Well, That Was Embarrassing

The America’s Cup is so named because this nation won it the first time it was sailed in 1851. America won it continuously for 116 years, and at least participated in it until 2000. After failing to make it into the race for the next ten years, America returned in 2010, winning 2 of the next three cups, so the overall record is by no means bad.

This year has been beyond embarrassing. The American boat has been one of three competing for the right to challenge New Zealand for the next America’s Cup, and was disqualified yesterday after sailing in nine matches, losing all nine and forfeiting one.

One loss was what a non-sailor might consider close, 30 seconds in a race that took 26 minutes to complete (to a sailor, 30 seconds is not even hand grenade distance), but the rest have all been by two minutes or more. This would compare to a stock car losing at Daytona by 20 laps or more purely because it is slow and/or was poorly driven.

There was one conversation with the American skipper which pretty much summed up for me why the boat’s performance was so sub-par. In discussing why he lost the start of the race he said that the opponent, “got his timing right, so we were not able to execute Plan A.” The commenter asked how he could have executed his plan and he repeated himself. “If he gets his timing right, you don’t.”

If your plan depends on your opponent making a mistake, it is a bad plan. It is a plan that you should not be using. It is a plan that pretty much assures that you will lose. If I had been using such a mind-numbingly stupid plan I most certainly would not admit it on television. It’s like asking Dale Earnhardt how he plans to beat Bill Elliott in the upcoming race and hearing him reply that, “I plan to drive carefully and hope that he hits the wall.”

The commentator, of course, either did not pick up on the stupidity of “Plan A” or decided to ignore it, and moved on to other things. He was too busy, in any case, conducting a pity party and making excuses for the American boat.

The Americans, he lamented, had been forced to spend the downtime repairing their boat’s damage incurred when it capsized, while the Italians were able to spend that time improving their boat. Well, boo hoo. If the Americans hadn’t capsized their boat they would not have had to be doing repairs and could have been making improvements just like the Italians.

The commentator even went so far as to lament that he felt sorry for the Americans and that it was “..all so unfair. It’s just unfair.” Oh, get over it. It wasn’t an act of bad sportsmanship by the Italians that capsized the American boat. It wasn’t some freak fluke of nature. It wasn’t some arbitrary inequitable act by the officials. It was pure bad seamanship by the American captain and crew that capsized the boat.

There was nothing even remotely unfair about their plight; their hardship was entirely self inflicted. They’re lucky they only had to forfeit one race.

What Comes Next?

When the pandemic started we were told that we would have to stay home, wear masks and close our businesses for five weeks in order to avoid overwhelming the hospitals. Given that the hospital ships sat empty the precautions either worked extremely well or were not needed.

Then, after five weeks, the empty hospital ships were sent home and we were told that we would have to "continue precautions" until we got a vaccine. This was known, somewhat cynically, as "moving the goalposts." They also sort of hid the goalposts as well as moving them, since they would not give us a time frame for the arrival for the vaccine, only that it would be a long time. Certainly not until after Trump was out of office.

Now the vaccine is here and the goalposts have not been moved again, they have simply been removed. We will have to "continue the precautions" even after vaccination, and now we must wear two masks instead of just one. Reasons vary from unlikely to absurd.

"We know the vaccine prevents the severe kind of Covid, but we don't know if it prevents the mild kind, which can still be spread." News flash. They are the same kind. The difference is in your body's ability to cope with the virus. Secondly, we should be afraid of a virus which is likely to cause death, but if all we have to be concerned about after vaccination is "the mild kind..." Please. Thirdly, we do know it prevents "the mild kind" because in testing the vaccine they tested for presence of the virus in any form after the vaccine was given.

That's even if you can get the vaccine. I'm 77 and high risk, and I can't. My health care system had 11,000 applications for 200 appointments and advised not even calling.

I'm afraid to ask what the next stage of this pandemic and its government controls might be.

Again: Thinking Things Through

The San Diego Mayor just imposed an upper limit on what can be imposed by third party delivery services who deliver food orders; 15% of the total amount of the order. He says that will help the companies that are selling delivery food, because drivers were adding as much as 30% to the cost of the order. 

 

 First, it's usually the customer that pays the fee, not the seller, so I'm a little uncertain of his thinking, but let's assume that the high delivery fees are driving customers away. How does it help if you drive the delivery service away? (You see what I did there? Twice!) 

 

Let's say you are delivering a $25 order. You have to get in your car, drive to the restaurant, wait for the order to be ready, drive to the customer, take time for the customer to pay you, process the credit card payment, pay the cost of the credit card payment (usually 3-5%), and then drive home. At a 30% fee, you would receive a princely sum of $7.50 for doing all this. The Mayor wants to cap this at a maximum payment of $3.75. 

 

Does that meet San Diego's minimum wage of $15/hr? I don't think so. Sort of an odd political agenda to want to raise what workers earn and then cap what they can charge. Still, he is a Democrat, so we should not expect consistency or logic from him.

 

What they Mayor did, of course, is raise to approximately $100 (for which the driver would get $15) the minimum food order that you can get delivered. That may be okay for four or more people who live together, but for a single person or a childless couple who want to stay home and have food delivered it might not work out too well.

The Cost of Oil

What liberals and the media will not tell you is that canceling the Keystone XL pipeline is not going to reduce oil consumption by one drop, and is not even going to reduce the amount of oil moving to the Gulf Coast. It's just going to keep the cost of that oil higher in dollars, environmental impact, and human suffering.

That oil is presently being produced, and most of it is moving to the Gulf. Some is going by way of existing pipelines, the rest is going by rail. Rail transport is much more costly than a pipeline, and it is incredibly more dangerous to the environment and to human life when trains derail and the oil burns.

The media did features in the past on such derailments, since they are very dramatic and make for colorful and frightening imagery on the nightly news, but the “ecology movement” has prevailed upon them to downplay that danger in favor of preventing the construction of pipelines.

Biden and his followers would have you believe that they are reducing the amount of oil used by blocking this pipeline. They are lying, because they know they are not. They are merely preventing the safer and less costly transport of existing and ongoing oil usage.

Garbage Wrapper

Wrapping your garbage in the San Diego Union Tribune has become an insult to perfectly good garbage these days. 

 

An article in Sunday’s paper (behind a paywall), which apparently required two “journalists” to compose began, “Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73% after several social media sites suspended President Donald Trump and his key allies last week…” 

 

That’s much like saying that horseshit in the streets diminished after the sheriff shot and killed 90% of the county’s horses. It finds it useful to remark that horses don’t shit in the street after they are dead, and it asserts that shooting and killing horses is a virtuous act. 

 

Not to mention that it is “misinformation” only because they say it is.

Best Play of The Year

If 2021 gives us nothing else, we can look back to this; one last meeting between two old guys on the field at the Superdome, after the game. Tom Brady came out after the game to visit with an old friend and, among other things, threw a pass for Drew Brees' son to catch. Nice moment.

Paranoid Much?

Not only are Democrats (well, the Establishment in general) posting more than 25,000 armed troops in Washington to "keep the inauguration safe," they are vetting those troops to be sure that all of them are "loyal." 

 

What the "loyalty check" consists of is not specified, but probably footlockers are being searched for MAGA gear.

Section 230

Liberals and the media are fulminating at great length about “Section 230,” a law which they claim allows the internet companies to permit “hate speech” to be published on their systems without fear of lawsuit. In fact, Section 230 does precisely the opposite of that. Here is the “meat” of that section of the US Code,

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected."

 

Note the words I underlined. This law, in fact, is precisely what allows internet companies to block hate speech (or anything which they consider to be hate speech) without recourse against them. It permits them to do what they are now finally doing, in fact, which is to cancel people whose messages they dislike.

It means the people who are suing them for cancellation will lose, because the law does not say who decides what material is “excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” Cancelling Section 230 would, in fact, prevent internet companies from blocking hate speech and from cancelling objectionable (to liberals) contributors.

Liberals are cheering the “cancellation” of the “other side” and delighted that their platforms will no longer be contaminated by writings that they don’t want to have to read, and at the same time they are demanding repeal of the law that permits that cancellation to happen.

This is another instance of knee jerk irrational liberalism. They are so upset to discover that a law protects an institution which they hate, even when their daily political activity is utterly dependent upon that institution, that they don’t even bother to find out what that law protects the institution from.

Ships and Fires

The USS Bonhomme Richard recently caught fire pierside in San Diego and burned for more than a week before the fire was brought under control. There are many things of interest about that fire and the course that it ran, which I will not go into here. They do not reflect well on the Navy.

Even more interesting is the end result, which is that the damage was so extensive that the Navy decided to decommission and scrap the ship.

The major lesson that should be taken from this incident is that Navy ships are still vulnerable to large fires. Fire, in fact, is the sailor’s greatest fear at sea. The fear of sinking is so far down in second place that there is no second place. The thought of fire at sea causes nightmares.

Enter the Arleigh Burke class destroyer, the most numerous class of destroyers the Navy operates. It’s an old class; they’ve been around forever, and have undergone more upgrades than anyone can count. Among those upgrades was the brilliant (!) idea to build the superstructure out of aluminum. Doing so, the theory went, would lower the center of gravity and make the ship more stable in heavy seas.

It worked like a charm. The ships rode out storms very well indeed. Then one of the new ships suffered a major fire at sea and the aluminum superstructure melted, because that’s what aluminum does in such a fire. Steel just gets hot, maybe turns red, but aluminum melts. A ship with a melted superstructure is not a ship.

Subsequent Arleigh Burke destroyers, ships of all classes in fact, have been built with steel superstructures. Seemed like the Navy had learned a lesson.

Not so much. The new “Littoral Combat” ships not only have aluminum superstructures, they have aluminum hulls as well. That which has been learned can be unlearned.

Excellent Logic

This could happen only in California. 

 

The Public Utilities Commsion has approved an increase in electric rates during summer for the specific purpose of reducing power consumption, in the same month that Governor Newsom declared that 15 million vehicles must be replaced by electrically powered vehicles within the next 15 years.

 

Not to mention that the PUC authorized power companies to shut off power during times of high fire danger, so how does the governor suggest that people who have electric cars escape danger when there is a fire in their area?

Covid-19 Narrative

 ABC News provides us with reasons why the vaccine will not end shutdowns and the need to wear masks. Which leads me to wonder why we had all the hype about the vaccine, and to ask why anyone should accept the risks of taking a relatively untested vaccine if it isn’t going to change our lives for the better.

It's another step in an insane progression. The shutdown was initially to be for five weeks in order to “flatten the curve,” and then lasted for more than ten months “until a vaccine is developed.” Now that the vaccine is developed they have moved the goalposts yet again.

1. “Vaccination does not provide instant immunity.” Okay, that’s fair enough, but they do not say that you need to wear your mask and “observe precautions” for two weeks, or four weeks. They say you need to just keep doing it until they tell you to stop, which we know will never happen.

2. “Vaccination trials did not track whether participants wore masks.” There’s a long explanation about this, but it boils down to the vaccine not being adequately tested and that we don’t know whether or not it works. So why are we distributing it with so much hyperbole about it, and why should anyone be willing to take it?

3. “The real world does not mimic a controlled clinical trial.” Another long nonsensical explanation follows, which boils down to “we don’t know if the vaccine works.” See my questions at reason number two.

4. “The herd immunity threshold for COVID-19 is unknown.” This is just unadulterated babble. If the vaccine is worth the time and effort to distribute it, that is if it makes individuals immune, then “herd immunity” is irrelevant. If an individual is immune and can neither catch or spread the disease, then that individual wearing a mask and “taking precautions” has nothing whatever to do with “herd immunity.”

5. “The duration of vaccine immunity is unknown.” Another argument that boils down to “we haven’t adequately tested the vaccine and we don’t know if it works.” So one more time with a sensible question of, why are we distributing it with so much hyperbole about it, and why should anyone be willing to take it?

6. “It is unclear whether vaccines prevent transmission of COVID-19.” This one is simply stunning in its level of stupidity. It means the vaccine was actually not tested at all for the primary purpose of a vaccine, which is to prevent the spread of a disease. Here we are rolling out a vaccine with great fanfare, breaking our collective arm patting ourselves on the back for our “success” and hailing the producers as heroes on the level of those who walked on the Moon, and we don’t even claim to know whether or not it serves the primary purpose of a vaccine, which is to prevent the spread of the disease.

And this garbage was written by an internist, a “Doctor of Internal Medicine” who is, to boot, an instructor at  the University of Illinois School of Public Health and is a physician in private practice. The dishonesty and stupidity of the narrative surrounding this virus is simply astounding.

Promising Signs

The San Diego paper had quite a lot to say (sorry, unable to link) about public opinion of Biden’s pick for Vice President. They said that it “changed few minds” but that survey showed that there were “promising signs” for Biden nationally, which seems a bit contradictory.  

 

“Overall support for Biden went from 54 percent to 56 percent,” they told us, while “Trump showed a slight bump” going from 25% to 28% in the poll. So a 3.7% increase for Biden deserves no modifying adjective, while a 12% increase for Trump is “a slight bump.” Interesting. Do we detect a slight bias in this reporting? 

 

If there were any “promising signs” in the survey, they were entirely for Trump, as his numbers improved in nearly every category by more than Biden's did, in some important categories dramatically more. 

 

In addition to overall support above, where Trump’s increase was larger than Biden’s by 12% to 3.7%, Trump had higher gains within his own party. Biden gained nothing among Democrats, remaining at 86%, while Trump gained 6 points among Republicans, going from 72% to 78%. 

 

Each gained a single point in the opposing party, which represents a 9% gain for Biden and a 25% gain for Trump. 

 

Biden gained a single point among white voters, from 44% to 45% which represents a 2.3% increase, while Trump gained 3 points, from 39% to 42% for a 7.7% increase. 

 

Biden got utterly destroyed in the black vote, which is really weird, since he selected Harris for the specific purpose of courting the black vote. It seems to have had the opposite effect. Biden actually lost ground, dropping from 83% to 80%, which represents a 3.6% decrease. Trump’s support among blacks went from 7% to 15%, giving him a 115% increase which is simply stunning. 

 

And somehow, Democrats can look at this survey and see “promising signs” for Biden’s election. Can he win the election with 15% of the black vote going to Trump?

It Depends On Who Says It

Democrats and many Republicans applauded Obama for saying that, "If Congress won't act, then I will." The same people are accusing Trump of acting as a dictator and/or being insane when he responds to Congressional inaction by saying, "I'll do it by myself if I have to." Sign of the times.

This Time It's On Purpose

The last time that home mortgages started being massively defaulted was, wait for it... 2008. This time the government is actually encouraging homeowners to default on their home loans. They seem to think it will turn out differently than it did in 2008. Good luck to us all.

Fine Lines: Riots Explained

From today's edition of Clusterfuck Nation:

"I’d be demoralized, too, were I twenty years old. To make matters worse, the cafes, craft beer joints, and twee little vegan lunch bars are shut down, along with the music halls and every other arts venue, and who has any money? Their intersectional bodies are roiling with youthful hormones, with an assist from weed and other stimulants. What better way to work off all that energy on a warm summer night than to riot in the streets against a society that has actually prepared them for nothing except protesting the unfairness of life."

Doing It Right

NASCAR has been annoying me the past few years with its hype and nonsense, but the race on Sunday (Memorial Day "Coca Cola 600") was pretty nicely done.

They started with a flyover of WW2 warplanes, including a B-24, a P-51 Mustang, F-9 Wildcat and others, all dressed up in their 1940s color schemes. It was, to boot, done during a very nice rendition of the national anthem.

Each car carried above the windshield the name of a military veteran who had lost their life in the service of their nation. During the race they periodically described the lives of these folks and how they perished. It could have been overdone, I think, but they hit a very nice balance. Each driver knew the history of the person whose name they represented, and spoke as if they felt a personal responsibility to do them right. It felt very respectful and serious.

Maybe this pandemic has made people stop and think.

Why Isn't This Obvious

People are complaining that airlines are filling airplanes too full, crowding passengers too close together. Are they doing so at the point of a gun? Why are the people who are complaining about it simply not getting on the airplane, or getting off once it becomes crowded? "I'm not sitting here," addressed to a flight crew member solves the problem. But no, the airline is blamed.

We're not sure that having Covid19 and recovering from it confers immunity? Really? How can one recover from a viral illness without developing immunity? If you don't develop immunity, you remain sick.

Good Thing We Shut Down

Meat packing plants are shutting down and creating a shortage of product because "all of the workers are going to die." One plant in Minnesota has just completed testing all 2700 of its workers and, sure enough, 1200 workers tested positive. 90% of those who tested positive had no symptoms; 12 of them needed to be hospitalized. That's 1% of those infected, and .4% of the workforce. There have been zero deaths.

There has, however, been 100% unemployment at that plant.

More Government Logic

San Diego County is undergoing a lengthy heat wave. Usually, in similar circumstances, the city and county issue advisories for elderly people to make use of "cooling centers," located throughout the county, because many elderly people do not have air conditioning.

Obviously, a simple solution would be to have them go to the beach, which is the coolest place in the county. That would have a couple of other advantages as well. It has been very well documented that the virus is much more contagious indoors than outdoors, and there is compelling proof that the virus dies very quickly in direct sunlight.

The problem is that no one is allowed to sit down on our beaches. You are not only required to remain six feet apart on the beach and wear a face mask, you must keep walking continuously. Hard to do when you're 87 years old.

Not sure of the reason for this "keep walking" rule. Do they hope that the virus cannot hit a moving target?

Military Air Travel

I had been home on leave and asked my father (Air Force) if he could line me up with a ride on one of his airplanes back to my home port on the east coast. He had nothing available, but he arranged for me to catch a Marine Corps R5D going that direction.

I should have been prepared for an adventure, since my interactions with the Marine Corps had always tended to be interesting. (For instance...) For their part, the Marines were delighted to be giving a ride to the Navy, instead of the usual vice versa.

The pilot, a lieutenant who looked to be about twelve years old, came back and asked if any of his passengers was less than 21 years old. I asked him if they were going to be serving drinks, which he didn’t think was as funny as I thought it was. Officers frequently didn’t think I was as funny as I thought I was.

Turned out I had sort of stepped on his humor, because his next line, after a couple of guys raised their hands, was, “Well then this airplane is older than you are. I will now instruct you in the proper use of a military parachute.” Real confidence builder. We were not required to put the parachutes on, merely to know how to use them.

The takeoff was uneventful, as was the flight until somebody looked out the window and observed that one of the propellers was not turning. There was a considerable amount of alarmed discussion among the passengers, who were all Marine Corps other than me, until I was able to reassure them that I grew up in the Air Force, knew something about airplanes, and this airplane could do just fine with three engines.

A bit later one of the Marines came over to me and said quietly, so as not to alarm anyone else, that, “One of the engines on this side is smoking. Is that bad?” I allowed that it might be and he wondered if the pilot knew about it. By that time some others had noticed it and, of course another fairly lively discussion ensued. I was not able to be quite as reassuring this time, and finally I was deputized to go forward and check with the pilots.

The pilot, in fact, did not know about it since he was asleep. The copilot was reading a book. I tapped the copilot on the shoulder and told him about the smoking engine and he told me to tell the pilot. I pointed out that the pilot was asleep and he said to wake him up. Enlisted men, even petty officers, hate waking up a sleeping officer, and I wanted to tell him to wake up the pilot himself, but...

The pilot, after he woke up and I told him, asked the copilot if he had seen it, and the copilot said no. So the pilot told the copilot to take a look, since the engine in question was on his side. I was thinking we were in kind of deep shit if these two clowns were all we had to fly the plane.

The copilot half stood as he turned and looked back at the wing, studied it a moment and then sat back down. Then he looked at me for some reason, not the pilot, and said, “That’s not smoke, that’s fuel.” That sounded a little alarming to me, much more so when the pilot said with a distinct note of alarm, “Shit, we’re leaking fuel?”

I asked the copilot, who had confirmed that we were leaking fuel, if that was as bad as it sounded and he replied, “Well, it would be worse if it catches fire.”

That, frankly, had not occurred to me, and the idea sort of freaked me out, but the flight crew appeared to think it was pretty unlikely because they were not doing much of anything other than having a languid conversation about whether or not they should or should not a) shut down the engine and b) hit the engine with the fire extinguisher.

They finally decided to do both which, of course, resulted in a huge cloud of white smoke from the engine. The passengers in back could hardly fail to miss that, and they didn’t, because when I left the flight deck and rejoined them everyone was frantically strapping on parachutes.

I was actually tending to be pretty much as freaked out as they were, but I had seen how unconcerned the pilots were, and I did know that this plane could go a very long distance on two engines. So I wasn’t putting on a parachute.

An officer commented about my lack of parachute and admitted that, while he could not actually order me to put one on, he really thought I should do so. I told him, “Sir, I am getting off of this airplane when it is on the ground, or when the pilot gets out, whichever comes first.” Like most officers, he had no sense of humor and didn’t think that was funny.

After a while the pilot came back to update us, and when he saw everyone (well, almost everyone) wearing parachutes he broke out laughing. “Where are you guys going?” he hooted, “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to Norfolk.”

He went on to tell us that, while the R5D could not take off with two engines, it could easily fly across the country with two. “If we lose another engine,” he told us, “I might start looking for a soft spot to put her down, but as long as we have two turning we can go wherever we want to go.”

Which we did, landing quite safely and (him being a Marine pilot) nose wheel first in Norfolk.

On Matt Kenseth

A former NASCAR driver, Matt Kenseth, is returning to active driving in the NASCAR Cup series, driving for Chip Ganassi in the #42 car for the balance of the 2020 season, whatever that consists of. Kenseth is 48 years old, won the Cup championship once, retired in 2018 and is from Wisconsin. He is soft spoken, is a consummate gentleman, and I am delighted to see him back.

Matt Kenseth moved up into the Cup series the same year the Dale Earhhardt Jr. did and it was, of course, the latter who received all of the attention and hype. I was with a group of my fellow "racing nuts" one day back then and pronounced that not only would Kenseth win Rookie Of The Year, he would win a Cup Championship before Earnhardt did. I was both laughed at and sworn at, and regarded as both stupid and insane.

I was right on both counts. He beat Earnhardt for Rookie Of The Year by a substantial margin, and won the Cup Championship three years later, while Earnhardt Jr. has never come close to a Cup Championship. I am looking forward to seeing what he will do in Ganassi's #42 car, which is a very fast car.

Democrats are Awesome

Joe Biden is spreading the alarm that Donald Trump may try to postpone or even cancel the 2020 presidential election, and Democrats are outraged. They are threatening to impeach Trump for something that exists only in Joe Biden's imagination.

Democrats then cancel the New York state Democratic primary election, giving all of the NY candidates to Biden.

More to Fear

The WHO now says that having survived the Wuhan virus, and having antibodies, does not mean you are immune. You can get it again. They do not say, but certainly want you to understand, that surviving it the first time does not mean you can survive it a second time. You are still going to die.

The concept of "herd immunity" which they have been promoting is therefore invalid. There is no such thing.

The "shut down until we have herd immunity" is also invalid. The shutdown must become permanent. All plans for reopening parks and outdoor recreation, and for restarting the economy must be cancelled. If they go forward, everybody will be sickened by the Corona virus and will die.

They also said that 2.2 million people in the United States were going to die of the virus by April 15th, so one might want to take their advice with a certain degree of skepticism.

Food For Thought

It's from the comic strip "Get Fuzzy," and it's amusing but not really all that funny. And then when you think about it...

"Are you becoming more annoying, or am I becoming less tolerant?"

What Kind of Immunity?

I swear, the next person who uses the term "herd immunity" to me in person is going to get punched in the face. The population of this nation, roughly 328 million people, is not a "herd."  That many cattle would be a herd, but that many people is a "population," or a "public," or a "people."

What would happen to a politician who referred to an election as "the voice of the herd"? What we need to develop is "population immunity."

Meanwhile We Need Testing

San Diego has reached the ability to test 3000 persons per day. That means that to test the entire 2.5 million people who live in the San Diego metro area will require 2.28 years. That's a long tome to keep the economy shut down. The problem is that any person testing negative will eventually need to be tested again, so... Shut down forever.

Nationwide, we are hoping soon to be able to test 150 per 100,000 daily. Sounds like a lot, but it translates to 0.15% of the population. So if we reach that goal (and it's a goal, we can only do 44 per 100,000 today), it would take 1.82 years to test each citizen one time. By that time there would be no economy to be restarted, and bear in mind that each person who tested negative would eventually need to be retested.

The Burden of Debt, Part 1

Seldom has Dean Baker put so much self-justifying nonsensical rationalization in one article as he did a last Friday in a piece titled "Debt and Deficits with the Coronavirus.” He then compounded it with even more egregious nonsense in Sunday’s “The Washington Post’s Debt Cult.” The man has gone completely down the rabbit hole.

I will start with Friday’s follies, in which he starts by pontificating at great length (and incoherence) on the horror of the thought that the Fed might increase interest rates and why they should not do so. The Fed clearly has not shown the slightest intention since last year of raising interest rates, so he wins that round by default, sort of like urging the sun to come up in the morning. Good idea. Yea, he was right, it did.

Then he addresses the idea that the budget deficits are “overheating demand” and leading to shortages, notably of toilet paper. Right. Except that we ran short of toilet paper before the government started handing out money, so that weakens his argument just a little bit. Maybe more than a little. Perhaps we ran short of toilet paper in anticipation that the government… Never mind.

But he gets more than a bit incoherent again, saying that shortages, “would result in higher prices because the government is giving people money to buy these things, but the shortages would still be there without the budget deficits.” If you don’t follow that don’t feel bad, because no one else does either.

He follows that up with what he seems to think is a solution, saying that, “large numbers of people who are now getting unemployment insurance and other forms of income support in the shutdown period, simply would not be able to buy anything, thereby eliminating the demand and price pressure,” which doesn't address how demand (and prices) got so high in the first place. That’s called “circular reasoning,” and economists do it quite a lot.

He then tells us that he is going to address the issue of, “The other part of the big deficit story is that we are adding more than $2 trillion to the debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay off, or so the story goes.”

Except he doesn’t, of course, because he address payment of interest on the debt (incoherently, of course) but never addresses “paying off the debt” part.

That's because, like most economists, Baker does not visualize government debt as something that is ever paid back to the lender. Economists live in their own reality. In our reality, if it doesn’t have to be repaid it’s not a loan, it’s an investment, and investment by definition means an ownership stake. How can one have an ownership stake in the United States government?

Well, it’s called “campaign contributions,” but that’s a different topic.

“First,” he says, “this is not a case of our children paying the money to us…” which actually is wrong. We are spending the money, and are receiving the benefit of having spent the money, and our children and grandchildren are paying the money back. How is that not them paying us the money?

(The answer, for Dean Baker, is that they are not paying the money back. No one is paying the money back. We spent the money with no intention that it would ever be paid back. What does that make us?)

“…it is a case,” he goes on, “of some of our children paying money to other of our children.” This is true, he profoundly observes, because, “At some point, everyone who is alive today will be dead.” Interesting. Who among us would ever have thought of that? I was wrong; the man is a deep thinker.

“At that point,” he goes on, “the interest will be paid to whoever happened to inherit the bonds. So, the burden created by the debt … is that most of our kids will be paying interest to the heirs of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and other wealthy people.”

Dean Baker is one of the wealthy, so he’s quite happy that your kids and mine will be paying interest to his kids. You and I might not like that very much but, as he points out, we will all be dead.

And bear in mind that, according to Baker, “The burden of the debt, insofar as there is one, is the amount of money that we are paying out each year in interest to service the debt.” The debt itself, $24 trillion at this point, is not a burden. It is an irrelevancy and is of no concern to future generations.

Tomorrow I will explore Sunday’s exposition of incoherence and insanity, titled, “The Washington Post’s Debt Cult.” I read this shit so that you don’t have to.

Again, The Story Changes

When the shutdown started, we were told it was about “flattening the curve.” Not so much about preventing people from getting the virus as it was about stretching those cases out over a period of time so that our health care system would not be overwhelmed.

So now that the health care system has been rather massively underwhelmed and the number of cases is declining, we are told that the shutdown cannot be terminated because if we do then a lot of people will catch the disease.

That’s like running your furnace to keep your house warm in the winter and then, when the weather gets warmer, insisting that you have to keep running the furnace because if you stop you will bankrupt the company that provides fuel for your furnace.

(In case you’re missing my point, supporting the fuel company is not why you were running your furnace. You were doing so because the weather was cold, and now that the weather is warm you can stop.)

In the same vein, if we were doing the shutdown to avoid overwhelming the health care system, now that the health care system is clearly not overwhelmed, and clearly will not be, we can end the shutdown. But instead of ending it, government wants to continue it, and is now giving us a different reason for doing so.

This Is Terrorism

Big headlines yesterday that "US Passes Italy's Death Toll." Many articles hyperventilating about how this country has now passed Italy in the number of deaths from the Coronavirus which is massively slaughtering our population.

They fail to point out that Italy has a population of 60 million to our population of 328 million, which means that on a per capita basis Italy is still at more than five times our fatality rate. That would not add to the amount of panic that the media is deliberately fomenting.

Deliberately creating fear in a society is, by definition, terrorism.

The Nonsense Continues

The current narrative now is that restarting the economy (ending the shutdown) will depend on the ability to do massive testing and, as usual, this narrative is not being questioned. It not only should be questioned, it should be laughed out of town. It is sheer nonsense.

They are talking about ending isolation and shutdown, which are for the purpose of preventing people from catching the disease, based on testing, which does not prevent people from catching the disease. Where do we get these idiots?

A person could be tested today, found to be free of the virus, and could become infected the very next day and proceed to infect dozens of more people. Again, where do we get these idiots?

If this shutdown were logical, which it is not, then lifting it would not become possible until we achieve a proven vaccine. That may happen a year from now, more likely 18 months or more, or it may never happen at all. This is a corona virus, as is the common cold, and we have no vaccine for the common cold.

We have a vaccine for the common flu, and two years ago it killed 60,000 people in this country. Covid-19 has killed 13,000 so far and is now forecast to top at 30-50 thousand. Is a Covid-19 vaccine (when and if we get one) going to cut that number to zero?

The media propagates utter bullshit about “herd immunity” based on testing, on the myth of a vaccine as miraculous absolute prevention of death, and the American people buy into it like sheep led to the slaughter because we have not been taught the ability to think for ourselves.

Fortunately, Profiteering Is Illegal

I bought a new kitchen faucet (Delta) six months ago, choosing it part because it stated that it was made in America. I paid $110 to have it installed.

It turned out to be a piece of junk. Temerature control is erratic, the pull down nozzle does not dock properly, and after just a couple months it would not shut off without slamming the handle. Now it does not shut off at all. I bought a new one (Moen) and now need to have it installed.

I called the plumbing company I used in the past and they charged $45 to send a tech out who would quote me a price and do the work. The price he quoted? $553 for a task that would take about 45 minutes. I told him to do something that is physiologically impossible for male, female or (in these modern times) nonbinary. He probably went home and tried to do it. Why not, he’s undoubtedly done it to a lot of other people, just as he tried to do it to me.

Panic Leads to Stupidity, Part 2

Local media has been hyperventilating about hospitals being stressed and running out of "protective gear;" masks, face shields, etc. They are warning that we might not have enough ventilators in our hospitals. Then, two minutes later, they tell us that in the entire county we have a total of 48 people who have developed the illness caused by the virus. They don't say how many of them are currently hospitalized.

Panic Leads to Stupidity

We are told that 242 people in San Diego are infected by the Coronavirus. How many of them are in the hospital? We are not told that. How many are at imminent risk of death? We are not told that either.

We are also told that many people who are infected by the virus have mild symptoms, and sometimes none at all. How many of the 242 fall into that category? Yet another number which is not being reported.

So, how serious is it that 242 people have been infected by the Coronavirus? There is simply no way to know, and at this point it may not even be significant, let alone serious.

I’m not suggesting that it’s not serious. I’m pointing out that in a city of 1.5 million, 242 is a trivially small number, that it is the only number being reported, and that it is being reported in grave tones as if it represents a major disaster.

San Diego beaches and parks are now closed due to the threat posed by the Coronavirus.

"Social distancing" does not apply, beaches and parks are closed no matter how far you stay away from each other. Proof is offered by film on the news this morning of six or so people on the beach, no one person closer that fifteen feet to any other person, and cops driving by and threatening to put them in jail for being on the closed beach.

Would they be doing "social distancing" in the city or county jail?

Grocery stores in San Diego have special hours for seniors (65+) only. Seniors hour is 7am-8am which, unfortunately, is before the day's trucks are unloaded and the shelves restocked. It also results in very crowded stores at that hour.

Nobody thinks logically about anything today. That’s what happens when panic sets in.

No wonder we're failing.

What part of “idiot” does Bloomberg News not get? We have a news item informing us that Trump’s import tariffs on steel do not protect the steel industry that gets so many things wrong you’d think it’s trying to sabotage his run for the White House.

It starts with “JSW Steel’s India-based parent company” reducing production at a Texas plant despite “tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum imported to the U.S.” The article goes on to tell us some weeks ago a stupid and ignorant Fox newsman (Bloomberg didn’t use those adjectives) wondered if the tariffs might hurt the plant, “given that much of the raw steel processed at the mill was imported from India and Mexico.”

The plant manager’s reply boiled down to, “Of course not because we support Trump.” He was counting on an exemption on the tariffs, which he didn’t get because he’s importing the steel. (And now we're going to have the grits hit the fan because India is supporting Trump.)

Now, the Bloomberg article tells us, “A big piece of the Baytown project has been postponed indefinitely, in part because of Trump’s tariffs.” But mostly, of course, because the project was based on using imported steel, which is subject to the tariffs. Hello?

The article becomes less and less in contact with reality as it goes on. It tells us that the company’s manager claims that the company, “set out two years ago to do precisely what Trump and his trade hawks said the tariffs would help accomplish: reestablish the U.S. as a premier producer of steel.” And it’s going to do that by importing steel. What?

I don’t know what role Bloomberg plays with his newspaper, but having his name connected to this kind of gibberish does not get him my vote.

No, It's Not Boring

Upon looking closely you will see that the daily high temperature varies by one degree, and next Friday will be "mostly sunny" instead of "sunny."  Weather forecasters are swooning with breathless excitement.

Marriage is Great

You run out of coffee one time in 26 years, and your wife harasses you from then on as if it is something you plan to do on a weekly basis. "Are we okay on coffee?" becomes a nightly refrain. She is a lovely person.

This Is News?

NBC Evening News has a segment every night now about a “massive storm” which is either currently or soon will be “sweeping the nation.” So desperate have they become to present this feature that they are reporting storms which will contain “winds of up to 30 mph, and as much as four inches of snow.”

Even as far south as northern Alabama, that is not really a newsworthy storm, but they have to do their bit for global warming climate change.

They also have a nightly segment on the Chinese virus. They refer to it as a “deadly virus" or a “killer,” despite the fact that 98% of people infected by it do not die. The SARS virus is still around and kills 9.6% of people who come down with it, but the media ignores SARS while hyperventilating about coronavirus, which kills 2% of its victims.

The Chinese virus has caused about 600 deaths worldwide, at this point, and is headlining daily while the common flu, having killed more than 10,000 this year in the United States alone, doesn’t so much as get a vaccination advisory.

I know… Besides which, my wife keeps admonishing me. I watch this stuff so that I have something to write about when there’s no football games on.

A Question

If Trump were to say something in the SOTU tomorrow night that really pissed off the Republicans, and they responded by voting on Wednesday to convict Trump and remove him from office, would Democrats still be insisting that the verdict was illegitimate because there were no witnesses? I think we all know the answer to that.

A Surplus of Incompetence

The House issues subpoenas and the White House rejects them. There is nothing new about this. The White House, regardless of which party occupies it, almost always rejects subpoenas from Congress. Congress then goes to court, gets a judge to enforce the subpoena, and the process moves on.

When this House Committee met with resistance to its subpoenas, however, instead of going to court for what would most certainly be resolution in its favor, it threw in its hand and charged the President with "Obstruction of Congress." The reason they gave for not pursuing legal enforcement of their subpoenas was that the issue was urgent and time did not permit the lengthy process of obtaining court rulings.

In 2000, on the issue of Bush v. Gore and the presidential election, the case went from the initial court filing in Florida on November 17th to a final ruling by the Supreme Court on December 13th. That was a time lapse of 26 days, 7 days less than the 33 days that Nancy Pelosi held the Articles of Impeachment in her office in a (failed) effort to coerce the Senate into conducting the trial in a manner of her choosing.

Sheer logic would dictate a desire to keep the issue in the House of Representatives for the greatest possible degree of resolution. If the charging party cannot win a battle with the President in the House, where they have a majority, why in the world would they punt that battle to the Senate, where they do not have a majority?

Democrats will undoubtedly go forward saying that "the trial was unfair," and that the President and the Republican Party obstructed the process. They are already doing so, in fact, before the verdict has even been reached.

In reality, however, the failure was entirely predictable and was entirely due to a long series of unforced errors by the Democratic Party. As is usual with this party, they showed no real stomach for a fight, and when they encountered push back, they simply caved.

Undisclosed Info, Hereby Disclosed

I am not registered on any dating sites. It will hardly come as any surprise to my wife to learn that astonishing piece of information, and it may by slightly comforting to her to have me divulge it. Probably not, as I doubt seriously that it has ever occurred to her that I might be registered on any such sites.

Anyway, if I was registered on any such sites, I cannot imagine how Russia or China would benefit from knowing that I prefer redheads (again, I am perfectly comfortable revealing this to my wife, since she is a redhead), or that I like hiking, golf, and boating. Just why would Russia or China care?

Baltimore: Upset Deserved

Lamar Jackson threw for 365 yards and ran for 143, but his numbers included some serious garbage time padding. Ryan Tannehill threw for only 88 yards and ran for only 13, but he passed for two touchdowns to Jackson’s one (which was in garbage time) and ran for the one score that effectively sealed the upset (Jackson ran for none).

Jackson threw for the same amount of scores against Tennessee that Derrick Henry threw against Baltimore, and Jackson’s score was with Baltimore trailing so badly that Tennessee was in a prevent defense. The league's census MVP was intercepted twice, lost a fumble, and twice stuffed on fourth-and-one runs.

The final game “rest” and the “bye” week killed Baltimore, and so did Derrick Henry (with 195 rushing yards) and a Tennessee defensive front that reduced Baltimore's offensive line to a shadow of what it had been all season.

But let’s not give the Super Bowl trophy to Tennessee yet. They beat New England, who clinched the playoffs early and “rested” most of their first string the final week. They then embarrassed the Ravens who did the same thing followed by a “bye” week. So, the question is, what will they be able to do against a team that isn’t rusty, but is coming off a win the preceding week?

Just A Reminder

The “post war period,” from the 1950’s through the 1970’s, was a time of unparalleled prosperity for the working class in this nation. Even more than that, it created a level of prosperity for this nation’s working class that had no precedent in the world at the time.

I am referring here to the working class known as “blue collar;” workers who entered the workforce from high school without advanced educations; people who built the machinery and infrastructure of a great nation.

That period was a time of a nuclear family in which only one member worked at a single job, the wages of which were sufficient to support the worker, a homemaker, several children and often one or more members of an earlier generation.

The economy which provided such great prosperity for the working and middle class of this great nation was based on the principle of capitalism. Whatever ills today’s economy suffers from, capitalism is not the problem.

Selling Bridges in Brooklyn

General Soleimani was taken out because doing so stopped an "imminent" massive attack he was planning on America. Right. And we had to invade Iraq because they were buying aluminum tubes and yellowcake uranium pursuant to increasing their stockpiles of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Patrick Cockburn has spent many years in the Middle East and generally gets things right about what is going on there. What he writes all but invariably is borne out by time to be true. He has been saying for weeks that the unrest in Baghdad was not anti-Iranian, as American media claimed and as American politics hoped for, but was a protest against the Iraqi government, demanding jobs, public services and an end to corruption.

In an article yesterday, Cockburn made reference to “...General Soleimani overseeing the brutal efforts by pro-Iranian security forces and paramilitary groups to crush Iraqi street protests,” and the light dawned. America has been seeing these street protests as anti-Iranian, which they were not. The media has been reporting them as anti-Iranian and, as usual, was reporting inaccurately.

America wanted those street protests to continue, and General Soleimani was the main leader who was shutting them down. Draw your own conclusions.

California Logic

San Diego installed some years ago a bunch of cameras which caught people running red lights. Outrage ensued, of course. The lights interfered with "civil rights." No, not the right to run red lights, the right to "confront one's accuser." Seems you cannot argue with or discredit a camera.

So San Diego, and most of the surrounding suburbs, removed the cameras and went back to letting people get killed by people who ran red lights because they had protected their "civil rights." Of course those people were trampling all over the civil rights of the people they killed, but...

Then somebody noticed the lower death and injury rate in the one suburb which had not removed the cameras, and a movement began to reinstall the cameras in San Diego. The countermovement has new grounds for opposing the cameras, that being that cameras will cause an increase in rear end accidents as people who are not stopping for red lights will crash into people who are stopping for the cameras. Only in California.

Our Christmas Present

We have an appointment tomorrow to pick up our new family: Daisy, a calico, and her brother Skipper, black and white. They are very social cats, not quite five years old, and lost their home when their owner passed away. We have been catless for about seven months, so it's going to be a bit of an adjustment, but...

Can Nancy Remain In Office?

I'm not talking about this impeachment mess and her role, or lack thereof, in it. I'm talking about the number of times she has stood at the podium and babbled along with a vacant stare and in a manner suggesting that her brain is not connected to her mouth. Will voters in her district look at that and reelect her to yet another term?

A Test Of... Courage?

When I was a youngster my friends and I would play a game of seeing who could stand closest to (but not on) the tracks as freight trains came through at speed. There were steam engines pulling these trains, really big ones, with side rods flopping around, and often there were several engines pulling a train, so it was a considerable test of courage.

It was also a substantial display of stupidity, of course, but we were young males with far higher content of testosterone than of gray matter.

The engineers hated it, and would blow their whistles at us, which did nothing but encourage us of course. One engineer hit on the solution. He would open the cylinder drain cocks just before he got to us, which produces a major blast of live steam at ground level. (See above.) That dropped our testosterone levels quite a lot and very quickly.

He would then give us a couple of celebratory toots on his whistle as we showed him a rapidly diminishing view of our backsides and elbows.

Unicorns Again

The Washington Post tells us that "The House on Tuesday approved a massive $1.4 trillion spending package that would stave off a shutdown and fund the federal government through September." Really? That's almost ten months for a paltry $1.4 trillion, when the government has been spending more than $3.5 trillion per year for more than five years now. Is the Post delusional, or has there been massive budget cuts that we don't know about?

The question was rhetorical. I think we all know the answer.

Insanity

The following statement appeared in the New York Times today (behind a paywall), in reference to American military forces stationed within Syria.

“Commanders have requested guidance outlining how U.S. forces might deal with an attack from the assortment of armed groups, including Russian-backed Syrian government forces, that have, in the past, tried to seize territory held by the United States.”

The absurdity of that statement, presumably issued by someone with an IQ above room temperature, is off the scale. The question being asked, and the situation leading to the question, is the work of total idiots. The least stupid part of that question is that the Syrian Arab Army is not merely one of an “assortment of armed groups.” The real question should be phrased as,

“What do we do if the Syrian Arab Army tries to take back territory which we are illegally occupying within their country.”

How does a democratic nation come to such a pass?

Football Highlights

This was the best football weekend of the season. I will admit that Ohio State vs. Michigan was not everything that one might have wished for, but the Iron Bowl (Alabama/Auburn) not only lived up to expectations, it exceeded them. The game was even better than the final score (48-45) might lead one to believe. It was not busted plays or flukes, it was an entire game of outstanding football by both teams on both sides of the line of scrimmage. Edge of the seat stuff.

On Sunday the Ravens and 49ers game, despite being played in a downpour, or maybe because of it, was everything we all hoped it might be. It looked like the defense of both teams were not playing up to par because both offenses looked so proficient, until one looked at the scoreboard and realized the final score was only 20-17. That's the way football should be played; no spectacular plays, just solid, every play perfection.

The best couple moments came during the game between LSU and Texas A&M. One of them was not during the game and the other was not even on the football field. The first was when quarterback Joe Burrow came out before the game wearing a jersey with his name spelled "Burreaux." The home crowd went nuts. He changed it for one with his name spelled properly before the game.

The other came in the fourth quarter when, with LSU having a massive lead, they ceremoniously took Joe Burrow out of the game. It brought the house down, of course, as it was intended to do, and the camera panned to his parents in the stands. The look of love and pride on their faces was the best moment of the entire football weekend.

Politics

For those of you whose paper doesn't carry this strip.

Where Do You Put The Horse?

Have you noticed that, while united on the desire to impeach, Democrats have changed the grounds for that impeachment several times? Shouldn't that ring an alarm bell that they don't really care about "high crimes and misdemeanors" and are putting the cart before the horse?

First it was about "colluding" with the Russians to meddle in the election. Problem was that nobody knew precisely what constituted “collusion,” which didn’t stop them from spending 2+ years and $320 million trying to prove that he did it, whatever it was, and even with an such an undefined crime they failed to get an indictment.

Then it was about "obstruction of justice," except that no one could be convinced that what he was doing amounted to “obstruction.” Further, with no underlying crime it turned out that what he wasn’t obstructing wasn’t actually justice, so that amounted to another failure.

Next they moved from Russia to Ukraine and changed the charge to a "quid pro quo" until it turned out that voters couldn't speak Latin. In any case the Ukrainian president said there wasn’t a “quid pro quo,” whatever that is, so Democrats were foiled again.

Now they have switched the charge to "bribery," not because Trump did it, or because they have any evidence of such a deed, but because (unlike “collusion, obstruction of justice” or “quid pro quo”) that crime is specifically stated in the constitution as grounds for impeachment. Clever.

In the normal course of events this process would go something like, "Hey the president bribed somebody so we need to impeach him." Instead the drivers of the process are saying that, "We want to impeach the president, so we need to find a crime to use." Awesome.

Democrats are really enamored of their impeachment cart, they just don’t know where to put the horse, assuming that they would recognize a horse if it walked up and bit them on the collective ass.

A Rising Tide Doesn't Float All Boats

It seems the rest of the voters are catching up to me, as I knew Elizabeth Warren was full of crap a long time ago. If nothing else, she’s an economist, an ilk which tells us that if you pour water from one bucket into another then all buckets will be full.

(Dean Baker; “There is no such thing as a labor shortage. All you have to do is pay higher wages and hire them away from your competitor.”)

Lizzie had risen to one of the top two in the Democratic candidate field, but is now down in the middle ranks, with her rating falling from 27% down to 14% in the polls. It’s not surprising given her astonishing performance on “healthcare for all.” (Among other things. “I sent my kids to public schools.” Oops.)

For months Warren competed with Bernie Sanders on this point, with Sanders admitting that he would tax the middle class to pay for it but that the tax would be less than they are now paying in insurance premiums, while Warren said the middle class would pay nothing at all. She said that “I have a plan” to pay for it, one which did not include “working men and women,” but steadfastly refused to reveal the plan.

She finally succumbed to pressure and revealed the plan but would have been better off, as is usually the case with this nitwit, to have kept it to herself.

The first part of the plan was, of course, the “wealth tax” and, amazingly, no one interrupted her to point out that she had already committed the “wealth tax” to paying for a free college education for everybody including, apparently, those who didn’t graduate from high school.

Long story short, the payment plan floated like a brick in a millpond, so Warren changed to a long term transition wherein people would “buy in” to Medicare and private insurance would not be cancelled but would sort of wither away to a natural death as the popularity of Medicare…

Right, that boat is not floating either. Thus the drop in the polls.

Ready, Fire, Aim

Elizabeth Warren opines that, “Traffic violence kills thousands and injures even more American every year. On World Day Remembrance for Traffic Crash Victims, I’m sending my love to the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones. It’s time to #EndTrafficViolence.”

How precious is that? It probably would be more to the point to send love directly to people who have actually lost loved ones, rather than to their families and friends, but Elizabeth Warren is probably a little too erudite to realize that. It seems this lady is one of those people who has been educated beyond her intelligence.

Keeping the Faith

The Secretary of the Navy resigned yesterday because, “I no longer share the same understanding (of military law) with the Commander in Chief who appointed me. I cannot in good conscience obey an order that I believe violates the sacred oath that I took in the presence of my family, my flag and my faith to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Yes indeed, because the constitution specifically states that a Chief Petty Officer who poses with corpse of a dead enemy shall be ejected from the Navy Seals. I cannot find the article and paragraph at the moment, but there is no doubt that allowing Chief Gallagher to remain in the Navy Seals would be a direct and devastating violation of our constitution, and that such a violation would greatly endanger the national security of our nation.

The Purpose of Tariffs

A few days ago Dean Baker wrote a piece declaiming the evils of tariffs. He is an economist, and should have been taught the value of tariffs as an economic protectionist tactic, and that our government has used them many times in the past 200 years, but apparently he skipped that part of class. I left the following comment on his piece.

Yes, tariffs raise prices on imported goods. That is their purpose. They do not raise prices on goods made in this country. That means that tariffs make domestic manufacturers competitive with cheap imports produced by low cost foreign labor, thereby benefiting workers who make those products in this country.

I am one of those workers. Back in the 1960s the American steel industry was being hurt by low quality steel imported from Europe, mostly from Poland, and sold at low prices. The government finally imposed tariffs on that imported steel, making high quality American steel competitive, and my job was saved.

Yes, the American consumer pays higher prices. They are doing so to support well paid, meaningful manufacturing jobs for their fellow citizens. You get what you pay for.

Dean Baker removed the comment from his blog.

(Yes, President Trump's comment was ignorant, in that it wrongly states the benefit of tariffs. That does not make Baker's response logical or reasonable.)

Why Colleges are Failing Us

I was directed to a Facebook post by Heather Cox Richardson, who is an American historian and Professor of History at Boston College, on the subject of Gordon Sondland’s session before the Senate committee. Her dissertation on Sondland's testimony sort of illustrates why today’s institutes of higher education are going so horribly wrong.

She does say that, “Sondland has changed his testimony three times now, and is clearly motivated by a keen desire to stay out of jail,” and that “…he was also clearly being very careful with his wording over some issues, and there is no reason to take his testimony as gospel truth.”

After that quite rational observation she adds another reason to discard entirely anything the Sondland might have to say. “Certainly his claim that Ukraine fell within his portfolio is wrong and self-serving. Ukraine is not part of the European Union, and at the time he began his shenanigans, Ukraine had an ambassador,” who wasn’t him.

Having made a couple of statements that reflect a reasonable degree of sanity, she then departs entirely from the sphere of reality. “Still,” she says, “my long-standing prediction that this administration ends in a resignation is looking stronger than it did a day ago.”

Seriously? You completely discredit this clown, and then assert that his dishonest uninformed bullshit is going to take the president down? And you are a college professor?

She then goes on to assert that, “the Ukraine scandal was about undermining Trump’s leading Democratic challenger by starting rumors that he was under investigation for a crime.” Well, that might be true if you believed Sondland’s lies that the scandal was about what Trump supposedly did, but reality is that the scandal was about Democratic lies attempting to undermine a constitutionally elected president.

She adds that, “Trump’s plot weakened Ukraine and strengthened Russia,” when it wasn’t Trump’s plot, it was a Democratic plot which didn’t significantly affect Ukraine at all, in part because Russia was laughing their asses off at American idiocy.

She finishes with, “It is an attack on American democracy itself, taking away our right to choose our own leaders.” Well, yes, because the losing side is trying to impeach the one we elected, merely because he won.

Lighter News

A post on The Duffell Blog, a military version of The Onion, was headlined “Marine crayon eating contest goes horribly wrong.”

The problem leading to the contest's disaster was, the article tells us, that “no one told Pfc. Smith he needed to chew the crayons.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Marine Corps, have a very high respect for them and have enjoyed a sterling relationship with them through the years.

FFL/NFL Thoughts

Last week I was in sole possession of 11th place in a 12-team league. I won this past weekend and am now in a four-way tie for 8th place, which is not as much of an improvement as it might seem, since there is still only one team with a worse record than mine. I am keeping company with the Chargers.

Did I really watch that last night? Four interceptions, and two more interceptions dropped? Five trips into the red zone in the first half, netting nothing more than three field goals? That was just weird.

Impeachment Follies

Please don't mistake me for a supporter of Donald Trump, but...

The “whistleblower” came forward because he was concerned that President Trump was “going against established US foreign policy.”   Since the constitution clearly and unequivocally establishes that is the President who sets US foreign policy, how is it even possible that the President could “go against established US foreign policy.”

The current “talking point” for impeachment is no longer “quid pro quo,” but is now the same actions relabeled as “bribery." This is because “quid pro quo” is not named in the constitution as grounds for impeachment, while “bribery” is.

Bribery is rather clearly defined in the dictionary, and there a few problems with the application of the term to this set of actions and statements. Trump did not give Ukraine this money, Congress did. Trump did not personally benefit from the putative “quid pro quo,” his presidential campaign supposedly did.

Even if legal maneuvering could manage to define Trump as the donor of the money to Ukraine because he held it back and then released it, which would be legal magic to an extraordinary degree, this instance would have severe consequences. If paying money to enhance one’s political campaign amounts to bribery, then every member of Congress is in very big trouble.

From Homeschoolmomof11, a commenter on Powerline, regarding Ambassador Yovanovitch, “I keep trying to hold to the ideal that women can be just as strong as men and just as deserving of leadership positions, but the Democrats keep pushing women like this into the spotlight and ruining it for me.” Yes, this woman and the ditz who tried to bring down Justice Kavanaugh.

Levity In My Life

My wife is makes many positive contributions to my life, among them an ongoing sense of levity. She is currently having an anxiety attack because I am changing a light switch in the bathroom. She is utterly convinced that this is an activity which will almost certainly lead to my instant and horribly painful death. There is a secondary concern that it might set the house on fire. I like her priorities, but...

She is well aware that I was an Electrician's Mate in the Navy. Everything else that I do is self taught, but electrical work is the one thing for which I have any formal training. It matters not. Electricity is a substance only slightly less dangerous than Republicans.

Interest On The Debt

Dean Baker published a piece a couple weeks ago in which he opined that government payments of interest on the national debt are too trivial to deserve any attention, and are in any case smaller now than they were in 1991. You have to make allowances for Dean, he’s an economist, and his brain was destroyed in college.

What he said, specifically, was that “interest payments were around 1.7 percent of GDP last year,” which “compares to a peak of 3.2 percent of GDP in 1991.”

Interest payments are not subtracted from GDP, of course, they are subtracted from federal revenue, and I’ll get to that in a bit, but like most economists, Dean Baker is really lousy at math. In fiscal 2019 the government paid $574.6 Billion in interest and the GDP was $21.3 Trillion, so the percentage was 2.7%, not the 1.7% he claims. In 1991 the numbers were $286 Billion and $6.16 Trillion, so that year it was 4.6% rather than the 3.2% that his slide rule came up with.

He doesn’t say where he gets his numbers, possibly from a portion of his body that the sun never shines on. I get mine from the US Treasury Department website. 2.7% is a bit more than half of 4.6%, so the “less than half” part of his headline is bogus, but even so his theory would paint a pretty nice picture if it was the whole story. But, of course, it is not the whole story by a long shot.

For one thing, he takes the position of a man falling from a ten story building, who says as he passes the fifth floor, “Well, I’m okay so far,” because he disregards the factor of interest rates. And that is by no means a trivial issue.

In 1991 the debt was $3.66 Trillion, so that $286 Billion represented a 7.8% interest rate. Today the debt is $22.8 Trillion and the $574 Billion amounts to a 2.5% interest rate. What that means is that if the interest rate rises we have a problem. At the 7.8% rate of 1991, interest today would be $1.78 Trillion.

How big a problem is that? Well, at 8.5% of GDP, even Dean Baker might consider that a bit of a problem. I would not, because its relation to GDP is utterly irrelevant. Interest payments are not paid out of the GDP, they are paid out of federal revenue, and payments of $1.78 Trillion out of federal revenue is a disaster. That interest payment would consume 51.4% of federal revenue.

Even at the current 2.5% rate, interest payments of $575 Billion consume 16.5% of federal revenue, which currently is $3.46 Trillion. No spending item other than “defense” spends more. And since we continue to spend $1 Trillion more than we take in every year, the cost of the debt grows larger and more dangerous every year.

And yet not only is this issue entirely absent from the political discourse, every Democratic candidate continues to promise more and more “free stuff” as the foundation of their campaign, assuring the “middle class” that they will have to pay for none of it.

Elizabeth Warren's Funny Money

As much as it was beginning to annoy the media, Elizabeth Warren would have been better served to continue refusing to answer questions about how she was going to pay for her “Medicare For All” plan.

One has only to examine the first item in her plan to see that what she is proposing makes “smoke and mirrors” look more substantial than a fleet of nuclear bombers.

Bear in mind that the plan will cost $3.2 trillion per year, and total government spending in 2019 was $4.45 trillion. Given that we are currently spending $1.3 trillion on health care, the $3.2 trillion cost of her “Medicare For All” plan will be more than the $3.15 trillion of non-health care spending by the government, so funding is not a trivial issue.

“First,” she says, “we’re going to use the $1.6 trillion of current spending on Medicare and Medicaid.” She actually says $16 trillion, because she adopts the popular fantasy of using numbers for a decade, but since the government only budgets for one year at a time I’m going to call her on using bogus numbers and stick to using real ones.

The first problem with her claim here, is that in 2019 we are spending only $1.3 trillion, so there is already a $300 billion hole in her funding plan, and we are still on the first line item of her plan.

The next problem is that she is evaluating apples by counting oranges with that claim, in that she is discussing funding and citing spending, which are two different things. The government is spending more than it takes in, and one item that is definitely operating at a deficit is Medicare. Medicare taxes, in fact, only cover about half of what is spent on Medicare payouts, and other health care spending is operating on the same 35% deficit that the government does.

So, and you can do your own math on this, the actual funding that she will get for her plan by claiming existing funding, rather than existing spending, is $800 billion. That is barely half of the $1.6 trillion she claims will contribute toward funding of her plan, so just by examining the first line item of her laundry list we see that she is already $800 billion short on her claim.

The rest of the items are no better, and most of them are worse, so this funding plan is really no better than her claims of Native American heritage.

California style

Santa Ana weather is not limited to wind. Winds north of us are still high, but the past couple of days we have actually had very little wind. What we have had is very low humidity which causes a large day/night heat difference, and that effect is magnified by being at the sea coast. Our differences are running almost 50 degrees between daytime high and night time low. We actually run the air conditioner in the afternoon and the furnace at night. Weird, but...

What's funny is watching the early morning dog walkers on the street in front of our house. Parkas are quite common, along with mittens. Oddly, the parkas and mittens are often combined with shorts and flip flops. Well, this is California.

Things are not always what they seem.

There was an article in Sky News about large numbers of young people seeking to reverse their decision to "transgender" themselves. Turns out changing their gender didn't make them as happy as they were promised it would do. Maybe their gender wasn't the problem.

My father was an alcoholic, as am I. Neither of us never lost our family or career, but we drank and lost our sense of self. When my father got sober and, nine years later I did likewise, I found out that feelings are often not what they seem.

My Dad and I both suffered from a great deal of anger. We did not beat our wives or anything like that. I got in bar fights for a while, but that phase didn't last long. But anger was always there for both of us. Anger management courses did nothing. You know that thing about expressing or "ventilating" your anger? Not only didn't work, it made things worse.

Then one time after I'd been sober a while I was talking with a psychologist about depression. This was not treatment, we were just chatting socially. He commented that I would never describe myself as depressed even if I was. I said that would be dangerous, to be depressed and not know it. I remember his response word for word. "Oh, no, you would manifest it as anger."

That social conversation started me on a journey. Was my anger actually something else manifested as anger? The answer, of course, turned out to be not just "yes," but "oh hell yes."

It wasn't depression as it turns out. What it was is not really pertinent to my point. I no longer have to deal with anger, though and I never actually dealt with anger. I worked until I found out what my problem was, I dealt with that problem, and the anger melted away.

How many of these poor lost souls who "transgender" would be saved a lot of pain if they had the good fortune to run across someone who helped them find out that the nature of their sexual organs was not what was causing them to feel weird?

What Kind of Star?, Take 2

Melvin Gordon wanted to be paid $13 million per year to be a running back for the Los Angeles Chargers. He carried the ball 16 times this past weekend, for 32 yards. At his desired pay rate he would be getting paid $25,390.63 per yard.

He ran twice from the one-yard line, gained zero yards and fumbled the ball once. I have no idea how to calculate the pay rate for that.

What Kind of Star?

In reporting her endorsement of Bernie Sanders, NBC News anchor Lester Holt referred to Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez as a "Democratic rising star." Abandon hope all ye who are members of the Democratic Party.

Voodoo Economics Again

Dean Baker is back at it again with his insane theories about the reason and need for taxes. He tells us again yesterday that, “the federal government doesn’t need revenue to spend, it prints money.”

You don’t need income when you can print money. The deficit and federal debt are meaningless, which would lead a person with an IQ higher than room temperature to wonder why we keep track of that debt, and why Congress imposes spending limits.

Adding to the spending limit mystery, of course, is that every time we reach that limit Congress raises it, which would lead a thinking person to wonder why it exists. Not to worry, though, as there aren’t any thinking persons in this nation.

So why do we have taxes? We have them, according to Dean Baker, “to reduce consumption, so as to create the economic space for spending.”

Okay, think about that for a moment. No one does, because thinking is extinct in this nation. Taxes exist purely to prevent you from spending your own money on what you want to buy, which is what “consumption” is, so as to “create economic space for spending.”

Spending by whom? They are taking money from us to prevent us from spending it in order to “create space for spending.” How is that anything more than mere gibberish?

And, if Baker’s argument is valid, why are all of the Democratic candidates talking about the new forms of taxes they are going to create, given that today’s problem is an inability to keep inflation up to the target of 2% as desired by the Federal Reserve, and that the purpose of taxes is to hold down inflation?

Hyperbole Returns to San Diego

The San Diego Union Tribune sports writers are so ecstatic over the Chargers (who, it should be pointed out, are no longer even a San Diego team) winning a football game Sunday, that one of them writes that quarterback Philip Rivers, "has a decent shot of reaching the Super Bowl tournament."

First let's be clear that the Super Bowl is a football game, not a tournament.

Next, let's come back down to Earth and point out that the Chargers have played only four games of a sixteen game season and have won only two of those games while the Chiefs have won all four of the games they have played, making the Chargers tied for second in their division. Not to mention that they have yet to play the Chiefs and the Raiders each twice, leaving the playoffs rather much questionable.

Not to mention that the game they just won, and which made the local sports writers so ecstatic, was against Miami, which now has a record of 0-4 and cannot really be called a bad football team because it is pretty much not really a football team at all.

Endlessly Feckless

The party that brought us Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Fitzgerald Kennedy has deteriorated to a band of harpies and dodderers whose sole motivation is the acquisition and preservation of power, and whose methods consist of a frantic contest to see who can offer the most lavish free lunch using other people’s, and mostly fictional, money.

Their current Plan A has been “RussiaGate,” a ship which they continued to steer long after it ran aground on the rocks of reality, fecklessly cranking on the helm and wondering why it was going in the wrong direction without realizing that it was hard aground and going nowhere.

They then moved to Plan B, which was called “Project 1619,” and was a plan that revised history to show that this nation was not founded in 1776 based on the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence, but was founded when the first shipload of African slaves landed on this continent in 1619, and that the new nation was intended as a market for African slaves. The purpose of Project 1619 was to demonstrate that the current president is a racist, but no logical explanation of how it does that has ever been offered.

The plan never ran aground for the simple reason that it never really left port. The public realized that, while this tomfoolery was great for destroying the “Make America Great” campaign, they didn’t really want a “Make America Awful” campaign to replace it, and even Democrats figured out that they weren’t going to be able to impeach a sitting president for aiding and abetting slavery in the 21st century.

So some Democrats noticed Joe Biden boasting about using $1 billion of US foreign aid money to extort Ukraine to fire their General Prosecutor and came up with Plan C, which boils down to, “Let’s impeach the current president for doing what Joe Biden did,” which actually has several flaws.

Flaw number one is, of course, that it shoots down in flames the leading Democratic presidential candidate, but that’s okay because he was the wrong gender anyway. Whoever the next president is, it must be a female. Sorry, Bernie, you’re next, but you should be used to it by now.

The second flaw is, of course, that the sitting president did not do what they claim he did, but that’s only a drawback if you’re not a Democrat. Liberals never let facts stand in the way of a good narrative, even though it was a Republican who famously claimed that, “we create our own reality, which you are at liberty to admire.”  Democrats do not really expect that their creation of reality, in which this nation's founding principle was the enslavement of African people, will be admired by anyone.

In order to enhance the culpability of the sitting presidency of doing what Joe Biden did, Democrats cook up various fictions to maintain that Joe Biden didn’t do it, as if his innocence somehow proves the sitting president’s guilt. The logic involved in that argument is somewhat less than impeccable, but…

One might think that lurking in the back of the Democratic mind is Plan D, which might involve an outline of constructive action, but it is becoming increasingly likely that such is not the case. ("Free lunch" cannot really be considered constructive.) They had nothing in 2016 other than preaching the evils of their opponents, and so far this cycle they seem to have nothing other than, “shampoo, rinse, repeat.”

Whitewash

NBC News ran a segment last night which included an "exclusive interview" with the Ukrainian prosecutor who was fired at Joe Biden's behest. The interviewer went to great length to get the prosecutor to say that he had not seen any evidence that either Biden, father or son, had violated any Ukrainian law. Apparently extortion is legal in Ukraine.

It matters not. NBC's effort to keep Joe Biden out of this story is bullshit. Any prosecutor will tell you that motive is not an element of the crime.

Joe Biden is convicted of extortion out of his own mouth. "If the prosecutor's not fired you don't get the money." It doesn't matter why he did it. If you rob a bank and give the money to charity, you are still guilty of bank robbery, and you will serve the same jail sentence as if you had used the money to buy diamonds for your wife or a Rolex for yourself.

"If the prosecutor's not fired you don't get the money." Guilty, case closed.

Willful Blindness

Democrats are outraged that Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, but the sad fact is that there is no need to investigate him. Joe Biden has convicted himself out of his own mouth, repeatedly.

He tells us, “They’re walking out of the press conference and I said, ‘Nah, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars.’” The Ukrainian officials challenged him, reminding him that the president had authorized the money, and he says that he replied to them, “Call him. I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars.” He tells them that he’s leaving in six hours and, “If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money.”  He then finishes the story by saying, gleefully, “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”

You do not need to know anything about the Ukrainian prosecutor or what he was investigating. You do not need to know anything about Joe Biden’s son, the son’s business dealings, or Joe Biden’s knowledge of the son’s business.

The facts needed to convict Joe Biden of a felony are contained in the words that come out of his own mouth. Joe Biden, acting in his official capacity as Vice President of the United States, interfered in the internal governance of Ukraine, using $1 billion of US foreign aid money as an instrument of extortion to do so.

Democrats are saying the Trump “pressured Zelensky by implication” because the actual threat of not delivering $350 million in aid was not made verbally in the conversation. Perhaps. Some would say the so-called threat was not made at all. Joe Biden’s threat was not implied. “If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money.”

What Trump did say in the telephone conversation was that, “What Joe Biden did was really shameful,” a statement with which I find it hard to disagree.

The media’s response to that, in their commentary following Trump’s news conference was, stunningly, unbelievably, “There’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything wrong.”

The media is accusing Trump, on evidence that at best is thinner than a single strand of a spider’s web and in actuality is entirely fictional, of holding foreign aid money as a quid pro quo for favors from a foreign leader, but in the face of Joe Biden actually boasting of doing precisely that they say that, “There’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything wrong.”

There can be no stronger evidence that the media has become an instrument of political manipulation and propaganda, and that it is is devoted to deposing an elected president by any means.

Redoubling on Double Standard

Hillary Clinton pays an ex-Russian agent to get dirt on her political rival while corrupting the Democratic Primary election, and when news of all that comes out the Democrats create “Russiagate” to brand Trump as a Russian agent.

After two full years of hysteria, that whole thing lies on the floor like a dead walrus while Democrats idly flog and poke the carcass hoping for signs of life.

Then Joe Biden brags about using $1 billion in US foreign aid to blackmail Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who is investigating the Ukrainian company that is enriching his son Hunter, and the Democrats create “Ukrainegate” before they even know what the telephone conversation in question actually contained, accusing Trump of maybe (there's no evidence) doing what they know for sure that Biden actually did do.

They really think this one is going to work, even though Hillary’s crimes were not identical to those attributed to Trump and that she did not admit them, while Biden’s crime is identical to that attributed to Trump, and not only has he admitted it, he actually brags about it repeatedly.

And, as an interesting little sidelight, they condemn Trump for not delivering the whistleblower to them, notwithstanding that no president in history and been as viciously prosecutorial of whistleblowers as Barack Obama, a policy of which Democrats were fully supportive.

The Antonio Brown Saga

New England fans were ecstatic. Bill Belichick is the one man in the NFL that will be able to control Tonio. This will make the Patriots 16-0 this season and turn the Super Bowl into a cakewalk. Oh, hahahaha. Not so much.

Hysteria Nation

Perhaps California could come up with this, but the following is from the today's issue of the Seattle Times.

"Two young people who used vaping products have been diagnosed with severe pulmonary lung diseases, bringing the total number of Washington state cases to three in what health officials say is a statewide outbreak of severe illnesses."

Three cases. 3. The number one larger than two. A "statewide outbreak."

Vaping has been around for several decades and has been practiced by millions of people. No problems have been reported until this month. Now we have 380 people sick and 6 people dead in a nation of 320 million people. Six people. Not six million, six thousand, or even six hundred. Six.

These people vaped, so it's time to panic. It's time to screech about the "vaping epidemic" (six dead, for God's sake), and ban vaping. "They were vaping and now they're dead."

We don't know what else they were doing. They may have been huffing paint. They may have been smoking magic mushrooms. But we have a fucking "vaping epidemic." God help us all.

They Are Who We Thought They Were

And who they have been for several years. Favored by 7.5 points, the Chargers were tied with the Colts at the end of regulation, after the Colts had missed two short field goals and an extra point kick. The Chargers did manage to win in overtime, but... They had a team total of 166 yards rushing without Melvin Gordon, which makes his $13 million demand look sillier by the week.

The Kansas City Chiefs won 40-26, so they met expectations. Eli Manning went down in flames 35-17, so he lives up to his recent reputation. The Patriots massacred the Steelers 33-3 as Big Ben continues on his sad road to ignominy.

Thursday Night Football

Today's headline read, "Defenses Put Offenses To Sleep."

How about "Offenses Put Viewers To Sleep." That may have been the most over-hyped, worst football game I have ever watched. 100 years have brought us to this? A game in which the coaches do not know how to call plays; calling for a pass to be thrown behind the line of scrimmage when trailing by seven points, with three minutes left in the game, and 70 yards away from scoring?

As bad as the play calling was, offensive player execution was even worse. Dropped passes were matched by receivers running the wrong routes, quarterbacks missing open receivers, throwing passes that took the receivers out of bounds, and offensive linemen that were not even looking at the players they were supposed to block.

Fortunately, there will be some games Saturday being played by colleges, which have players and coaches who actually know what they're doing.

CA legalizes discrimination

SB 826, passed last year, added a section to the California Corporations Code to mandate that all corporations must include at least one female on their boards of directors. Larger corporations must include more than one. The benefit to corporations is unclear. The benefit to the state of California is even less clear.

Note that they do not need to include any males. A board of directors which is 100% female would be perfectly okay with the California Legislature, just not one which is 100% male. This is, somehow, not discriminatory.

Low Expectations

Much excitement is being made about Auburn's freshman quarterback and his "awesome" performance against Oregon last night. I'm like, "What?"

The guy completed 13 passes out of 31 attempts, for 42%, which might be okay in Pop Warner leagues but stinks in the NCAA and utterly reeks in the SEC. It goes downhill from there. He threw two touchdowns and two interceptions, and the winning touchdown with nine seconds left in the game was badly underthrown. It was a completion only because the Oregon defender badly botched the defense.

For the entire game the announcers were raving about the wonderfulness of Gus Malzahn's play calling, and I was wondering what planet they were on. He continually ran straight into the teeth of Oregon's strength, leading to Auburn generating a total of 206 yards rushing, which normally would be a decent halftime figure for an Auburn team. Overall, he made Oregon look better than it actually is.

Auburn has LSU, Georgia and Alabama on their schedule, and if they don't get their shit all in one sock those three games are not going to be the only ones that embarrass the hell out of them.