonomous AI driven hunter killer drones are well within reach. Physics are still limiting them, carrying capacity, communications, range, etc. They also make a lot of noise.
Tom, it’s just as you suggested:
“Truck phobia in russia. russian intelligence agencies have apparently decided to monitor all trucks. There are traffic jams stretching for miles on the roads.”
Video:
https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1929446820188438774
Some guy musing on âXâ today:
âA reminder, given today’s Ukrainian drone strikes, that it is becoming borderline-insane that we routinely allow ships owned and operated by DoD-designated Chinese military companies to sit in our ports with thousands of containers onboard and under their control.â
These same ports are where the U S Navy docks their warships.
https://x.com/tshugart3/status/1826597525492523466
The Military Summary commentator says that nuclear capable strategic bombers must be visible from satellites. The USA and their allies should not attack them. What may Russia do to NATO bombers?
The US already knows this. 35,000 trucks cross the Mexican border every day, 28,000 across the Canadian border. Try to prevent drug smuggling with that, good luck. In another twist the cartels have been using drones to drop fentanyl across the border at predetermined GPS points for later pickup. I suppose the people picking them up could also use drones.
Running an open society with free trade has a lot of exposure. You mostly just have to absorb the hits and hope it doesn’t get out of control.
P-E Harvey,
Here is a report of a previous drone strike. The satellite images clearly show damage to a Russian war plane..
https://united24media.com/latest-news/satellite-images-show-russias-top-su-57-fighter-jet-damaged-in-a-ukrainian-attack-646
A guy on an overstayed tourist visa got a work permit? How does this even happen? Shameless lawlessness caused by an utter lack of accountability. You sign off on these visas, you take responsibility for their actions.
Men’s bodies in women’s sports.
The infamous Algerian Olympic gold medal boxer had “their” 2023 genetic tests leaked and it shows “they” are a biological male. World boxing will not allow “them” to compete again until they pass this now required test.
“No numerical or chromosomal anomalies detected at 450-550 banding resolution” allegedly means that they don’t have any of the rare crossover gender types.
So not even a genetic abnormality, just a growth defect? I feel like I’m in an unethical harvard psych experiment.
Russell, I worked on Westinghouse’s JSTAR proposal in 1985-86. The procurement competition techincal development was run ba an Air Force major who was blazingly smart. No matter how complex or screwy a question might be as our proposal was developed, he alway understood and nothing needed to be repeated or expanded. And the quuality of the discussion was very high. It was a lot of fun.
Turned out he had an ScD from MIT which I understand had been at the AirForce’s expense. I’m sure that if there was any resistance to innovation it would have been in the ranks above him.
JSTARS was used successfully in the Gulf War. Useful for identifying convoys at night / all weather conditions. Synthetic aperture radar, or SAR.
Of course flying around with a high powered radar also makes you quite discoverable in all weather conditions. I wouldn’t want to be in one near a competent air defense.
They can also do this from space now but I don’t know the resolution.
Tom Scharf,
I believe, as with telescopes, the best possible radar resolution is proportional to the receiver aperture and inversely proportional to the wavelength being received. Since radar wavelength is very large compared to visible light, the best possible resolution will be terrible (at least compared to spy satellite resolution). There may be ways around this (eg two receivers on satellites spaced far apart have their signals combined to create an effective “giant aperture”), but this is not simple in to do in practice.
New Start Treaty
https://www.state.gov/new-start-treaty
Non?Interference with National Technical Means (NTM) The treaty permits the use of national technical means of verification (e.g. satellites) in a manner consistent with international law, and contains explicit provisions that prohibit interference with NTM and the use of concealment measures that may impede monitoring by NTM.
The US and Russia have committed to not hiding strategic nuclear platforms. This is why both the US and Russia have not dispersed and hidden their nuclear capable bombers.
As the US is complicit in the targeting of Russian strategic nuclear assets by providing targeting information to Ukraine for strikes on these assets, the US is in direct violation of the treaty.
Though the destruction of these assets by Ukraine is not in of itself crippling the Russian nuclear triad, the abrogation of the terms of the treaty will lead to Russia dispersing and hiding their bombers. This raises the uncertainty of the nuclear intent and capabilities of the nuclear powers which can lead to escalation.
The Ukraine attack will have little to no effect on the Ukraine/Russian war but does raise the risk of nuclear war between the US and Russia.
Ed Forbes,
I think it is difficult to say for certain where Ukraine got detailed targeting information for Russian strategic bombers. They could have just used Google Earth or some other satellite data source.
That said: Yes, I agree that the Russians will now almost certainly disperse and hide their strategic bombers, even if that means a formal withdrawal from the existing START treaty.
I also expect that Russia will, to the extent they can, target Ukrainian political leaders, even if that means lots of Ukrainian civilians will also be killed.
Steve
I still contend that Russia will not target Ukraine leadership. Itâs in their best interest not to.
If targeted they become martyrs and new leadership gets a honeymoon for a time. Current leadership is discredited both internally and internationally.
I still believe Russia has its own security apparatus overseeing the Ukraine presidents location to ensure nothing bad happens to him from Russian air strikes. Very much in their interest for him to stay healthy and in charge.
I don’t know how successful this effort will be: https://thespectator.com/topic/department-justice-false-claims-act-colleges-pam-bondi/
But I bet it is going to cause colleges and universities (not to mention a host of other organizations that receive Federal funds) a lot of headaches. Of course, they could just stop all DEI based racial discrimination in hiring/admission/promotion/etc, but I doubt that will happen any time soon (Harvard has gone even more into racially biased admissions after the Supreme Court told them to stop discriminating). So it is very likely to be be ugly.
I was wondering whyâŚ..
FROM âXâ:
âWhy did Ukraine publicly disclose so much info about Operation âSpiderwebâ?
Thatâs a very good question â and the answer reveals how modern warfare now goes far beyond the battlefield.
Now, every russian cargo truck becomes a potential weapon.
Every driver is a potential saboteur.
Every highway â a threat vector.
Result? Paranoia, friction, and skyrocketing internal costs.
russia will now be forced to:
â Inspect every suspicious truck
â Monitor internal roads with military resources
â Distrust their own private drivers
â Slow down all logistics, civilian and military alike
This strains infrastructure. Chokes supply chains. Erodes trust.
Ukraine didnât just hit planes â it weaponized uncertainty. It turned russiaâs vast territory into a battlefield of doubt.
https://x.com/rshereme/status/1929478895725679051
BDA OSINT current, including some satellite images:
(Still preliminary)
7x Tu-95 Destroyed
2x Tu-95 Damaged
4x Tu-22M3 Destroyed
1x A-50 or Il-76 Damaged
1x An-12 Destroyed
Trump, on Truth Social, overnight:
âBecause of tariffs, our economy is BOOMING.â
Russell,
“weaponize uncertainty” Great!
But maybe also “spreading uncertainty”
Russia’s interface (border too strong a term?) with Ukrain must be pretty porous if they could get this thing organized, provisioned, and turned loose all in-country.
Amur is a very long way from Ukraine. Bravo
john,
yes, I canât figure out all the logistics of it. Some components must have been smuggled in, like the drones and warheads.
Some supplies had to be acquired inside of Russia, like the construction materials for the crates. They also had to coordinate with Russian truck drivers and they also had to have buildings for receiving, shipping and assembly.
I am impressed.
To what extent are containers inspected at the port of entry? Maybe the containers were loaded outside of Russia and arrived by ship in, say, Vladivostok with a false invoice. They could have been loaded so that goods matching the invoice would have been seen when opening the normal door. The drones behind those goods would have still been able to launch using the hidden door on top of the container.
Russia has an enormous border. I suspect smuggling stuff in is about as easy as it is in the US. Russia has it’s own drug trade no doubt and they may just use whatever techniques the current smugglers use.
Drug smuggling in the US is a numbers game, some percentage will get caught. The Russians may have even intercepted one of these crates and couldn’t figure out what it was for.
Ukraine appears to have done this with a lot of thought. It’s likely this vector of attack will get shutoff so they were patient and did it all at once.
I hope the US is watching and learning.
GOP Senator Draws Red Line on Trump Megabill
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/ron-johnson-trump-tax-bill-deficit-dec36940?st=hsuU7m&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
See the picture here. The libertarians have no party to back. And of course the NYT’s is currently running articles on how the deficit matters now. Aaaargghhh.
Ed Forbes
Can you point to the provision? A country being in violation for providing information about where things are does not follow from a provision that says countries can’t hide things. To some extent, having provisions that say these can’t be hidden suggests precisely the opposite: that where these things are is supposed to be knowable– and so there would be nothing wrong with sharing information on where they are.
Maybe there there is a provision that says these things can’t be hidden but also, no one who knows where they are can tell anyone. If such a thing exists, you should be able to link to that.
And of course, besides that, Ukraine may not have gotten their info from the US. People have been tracking the bombers as they fly toward the Ukraine. If you can track flying bombers you can likely infer where they come from. And if people talk, you could probably figure out where many actually are sitting entirely not hidden on the ground. Under the circumstances, it might not require satellite information.
But I’d still be interested in the provision in any treaty. So if you can link it, that would be nice.
Of course, it would be nice if you point to the provision that shows the terms you claim. But sure… whether or not this abrogates the treaty, this might lead to Russian hiding whatever they have left.
How many do functional bombers does Russia have left?
Sure. Like it or not, whether or not it violated a treaty agreement, Putin rolling into Ukraine in the first place raised “uncertainty” and could lead to escalation. Escalation of various types often happens after wars.
lucia is correct that Ukraine need not have gotten their info from US intelligence. It is easy to do a search of where US nukes are based. Sure, it might not be accurate at any moment. But Ukraine did not need to info to be perfectly accurate. They only needed it to be good enough to allow for significant damage.
Here is an excellent essay on why it is essential for Republicans to retaliate in kind against Democrat lawfare and weaponization of government:
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/why-tit-for-tat-lawfare-is-necessary/
The basic idea is that by showing restraint and taking the high road, Conservatives do NOT preserve institutions. That only allows the Left to continue to destroy those institutions. Retaliation in kind might not restore norms, but it is the only hope of restoring norms.
Tom Scharf
Yep. Well planned, patient. Also, I’m sure when this was proposed someone in the room said “This could never work.” They would give very intelligent sounding reasons it couldn’t work.
The Ukrainian leadership is clearly willing to decide to try things that sound like they could never work.
Ed Forbes
I would suggest that however discredited Ukraine leadership may have been last week, it’s significantly less discredited today.
Everyone has to be impressed by the balls, the planning and the outcome of this. Even Putin who doesn’t like it has got to give a lot of credit to the small, not bombastic Zelensky for pulling this off. Zelensky may not bloviate like Trump, but he pulled off something pretty darn big.
Of course Ukraine could get targeting information from many sources. Where they got the information is kind of irrelevant, since Russia’s likely response is to withdraw from the treaty and then disperse and hide their bombers.
On a dreary note, the ‘lists of conditions’ Russia and Ukraine produced before today’s negotiations are reported to be mutually exclusive on many key points, meaning neither is likely willing to significantly compromise to reach a ceasefire agreement. The killing will continue.
SteveF
Agreed.
Nevertheless, I’m interested in Ed’s claim about the treaty.
Well… I mostly avoid discussing the “peace” efforts. But I expected this. I remain pretty sure that Putin always wanted all of Ukraine, still wants it and prefers war over not getting that. He’ll pretend to negotiate until the cows come home, especially as long as the war is conducted over Ukrainian soil.
And Ukraine does not want to cease to be Ukraine and would like their territory back. Yes, they may not want to die. But they don’t see living under the jack boot of Russia as a better alternative.
It seems Trump never liked Zelensky, but may have finally figured out that Putin is not really seeking peace. Putin has been playing Trump. Go. Figure.
Lucia,
“And Ukraine does not want to cease to be Ukraine and would like their territory back. Yes, they may not want to die. But they donât see living under the jack boot of Russia as a better alternative.”
I expect there is a wide range of public opinion in Ukraine. Of course, what we hear reported is mostly from the western part of Ukraine, where there is indeed a strong reluctance to give in to Russia’s demands of neutrality (etc). I doubt it is that way everywhere. But more importantly, I just do not see there is an alternative to some acquiescence to Russia’s demands in exchange for peace; at some point the Ukrainians will have had enough of their soldiers being killed.
The USA is not going to send troops. If the Europeans do, that will almost certainly lead to a nuclear exchange; the Russians have stated clearly, and multiple times, that European troops in Ukraine would be considered a declaration of war by NATO.
Fortunately, despite their bluster, I doubt the Europeans have the stomach for war, and especially not nuclear war in Europe (just think of the environmental damage! đ ). So it seems to me very unlikely they will actually send troops to Ukraine. In a war of attrition, Ukraine has little chance of prevailing.
I do not pretend to be able to read Putin’s mind, but as a practical matter, I suspect administering the Eastern part of Ukraine would be very difficult with a hostile population. Maybe not worth the effort. The current massing of Russian troops at the boarder between Kiev and Karkiv looks like an effort to split the country roughly in half, trapping Ukrainian troops in the east.
Unfortunately, many more will die before the fighting ends.
Mike,
It’s not that I think there’s a better answer, because I’m pretty sure there isn’t, but:
What constitutes a ‘rational strategy’ depends on the objective. If your adversary’s objective is explicitly to wreck civilization, it isn’t going to matter what costs you impose; they aren’t going to cooperate while they cling to their objective.
For those who are skeptical that progressives want to wreck civilization, I refer you to the immortal words of yoavgo on X. Not all progressives want to wreck civilization of course, but there’s some subset who certainly do.
And so on and so forth, right, it’s nothing new.
At a minimum the US has plausible deniability that it didn’t provide the bomber location information to Ukraine. AFAICT only in Ed’s corners of the internet is this assertion being made, as they say, without evidence. There are plenty of commercial satellite imagery providers that can easily spot gigantic bombers sitting on a runway at a well know air force base. I bet you can also see them with commercial drones locally!
If there is some treaty provision to have them sitting out in the open or verifiable from space in some way then Russia would be justified in putting them in hangers now and working something else out.
mark bofill wrote: ” If your adversaryâs objective is explicitly to wreck civilization, it isnât going to matter what costs you impose; they arenât going to cooperate while they cling to their objective.”
True. And there are those on the left who do want to wreck our civilization. The only thing to be done with them is to destroy them.
But I suspect that most politicians on the left, and others with power, are just trying to get as much power, wealth, prestige, etc. as they can for themselves. They will respond to retaliatory lawfare and weaponization.
mark bofill,
I think it comes down to many ‘progressives’ (not sure that is even a fair description, ‘authoritarian socialists’ is probably more accurate) being absolutely convinced they are right, and nothing in the longstanding structure of “liberal democracy” is worth saving. They don’t think they are wrecking civilization, they think they are wrecking a “racist/sexist patriarchy” that is profoundly evil to be replaced by a socialist paradise of equity.
You can see this in how European progressives have ever increasing censorship, and ever more ruthless, authoritarian refusal to honor the will of voters…. “unacceptable” candidates and parties are simply not allowed, by extra-legal means, to take power, no matter what the voters want. This may not end well for Europe.
The Constitution presents many hurtles for that kind of authoritarian political action in the USA. Which does mean ‘progressive’ justices would not undermine the Constitution if in the majority. They would jump at the chance.
Bottom line: I agree that the “progressive left” in the USA is never going to relent, even if they suffer some consequences for tearing down long standing norms. It is not that they are unprincipled, it is that their principles are completely incompatible with personal liberty and a constitutional republic controlled by citizens at large.
Sorry, left out a key word:
“Which does not mean âprogressiveâ justices would not undermine the Constitution if in the majority.”
The Trump lawfare campaign backfired spectacularly and that should be enough to dampen this behavior. Not only did Trump get an immediate boost in polling every time this happened, he won the election, and then proceeded to use the levers of government power against all his antagonists.
I don’t know but I also predict this behavior will backfire on Trump even though it is retaliatory in many voter’s minds. Trump doesn’t have reelection to worry about. Many people including myself want all this behavior to just stop.
I understand the point though that sometimes you must fight fire with fire to make opponents understand it is a two way street (see censorship and free speech). Perhaps lessons will be learned and things will get better, or not.
Thanks all. I agree with all of the points you raised.
Retaliation need not be all or nothing. I don’t want to see Republicans pushing ludicrous, made up charges against Dems. They should retaliate in kind, but perhaps not quite to the same degree. That is, they should avoid escalating. So they should not hesitate to push charges where they are justified. Examples would be the Letitia James mortgage fraud in Virginia and the Dem Congress Critter who assaulted law enforcement in NJ.
Mike M,
I agree, better to prosecute the obvious cases, not the stretches.
James is just too easy a case to not go after. She may not get convicted (depends on venue, of course), but she is absolutely more guilty of fraud than Trump ever was… she should be disbarred and removed from office. I doubt she will spend time in prison, not matter how deserving.
Tom Scharf,
I doubt Trump winning election in spite of the lawfare would ever give the loony left even a second thought about the wisdom of that tactic. The left never relents and never compromises; they are true believers in their cause, like the most dedicated fundamentalist Christian, and will never admit error or poor judgement.
They would do it all again in a second, and will….. prediction: should Dems control the House in January 2027, it will be all impeachment of Trump all the time, no matter how futile, and no matter if it means Vance is more likely to be elected in November 2028. Should a Dem win the White House in 2028, they will prosecute Trump after he is out of office, for a multitude of ‘crimes’. Bad people doing bad things, but utterly blind to their own evil.
Ed Forbes — I don’t agree that Putin thinks it’s in his best interests to NOT target Ukrainian leadership. Putin is at heart a thug, I rather suspect he thinks a decapitation strike would undermine Ukrainian will to continue their fight. Of course, to do it, he would have to find the Ukrainian leadership in areas he could strike freely.
Whatever happens, the Ukrainian strike complicated the lives of everyone involved in or responsible for force protection planning.
Why would any of “those on the left” want to destroy civilization?
It’s true that there are nihilists among us but I don’t see them tied to one side or the other
John,
Do I need to link passages from the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital where Karl Marx advocated communist revolution and the overthrow of existing capitalist systems? Surely not.
In his book The Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon characterized decolonization as an inherently and fundamentally violent process (to his credit IMO, since I think this is clearly so). Decolonization is a leftist idea to begin with.
Various radical environmental movements are fundamentally leftist and anticapitalist and hold that humans should die, more or less, such as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
I could go on, but does this not suffice for starters at least?
Further:
Nihilism is rooted in the ‘death of God’. This was Nietzsche’s observation. I think it is fair to say faith and religious belief is the province of the right? Although there are certainly atheists on the right as well.
I am often curious what differentiates atheists on the right from leftists. Wisdom, I’d like to think. But I’m sure I don’t really know.
There are plenty on the left who want to tear down western civilization. Also many who advocate policies that will undermine technological civilization. And large numbers who want to destroy liberal democracy and the rule of law.
Mark,
Conservatives tend to be supportive of preserving traditions and institutions. So although some might be atheists, they still support much of what religion has given us.
A progressive atheist has no guardrails.
Mike,
There is that.
Mark,
My thought was they have a different version of civilization, not no civilization.
Drone attack update:
OSINT reports that satellite photos show âThe destruction of at least 11 Russian strategic bombers is visible – 7 Tu-95 (and one, probably, damaged), 4 Tu-22 M3 and one An-12 cargo plane, which does not belong to strategic aviation.â
Image: [you need imaging hardware to properly analyse the photo]
https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1929954014566793525
OSINT reports that satellite photos confirm at least one A-50, maybe two, sophisticated AEW&C [Airborne Early Warning and Control] planes were hit. Ukraine downed two of these last year At that time Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR), said that Moscow only had six A-50s left in its arsenal.
Image: [you need imaging hardware to properly analyse the photo]
https://x.com/Hurin92/status/1929526403113836753
From NYT:
âThe New York Times, which cited satellite imagery and drone footage to report seven strategic bombers destroyed at Belaya airbase, including four Tu-22M and three Tu-95 bombers, with additional damage at Olenya. Additionally, American and European security officials were cited as estimating up to 20 aircraft destroyed or severely damaged across the attacked airbases.â
Grok:
Russian military blogger Rybar claimed 13 Russian aircraft were damaged, including up to 12 strategic bombers, in the Ukrainian drone attack on June 1, 2025.
I am still baffled by the logistics of the drone attack. I am continuing to research it and present information I think is reliable below. Bear in mind all the information on logistics so far comes from inside the Ukrainian government so it may be factual and it may be PSYOPS.
Kyiv Independant:
âAccording to the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine], the drones were smuggled into Russia where they were then hidden in the roofs of wooden cabins, which were then transported by truck to the air bases being targeted.
When they reached their destinations, the roofs were retracted remotely and the drones simply flew off towards the Russian bombers.â
Zelensky: “Whatâs most interesting, and this can now be stated publicly, is that the ‘office’ of our operation on Russian territory was located directly next to FSB headquarters in one of their regions,”
https://kyivindependent.com/operation-spiderweb-everything-we-know-about-ukraines-audacious-attack-on-russias-heavy-bombers/
From Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), A US think tank:
âUkrainian operatives smuggled around 150 small strike drones, modular launch systems, and 300 explosive payloads into Russia through covert logistical routes.
As part of the operationâs deception strategy, the SSU reportedly recruited Russian truck drivers to deliver the mobile drone launchers camouflaged as standard cargo loads. These drivers were instructed to arrive at specific times and park at predesignated locations in the vicinity of Russian strategic air bases, including fuel stations and isolated roadside areas.
After all the drones were launched, the trucks exploded, indicating that they were equipped with a self-destruction mechanism.
all personnel involved in the operation were successfully moved from Russian territory to Ukraine prior to drone launch.
The first-person-view (FPV) drones used in the operation were remotely controlled through Russian mobile telecommunications networks, including 4G and LTE connections. These networks provided sufficient bandwidth to support real-time video transmission and command inputs across vast distances, allowing Ukrainian operators to manage drone flights from outside Russian territory. This setup avoided the need for any physical ground control stations or nearby operators.â
A lot more detail:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-ukraines-spider-web-operation-redefines-asymmetric-warfare
john ferguson,
“My thought was they have a different version of civilization, not no civilization.”
Sure. Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, and Che’ all had visions of what civilization should be. The results speak for themselves.
John,
I’m sure they do. It doesn’t change the fact that some of them want to violently destroy what civilization we have today, does it?
.
[Edit: My contention was never that leftists are anarchists. Some are, but it wasn’t what I was saying. ]
Result is not the same as intention. I just finished the Ken Burns Vietnam series and was astonished that once the North had conquered the whole place, they implemented communism across the board and it failed disasterously.
You can then say that whatever the intent might be, the impact of adopting communism to run a state is very likely to be disasterous, and put that way, you could say that civilization as we enjoy it is unlikely to survive a communist takeover.
So I concede.
The BBC is starting to examine and report on OSINT. They didnât find anything new , but they have the best color sat. photos:
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cx2xrz4yqvwt?post=asset%3A7684dc3d-6124-47e5-a0b5-a49630556c62#post
John,
I can’t decide if I am picking nits, but FWIW this isn’t really what I was saying. You seem to be talking about the ruin wrought by the system that gets installed after the revolution. I’m just talking about the destruction caused by the revolution in the first place. Maybe it’s a distinction without relevance, since we’re done with the subject.
Last night on Jake Tapper’s prime time news program on CNN I detected a change in reporting on American anti-Semitism. He had an in depth report on the effect the recent attacks on Americaâs Jews was having on our Jewish population. It was quite sympathetic and had no pro-palestinian rhetoric.
Now if only the Democrats and universities would stop spewing their hatred.
Mark,
I found the threat of socialism posed by our left more insidious but not specifically aimed at destroying civilization, although I was prepared to agree that the result should they succeed might be that.
FYI: Some of those satellite photos from Russell are from commercial space based SAR. They have probably been enhanced but they have useable resolution. Apparently there has been a lot of cloud cover over the target sites.
Tom
Do you mean since the attack?
The right refuses to acknowledge the societal damage from over the top capitalism and the left refuses to acknowledge that socialism / communism has been tried and failed in practice everywhere.
So yeah, the pure strain of each has unacceptable results * overall * for society, but in different ways. China has better results now because they finally embraced economic capitalism combined with their authoritarian control. The US may be the most capitalistic country out there but they also have plenty of social safety net systems. The pure strain of capitalism would be voted out quickly in the US IMO, no social safety net.
My main problem with the leftist utopian vision is they just assume economic dynamism that drives the capitalist economy will be unaffected by a massive government with a heavy hand, combined with the IMO inevitable corruption that comes with unfettered government control. See almost all leftish run cities in the US currently.
The pure libertarian view is that government itself is the enemy, not which flavor, and I fall closer to that view although I acknowledge the need for government services even if that is only the government collecting taxes and paying private companies to provide the services.
“Do you mean since the attack?”
Yes, allegedly that is why there aren’t visible satellite photos of the damage.
john ferguson wrote: “My thought was they have a different version of civilization, not no civilization.”
Sure. The Egyptian Old Kingdom was a civilization. But I doubt that many of us would find life as the ordinary people lived it to be very civilized. In many ways, we would not find life in 18th century America to be very civilized.
john ferguson: “Result is not the same as intention.”
There is a large and influential contingent on the Left who have the intention of destroying much of civilization as we know it, in terms of both intellectual and material goods. Among their goals are dispensing with most of Western culture, forcing people to live in tiny apartments, drastically reducing the availability and reliability of energy, greatly restricting our diets, and eliminating personal liberty.
I don’t know how numerous such people are, but that have enormous influence. The result is deliberately disastrous policies such as defund the police, open borders, DEI, trans ideology, woke DA’s, etc. The point of such policies is destruction, although the Left’s useful idiots probably don’t realize that.
Tom,
Also, the fact that a commercial satellite that can even see things through clouds and with companies that advertise their capabilities commercially can be used to view what’s at the attack sites clearly supports Ed Forbes claim that the US “provid[ed] targeting information to Ukraine for strikes on these assets” . After all, if how else could the Ukrainians know the location of things that are visible by commercial sattelite? And whose images are now appearing on the intertube?. [/sarc]
Also: the air craft likely weren’t moved from base to base on a daily, weekly basis. So the Ukrainians wouldn’t have needed to see much through clouds to plan their attack.
The SAR is useful for seeing the outcome of the attack right now because there is cloud cover right now. But surely the airbases aren’t covered by clouds 24/7.
Jake Tapper is Jewish so that might make a difference.
Tom Scharf wrote: “The right refuses to acknowledge the societal damage from over the top capitalism”.
Iam puzzled by that. Just what is this “over the top capitalism” that the Right supposedly advocates? So called “free trade”? But that has plenty of advocates across the pre-Trump political spectrum.
John,
Communism is only one of the examples I raised, but it’s certainly not the only one. It doesn’t surprise me that you think that. The Democratic party is blind to this, and it’s one of the reasons they are lost in the wilderness now. They don’t understand that the radical progressives who wield strong influence in their party are enemies of civilization, but the rest of the country has caught on. This suits me, although I’m sure sooner or later your party will puzzle this out and make a comeback.
You can see aircraft that large sitting on runways with binoculars. I don’t think finding those planes was the hard part of the plan.
Supposedly the Chinese have been buying a lot of private land around US military bases lately and the US is trying to restrict this practice.
Spectacular KABOOM!
Video of yesterdayâs explosion on the Crimean Bridge from underwater explosives planted by Ukraine. Although the fireworks were impressive, the bridge reopened after a few hours, which doesnât prove that there is no structural damage because the Russians could be just whistling past the graveyard.
https://x.com/gerashchenko_en/status/1929859663761215972?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
Bridge details (maybe):
https://x.com/chuckpfarrer/status/1929886538680222030?s=61&t=7w4bCW3a8ve2DqoeniQatQ
MikeM
People like to make up ill defined terms when advocating various policies.
Heck, the like to make up terms when discussing anything. One guy on a dance forum likes to describe moves he disapproves of as “flash and trash” and suggest that’s somehow uniquely bad. (In fact, he dislikes all flash.)
Well… “trash”– which would be things not done well is not so great. Obviously. But “boring trash” is also not so great. And “boring” and done pretty well? Well, it’s boring. What one should strive for is a matter of taste, values, ideas of how one manages to improve, yada yada.
(For reference, he gets annoyed at moves like this after second 13 or so. . He doesn’t seem merely annoyed when jumps are done badly. He seems to wish they would go away altogether. Jim and I think: Well… ok. But then who’d want to watch quickstep? )
âFlash and trashâ cool expression, I may steal it.
Pure capitalism wouldn’t have a social safety net, other forms of income redistribution, subsidized medial care, equal funding for schools, etc.
If you combine too strong income inequality with democracy then once the losers in this equation form over 50% of the electorate then it will eventually get voted out. Like governments a cadre of insular capitalists will become corrupt as well.
The tricky part is more capitalist societies create more wealth that funds a better social safety net, thus if you are poor then you want to be poor in the US instead of poor in Somalia. Not only are you better off absolutely but your opportunity to get out of poverty is stronger in the US.
One thing lost in US poverty statistics is many/most people are only in poverty for short periods of time.
The point being is that activists for both sides tend to argue against strawmen that are the pure form of the opposing economic policy. Pure capitalism has faults.
I should have stated it as: âThe right refuses to acknowledge the * potential * societal damage from over the top capitalismâ … and how its policy would avoid this. I’m not stating that there is currently a lot of damage, but there is some if you go looking.
Tom Scharf wrote: “Pure capitalism wouldnât have a social safety net, other forms of income redistribution, subsidized medial care, equal funding for schools, etc.”
OK, but that is a strawman since nobody of any real influence advocates for that. And it does not make sense to say that the Right does not recognize the obvious flaws in that since such advocacy is limited to extreme libertarians who have no power and no significant influence. That is very different from the crazies on the Left who actually have gained a great deal of power and influence since Obama’s second term.
People on the right with power and influence are advocates of a mixed economy, not pure capitalism. Because they recognize the problems with the latter.
The activist argument style is pointing out flaws in the opposing policy with the hidden summary … your policy has proven flaws therefore my policy is superior.
This combative debate style has its place such as in a courtroom but is pretty boring, repetitive, and tiring in informal or online debate.
Never give an inch peacocks strutting about with memorized talking points. Snore. Never has so much energy been expended for so little.
I do agree that where the debate should be more substantive, in academia/legacy media, has also recently fallen to the same worthless sniping style. They allowed their institutions to be captured.
WSJ: Inside the Ukrainian Drone Operation That Devastated Russiaâs Bomber Fleet
https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-russia-drone-attack-bombers-cc77e534?st=a52Qwq&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
FYI these articles I post from WSJ are free from paywall.
mark bofill,
“.. Iâm sure sooner or later your party will puzzle this out and make a comeback.”
For sure, but with the Dem ‘base’ (which wields a lot of power) holding the view that Dems lost because they didn’t go far enough left, it may be a while to recognize a need to move away from the crazy policies. Of course, there is a greater than 50:50 chance the House will be under Dem control in January 2027…. they can sleep-walk into power in the House because without the ability to do anything, voters can’t blame them for much. And besides, in midterm elections, only the most dedicated tend to vote, and that group does not include many of the voters who put Trump in office.
Should Dems control the House in 2027, and the 24/7 impeachment efforts go forward as often promised, I think Dems could be in the wilderness for a long while. The LAST thing most voters want is a replay of 2019 and 2020 in the House, but that is exactly what the Dem ‘base’ wants.
Steve,
Yes. I don’t know how widespread the belief among the base is that they didn’t go far enough left, but I think there is at least a chunk or plurality that think that. That makes changing directions difficult for them.
I agree with your projections. Dems will probably win the House. Republicans will probably hold the Senate. I don’t know what point there’d be in this scenario to the House impeaching Trump, but that might not stop them from taking a crack at it.
I think the Dems “didn’t go far enough left” contingent isn’t holding a lot of sway at the moment.
This doesn’t mean that AOC or Sanders won’t win the nomination anyway. We have the Trump precedent.
The left will probably retake the House because of the normal overreach and failure to keep promises. If the center wins the war on the left then I think they will not partake on another round of Trump persecution, or at least wait until he truly deserves it.
Tom Scharf,
“This doesnât mean that AOC or Sanders wonât win the nomination anyway. ”
Bernie will be too old…. even according to him.
Were I a religious person, I would pray daily that AOC is the Dem candidate in 2028…. Bernie is unelectable anywhere that the majority of voters are not insane, but AOC is unelectable virtually everywhere! There is nothing that would be better for the country that the complete rejection of a flaky, mindless communist; she is so far out in crazy-land on every important issue that it would result in a Reagan-like landslide election, with a slaughter of Dems in the House to go with it.
Please Democrats, please… I am begging…. choose AOC in 2028!!!
Alas, I am sure they will choose someone else.
I’m not so sure. Who else could they nominate? Buttigieg? Newsom? Maybe it’ll be one of them. Maybe it’ll be AOC. It’s far enough off that anything could happen.
I am more confident that it’ll be Vance for the Rs of course; that’s pretty much a no-brainer AFAICT.
Trump is more popular that St. Obama was at this point in their second terms? https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/trump-obama-bush-second-term
Ouch!
Mark Bofill,
I think Newson is damaged goods; nobody will believe him if his views “evolve’ from what he has long supported in California; baggage that makes him unelectable. Buttigieg? Even less electable.
I expect it will be someone like Klobuchar or Whitmer.
I would caution that the left celebrated when Trump became the nominee in 2015, ha ha.
Tom,
IKR? Out of the five names mentioned (I’m not counting Bernie, he IS too old and won’t be nominated), I think AOC would have the best chance, honestly.
[I ought to add, I’m not really worried about it. I don’t think there’s anything Dems can do to win 2028 unless Trump really effs up bigly.]
Tom Scharf,
Trump got lucky in 2016. He had the good fortune to run against someone both profoundly corrupt and remarkably unlikable.
But AOC? She is remarkably unlikable, AND supports crazy policies, AND is a dedicated “socialist” (AKA communist). Worse yet, she knows very little about anything; just listen to her talk! Mindless is the only description I can come up with. IMHO, she is never going to president. YMMV
Steve,
Like hope, the grievance entitlement message resonates eternally. But you may be right. We will eventually see.
Mark,
I hope you are right. I fear you are wrong.
Yes, there is always going to be the envy/grievance/entitlement vote, but that doesn’t win national elections. Clinton and Obama won national elections by convincing voters they were not going to ‘go after the rich’. They both lied, of course.
Clinton’s tax hikes (and the concurrent removal of deductions/exemptions) were terrible for me… the first time in my life that I earned more that a typical employee salary I was crushed by taxes…. at the time I was living in a high tax state, on top of the increased Federal rates. My marginal rates overall were well above 45%. I was not smart enough then to learn to not to believe Democrats who disclaim ‘going after the rich’, but after Obama’s first term, I was cured of my naivete: I usually don’t believe leftist politicians.
But AOC is an exception: I believe her. She thinks top marginal rates should be north of 90%. I have no doubt: she is a communist.
If the Dems have competitive primaries in 2028, they might find a surprise candidate who can do well in the general. Like Trump in 2016, Clinton in 1992, and Carter in 1976. But the Dems have not really let a competitive primary process play out since 2008. And if they do, the far left might well carry the day.
The Free Press is a respected online news publication that was founded by, and is still led by, a Jewish lesbian. Image my surprise when I saw the following an article:
âHow Catholicism Got Coolâ
âYoung Americans and people around the world are flocking to the Catholic Church. The Free Press spoke to them to find out why.â
A couple more surprises:
âAmerica is not alone. The Catholic boom is also happening in Franceâwhich saw a 45 percent increase in the number of adult baptisms this yearâand in Englandâwhere, due to a surge in Mass attendance, Catholics are on track to outnumber Anglicans for the first time since the Church of England was born.â
More Catholics in England than Anglicans!
Also:
âIf Americaâs Catholic boom is being driven by young people, itâs being driven particularly by young men.â
https://www.thefp.com/p/meet-americas-newest-catholics?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=organic-social
Mike M,
I am hoping the far left carries the day in the Dem primaries, leading to a slaughter in the general election. The USA is a center-slight-right country, not a far-left country.
I have been advocating ever since the Left adopted the title “progressive” that anyone with any sense should require truth-in-advertising and refer to them as what they are: regressive Maoists or Stalinists. They were rewriting history like Mao or Stalin and had “teachers” leading elementary school kids in chants of “Oh Bah Mah” like the hordes under the thumb of Kim Jong Il.
I think the misuse of government institutions to persecute political opponents was the last straw for centrist voters in 2024 but the American public is fickle and has short memories so we will see what transpires in 2028. Until then the best thing Republicans could do is carry through with Sen Kennedy’s joke about Operation LET HER SPEAK (referring to AOC). Package AOC’s many misstatements and over-the-top pushes for Maoist-style government into short (5-10 minute) bites and post them without editorial comment on YouTube.