A Stop on the Revenge Tour

The usual gang of pundits are all agog over Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} going after all these rich Ivy League schools. After all, didn't he graduate from one of them? Isn't the Ivy League his Tribe? Well... not really.

You see, he tried to get into Penn/Wharton as a freshman, but got rejected!! Another basis for retribution.

Both friends planned to enroll at Penn [or in Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell}'s case, USC as well], but only Nolan got accepted. Ten years later, Nolan was working in Penn's admissions department - he would later become director of undergraduate admissions - when Fred called in a favor.

So, Donny "2 Dolls"^{©Lawrence O'Donnell} has had decades to seethe and squirm over that rejection. He had to spend two years at some commuter school in the Bronx, before sneaking in the back door. Ivy League said, NO!! Gotti make them pay.

In Case You Haven't Heard - part the second

Mad Dictator Don gave away the simple fact that he's been lying for at least 4 decades (according to much reporting on his miserable life) about the target of tariffs. He continues to insist that China's Gummint, et al and Chinese companies, et al are the ones who pay our beloved Treasury all those Trillions of Bongo Bucks. They'll come in like a tidal wave.

Then he had to go and spoil his own (made for teeVee) party by admitting:

"Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally."

One might wonder whether the sub-GED folks who (may be) voted him President get the gag?

Which, of course, led Lawrence O'Donnell to offer up

Donny "2 Dolls"

as if he were a character on "The Sopranos". Which, in and of itself isn't far from reality. He shur do run the country and the world like a Mob Boss.

Risky Business

One might wonder why it is that Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts wish so much to kill SS, Medicare, and Medicaid? I mean, they are Christians right? Succour the poor and all that? I mean, other than just pure cruelty, what's in it for the Oligarches? Cruelty is Good, but Moolah is better!!

So, the answer is as obvious as the nose on your face: risk. In particular, shifting as much as possible from Uncle Sugar, who can handle it; if He wants to. There was lots of bleating when the Bond Vigilantes went to work when Mad Dictator Don went total batshit with his 'foreign countries pay the tariffs, so let's make them pay more'. Except, of course, Batshit J. Moron is just that. Seems to have been playing that tune in his head for about 4 decades. Instant Great Trumppression is something not even the ball-less Congresscritters will tolerate. The Right Wingnut talking heads pooh-poohed the plain fact that household investment assets took it in the neck. 401(K) and such. 65 year olds bleating that they can't retire, since they don't have (with the death of unions) defined benefit retirement plans. Gone the way of the dodo. Just some moolah socked away in melting 401(K).

So, what's in it for the oligarches? Well... follow the money. If SS disappears, what's a middle class unit to do? Why, jump into the stock market with both feet!! All that free moolah for brokers and such. Imagine the Chrismas Goose of the SS trust fund nest egg out there to be pillaged by them guys. Guess how much it amounts to today? A little bit, just $2.8 Trillion Bongo Bucks. Imagine the brokerage industry getting its hands on that? Boy howdy!! They'll fleece tens of millions of retail plungers out of that in no time!! Yessirree Bill.

There's a reason civilized countries have pensions financed and run by the Damn Gummint. And it's simple: investing intelligently takes a lot of time, a lot of specific knowledge, and, most of all, a stock pile of Bongo Bucks so that Mr. Jones and family can reliably pack it in for retirement knowing that the expected Bongo Bucks will flow as promised even if there's a Trumppression. Not so much if Mr. Jones, who's just a bare assed plumber, has no real stock pile. If there's a Trumppression, Mr. Jones and his family are shit out of luck. The oligarches have gotten away with Mr. Jones' nest egg. "We're so sorry the market crashed, but we had nothing to do with it, and we decided to keep your moolah. Have a nice day."

No Fucking Way - part the seventh

Well... I'd be willing to bet a vente lemonade that the sub-GED crowd living in them there hollers never expected this. The, mostly, only access to some level of healthcare is going poof. Serves them right for continuing to elect rich white guys at all levels of governance.

Funding for rural hospitals would be hit particularly hard. The draft budget would eliminate Rural Hospital Flexibility Grants, State Offices of Rural Health, At-Risk Rural Hospitals Programs Grants and the Rural Residency Development Program.

It's hard enough, even under Woke Politicians, for the sub-GED shitkickers to get any kind of healthcare. With Medicaid on the ropes, may be the sub-GED rural shitkickers will finally, finally figure out that it really, really is just the Woke Politicians who give a shit about their plight. shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw sure don't. What a surprise. As Heinlein observed: "ignorance is curable, stupidity is forever."

President Donald Trump's firings at the Department of Health and Human Services included the entire office that sets federal poverty guidelines, which determine whether tens of millions of Americans are eligible for health programs such as Medicaid, food assistance, child care, and other services, former staff said.

You ain't the Damn Gummint's definition of Poor, you ain't got no Medicaid. Among others. Hell, if shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw get their way, even a Red Blooded American, who pisses off either of them, will end up in El Salvador.

Foot, Meet Bullet

My time with DB2/LUW has been with community edition (free-ish) 11.5 for some time. Fact is, I acquired this M900 (IBM) pc to outfit it with 16 gig of memory, which is the max supported in 11.5. Since I'm going through the agony of upgrading ubuntu (the image has been moved from 8.04 onward, with the original root partition too small to upgrade further; new machine cloned drive, and so on). So it seemed opportune to have another look at DB2. Imagine my surprise to find the max memory support has been cut to 8 gig in today's shipping edition. They, of course, spin this as a favor to users. Yeah, right.

By most accounts/metrics, DB2 is at the back of the RDBMS pack. They invented the damn thing! So they shoot themselves in the foot. PG is ok, but it's a process model database. MySql is not so ok, what with the corporate nonsense.

Let's Bet

So, they've caught the dude that burned up the Pennsylvania Governor's manor. Let's all bet on whether or not he's a MAGAnaut. Seems more likely than not. Second choice is Real Anti-Semite.

You Might Not Know

It appears, for a long time, that John Q. Public has a false notion of how the Damn Gummint interest rate works. First, and most importantly, the USofA doesn't have a Gummint Bank to rule all others. Most countries (1st world and lower) do, the Bank of England is one such. Our Fed doesn't set any interest rate, at all. Imagine that? The closest lever it has is the so-called Overnight or Interbank Lending rate. But this is just a benchmark which the Fed promulgates to commercial entities. "Pretty please." Of course, if an entity thumbs its nose...

Ok, you might ask, where does an interest rate come from? Well... it depends, but most importantly, it isn't like when you get a credit card (20% ish), or a car loan (6.35% for new and 11.62% for used; people buying used are high risk deadbeats I guess), or a house mortgage (6.62% 30 year). All of those rates are given to you by the lender, period.

Selling Uncle Sugar's Treasuries doesn't work that way. First off, once a note is sold "to the public", it remains an asset for sale forever, well until retired. So the value at which a note sells for this minute is not likely to be exactly the same value shown on the face of the note (you're not likely to ever see one printed like an Abe). So what, you might rejoin!!! It sold for 4.5% at auction last week, so it's a 4.5% note. Nope.

The key word there is "auction". Treasury announces the so-called coupon (what Treasury pays the holder every so often) of, say $5 for a (nominal) $100 note. Normal citizens can't directly buy one or two, but if they could they don't really buy a $100 note because the actual price will be determined by the auction process. So the earned interest rate will depend on the coupon / sale value. If they sell at $100, then the earned rate is 5%, just what Treasury expected. But it doesn't have to be.

More to the point, all those active notes are on sale every minute just like Tesla stock, and the current sale price (and thus the earned interest) is what the trading public wishes to pay. More than $100 and the buyer gets less than 5%; conversely, lower and more.

So, once the implications of Mad Dictator Don's insane tariff regime began to sink in with the hedge funds, and retirement funds, and Japan, and billionaires they all went bananas. According to some reporting Japan (and not China, surprise) was sufficiently pissed at the gag that they sold off reams and reams of Treasuries. Pretty much all at once. Treasury prices sank, implied interest rate soared, and the financial Daddy Warbucks sent Mad Dictator Don a message: "cut the shit, asshole". And he did.

Treasury does auctions, under usual circumstances four times a year. Guess when the next auction (again, normally) is up? May. Guess what happens to that $5/$100 note auction if the trading market keeps dropping the price of Treasuries? Uncle Sugar takes it in the nuts. Expecting $X billion but ending up with $(X - Y) billion instead. Not Good Eats. Even Batshit J. Moron could read those big block crayon letters on the wall. He loves him some debt, and he's gonna need gobs of it to pay hisself and fellow millionaires and billionaires that juicy tax cut he promised. Again. Oops.

Thus endeth the Tariff War. May be. He's so unhinged that he could well try it again soon. Stay tuned.