The Office of Data Integrity in Action

Regular reader knows my thought on the risk NSA pays to the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts in general and Mad Dictator Don specifically. Now Lunatic Laura Loomer appears to have instigated a data purge at NSA. Of course she would.

Believe it or don't: the NSA remit is to hoover up all electronic comms to and from, but recorded from, anyone not in the USofA. That, of course, includes all the chatter betwixt Mad Dictator Don, his minions, Vlad and his minions going back forever. Where's Edward Snowden when it matters? We American People need to know whether Mad Dictator Don has and is selling out our country. Full stop.

Thought For The Day - 3 April 2025

Long time readers will recall one of the memes of these missives: anarchy favors the rich. The Left Wing Lunatic Fringe has been frothing at the mouth over Mad Dictator Don's tariff regime. They can't or won't figure out the rationale of what, from a macro point of view, is full blown stupidity.

I can't bring myself to type the needed words to describe what he, or as likely, his staff of simpletons concocted

To determine how much higher those nations' rates should be, the White House says it calculated the size of each country's trade imbalance on goods with the United States and divided that by how much America imports from that nation.

It then took half that percentage and made it the new tariff rate.

That is just idiocy.

Now, Mad Dictator Don claims to have a high-quality econ degree from The Wharton School. Well, he's about a third right. 1) he didn't go to Wharton, he got a hall pass through the back door after two years at Fordham, where he did go. 2) that degree he got wasn't a rigorous econ curriculum (I went through that at about the same time); it was not the MBA that Wharton has been famous for, for years, but just something called real estate economics as a BA. 3) at the time, that program accepted nearly anyone who could fog a mirror out of high school; they didn't want him.

Once again, with feeling: only a fucking moron thinks that the foreign entities, governments and businesses, send the US Treasury a check once a month or quarter to pay the tariff bill. It appears that Mad Dictator Don made up that shit decades ago, and he's sticking to it. Tariffs are a, very regressive, sales tax. Full stop. And will harm the sub-GED crowd, Mad Dictator Don's base, the most. Ya know, those folks who think 'experts' are out to get them, and who think that book larnin is a waste of time at best and evil most of the time. Measles? Just load up on vitamin A. Covid? Ivermectin.

Moreover, if the intent is some (as yet undescribed) plan to re-shore business in the Red Blooded USofA, by what law of modern economics will the average oligarch pay middle class wages for average assembly line drones????? The plain fact is that American oligarchs could have paid such wages decades ago, the Damn Gummint didn't prohibit them from doing so. The Damn Gummint (mostly the Right Wingnut version), throttled unions about that time, which lowered manufacturing wages, yet the oligarchs still shipped the jobs off-shore. Again: what's going to compel them to pay good wages now if they do re-shore? Case in point (read it up): Boeing's attempt to cut cost in South Carolina; pure disaster.

As many pundits, not just this author, have pointed out: the main beneficiaries of the fucked up tariffs will be those few oligarchs with on-shore production, who'll simply raise their prices to match the higher tariff-induced import prices. They're not so dumb as a sack of hair to leave all that moolah on the table. Will their worker drones see any of it? In a pig's eye.

What Mad Dictator Don just about guarantees is Trumpcession. Whether it's just a really bad Great Recession or full blown Depression isn't yet known. Once again, I remind gentle reader of Smoot-Hawley

The ultraprotectionist Smoot-Hawley Act is widely blamed for deepening and prolonging the worst chapter in U.S. economic history. In a 1993 debate with independent presidential candidate Ross Perot on Larry King Live, then VP and free-trade advocate Al Gore brought an antique picture of the two senators, mocking them for a disastrous policy prescription that "sounded reasonable at the time." Indeed, for the general public and a wide swath of trade experts, going the Smoot-Hawley route is the economic equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.

The oligarchs, mostly, kept partying in speakeays all the way through.

Feets Don't Fail Me Now

It was, IIRC, Dr. McElhone who introduced me to the saying, "the good people vote with their feet." 'Good' is, of course, fungible. Some take a broad view, while others keep it to the very straight and narrow. As in minded, by the way.

Speaking of straight, here's a report on the bent among us.

"With everything going on in my previous country, I didn't have much choice," Kasatkina said about choosing to switch nationality, per Reuters. "For me, being openly gay, if I want to be myself, I have to make this step, and I did it."

Doesn't say why she chose Aussie rather than some European enclave. May haps she knows more about Vlad the Impaler's plans than the rest of us? I expect we'll see more Americans leaving the Red states for the relative 'freedom' of the Blues. And so far as killing all that funding from Blue to Red through DC, well we in the Blue will welcome the lifting of the burden. Will Red state administrations work to replace the lost moolah? HA.

I Told You So - 1 April 2025

And not, alas, an April Fool's Joke. The real skinny.

In the week ending on March 8, the number of homes for sale in the Washington, D.C. area market grew by 56.2 percent compared to a year earlier, Realtor.com found.

It was the third consecutive week of rising inventory, after the number of homes for sale in the metropolitan area grew by 46.5 percent year-over-year in the week ending on February 22, and by an even higher 48.3 percent year-over-year in the week ending on March 1.

Next, we'll find out that those private equity monsters that have been buying up distressed houses all across this great land, will have lunch on worthless, out of work, bureaucrats.

No Fucking Way - part the sixth

Yet another shoe has dropped. How many shoes does a centipede have? And, just as last time, shitler is bailing out the Rednecks. Farmers first, of course.

A sponsor of the measure, Representative Dan Newhouse, a Republican who owns an 850-acre farm in Washington State, said his colleagues had felt unable to act while the border remained chaotic. "That excuse no longer exists," Mr. Newhouse said. "I truly think this is the Congress that we can make it happen."

Who said they can't find folks? Oh, they can't find American folks who'll work for starvation wages like those Mexicans?

And, then, there's the direct bailout, just like 2018.

The early discussions offer a tacit acknowledgment that Mr. Trump's expansive tariffs could unleash financial devastation throughout the U.S. agricultural industry, a crucial voting base that the president similarly tried to safeguard during his 2018 trade war with China.

So, ya tink egg prices are bad now? Just you wait.

Such a rescue package ultimately proved expensive, with the government shelling out about $23 billion after China imposed high retaliatory duties on soybean, corn, wheat and other American imports beginning in 2018.
...
But the price tag this time could prove even higher, since Mr. Trump has threatened to target many countries, including American allies like Europe, Canada, Mexico and Japan. The potential scope of their collective retribution could inflict deeper, more lasting harm on American businesses.

Or, as shitler has said

"When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win," Trump tweeted Friday morning. "When we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don't trade anymore — we win big. It's easy!"

Once again, with feeling: "Hey shitler, show us just one wire transfer that pays the tariff from just one foreign gummint or company!" Whataya say man?

What only a few of the pundits have told the American People: when tariffs increase the price of a foreign good/service, domestic producers follow along. And, why not? Why leave money on the table? Anyway, who'll tell differnce between French Champagne and that Gallo ersatz version at about the same high price?

No Fucking Way - part the fifth

It should come as no surprise that the venerable NYT reports on the process by which the MAGAnauts avoid the lash of the shitler and muskrat^©dugugotw whip. But, I suppose, you knew that would happen. Right? We can't let the shithole states bear any burden from their stupidity, now can we?

Mr. Cole, the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee that controls federal spending, quickly swung into action to try to head off the cuts. He and his aides started dialing their staff contacts at DOGE, the White House and the federal agencies in charge of the facilities on the chopping block, which also included a field office for the Indian Health Service.

What!!! Shut down SSA and SPC facilities??? That's so unAmerican!!! Digest the report, it's corruption of the highest (or lowest, depending on your point of view) order.

May be the coming mega-storm which will raze the midwest and south in the coming days will put a dent into the MAGAnauts heads? Nah. I don't think so either.

It's already been a busy year for tornadoes even though the peak of severe weather season is still a few weeks away. There have been about 300 tornado reports since 2025 began, compared to 164 by the end of March 2024.

Yeah, climate change is just a hoax ginned up by pointy head woke "scientists". Shitler knows he's the polymath to top all others, and will prove that climate change is a hoax. Same as RFK proves that vaccines cause autism. The Musk Ox will prove the earth is flat shortly thereafter. A flat earth makes EVs more practical.

Thought For The Day - 27 March 2025

Well... yet another, sorta kinda, slap at AI. But it doesn't get at the kernel of failure: AI, as currently implemented, isn't intelligence. Any more that winning at Jeopardy! is intelligence. Yeah, there's all that "Ken Jennings is sooooo smart!" bullshit. It's just prodigious memory (churned through a correlation exercise); some people have it, most people don't. Having prodigious memory doesn't make you smart, it might, in the end, make you kinda dumb. While the current count is 86 billion little grey cells, that's still not an infinite number and some will be dedicated to memory and others to, among other things, logic. It's logic processing that makes intelligence. That's how Einstein figured out special relativity just by sitting in a tram and watching a clock tower disappear in the distance. Can your AI do the same? Call me when it can.

This is where we, the people, are apparently failing AI. Because in addition to being humans with jobs and social lives and laundry to fold and art to make and kids to raise, we should also learn how to tiptoe around the limitations of large language models that may or may not return accurate information to us.

Where's the logic in all that? Nada, zip, nil. It's all a galaxy sized correlation matrix, and as we all know, 100% correlation belongs only to God.

And, for what it's worth, I've not been hit with a hallucination from the wiki. Ever.