Oh Gack

Sixty Minutes did a piece last night that should have been titled "Do You Really Want Donald Trump's Finger On This Button?"

Choice little lines were included like, "So these are the President's rockets?" The "expert" replied that no, they are the nation's rocket, but that only the President can fire them. Dickweed repeated his line that they are, then, "the President's rockets."

Frankly, yes, I would rather have Trump's finger on that button than have Hillary Clinton's finger there.

Yeah, That Makes Sense

Melvin Gordon was running behind a fullback in the first half Sunday and gaining 8-10 yards at a time, scoring two touchdowns. In the second half he ran only three times, all three as a single setback from a shotgun formation, and gained a total of five yards. Coach Mike McCoy told the media, when asked about it, that the change was due to "the flow of the game." What? The flow of the game is dictated by the plays called, not the other way around.

I told my trainer at the gym this morning that she needed to go easy on me because I was suffering from dehydration. She laughed and told me that I should have fully recovered in 90 minutes.

And So It Continues

Giving us information which, while it may not be entirely false, is misleading and distorts reality.

The New York Times blares in a headline that "Household Income Grew
5.2 Percent in 2015," which sounds like quite an accomplishment for our economy. Our local bird cage liner went even further, headlining the same article, "Americans Register Big Economic Gains."  Read the details, however, and we see that income for men grew by 1.5% while income for women grew by 2.5% in the same period.

There is one aspect of the latter that is actually good news, because it indicates progress toward gender pay equality, but if household income has grown by an amount so much greater than either component of that household it means that there are more workers per household than the prior year, and that is anything but good news, and it certainly isn't "big economic gains."

The same article says that "unemployment dropped to 5%," but doesn't remind us that the number does not represent 5% of the workforce, but rather is 5% of those who are participating in the workforce. That percentage is only 63% of those who are in the workforce, and is a historically low number which is not improving significantly.

The Cheerleaders Are Back

I just read the sports section of our city's Sunday morning bird cage liner, which reminds me that the Chargers are playing in Kansas City today. I had not forgotten, of course, but...

The Las Vegas betting line is the Chiefs winning by six points. The San Diego sports writers are picking San Diego to win by a six to one margin. The one writer picking us to lose is doing so for the wrong reason; something about the new stadium, which is neither new or a stadium at this point. Needless to say, the six picking us to win are simply delusional.

Now the Chargers will probably win and make me look like an idiot, but I can deal with that. I've been looking like an idiot for much of my life.

Debunking the Debunker

Dean Baker writes a column called “Beat The Press,” in which he debunks articles written by other pundits and sets the records straight with what they would have said if they a) were not liars, b) did not have an agenda and/or c) were not stupid. He is not always polite about it and is frequently fun to read but, being an economist, he is fairly often full of shit himself.

Yesterday he set about correcting a column by David Brooks, which is usually fun, what with David Brooks being who he is, but he gets a little weird in the process. He cites a claim made by Brooks that, “the exchanges are disproportionately drawing lower-income people.” Actually, since the exchanges pick up a portion of the cost of insurance based on income, I believe that’s precisely what they are designed to do, but Dean Baker doesn’t go there.

Instead, he refutes Brooks by saying that, “Apparently Brooks did not realize that the ACA also requires that all insurers charge patients the same premium regardless of their health condition,” which is a masterpiece of non sequitur. He tries to strengthen what purports to be an argument by talking about health conditions a bit, and finishes that sick people now, “can get insurance at the same price as anyone else of the same age.”

“Non sequitur,” for those who don’t know, is Latin and loosely translates to, “What the hell does that have to do with what I just said?” Brooks is talking about people choosing the exchanges based on income and Baker “refutes” him by babbling about choosing the exchanges based on health condition.

In the comments it becomes somewhat more clear. Dean Baker was actually ignoring the Brooks comment about low income users of the exchanges and changing the subject to say, “Yeah, but Obamacare does some good things, too.” Typical economist, in that he can never admit that the other guy has made a valid point; when that happens he changes the subject.

Football ?

Not sure that what I watched this weekend was actually football. All of my teams not only lost, they humiliated themselves. Haven't heard any Les Miles firing rumors, but I would not settle for that anyway, preferring lynching. About the middle of the fourth quarter last night I swore off football altogether. Francois, forsooth. That's not only a first name, not a surname, it's a girl's first name. I think I'm over the swearing off thing now, though. I'm nothing if not resilient.

Fantasyland

Media reporting is becoming increasingly detached from reality these days.

The New York Times carries a column by Paul Krugman in which he claims that the shortcomings of Donald Trump are being unreasonably downplayed by the media, while the travails of Hillary Clinton with respect to email servers and charitable foundations is being seriously and unfairly distorted into what amounts to falsehoods. I don’t know what planet he is living on, but it isn’t Earth.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post goes on at great length about a national security investigation into “a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential election and in U.S. political institutions.” I think our own politicians have already beaten the Russians to the punch on that, but…

The headline reads “U.S. investigating potential covert Russian plan to disrupt November elections,” an accusation which is not made in the article. In fact, the statement is made within the article that, “The Kremlin’s intent may not be to sway the election in one direction or another, officials said, but to cause chaos and provide propaganda fodder to attack U.S. democracy-building policies around the world, particularly in the countries of the former Soviet Union,” which is pretty opaque, but does not seem to imply “swaying November elections.”

Employment's "Sound Footing"

The consensus of reporting is that the 155,000 new jobs created last month means that “employment growth is still on a sound footing.” That number, however, is seasonally adjusted. The unadjusted number was a mere 33,000 new jobs. Even if you accept the rosier adjusted number, despite no explanation ever being given for why the adjustment is needed or how it is made, the 155,000 new jobs did not keep up with the 176,000 new people who entered the work force, so I find the “sound footing” hard to swallow.

Of those 176,000 new workers, 33,000 found new jobs, 20,000 joined the workforce as unemployed, while 122,000 were “seasonally adjusted” out of the statistics. Awesome.

Year-to-date numbers are even more depressing. Without the “seasonal adjustments,” which cannot possibly be needed in annual numbers, 275,000 fewer jobs have been created this year than were created in the same period of 2015, and 460,000 fewer jobs have been created this year than were created in the same period of 2014. To condense that a little bit, the economy is down by 275,000 jobs over last year, and by 460,000 jobs over the year before that. Sound footing?

The candidates are too busy pointing out each other’s personality flaws to have time to discuss anything like the job situation faced by working class men and women.

Food Blogging, Friday

I invented this recipe out of thin air and made it last night. Results, frankly, surprised me a bit. I don't usually hit it on the first try. My wife freaked out. It is very spicy, so you may want to use a little less Creole seasoning, but my wife said it was a home run the way it is.

Pasta Jambalaya

1 lg or 2 sm Chicken breast, skinned and deboned
8-12 shrimp, uncooked, peeled and deveined, tails removed
1 ea, spicy smoked sausage, diced fairly small
8-12 oz ham, diced fairly small
2 tsp Creole seasoning, plus more for blackening
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
1 can petite diced Tomatoes
½ cup white wine (Pinot Grigio)

Put tomatoes, wine and seasonings into a large stovetop pot and bring to a simmer. If you think the volume doesn’t justify the large pot, just trust me and use it anyway.

Brown the diced sausage and ham in a hot skillet and add it to the pot, mixing them in.

Now things get a little more tricky. Cut the chicken into pieces bigger than bite sized, but not very large. You can use the “chicken tenders” which are about the right size. Now dust those pieces very heavily with Creole seasoning. Don’t be bashful, use quite a lot. Put the seasoned chicken pieces into a little oil in a very hot skillet and brown them heavily. Get them very brown; maybe a little black. The skillet should be hot enough that it happens quite rapidly, and we aren’t concerned with cooking them through.

Once they are done on both sides, place them on top of the liquid in the pot. Just let them rest on top, don’t submerge them. Cover the pot and let it simmer very low for about one hour.

Now take your shrimp and do the same thing with them that you did with the chicken, only use less Creole seasoning and less time in the skillet. Just a few seconds on each side will do the trick. Put the shrimp on top just like you did with the chicken. Cover and let it continue to simmer until the shrimp are done; about 15-20 minutes.

Serve over pasta.

Modern Navy

Another new littoral combat ship has been rendered “hors de combat” on a long term basis, the third one in a year, and while the article does not say so, this one appears to be one of at least two where the issue was crew maintenance failure. The USS Freedom lost a main engine when “seawater entered the engine oil lube system through a leak in a seawater pump's mechanical seal.”

It’s hard to follow that description, because normally the mechanical seal on a seawater pump would be sealing the shaft that connects the electric drive motor to the pump, and it would be sealing the pumped content from the atmosphere of the ship, or from the electric motor. Freedom must have some pretty funky mechanical systems to allow the failure of such a seal to dump seawater into the lube oil system. Either that or the government is doing one of its infamous tap dances again.

And yes, seawater pumps cooling diesel engines is something I know quite a lot about. Look at the picture at the top of this blog. Granted, I was an electrician, but those pumps are driven by electric motors, and I have actually changed the mechanical seals in question. Seawater did not get into our engine lube oil when the seal failed; it sprayed into the electric motor, creating a bit of havoc, and then went into our bilge.

In any case, allowing the leak (whatever it was) to develop is bad enough, but apparently it was not discovered for quite a long time, because the entire engine is having to be replaced due to interior rust. That means a lot of seawater got into the lube oil, a hell of a lot, and it stayed there for a long time without anyone noticing. Seawater in lube oil is not that hard to notice, and regular inspection should have caught it long before it did any damage.

USS Fort Worth was crippled when it tried to operate with no lubricating oil in its main propulsion reduction gears because the crew had forgotten to put it in after draining the gearbox for maintenance. Again, I thought it was pretty remarkable that a ship that new would already be changing the gearbox oil, but that the crew would overlook something so basic as replacing the oil is mind boggling.

This incident happened in Japan, and the ship is having to be towed all the way back to San Diego for repairs, which raises the question of why they were performing this level of maintenance in a foreign port.

The USS Milwaukee suffered a disabling breakdown when a clutch failed to disengage, but she had been in commission for less than a month so it's hard to draw any conclusions from that. Although, from other events in the news it would not surprise me that a Navy crew could screw up a new ship in less than a month.

Later in the article an admiral actually comes to the defense of the ships as if these failures were the fault of the ships themselves. He refers to them as “teething problems of the class.” So the Navy has massive leadership and crew incompetence problems and doesn’t even recognize what it is looking at.

The Navy in which I served was certainly not perfect, but this is astonishing. We had ships that were twenty years old and we took good care of them. We paid attention to our jobs. We took pride in our service. Today’s Navy seems to incorporate none of that, being given brand new ships and simply trashing them.

Attracting?

Dean Baker, a couple of days ago, offered a rather odd explanation of why the Obamacare healthcare exchanges are failing in many states, with major insurers losing money and pulling out of them. He says that the exchanges are, “attracting a less healthy group of patients.”

He goes on to say that insurance companies “are happy to insure relatively healthy people,” which seems fairly obvious, and suggests that the states can “require that insurers commit to insuring less healthy people on the exchanges as a condition of insuring the more healthy people on the individual market.”

Let’s see if we can parse what he’s saying here. People who are healthy buy expensive policies outside of the exchanges, while people who are sick buy cheaper policies in the exchanges. No, that doesn’t sound right.

People who buy health insurance on the exchanges rather than in the mass market do not do so because they are sick, they do so because they have lower income and receive a subsidy when using the exchanges. That subsidy applies to sick people and healthy people, but the healthy people don’t want to buy health insurance.

Obamacare was supposed to assure that healthy people would buy health insurance whether they wanted to or not, but has not delivered on that promise because the penalties are far too small. Healthy people have figured out they are better off paying the trivial penalty than they are spending a vastly larger sum on insurance they don’t want. Pundits universally claimed that no one would ever think that way, but…

As for Baker’s suggestion that states require that insurance companies remain in the exchange as a condition of remaining in the mass market, yes, they could do that. The result would be an increase in rates for the mass market to offset losses in the exchanges, which might not be too popular, especially given that popular pressure is to reduce health care cost rather than increase it.

Biden Barking

Watched a film clip last night of Joe Biden in Turkey barking with great indignation about how the United States would never, ever, never, under any circumstances support the evils of a military coup. He apparently has already forgotten about Egypt and Honduras, both of which happened during his watch. Whatever shred of credibility this nation might once have had is long gone now.

Missing the Point

Clinton is accused of doing government favors for donors to the Clinton Foundation because of memos as Secretary of State and because more than half of the meetings she has had as a candidate were with Foundation donors; says she met with them but never actually did them any favors.

Opponents say she’s lying, supporters say she’s telling the truth, and both of them are missing the point. The problem is that, favors or not, such access to government officials is a problem in itself. Ordinary people, people who are not filthy rich, do not get to meet with people in power and express their views.

Opponents also say she’s lying about the email server thing while supporters say she’s telling the truth but, in reality, why should any of us pay the slightest attention to anything she’s says about it? Not because she’s crooked, but because she’s not stupid. If she did do something wrong, is she going to admit that to a reporter? The reporter is actually pretty damned stupid to ask the question.

“Mrs Clinton, did you send secret material on an insecure email server?”
Do you really think that she is going to answer in the affirmative? So why bother to make such a big deal about her giving the only possible answer and saying that she didn’t do it?

I’m not claiming that she did any of these things; I’m just asserting that her denials mean nothing.

A "Still Small Voice"

I’m leery of “Wall Street experts,” but James Grant makes, I think, an interesting point when he discusses the wisdom of investing in government treasury bonds.

“Sovereign debt is my nomination for the number one overvalued market around the world. You are earning nothing or less than nothing for the privilege of lending your money to a government that has pledged to depreciate the currency that you’re investing in. The central banks of the world are striving to achieve a rate of inflation of 2% or more and you are lending certainly at much less than 2% and in many cases at less than nominal 0%. The experience of losing money is common in investing. But where is the certitude of loss even before your check clears? That’s the situation with sovereign debt right now.”

He does not go into the perfidy of governments paying less than 1% on the money you lend them while deliberately devaluing that money at an annual 2% rate. Who is served by such a policy? Yes. Bankers.

The whole thing is worth reading, especially the part about the Swiss National Bank buying American equities using Swiss francs which they “create from the thin alpine air where the Swiss money grows.” Unlike the American Fed money which is created from the humid, heavy air at sea level.

The Effect of Taxes

The media is not talking much about what the two candidates are promising for income tax changes. They don’t offer much detail, and they don’t say how the changes offered by either candidate will affect taxes paid by average working class Americans.

Trump, we hear, proposes to change the brackets and have only three tax rates of 10%, 20% and 25% with increase in the standard deduction to $25,000 for single filers and $50,000 for married couples. The media stresses that such a scheme would result in the rich paying lower taxes.

Clinton says that she will add a new rate at the top, percentage unspecified, which the media quotes her repeatedly as saying will, “finally make the rich pay their fair share for a change.”

Trump doesn’t say what the wage brackets are for his three rates, but since under the current tax plan the 10% bracket tops out at a mere $9275, there is no 20% bracket and the boundary at which we begin paying 25% is below average wage of $39,156, it’s safe to say that income on which you are now paying 15% will be taxed at 10% and income on which you are paying 25% tax will be taxed at either 10% or 20%. Not to mention that the standard deduction, for the 82% of people making average wage who do not itemize, is quadrupled.

In other words, Trump’s proposal will significantly reduce the tax liability for average working class men and women. The media carefully does not point that out.

Clinton’s proposal does not change the taxes paid by the working class, but does raise taxes paid by the rich by some unspecified amount. The media, then, is persuading working class voters to reject a tax reduction for themselves in favor of a tax increase to punish the rich. What kind of sense does that make? How does the working class benefit from making the rich just a tiny bit less rich?

They would, perhaps, rather feel good about kicking someone else’s ass than having some extra income for themselves? Have we really deteriorated to that?

Uber Gets A Beating

Bill Mitchell had a discussion Tuesday on why progressives (damn, that is starting to sound to me like a dirty word) should not be swanning over the likes of Uber, explaining the ways in which that business model resembles sharecropping. He goes on at some length about the evils of sharecropping, and of Uber.

He does not, at least, refer to “the sharing economy,” a term which seems to have lost momentum lately. Thank God. That term was always nonsense. If you’re charging money for it, you’re not “sharing” it. Anyway…

I have noticed lately that Uber is running television commercials for drivers. They ran them for riders for a long time, but then there was nothing for a while and now it’s for drivers. I’ve been wondering what that means, but now I read that Uber also does car financing and I think I know. Ugh. That’s not a pretty picture.

I agree with much of what Mitchell has to say, although I’m less sympathetic than he with the taxi industry. I have a little different slant than he does on the history of the taxi industry persuading (bribing) local governments to limit the number of licenses. He sees that as opportunity for impoverished taxi drivers to realize capital gains on taxi licenses, while I see it as a method of enriching taxi owners through the limitation of competition. Either way, seeing them suffer from competition now because their bribes were overtaken by events doesn’t really bother me much.

Way down in the comments section someone mentions that sharecropping is not intrinsically evil; that it provides entry into farming without the need for capital to purchase land, for instance. Which raises an interesting point. Most systems, either in government or business, are intrinsically neither good or bad. What matters is the manner in which that system is implemented.

The modern generation of “progressives” are ranting on the evils of capitalism, and notably not offering to say what should replace it, but capitalism is what produced the boom times and almost utopian living standard of the 1960's and 70's. What changed about the way our systems have been implemented between then and now is for another discussion, certainly Uber is part of the change and part of the problem, but the problem is not the system itself.

Pearls of Wisdom

A talking head commenting on the women's eight rowing team said that they dominate the class because, "They have established their own identity and are rowing to their potential."

The women were in command from the opening horn and won gold by a bit over two seconds, so I'm sure this female commentator was pretty excited, but what does that even mean? Their own identity? Yes, they wore team uniforms, as did all the other teams. Rowing to their potential? Yes, I dare say they were, as were seven other teams in that competition. I'm no rowing expert, but I suspect that their winning probably had a lot to do with strength training and many hours of practice to get their timing just right, and very little to do with "establishing their identity" etc.

I once told my father when I was a kid that I needed to "find out who I am." I won't tell you what his response was specifically. He sent me on a journey, but it was very short and it wasn't about self discovery.

Yes, I sometimes engage in snark when I pick titles.

Say What?

In the comment section on an NBC article about Joey Bosa's holdout with the Chargers a fan writes, "As much as I think Bosa should accept the reasonable terms set by the team I still hate that the Chargers always seem to find ways to crap on their players."

So, making a reasonable offer to a player which he does not accept is "crapping on the player" these days?

They're Back!

This is even better news than the return of Twinkies! Archway only had one facility, which went bankrupt several years ago, and now they are back. These are the real deal, too. They are crispy, crunchy and you can taste the molasses. So far Vons is the only store I've seen that has them.

Twinkies, Windmill cookies and football season only days away. I am almost giddy. Well college football and the NFL regular season is still four weeks away, but the NFL preseason will tide me over until then.

Now if we can only get Chase Elliott to quit doing stupid things on the race track.

What is Progressive?

In a comment on another venue a commentor referenced polls showing that "younger people are overwhelmingly progressive." Someone has a different definition of "progressive" than I do.

"We want to receive a free college education and a higher minimum wage, and we want the rich to pay for it," is not progressive.

"We want to build water systems and develop clean energy and are willing to pay taxes to cover the cost," is progressive.