Thought For The Day - 11 August 2026

So far, none of the Lamestream Press (that I know about) has raised the really important point: MAGA is breaking as we watch. Supposedly close allies in his retinue are giving up the dumb fuck without even thinking about it. Hiding in a catering cart!! Except, of course, that isn't true and makes Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) much more likely. It was a catering container; not nearly as cramped. But, if you go looking, you'll find AI deepfakes of him squished into an aircraft cart. The palace guard is turning.

Thought For The Day - 10 August 2026

There's been a tsunami of ink spilled on AI and data centers of late. But I've not run across the nasty issue: if MAGAnauts write the laws and rules such that Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson and his successors get control of AI, then truth (social!!) goes out the window. Just as with crypto: he was agin it until someone (Miller??) whispered in his ear - "you can make billions!! the greatest grift of all time!!" And so it was. Everything will be MAGApropaganda 24/7. Just like Orwell predicted. Ayatollah 49% Don^© has done so much to eliminate truth and intelligence already. So, not only the billions, but full control of the population. Just like Kim and Putin and Hitler and Mao. What to give the dictator who has everything.

I Told You So - 10 August 2026

Dedicated readers must recall how these missives have excoriated the decline of the econ world over the years, pointing to Samuelson as the (nearly) patient zero of the epidemic. What Samuelson and his followers have done is to re-define macro as just the sum of the micro, with no account for how the Damn Gummint can do favor, or ill, to either the whole economy or corruptly favor (ill) supporters or opponents. One need go no further than Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson to see this in action. And, of course, he claims top grades and honors from Wharton, while there is no record of him earning any such. He only spent his last two years there (after only getting into Fordham, easy commuter school in NYC) getting a BBA (or a BS, reports vary) in something (no longer offered) called Real Estate Economics (reports vary as to whether it's explicitly Wharton or just Penn). IOW, he don't know shit from shinola in any kind of serious econ. Although, being a bigly builder (well... once a long time ago), he demands easy money. After all, Other People's Money most always pays the bill.

The contribution of Samuelson et al is said to be more "rigour" in the discipline. But what that really means is that econ is just micro, aka, business unit. The good thing about micro, is that it's data rich (or, should be) since a business has all the records of its activity. Ya don't need no damn lying statistics when you have a population dataset. But that does allow one to concoct all manner of "mathematical models" of business activity. And, of course, it doesn't surprise that the micronauts then make the leap to re-define macro as just aggregate micro.

But, of course, FDR and his cabal did understand that the Damn Gummint can be a significant economic actor, for both good and ill. Ill, mostly, means inflation, but can also mean tipping the scale for and against the blessed and the cursed; as seen by the Damn Gummint. And now we have it codified by The Gang of Six^© that POTUS is the Damn Gummnit, ya know Fascist Dictator. What could possibly go wrong? Well... the specter of a Guns n Butter great recession is coming toward front of mind for the Bond Vigilantes.

Well... just as Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson denies elections can be fair and accurate, when he or his lose, the fact that most macro data is survey sample based is the opportunity to deny that any macro decision need be based on data which is obviously manipulated by communists. It's all fake, anyway. It's simpler and better to just reward my benefactors and jail my opponents; just like Marcos and the like. We'll win no matter what the data ends up saying. And, if it says the whole exercise was bogus, there's always Fake News to shoulder the blame. Bari will see to it.

Now we get some views from a Harvard econ prof (which Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson never could be) that Warsh is up to his ass in shit. Well... he doesn't really say "shit". But that's clearly what he means.

Consider the call for better data. Mr. Warsh correctly notes that the nation's existing data architecture could be improved. What stands today relies largely on household and business surveys that face declining response rates, and it takes time to collect and process them.

Do you really think that Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson would welcome better data??? In a pig's eye, he would.

Prediction - 7 August 2026

Well... ya gots Kalshi and Polymarket. Now ya gots me.

So, for the inaugural shot in the dark, hows about an answer to why Cornyn, Tillis, and (just now) Cassidy decided it would be bettor for each to suck Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don's dick than Do The Right Thing for the Constitution and democracy? The answer: K street. Ground zero for the political and monetary craven. Now that they've been bounced from position of lucrative insider information, thanks to Our Malignant Narcissist^{©John Gardner}, their only hope for as much of a lucrative sinecure is K street "consulting". The Constitution and democracy can't compete with that. If you're a money grubbing craven Right Wingnut MAGAnaut.

All we need do is watch the Fake News come the new Congress, and see where each lands. I rate it a slam dunk.

It really is all about the money.

Ballard Partners, which counts Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles among its alumni, signed more than 200 new clients after Trump's election. It led K Street last year with more than $88.3 million in lobbying fees — a 350 percent increase from 2024.

Ya think any of the Three Mouseketeers is willing to piss off Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson and get blackballed from that fountain of money? Really?

Thought For The Day - 6 August 2026

Caught a snippet from a Lamestream TeeVee news feed. Some medPro stated what I've found to be obvious since the start of Covid-19: it's an animal to human skip, just like SARS and MERS before it. I suppose that, because the brunt of both was elsewhere on Mother Earth, the Right Wingnuts didn't bother to conjure a dark conspiracy. I guess they hadn't heard of Fauci then.

Pie in the Sky - part the second

All those many months ago, when I first read reports about the Best New Idea in AI, the orbiting Data Centre, I nearly blew lunch. Clearly, these guys don't know shit about physics or engineering. I put off puting up the obligatory diatribe, assuming that some Lamestream Pundit with access to numbers and real engineers, would do so. It's taken longer than I expected, or I don't obsess as much as Dear Reader might think.

Well... today I found such a diatribe... sorta of.

In an interview, McCalip says his initial rough calculations a few years ago suggested that data centers in space would cost in the range of 7 to 10 times more, per gigawatt of capacity, than their terrestrial counterparts. "It just wasn't practical," he says. "Not even close." But when Elon Musk began publicly backing the idea, McCalip revisited the numbers using publicly available information about Starlink's and Tesla's technologies and capabilities.

So, the Main Smartest Guy in the Room (all the time)^© began beating his drum (or other appendage, hehe) for the effort. And, as one might expect, he pushed his LEO Taxi Service in service to in orbit data centers.

What so many ooh and aah over, the reusable lifter, is really Olde Tech. 1 - reusability was demonstrated at least as far back as the SRB for the Space Shuttle, 2 - the landing on a dime from re-entry goes back to at least the Apollo missions landing on the Moon (you can, I expect, find them on youTube; unless, of course, the moon landings were all FAKE). Nothing new here, move on.

So, the author then backtracks bigly when he accounts that these orbiting data centres would be mated to Starlink locations

Bottom line, with some solid but not necessarily heroic engineering, the cost of an orbital data center could be as low as three times that of the comparable terrestrial one. That differential, while still high, at least nudges the concept out of the instantly dismissible category. "I have my particular views, but I want the data to speak for itself," McCalip says.

It's not of no significance that The Musk Ox's taxe service is limited to LEO, not geo-whatever very high orbit. What's the diff, you might ask? Well... very high orbit is well above atmospheric friction, so falling out of orbit is a rare occurence. With LEO, on the other hand, falling out of orbit in short order is part of the taxi service bargain.

If you visit the innterTubes you'll find: Starlink sats last 5-7 years and 1 or a couple plummet to Mother Earth daily.

For this illustration, we picked a configuration with an aggregate 1 GW of capacity. The network would consist of some 4,300 satellites, each of which would be outfitted with a 1,024-square-meter solar array that generates 250 kilowatts. The data center on that satellite, powered by the array, might have at least 175 GPUs; McCalip notes that a popular GPU rack, Nvidia's NVL72, has 72 GPUs and requires 120 to 140 kW.

Notice, of course, that the author elides the need to replenish the sats. My wild ass guess? Such a host of orbiting data centre component sats could never be fashioned as an on-going concern; The Musk Ox couldn't keep up with the replinishing requirement. And consider two other snags: cooling all those motherfuckers and "wiring" those 4,000 units into a whole data centre. Much easier to do the wiring here on Mother Earth. Ah, but Arizona, data centre ground zero, is on the verge of going waterless. Air cooled computers, mainframe and mini, have been in service for decades, but these AI fashioned ones... nope. Ain't much air up there in space. Cooling is still up in the air. hehe.

Free cooling is perhaps the biggest misconception. Space is cold, but it also has no atmosphere. That means the best heat-removal mechanisms, conduction and convection, are off the table. The only option is radiation. To prevent a chip from overheating in space, a large, costly surface area is required to dissipate the energy and then radiate it.

Stupid is as stupid does.

The governing equation for radiative cooling, the only type of cooling available in space, is known as the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. It states that the amount of power you can radiate is proportional to the area of the radiator times its temperature to the fourth power.

Oops - part the first

Well... y'all should still know that I've grown even more skeptical of AI as the months have passed. Hundreds of billions of dollars on a tech whose TAM is based solely on axing all labour from the economy (in particular those well educated office/lab workers in Blue States whose 10% of the income distribution make 50% of consumption). So, how much axing will it take to reach the tipping point of global collapse of aggregate demand? And, naturally, that will spark The Permanent Great Depression. No one who works can work to get moolah to spend on stuff, and the companies that make stuff have no buyers. And all those Smartest Guys in the Room who bought up every last CPU and GPU to make AI will never see a dime of profit from this "investment". Neato. Some things don't require really elaborate war games to predict.

Day by day, the dam holding back collapse of AI, and before it's even finished being built and running as intended, takes another step to oblivion. Wel... here's today's bit of news.

Situational Awareness, a fast-growing hedge fund in San Francisco founded by 20-somethings that invested heavily in A.I., put out an emergency call for help to rivals in the past 36 hours, seeking to sell more than $10 billion of its stocks to shore up its plummeting portfolio, according to three people briefed on the call.

What was that story about a kid name Icarus? Or that olde (German?) adage: "we are too soon old and too late smart."

Eating

Years ago some pundit (Marc Andreesen), remarked that software will eat the world. Boy, has he ever been shown to be an idiot. AI is 99.44% hardware, and the rest is 100+ year old stats. Now we get the dire skinny from Jeff Sommer:

These big companies are able to categorize the money as an investment — a capital expenditure — and not as an expense. So under current accounting rules, the bulk of the spending has not yet counted against their gaudy earnings. That is helping to propel the stock market to new heights under rosy assumptions that A.I. will transform the world, and that the companies behind it will be making money.

Just like man's laws, accounting rules are also manmade. Unlike, for example, the laws of thermodynamics. Even the laws of economics are manmade, not natural. So, what does it all mean, Mr. Natural?

One day earlier, IBM's shares lost 25.2 percent. That was its steepest daily decline since the 1960s, and it was set off by an earnings shortfall that its chief executive attributed, in part, to the spending underway on A.I. data centers. "We did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization," Arvind Krishna, the company's chief executive, wrote in a letter to investors. Other companies spent so much money to build A.I. foundations, he said, that there wasn't as much left as expected for software service companies like IBM.
[my emphasis]

It's stll not clear to me, anyway, how AI's TAM can amount to anything more than labour replacement. If that really does decimate employment, who'll have moolah to buy all those Bongo Bits? Or, will 'modern economies' devolve into a 'modern dark ages' with only the oligarches having need of the only 'product' made by this modern economy: fancy financial services? With the amount of billions of Bongo Bucks going into each entity's 'data centres', is there enough labour in the world to satisfy the bond holders? Much less show a tidy profit?

There are already rumblings in the high yield market surrounding concerns that the explosion in issuance has bubble-like characteristics similar to that of telecoms in the early 2000s or energy in 2015 to 2017, when investor enthusiasm outweighed a sober assessment of risk. These same critics also worry about the potential for overbuild or overcapacity, i.e. the massive demand fails to materialise, or that despite the strong tenant base, these contracts have yet to be tested.

When it's the Damn Gummint, the 'bond vigilantes' come to the rescue, or corpse feeding. We'll see how they do with such, mostly, private paper.

Thought For The Day - 16 July 2026 (kinda, sorta the Ides of July; how appropriate)

And, fur shur, Day; before Ayatollah 49% Don^© spews more Big Lies tonight. As stated in these missives more than once: NSA has the receipts; they have known since '15 and '16 and '20 and '24 who from Russher, Russher, Russher and who from Ayatollah 49% Don^©'s camp were talking up the fix. I'll bet that Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson himself was talking. After all, he's the best shill for his bidnezz. And he knows it.

Will it be treasonous enough to inspire another Snowden? Only The Shadow knows.

Rite of Passage

The MAGAnauts, and many of the others, keep mewling that the Strait of Hormuz is some kind of international waterway, and thus can't be deemed within the territorial waters of Iran and Oman. To be clear: even the olde time 12 mile limit means that Oman and Iran have an overlapping claim to the waters of the Strait. That is not in dispute, no matter what Bone Spur Samurai^© and his minions say.

But... there is an international treaty, known by its acronym UNCLOS

This is because Iran is not a party to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

And, as you'd likely guess, neither is the USofA

The USA has long been one of the most ardent champions of the freedom of navigation, despite not being a party to UNCLOS.

Neither country ever ratified the treaty.

A history of UNCLOS and the USofA from that left-wing commie wiki. We can take anything we want.

What Eccles Means - part the first

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption; mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.
-- Marriner Eccles/1951

Well... let's update, just a tad. It was recently reported that the top 10% of consumers comprise nearly 50% of consumption. That's a lot. It also, one might suppose, means that the things consumed by that 10% are markedly different from the other 90%. IOW, the 10% spend on luxury, discretionary stuff, while the 90% seek not much more than subsistence. Yes, that's what was reported. Surprise, surprise.

This goes a long way to explain Trumpism: he has been a very good liar, and his marks have been very, very stupid. OTOH, he has given them what they really want: the restoration of The Way Things Were - White folk always having some dark folk below them.

But, here's how labor has been treated for decades

What this means for Eccles? The macro arithmetic no longer works. With AI threatening to move labor's share way, way lower economic policy has to choose: aid the Rich to be Richer, or aid the Poor to be part of the whole economy? Only the shadow knows.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this is a vision of work in which even high-level employees systematically automate nearly every task they perform, until all that is left for them to do is train A.I.

Regular reader likely remembers, long, long ago in a place far, far away, that the only way to de-hallucinate AI is to build it on a database, preferably of the RDBMS variety, to store the ground facts of some area of interest, to act as a safeguard against stupid AI. Well...

Handshake then sends its clients a database with hundreds or thousands of values, containing the original prompt, the top answer and various metadata.

Boy howdy. Now, the report doesn't specify what that "database" is, but it need not be my favorite DB2/LUW. MySQL or even SQLite might do. After all, in use it will likely be read-only. At most WORM.

Who, and how many of Who, will have moolah to drive GDP if these Bros get their way? Will it just be Dark Ages V2.0 with the Really Rich living in castles and the rest living subsistence no matter their inherent talent?

Catch 22

Now here's a good one. The Melbourne Symphony cancelled a concert by a pianist who voiced objection to Israel's killing of journalists in Gaza.

He sued, and, so far, lost. The report doesn't say whether the judgment can be appealed or whether the pianist will do so. But in the course of the reporting we get hypocrisy.

The pianist, Jayson Gillham, claimed in a lawsuit that the orchestra had violated the country's Fair Work Act and his right not to be treated unfavorably in the workplace because of his political beliefs.

That's, sorta kinda, a First Amendment argument. OK.

But the judge, Graeme Hill of the Federal Court of Australia, ruled on Friday that because Mr. Gillham was an independent contractor he was not protected under the workplace rights law. The orchestra, Justice Hill determined, had acted to protect its business and reputation when it canceled the performance by Mr. Gillham and issued statements to its patrons about the matter.

OK. An independent contractor isn't an employee, right?

A spokeswoman for the orchestra said in a statement that it welcomed the judgment and that Mr. Gillham "should have sought the authorization of the M.S.O. before making the statements he made" from the stage.

So, why would a contractor be required to get authorization to make independent statements? He's not an employee of the M.S.O., right?

I guess being for killing journalists (anywhere, for the sake of argument) is in the M.S.O.'s best interest for its "business and reputation". At least, that's how I would parse the sentence. At least one head rolled

After the cancellation, the orchestra's musicians passed a vote of no confidence in the administration, and the organization announced that its managing director was departing.

Voters - part the first

Another series on its way.

If you really, really believe that all those Hill Folk dropped down the chute in all those Red Backwoods with no paperwork to prove it happened will be prohibited from voting, your an Idiot. Our Malignant Narcissist^{©John Gardner} is being supported by the The Gang of Six^© to take over our beloved country just like Erdogan and Orban (RIP politically, for now).

Make America White Again^©. Preferably the dunderhead species.

By The Numbers - part the one hundred and second

One might wonder what, if any, classes these millionaire "student athletes" attend? As the saying goes, "two wrongs don't make a right". State schools, esp. Red state universities, suck up millions of sports bongo bucks in order to beat The Other State teams.

Now a a story from the left wing Commie NYT with some numbers revealing the corruption in college sports, these days.

July 1, 2026, marked the five-year anniversary of name, image and likeness in college sports.
Oh, how quaint July 1, 2021, seems now.
Five years later, there are college quarterbacks making more than $5 million.

Some numbers

- total spending across the industry will reach $4.5 billion this year
- The average Power 4 school's athletes are making a combined $34.8 million.
- Iamaleava's $2 million annual figure remained a unicorn for at least a couple of years.
- (Today, at least a half-dozen QBs make nearly three times that.)

A Tune For Our Time

In honor of our President, Bone Spur Samurai^© at this time of 250 years of White As The New Fallen Snow America

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a
One slave yoked to sleigh

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a 
One slave yoked to sleigh

Dashing through the Lefts in a
One slave yoked to sleigh
With the scams we go
Laughing all the way

Bells on Libtards ring
Making Trumpists Right
What fun it is to ride and sing
A slaying song tonight

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a
One slave yoked to sleigh

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a 
One slave yoked to sleigh

Dashing through the Lefts in a
One slave yoked to sleigh
With the scams we go
Laughing all the way

Bells on Libtards ring
Making Trumpists Right
What fun it is to ride and sing
A slaying song tonight

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls 
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a
One slave yoked to sleigh

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a 
One slave yoked to sleigh

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a
One slave yoked to sleigh

Jingo Balls, Jingo Balls
Jingo all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride in a 
One slave yoked to sleigh

Thought For The Day - 3 July 2026

Well, now we know. Pulte really, really was installed to open the Gates of Hell for Vlad and Xi. As an earlier sub-title stated: "Vlad I'll take the Western Hemisphere, and you get Europe. Deal?" Democracy is dead.

Thought For The Day - 29 June 2026

Well... the 19^th century is well underway. Now Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson can turn the entire Damn Gummint into his personal hobby horse. Assuming, of course, that neither he nor any successor doesn't end up a Garfield (not the cat). The one, most important, thing Big Bidnezz wants is stability. That is to say: long term stability. Big Bidnezz, with or without Baksheesh, can work its magic so long as it knows the rules don't change every two or four years. Of course, if Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson manages to pull off his planned soft coup, and fills his bank account even further, they'll just add in the Baksheesh to prices. Just like all those tariffs the Furriner Gummints and Bidnezz pay. According to Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson.

Welfare for the rich. Come on Down!!

The Gang of Six^© has put the nail in Article I. It no longer exists, to all intensive porpoises.

By The Numbers - part the one hundreth and one

Stupid is as Stupid does. So, an idiot Mainer thinks an AI data center will make as many jobs as the old paper mill that shut down years ago. Ain't gonna be. Data centers, esp. AI version, are almost all hardware. That runs itself.

"The parking lot we're standing in was full. There were probably about 800 employees. Good money and good salaries."

Right. Data centers, on average, barely break 100. And those folks are mechanical drones in flesh colored skin with actual technical training. Not uneducated paper mill drones. Some voice of reason speaks

Utility bills spike, water systems are strained, taxpayers subsidize these projects, communities deal with constant noise, light pollution and environmental degradation.
-- Democratic State Representative Melanie Sachs

Same grift as sports arenas: the billionaires get richer, and the poor get stiffed. And, surprise, surprise: I guess the grift just wasn't big enough for the billionaires

The company that would have provided the computer servers pulled out of the project. Tony's deal fell apart. Now, he says he's working on finding a new partner. But for the time being, the parking lot at the paper mill is still empty, and the town of Jay is still waiting for a lifeline.

Just in case you don't know (and, of course, I suspected but didn't know until I looked it up) the mill town is Jay, in Franklin county, and said county is near the bottom of Maine's counties by college education. So, who would run this data center, if it were built? Aliens from Big Blue cities in Blue states, likely not the unemployed mill workers.. Always works out that way. It ain't easy turning a sow's ear into a silk purse.

Ya gotta run the numbers before you sign on the dotted line. Morons always think the city slickers can be taken for a ride. The problem with moving from yesterday's tech and yesterday's workforce is: it doesn't compute. Never has. Never will. The reason the Great Migration worked was simply that the workforce in Northern factories wasn't brain-taxed to work the assembly lines. How many Damn Gummint programs helped buggy whip factories become car factories? Let me know when you find even one.

Dear Marco, Some History

Now that Bone Spur Samurai^© has caved to Iran, with this announcement about missiles

I'm saying that if other countries have them, it's a little bit unfair for them not to have some. If Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and they all have some, I would say in relative proportion, I think it's okay.

OK, so Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) has a heart of fairness wrt to Iran, all of a sudden.

I wonder: has Little Marco been listening? Let's turn the clock, back to the future, wrt to Cuber. It finally came to the public that the Rusher/Cuber effort was not a first attack. It was, in fact, a defensive measure. It finally was revealed that the United States of Alabama had put similar missiles in Turkey long before Rusher/Cuber made the effort to balance the scales. Of course, even JFK went ballistic. So to speak.

In 1959, the US government deployed Thor nuclear missiles in England, an initiative known as Project Emily. In 1961 the US put Jupiter nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. All were within range of Moscow.

JFK and Nikita secretly drew back from the brink. The deal was revealed in 1969.

So, Little Marco, detente with Cuber is the better path.

Thought For The Day - 18 June 2026

Now that Bone Spur Samurai^© and his lackeys Witkoff and Kushner, experienced foreign ministers of the first water all, have been rolled by their Iran counterparts, we must ask: what did the United States of Alabama get for all that time and treasure (and some body bags)? Well... I expect we'll soon see Trump Tower Tehran. After all, that's all the Three Stooges care about.

Yeah That's Right

Likely been mentioned here before, but, what the hell, why not yet again? My Pappy explained it all decades ago. Of course, didn't actually explain anything, simply reported what he saw.

He finally get drafted, then being WWII and all, and even in those dire times, the US military took the effort to sort the knuckleheads from the brainiacs. Pappy was closer to the latter than the former. The result was that rather than carry a rifle and get shot at by Germans or Japanese, the Signal Corp had first pick, so he built radio towers. Say, what? Turns out that back then, and it turns out more necessarily, airplanes needed signaling towers in order to know where they are and where they are going. These were and are called beacons. Not so important now, what with GPS and satellites generally.

Most of his time was spent in North Africa, mostly around Algeria. And, being the local winners, he and his crew were billeted in mansion-like housing. And, for good measure, they had a houseboy to do the scutwork. Said houseboy was a juvenile, may be 10 years old. Pappy was impressed; the kid spoke a handful of languages fluently. And not all White Man's language, either. Pappy was amazed.

Over the years I've returned to that story from time to time in idle conversation. My sister was born when I was 13, so I saw her early development with near-adult eyes and ears. And, I've also known myriad people who grew up with more than one language. So, how is such fluency possible? It sure as shit ain't like falling off a log for many, if not most, adults.

My interpretation is dumbshit simple: when a walking meatloaf begins to contemplate hearing and speech and meaning, said meatloaf has no notion of languages, plural. To the walking meatloaf it's all sounds. Just sounds. Language is not yet a concept. Just sounds. And, over time, each sound gets associated with some thing. And just things, not yet abstract ideas, like special relativity.

As the walking meatloaf is exposed to sounds and things, he is also exposed to the people making these sounds with these things, and, if the walking meatloaf isn't as dumb as a sack of hair, he'll notice that Joe has one sound for truck while Jacque has a different sound for that truck. So, the walking meatloaf doesn't care about the sounds, except that which one to use is determined by the object and the person/people making the sound.

So, in simplistic terms, walking meatloaf doesn't learn multiple languages (the walking meatloaf is ignorant of languages), but just one. Only later will he be told that one is english and another french, and still another arabic. And that's the kicker: language family doesn't matter either. It's all just sounds.

And that's about what the high priced researchers more or less found

On the whole, Dr. Blanco-Elorrieta said in a news release, a single "grammatical engine" in the brain appeared capable of powering multiple languages at once.

Well, no shit Sherlock. Engine runs just on petrol, not petrol, diesel, and natural gas at the same time. It's not obvious from the report who the subjects of the study were. It matters whether they were adults learning some second language, or like Pappy's houseboy, absorbing multiple languages (really just Language) from the gitgo.

Here's the core error

Early research viewed bilingualism as an "add on" or "disruption" to the processing of one's native language, said Judith Kroll, a psycholinguist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the new study.

For the walking meatloaf, it's all one native language. A mix of different sounds, depending on the context. Context another concept that walking meatloaf is clueless.

Thought For The Day - 14 June 2026

I wonder... how is a 60-day cease fire the same as "unconditional surrender"? Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) lying yet again. I wonder... will the MAGAnaut idiots see the difference? Will they credit Bone Spur Samurai^© with ending the war just by making (so he says now) Hormuz open again? Status quo ante isn't much to write home about. Well... unless you're a malignant lying narcissist.

Of course, he had to have something to sell. After all he's 80 today, and likely won't remember anything tomorrow.

I Told You So - 11 June 2026

Well... almost. I hope nothing more. Back on 3 June, I opined that Pulte was installed to erase the NSA tapes from 2016/Trump/Russia. Now comes this from the NYT

The president has also long been deeply skeptical of the intelligence community, primarily because of the investigation into whether his 2016 campaign conspired with Russians who, officials have repeatedly said, interfered in the presidential election that year to harm Mr. Trump's Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

A real DNI, not even Gabbard, would do such bidding. Pulte? He doesn't even need to be asked. Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) has been very busy erasing anyone and anything which challanges his psychotic view of the world and its history.

[Well... that didn't age all that well!]
I saw the Clayton announcement and thought, "from worst to worst". Just as unqualified. Just now found this

Donald Trump has agreed to drop Bill Pulte - but his new choice is just as bad.

Great minds run in the same gutter.

Dee Feat is in Dee Flation - part the fifty first

Just a reminder from Santayana:

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

So, I've plucked some part of Part 44 (aka, the Covid inflation problem) to refresh your memories; and don't have to re-write the wheel. Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) is dead set (and deadheaded, though not that old rock band version) on repeating the LBJ fiasco of guns and butter. And he'll blame the Chinese or the Democrats or Cuber (more on that is coming). Here we go again.

The Moneterists mantra is that inflation is solely the result of too much moolah in the economy, and therefore the only cure is to 'take away the punch bowl'. As it happens, sometimes it is true that excess moolah has invaded the economy, and resulted in inflation. In my short lifetime, the most infamous devolved from LBJ's "guns and butter" speech and subsequent actions. Excess real demand exceeded available widgets.

Q. Mr. President, from what you have outlined as your program for now, it would seem that you feel that we can have guns and butter for the foreseeable future. Do you have any idea right now, though, that down the road a piece the American people may have to face the problem of guns or butter?

THE PRESIDENT. I have not the slightest doubt but whatever it is necessary to face, the American people will face. I think that all of us know that we are now in the 5 ad month of the prosperity that has been unequaled in this Nation, and I see no reason for declaring a national emergency and I rejected that course of action earlier today when I made my decision.

I cannot foresee what next year, or the following year, or the following year will hold. I only know that the Americans will do whatever is necessary. At the moment we enjoy the good fortune of having an unparalleled period of prosperity with us, and this Government is going to do all it can to see it continue.

Which then got us the Volker destruction. It took some time, abetted by Nixon of course.

So now, according to Bone Spur Samurai^©, this isn't a forever war, his monuments to his monumental ego don't matter, tax breaks for the rich don't matter, and K-shape economy doesn't matter. The price of gas will drop through the floor, along with everything else, the instant the War is Won and Hormuz is instantly "open". He'll likely fall asleep then, just like at the Knicks came. The little people, black, brown, and white will take it in the neck. As usual. He, of course, gets all the butter.

Nausea

All this faux let's be nicey to each other over at CBS is making me vomit in my mouth. Here's all you need to know, to know why. It's from Pelley's interview

So I sit down, like, OK, let's talk about it. Tom accuses me of physically abusing Nick Bilton. This is a lie. I didn't come within 10 feet of Nick Bilton. In my life, I have never put my hands on anyone in anger. And when he was caught in that lie, he said, well, OK, I take that back. And I said, great.

Just like Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) the Ellison flunkies make up shit that suits Bone Spur Samurai^©'s agenda. Anyone who believes that "60 Minutes" correspondents will have independence from the thugs up the chain of command is an idiot.

Ellison won't have to intervene with Weiss or Bilton... they're Bone Spur Samurai^©'s flunkies from the gitgo.

The Seer Speaks - part the first

The efforts of Weiss and Bilton were foretold either millennia ago, or just a few hundred years. Depends on how accurate history has been

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.

"60 Minutes" is buried. Stahl, Whitacker, and Wertheim may make it through the coming season. Were I a Kalshi addict, I'd bet no. the tell

(CBS News has said it plans to hire additional correspondents soon.)

If you really think these new folks will hold the MAGAnauts to account, well...

Ms. Stahl said their decision to stay would be reversed if Mr. Bilton did not live up to his promises. "We're more or less taking his word for it," she said. "But if what he was talking about in his statement doesn't work, we're going to leave."

Well... Lesley, don't let the door hit you in the ass too hard.

Thought For The Day - 3 June 2026

Lots of folks are puzzled by Pulte being named DNI. I'm not. But I know Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) is intent on erasing history. He can't do that without erasing all the tapes in the vaults at NSA. He knows, and many in the news business know (including me since I spent some time with Jack Anderson while he still had some relevance), that NSA really does have the receipts.

But they don't leak. Much, modulo Snowden of course. But to be safe Bone Spur Samurai^© just has to burn the tapes. Pulte will do that. No professional spook would.

Pollyanna on LSD - part the fourth

One likely remembers, so soon you forget eh?, how AI was going to transform life into the Next Garden of Eden. We'll all have time to do Great Things without having to worry about getting moolah to buy other great things.

If you actually believed that, your an idiot. Sorry to be blunt, but when was the last time a technology that could be used to control/manage/shape human life was used by The Powers That Be to do anything other than increase the power of The Powers That Be over the Rest of Us?

So, as expected, we finally get a report that China, of course, is using AI to control its population.

The idea that an authoritarian government would use artificial intelligence to suppress dissent is troubling enough. But the use of A.I. to predict dissent well before a person has taken action has become a nightmare scenario, according to some involved in the industry.

You can bet your bottom shekel that Emporer Nero The Donald^© (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) is screaming at Steve "Blacks Be Slaves" Miller to get him some of that AI. What good is it being Emporer if the rabble can make bad noise?

I believe I've been predicting this scenario from the git-go. Dictators, and the wanna-be versions, don't change their stripes.

Pollyanna on LSD - part the third

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption; mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.
-- Marriner Eccles/1951

Well... as asserted in the past, this is just a tautology, rather some deep insight into the macroeconomic sphere. OTOH, in 1951, The United States of Alabama was closer to being a self-sustaining closed economy than it is today. Whatever. From a macro point of view, it's all just arithmetic. So long as The Rest of Us have most of the moolah and buy up the output, then the equation balances. We experience neither runaway inflation with output limited nor depression when demand collapses due to The Rest of Us not having most of the moolah.

And, as usual, it does matter what that output is and who might buy it up. When we used to make shirts and shoes and other stuff that the proletariat needed, the equation balancing implied that The Rest of Us were doing OK. But... how does the equation work when output is skewed ever more to financial services relevant only to the 1% and 5%? Not so much balance.

One might recall that, until FDR, Uncle Sugar did nothing to cushion the destruction of jobs and aggregate demand when some creative destruction ruled the economy. Check out, once again, the graph of recessions and depressions throughout the 19^th century. Not a pretty sight. But... back then, even with some mechanization of production, it was still times when the mass of the proletariat was husbanded to produce the Good Stuff for the 1% of the times. Humans as disposable parts. My Grand Pappy well remembered that very effective job retraining he got from the Department of Labor when the horseless carriage killed his job making buggy whips in 1901. Those were so much better days.

So, now we face the specter of AI going primal nuculur on labor. Makes the 19^th century experience look benign. And, of course, the bankers to the !% pooh pooh all the angst of the proletariat. Of course they do. Here's among the latest. From the mind and pen of the Chairman of Goldman Sachs, no less. He must be smart. He's so rich.

Will A.I. disrupt the labor market? Absolutely. This transition, like other significant moments in our history, will entail new challenges, especially as A.I. separates labor from productivity in magnitudes we haven't seen before.

That's a no shit Sherlock tautology, as well. But recall the Great Migration. The movement of the proletariat from the rural South to the assembly lines of the North. What made that successful, for some definition of successful? Simply that Southern farmers were smart enough and able enough to do the repetitive tasks of the assembly line.

Let's see what Solomon has to say

But the United States has a long track record of creating new jobs in response to disruption, from the electrification of the 1900s to the digital revolution of the 1990s; I don't see any reason to think this dynamic will stop now.

Much of that "digital revolution" was merely converting from manual to automation of the same tasks! A bit of retraining in how to use word processing and spreadsheets was about as hard as it got. Not a requirement to drop steno work and learn medicinal chemistry. Get real.

But when you look at jobs or sectors less relevant to automation, the picture changes. Our economists estimate that the growing demand for data centers has created more than 200,000 construction jobs since 2022.

Once again, with feeling - construction is not an ongoing job type. Not unless we want to keep building data centers for the next 50 years at the current pace. Dwell on that for a second or two. We'll need nuculur fusion electric plants to run 'em.

Let me get this strait - the educated, smart Blue People will be shitcanned in favor of Dumb as a Sack of Hair MAGAnauts? Yikes.

Now, this one is gobsmacking

In 1900, global life expectancy at birth was 32 years old; today, it's over 70.

So... mass unemployment is the reason for this increase in lifetimes? Really??? How about drugs, vaccines, and public health mandates. Or, in other words, smart Blue people figuring the tough stuff out.

Now... Pollyanna on steroids

[T]he health care industry now employs more than 18 million workers. The U.S. economy is still the most innovative, dynamic and entrepreneurial in the world.

And most of those are engaged in either high eductation demands or menial bed pan changing. The K-shaped economy, also on steroids.

Have a nice day.

By The Numbers - part the one hundredth

Have you ever wondered how the Strait of Hormuz fits in the territorial waters figure? I sure have, and finally looked it up. There are more claimed than you can count, but the minimalist one is our olde friend the 12 mile limit. Turns out that Iran and Oman control the narrowest passage area, 21 miles, with their mutual 12 mile limits. So, those who claim that the Strait is "international waters" are just lying. That such had historically been the case... well fuck you Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte). I love it.

In 1959, Iran altered the legal status of the strait by expanding its territorial sea to 12 nmi (22 km) and declaring it would recognize only transit by innocent passage through the newly expanded area. In 1972, Oman also expanded its territorial sea to 12 nmi (22 km) by decree.[21] Thus, by 1972, the Strait of Hormuz was completely "closed" by the combined territorial waters of Iran and Oman. In 1971, Iran took over the Greater and Lesser Tunbs islands west of Hormuz against Arab wishes, thereby extending control of the navigation channels.

That's a great catch that Catch-22.

Pyrrhic Loser - part the third

Thomas Massie, first among others, might well be Emporer Nero The Donald's (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) Rubicon. Like the allusions?

It will boil down to: what will the 45% of GOP-ers who protested Emporer Nero The Donald's (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) dick sucking choice? Will they join with Dems and Independents come the General Election? Will the voters for the other 'losers' to Batshit J. Fucking Moron's^©Tillerson dick sucking picks join with the Independents and Dems in the General?

And, given the really nasty gerrymandering in play, mayhaps the Dems should pivot to flipping the Senate? Why? Simply because all those Blue City Dems still way outnumber the knuckledragging morons in the sticks that Bone Spur Samurai^© must have. He is, after all, a 49% minority dictator. And, by some measure, no where near that much support. His core zealots appear to be around 20% of the GOP: a slim minority of a minority party.

Man Made God in Man's Image

There are many reports dealing with Emporer Nero The Donald's (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) fixation on his White-Supremacy-Evangelical-Protestant morons connected to America 250. Here's one from the usual suspect.

Cardinal Robert McElroy, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, said in a recent interview that language describing America as a Christian nation "can be destructive," especially when it's used to center culture around the exclusion of certain groups.

Some 80 years ago, Catholics were routinely excluded in American public life, he said.

"They wouldn't say, this is a Christian nation, they'd say, it is a Protestant nation," he said.

And, for the record, this is the relevant bit of the 1^st

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

We ain't just Puritans.

Roger Williams was kicked out of Massachusetts even before there was a USofA.

Initially a Puritan minister, his beliefs evolved and he questioned the authority of the Puritan church in enforcing religious conformity. He was expelled by the Puritan leaders from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and he established Providence Plantations in 1636 as a refuge offering what he termed "liberty of conscience" making Rhode Island the first government in the Western world to guarantee religious freedom in its founding charter.

Jews attempting to escape Nazis were barred from coming to America, fur instance.

And so on.

Ya cain't have all them dirty Irish and German and Italian folk "poisoning the blood of our country" during the 19^th century, and even the earliest part of the 20^th. As Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) says it.

"No Irish need apply." A history. It wasn't just the jingoists of the 19^th century

The 1924 National Origins Quota Act (known as the Johnson-Reed Act) establishes that quotas will be calculated based on 2 percent of each nationality's proportion of the foreign-born US population in 1890, as indicated in the 1890 census. The use of the 1890 census to set the quotas is criticized as discriminating against southern and eastern Europeans, who arrived in the United States in greater numbers during the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century. Students, nationals of Western Hemisphere countries, members of certain professions, and the wives and minor children of US citizens are exempted from the quotas.

The Dark Ages were impelled by religious zealotry. It's gonna be a rough ride. Tom Lehrer gets it on the nose, yet again.

Stupid is as Stupid Does - part the seventh

Well... yet another example of Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson proving him quite right.

While Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson keeps filling the coffers of the fossil fuel companies (Shell, and one suspects the rest, reported huge windfall profits), most every other country is developing electrified transport systems. How much of petro in the USofA is devoted to transport, you might ask? Well, it's 70% and a good part of that is tied up in the Persian Gulf, thanks to Batshit J. Fucking Moron^©Tillerson.

At a time when oil and gas supply is faltering, the cost of wind and solar energy keeps declining. And, when paired with battery systems for storage, renewables can often provide steady electricity more cheaply than fossil fuels, even when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow.

Of course, it's not all bunnies and roses. To signficantly transition to wee little electrons moving stuff, there needs to be infrastructure that can run on wee little electrons. Most of the rest of the world kept, and expanded, their rail systems post-WWII, while the USofA went all in on cars and trucks. It may be that battery powered cars and trucks can exploit those wee little electrons rather than directly with trams and trains. We'll see. One hopes.

Gaslight

Since AI, as currently implemented, isn't very secure by nature; hallucinations and fake data and so on, it would be a Good Idea to vet such systems. Today's report has it that Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) intends to "vet" AI models. After Anthropic announced that its still (for some definition of 'still') hidden from public view Mythos model can break virtually all of computerdom, Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) and his merry band of psycopaths clearly began to see visions of Absolute Power Over Everything.

Mythos is so powerful at identifying security vulnerabilities in software that it could lead to a cybersecurity "reckoning," said Anthropic, which declined to release the model to the public.

Do you really, really believe that Emporer Nero The Donald (better than Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte) our Grifter In Chief would ever, in a million years, let anyone stop him and his merry band of psycopaths from using it to subjugate The Rest of Us??? MTG, evil apostate that she is, would likely be on the New Shortlist of Those to be Deleted.

The administration is also evaluating whether new A.I. models could yield cyber-capabilities that could be useful to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, they said.

So, there it is: the evil bit said out loud.

By The Numbers - part the ninety ninth

Farmers have been getting the Cadillac treatment pretty much forever. Even though non-urban population is down to 20% in this here The United States of Alabama. One of the ways is money and data support from Uncle Sugar. The Farm Bill has been mentioned here at least a few times. This recent report describes, mostly, farmers reliance on USDA data collection and reporting to run their farms. Quite a boon. But, according to the report, the last corn crop total acreage report was off by, it is believed, 5%.

Of course, the Batshit J. Moron and his merry band of acolytes don't assess that the miss report is due to the draconian slashing of employment at USDA; of course not

The Agriculture Department lost 23,000 employees in 2025, as Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency slashed jobs across the federal government. The National Agricultural Statistics Service, which produces crop reports, was one of the hardest-hit divisions; it lost 34 percent of its staff, going to about 500 employees from around 800.

The guy in charge puts the blame on lowering survey response rates

For years, the department has struggled with fewer farmers returning its surveys, one of the key data sources for crop production reports. The response rate for recent surveys was around 40 percent, according to the department, down from around 60 percent a decade ago.

What's funny about such an excuse? When you watch (or read) your fave news source, you'll get survey results on Batshit J. Moron's approval rate for various actions or his overall approval/disapprovel and the like or Americans view of abortion or immigration and the like. If you look at the fine print at the end of the report you'll see two numbers (approx. values) the sample size, generally around 2,500 (sometimes smaller), and the margin of error of the percent(s), generally around 3.4%. For 349,000,000 Americans. Now, the number of voters is about 174,000,000 in 2024.

Now, the whole point of the crop reports is to support gaming the market by commodities traders and farmers. One wants the lowest price, the other the highest. But

Farmers have a deep and direct relationship with the federal government, which sustains much of their business. Farmers participate in crop insurance and conservation programs, apply for grants and receive disaster assistance and ad hoc payments. The Agriculture Department projects that government payments will account for 29 percent of farm income this year.

Welfare kings. The tail is wagging the dog.

Feets Don't Fail Me Now - part the third

Yet another series is established. There've been occasional reports about the foreigners' reaction to Emporer Nero The Donald's Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte jingoist vetting of them come visa time. As one might expect, more and more are saying, "thanks, but no thanks". And, even less surprising, Batshit J. Moron and his merry band of idiots has set its sights on the science minded. Fresh off the presses is what's happening in the healthcare side of life. Paywalled, per usual, but the lede is open.

New and intrusive burdens for renewing a component of her visa — which required her to make public her social media profiles for U.S. review while she was back in India — caused her to be away from the lab for two months during the crunch time of wrapping up her degree.

We can't have yet more aliens invading, especially ones that refuse to suck Batshit J. Moron's tiny dick.

An open report says the same, with more detail than the STAT lede

The Trump administration's deep cuts to federal funding of scientific research, crackdown on universities, and proposals aimed at deterring international talent have unleashed a loss of scientific talent - a brain drain - away from the United States to other countries.

This is what happens when Emporer Nero The Donald Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte, who wasn't bright enough to get into the Ivy League without some post-sophomore (which means, "wise fool" btw) help. And the program he ran was nothing but EasyA courses in Real Estate Economics (no longer an Econ curriculum, of course). Of course. If you want The United States of Alabama to be just like the antebellum version? "First thing we do is kill all the smart people".

Side Eye For The White Guy

In the news today:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is poised to file a civil rights lawsuit against The New York Times, centered on the allegations of a white male employee who did not get a sought-after promotion and argued it was because of his race and gender, two people familiar with the matter said.

Come on man!! Ever body knows that pencil neck rednecks are smarter than the smartest split bottom or negro!! They tell us that at ever Klan meeting. We gotta get back to the Real United States of Alabama, like before the War of Northern Aggression. White Pride World Wide. And, no, I didn't make that up in a fit of sarcasm.

Power To The People

So, here's some numbers wrt The Musk Ox's Pipe Dream.

The largest solar array in space serves the International Space Station. It generates ~215 kilowatts.

Here's the power needed for a contemporary data center:

A single AI server rack requires 50-150 kilowatts compared to 10-15 kilowatts for conventional computing, driven primarily by dense GPU clusters that operate continuously at maximum capacity.

And, remember: that's per rack!! Cookie monster. One rack eats most (more recent estimates bump that power demand higher) of the largest orbiting array power in existence.

Now, what's the average data center count of racks? According to Google, it depends

1 MW About 1,000 - 2,000 rack servers
10 MW About 10,000 - 20,000 rack servers
50+ MW Up to 100,000+ rack servers

Back of the envelope? 1 MW is 4 times what the ISS has, and that's not continuous power, since Mother Earth gets in the way for a significant slice of the orbit. So, LEO or geosync? The latter allows for continuous contact with Mr Sun, likely never to be feasible not to mention cost effective. LEO can be gotten to, but building such big structures there? Not my kettle of fish.

Doesn't sound all that practical. By no means obvious. Well... if you want to depreciate, at Uncle Sugar's expense, all those 'reusable' rockets it might be!!!

Just found this piece on the feasibility of space-based solar power. Now, the author's point of view is harvesting wee little electrons from space-based solar panels and sending, sort of, them back to ground stations to be enjected into the grid. So, some of his math relates to transmission losses and the like. For such electric generation to be used for The Musk Ox's Pipe Dream, those costs don't matter. Otherwise, setting up the facility would cost the same. In the end, it's a wash. It certainly costs more to put panels in geosync orbit than in the Arizona desert. And, not for nuthin, The Musk Ox hasn't made the case for why space-based AI data centers are better than earth-bound ones. If nothing else, at ~22,000 miles up, all of the nasties from Out There don't get filtered by our atmosphere and not so much of the magnetosphere; you won't lose all of it, as it goes out to ~40,000 miles.

As to the sun coverage, the paper doesn't get to 100% 24/7, but sorta close:

In sum, we can expect shading about 0.7% of the time. Not too bad.

The Real Question

Those who pay attention likely noticed that Batshit J. Moron and his henchmen are pushing a faux Christianity down our collective throats. MMM!!! Tastes so good!!!

Today's news brings yet another example.

In the first place, of course, is the Christ was the junior partner in the trio. Hardly a King. Moreover: since God is said to be omnipotent, how is it that only one (or may be a couple) religion to Them "knows" about all the folderol that the Judeo-Christian tradtion imbibes??? Why would They permit 10,000 religions to persist, with different, even antithetical, belief systems? Why appoint only the Judeo-Christians to the ultimate throne?? Seems kind of fascist; the Christ Is King bunch don't want the Jews, of course. The whole Rapture thingee is all about getting all the Jews in one place to blow them up, and the Christians go to Heaven. Not very Godly. Ya think?

God, of course, didn't do it. Humans did. Each clan made the God, or Gods, that served the purpose.

By my estimate 99.44% of the worst wars in all of human history (at least since we've been literate and have had something like countries, anyway), have been driven by religious zealots. Can we have a Crusade? How about one with kids. Batshit J. Moron (and Bibi) have taken us into one today. And he's not very Godly, to say the least.

Truth be told, and I'm going to, humans since ancient times, especially far enough back when one clan knew nothing about the other clans on the other side of the planet (Hell's bells, even a few hundred miles away) invented a religion which suited each and every tribe; in isolation. Hell's bells, they didn't even know Mother Earth was a planet!! In other words, the truth is humans, of every distinct type, invented their God(s) in their image. Not the other way round. The Trio is not different from the pantheons of Greece and Rome. The Judeo-Christian God served the purpose of the Powers That Be at the time of Her invention by The Powers That Be. Happens like that every time and every place throughout history.

Pandora

If anyone thinks that this report is telling the truth, I'll sell you a bridge. Damn Gummints will never, ever leverage the power of Mythos (nor any other weapons grade software), for the Good of The People. They will use it to subjugate the people, just as they always have with any such weapon or law.

Among U.S. rivals, the response has been more muted. Despite Anthropic's recent clash with the Trump administration, Mr. Amodei has made clear that A.I. should be used to defend the United States and other democracies and defeat autocratic adversaries.

If you believe that Hate filled, Petty, Paranoid, Demented, Dictator Don will NOT use such a weapon against his "enemies", which amount to anyone not MAGAnaut, your an idiot.

What might we expect? For one thing, and likely the first: all code going forward will be closed, and likely by law. We know that the 'data centers' have hoovered up most everything on the innterTubes, which includes open source code.

Smile, your on Candid Computer!! We are watching you.

Le Grande Conspiracy

The NSA has been mentioned a few times in the course of these missives, esp. since the 2016 stolen election. Here's a missive. Now, NSA has reared its head again. But not quite in the way I'd like.

Now, we have the Grand Conspiracy to endure. The fact remains: NSA hoovers up every signal on the planet 24/7, and has the receipts on The Trump/Putin Affair. We need another Snowden.

Can you say Putin, Jr.?

Thought For The Day - 12 April 2026

The sub-headline reads "All six board members that oversee the national historic landmark were terminated, part of the administration's efforts to reshape the federal bureaucracy."

Which, of course, is not quite accurate. Bone Spur Samurai^© is wielding Jacksonian dictatorial authority over [quasi]-independent organizations, which don't have Civil Service protections. The purpose, of course, is return the United States of Alabama to the thrilling days of yesteryear, when the whole Damn Gummint was run on the spoils system. Garfield paid with his life, and Congress finally figured out that a developed country can't be run that way. And, I shan't attempt to find a link, one of the MAGA affiliates recently opined that the Founding Fathers had no intent to create a Full Democracy. For those who think that, there remain (notably in New England where I reside) towns that are governed by a town meeting; everybody shows up and votes. If you don't show and don't vote, you can't bitch.

And, surprise surprise, Orban admits defeat. I expected a Putinesque landslide. We'll see if he really leaves. And leaves well enough alone. A true dictator sure wouldn't.

Data or Events?

When I started grad school, the econ profession was in a bit of turmoil. Samuelson and Solow and the gaggle of 'quants' were everywhere. And the event and history brigade was very much in retreat. As any grad student in any field in any school at any time, each will be caught in the internecine battle between the two (sometimes more) cabals fighting for control of the department. And grad students, being essential to profs need to not actually teach, are coveted. I was caught between the history cabal and the quant. I left with a Masters as soons as practicable.

While I've spent my life in the data vicinity, simple observation makes it clear that seeing how the world will be tomorrow is 99.44% determined by events from today and some bit of time before. And, no real surprise, it helps to study the results from similar, or even identical, events from the past. History rhymes. Some times even repeats.

People in power make the decisions based on what events and decisions benefit them. High speed trading and macroeconomic models never understand events. And, even without grifters putting a foot on the scales, macro data is nearly always tender samples, and thus fuzzy. Pick any sector, and watch the market for those companies. What really moves the market cap is news, good and bad. Makes insider trading so alluring.

Which brings us to a new report from an economic historian. Fact is, I didn't think there were any left. He, of course, is at Harvard.

The report presents the results of events on the world economy around WWI. It ain't pretty. He draws inference to Batshit J. Moron's Iran war. While acknowledging the difference in scale, he offers up evidence of events which parallel WWI. WWI because it was the seed of global interdependence that we live in now.

The lessons from history are sobering: In an interdependent global economy, the shock of the outbreak of war can produce long-term instabilities overnight, many of which become apparent only over time.

Well, boy howdy, as Dr. McElhone used to say. May be our Dear Leader and his band of dick suckers don't know much.

Now, there are fertilizer shortages at the beginning of the spring planting season for foods including rice, which means that we may eventually see reduced crop yields and higher prices. As the experience of the Covid pandemic made clear, supply chain disruptions like these can produce inflationary surges with long tails, which, before they abate, can have damaging secondary effects, from higher mortgage rates to fiscal crises to political unrest.

The title on the innterTubes version of his report

I Studied the Economic Fallout From World War I. This Could Be Worse Than We Expect.

Have a nice day. .

Run!! Tsunami's Coming

If you've been keeping track of AI in the compute world, then you've seen/read at least a few reports that AI generated code has eaten the world. Here's a NYT version. All of which makes me laugh out loud. For at least two reasons.

The first, naturally, is that the RDBMS approach to code is to not do any (at least, as little as possible), and let the database manager take care of data integrity. The advantages are well documented here, and some other places. Not having to updage client code every day or two around the world is just one advantage. The other is that data constraints are succinct. Very. Yahoo.

The second, of course is that AI systems are based on the shit that litters the innterTubes; I suspect that what these AI Code generators do is slurp up all that RBAR (do I hear the plaintive cry of COBOL in the distance?) code from 1970 onwards. Back to the future? No, reactionary idiocy. Dr. Codd showed us how to build robust systems built on explicit data logic, not spaghetti code. But, just like AI Agents, doing that reduces the need for a battalion of coders. The difference is that RDBMS eschews code, while AI Agents have unchecked diahrrea. In the Good Olde Days, the coders counterattacked by asserting (and this is a direct quote) "we prefer to do transactions in the client". Keep those fingers typing.

When a financial services company recently began using Cursor, an artificial intelligence technology that writes computer code, the difference that it made was immediate.

The company went from producing 25,000 lines of code a month to 250,000 lines. That created a backlog of one million lines of code that needed to be reviewed, said Joni Klippert, a co-founder and the chief executive of StackHawk, a security start-up that was working with the financial services firm.

This is progress????

Of course, the reporters aren't clued in

Someone has to review the A.I.-generated code to test it for bugs, security and compliance. But it can sometimes be unclear whose job it is to fix issues created by A.I.-generated code. In the past, it would be the responsibility of the person who created the code.

That's not always, or even now, been the case. Back in the Good Olde Days, when COBOL (and earlier when it was assembler) ruled the business world, the programming shop was divided into three parts: systems analysts, coders, and testers. The latter two still exist widely. The first had, until now, been abandoned. But now that function has been split out, again. The purpose of the systems analyst is to define what the programs are intended to do, then assign a coder to make it manifest.

Now, if the AI monsters get their way, they will be the analysts and coders. The humans will be the testers, and of necessity, the second class analysts. "Joe, ya gotta figure out what the fucking AI did!! Your job depends on it!! Get to it."

Fun fact: when the analyst position was made largely redundant, the loudest bitch heard in the programming shop was when a project artifact was moved from one analyst/programmer (yes, that's how the job was often labelled) to another. The reason, of course, is that there wasn't an analyst's document of the code. Worse yet, in the world of C/C++/java coding, lots of folks never, ever bother to work out the code before typing. And, of course, the code never really works, sometimes mostly it does and sometimes it doesn't at all. Either way, the coder then fires up the debugger, and finally gets down to writing a working program.

Now, imagine how that's going to work when the AI machine goes off on its merry way!! You guessed it - KAOS.

Companies are struggling to hire enough people to monitor the A.I. code for risks, a role called application security engineer. "There are not enough application security engineers on the planet to satisfy what just American companies need," said Joe Sullivan, an adviser to Costanoa Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture firm. The large companies he works with would add five to 10 more people in this role if they could, he said.

Some have faced the Monster

Sachin Kamdar, a co-founder of Elvex, an A.I. agent start-up, said he created a rule around 16 months ago that all of the company's code needed to be reviewed by a human. Otherwise, problems would be harder to fix because no one would understand the work that A.I. had done.

"It's just going to break something, and they're not going to know why it broke," he said.

Well... duh!! The agent halucinates while writing yet another General Ledger. Cool. The smartest, coolest guys in the room have fucked the dog. Even more Cool.

Thought For The Day - 7 April 2026

11:00 AM eastern

And, I guess, some of you thought I was exaggerating. Well... no.
"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."

Will the supine GOP grow some balls and a spine and 25^th this lunatic before he and Bibi destroy the world? Not a peep from them as I type.

Thought For The Day - 6 April 2026

Well... I guess it comes down to this:

1 - Batshit J. Moron remains the TACO man
or 
2 - Batshit J. Moron gives the Rapture cult and Bibi what they want -
    blow up the world

Consider how the world will be if Batshit J. Moron does bomb Iran back to the stone ages. He will have pulled off what Goldfinger couldn't - destroy a considerable amount of the world's petro reserves. But, as previously demonstrated, crude is not really fungible just because each type requires a refinery constructed for that feedstock. The United States of Alabame can't use Irani oil. Oh... and that means invading and killing about 90 million Iranis. Won't that be fun? Pete would love that.

The cocksucking GOP really needs to accept that their Dear Leader really is a lunatic and needs be 25^th'd out of the way. JD might not be so crazy. One hopes.

The Totally Unhinged - part the fourth

We told you so:

Smart people vote with their feet. [you betcha]
-- Donald Hughes McElhone, Ph.D.[statistics, Iowa State]/1975

Yet another, although not near enough of them, example from the NYT on the exodus.

Malik wasn't looking to uproot his life and move abroad. He was married with three children, and his parents lived in Washington. But with President Trump slashing science research, Malik rolled the dice.

"I had friends who lost their jobs," he said. "I saw that happening in real time. I thought, 'Let me entertain this.'"

Of course, those whose ox is getting gored have noticed

Experts are sounding the alarm. A study in September by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank, warned that without a reversal, the cuts to science could shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years. That could leave the U.S. lagging behind China, which is investing heavily in research.

And, and there's always an and, a recent report from Fierce Biotech on the attack on medical science. "A fucking moron"^©Tillerson, and his toadies, really do want to turn this previously intelligent country into the antebellum United States of Alabama.

This time around, the White House said executing on the AHA would bring about $5 billion of savings by consolidating or eliminating subagency programs that "duplicate other Federal spending, promote radicalized [diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)] ideologies or use taxpayer funds to support radical nonprofits that are not aligned with Administration policies."

"aligned with Administration policies" is just code for Make America White Again. Well... and evangelical (it never has been more than cults), old, rural, and male.

Goldfinger - part the second

Well... more news to support the hypothesis: Bone Spur Samurai^© seeks to corner the market on petro. And now, this (in the spirit of John Oliver):

President Trump declared Wednesday night that other countries should "take the lead" on the Strait of Hormuz in yet another signal that the US may aim to depart Iran with that economically vital issue unresolved.

Shut down Fort Knox, and your pile of moolah just got more valuable. If Bone Spur Samurai^© really, really were "America First", he'd direct an EO (or demand that Congress...) to implement 100% export restriction on USofA petro products. That'd show 'em!! But, of course, he won't do that, since his best buds in the petro bidnezz are reaping scads of excess profit off the blocked Strait.

A couple of oddities, yet unresolved in my brain. MidEast oil is the light sweet stuff, while most of USofA refining is structured for heavy, sour stuff. Venezuela has a lot of that. West Texas Intermediate and shale tend toward light, sweet. So, it'd cost a bundle to make the USofA "independent" in oil, using only/mostly our indigenous stuff. Each type/grade of crude needs a refinery designed to it, so the USofA has a lot of light, sweet stuff, but for historical reasons, the refining infrastructue tilts toward the heavy, sour stuff. Switching is acknowleged to cost a bundle. Go figure. OTOH, one of the talking head pundits on the Lunatic Left MS... noted that the Venezuela crude is too bad for gas refining. Who knows?

But, given Bone Spur Samurai^©'s reptilian brain, doing an Oil Patch Goldfinger is right up his alley. Cut off the feed stocks for our frenemies? Interestingly, most of the countries which import middle east oil are Asian, not European. It appears that Uncle Sugar's Country is the major supplier to Europe's refineries. What will Bone Spur Samurai^© do?

We Told You So - 27 March 2026

The world is not linear.
-- Donald Hughes McElhone, Ph.D./1980

All one need do to see the obvious: look at a graph of global population since AD began. For an even starker image: go back another 1,000 years. Mother Nature isn't linear, either.

David Gelles writes recently that even the scientists find their sphincters clenching. Mother Earth is warming faster than their earlier predictions. Which, naturally, Batshit J. Moron screams is a hoax.

Seas are rising and glaciers are melting — and there's also now a growing debate about whether the rate of planetary warming is actually speeding up. New research published this month found that even after accounting for other phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, solar radiation and natural variability, the rate of global warming has accelerated since 2015.

So, Mother Nature is biting The Stupid (and the rest of us) in the butt when The Stupid are our Dear Leaders. Much like Batshit J. Moron's beloved 19^th century primitive economy and society (wonderful tariffs and clean, beautiful coal, and the like). Killed your farm's soil? Just go a few miles West to get virgin pasture. Kill that in a few years? Just go a few more miles West. And so on. Some time ago I saw a teeVee report with a corn farmer (the 12 foot high silage kind of corn) who observed that the only thing the ground did was hold up the stalk; the soil is barren and without petro fertilizers, nada.

Thought for the Day - 22 March 2026

Ya tink the petro problems are bad now? If Batshit J. Moron goes through with his latest psychotic excursion, obliterating Iran's electrical infrastructure, that 20% or so of petro stuff will never get to market. American farmers will have to go back to cow shit to fertilize. Not so much of that anymore.

Data Data Everywhere nor Any One to Trust

So, let's get in Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine, and visit econ near its beginning, 1776. The field was then known as 'political economics', reflecting that Damn Gummint policy has both direct and indirect effects on the nation's economy. And, if your economy is big enough (the United States of Alabama, fur instance) or deeply embedded enough (OPEC, et al) in the global system, then all nations.

And so it was, until Samuelson screwed things up by plastering political economics with a slathering of mathematical lipstick. Then his colleague, Solow, went ahead and did much the same with math stats.

Unlike natural phenomena, which play by God's rules (more or less immutable; until we find we've deduced one or so incorrectly, see Einstein), humans write the rules of economies. And, of course, in most cases the stronger players write the rules on their behalf. And, so economics lost its way. They/we might bigly benefit from a text by a couple of real maths, von Neumann and Morgenstern on Game Theory:

Richard Stone (1948) Asserts that Unquestionably, for economists this book is the most important contribution that has appeared since J. M. Keynes's General Theory was published in 1936. It is concerned with the behaviour of individuals, and the coalitions which they may form in attempting to better themselves. It is directed therefore to the kinds of problem that are met with in the theory of value, and especially those that arise under conditions of duopoly, imperfect competition and the like.
[my emphasis]

As most know, econ is divided into at least two distinct types: micro and macro. The former generally deals with problems of The Firm, and the latter with problems of The Whole Damn Economy, and by default, what the Damn Gummint does, or doesn't do, to affect the nation's economy as a whole. Our Dear Friend Krugman is of the latter tribe. As am I.

The overriding problem for the macro tribe is data. Most of it is shaky, at best. Manipulated at worst. And, not always by malfeasance. As mentioned in these missives from before they existed, much of the macro data is samples. And, of course, sampling always has error; there's a good bit of theory about that in any math stats sampling text. And, of course, it's been widely documented that much sample data at the national level has been falling in response rate. On the whole, one might surmise that a data-driven macro policy agenda is on thinning ice. (Ayatollah 49% Don^© is licking his chops.) Take the recent oddity with the inflation number: our friends in the Damn Gummint put a foot on the scale. I guess they figured no one would notice.

Deep inside its monthly inflation report on Friday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said that the cost of legal services rose 1.8 percent in January. That was an unusually large increase, but not nearly as big as the double-digit gain that some forecasters were expecting.

The reason for the divergence: The agency, which is part of the Commerce Department, had changed the source of its data on legal prices, relying on wholesale prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics rather than the consumer price data it usually uses.

[T]he adjustment was enough to shave roughly a tenth of a percentage point off the monthly change in the core Personal Consumption Expenditures price index.

Which brings us to the obit of an unknown, to me anyway, economist, Christopher A. Sims. Who the hell cares about an obscure econ? Because he was emblematic of the curse of macro data in economic analysis.

Though statistical models of the economy improved, they still couldn't always provide reliable forecasts or guidance for policymakers. A notable failure was the 2008-9 financial crisis, which few economists saw coming.

Ahhh. The ones who did, and often not 'economists', knew that macro results are always, within non-primitive societies, driven by the Damn Gummint's laws and regulations. Some times by intention, and some times by inattention. What those who figured out where the USofA's economy was headed knew what Blythe Masters had unleashed. With no guardrails or barriers or laws or regulations to stop the tsunami from killing the global economy.

She is widely credited with creating the modern credit default swap, a derivative used to manage credit exposure to underlying reference entities.

Here's the CDS:

Some general criticism of financial derivatives is also relevant to credit derivatives. Warren Buffett famously described derivatives bought speculatively as "financial weapons of mass destruction." In Berkshire Hathaway's annual report to shareholders in 2002, he said, "Unless derivatives contracts are collateralized or guaranteed, their ultimate value also depends on the creditworthiness of the counterparties to them. In the meantime, though, before a contract is settled, the counterparties record profits and losses—often huge in amount—in their current earnings statements without so much as a penny changing hands. The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen)."

In essence, CDS et al, are just gambling vehicles which allow unconnected parties to bet on the health, or lack thereof, of companies. As the Great Recession proved, at values far in excess of the companies targeted. One might call the CDS as short-selling on one part LSD and two parts steroids.

So, was Dr. Sims an evil genius? Not entirely sure. He did get the nearly-Nobel in econ, though.