Thought For The Day - 24 July 2025

The headline reads - "Swallowing Reservations, Democrats Go on Offense on Epstein Files"

Whaaaaa?!?!?!

C'mon, dude!! Just how many left-wing lunatic pedophiles do you really think there are? Throughout history, sexual exploitation has been a right wingnut thing. A power trip. The right wingnut manna. Except for Horn Dog Bill, how many more? How many left-wing billionaires can there be? Not a whole lot. Of those, how many hobnobbed with Epstein? Not so many.

As many, if not all, sexual exploitation advocates and researchers have claimed: it's not about the sex, but the power. And which Party is most in thrall to Personal Power? The elephant in the room. Chuck Schumer cavorting with Epstein? Gimme a break.

The Greatest Threat - part the fifteenth

Demented Dictator Don and his merry band of henchmen (Offices of Data and Policy Integrity) are at it again. Not that they ever really let up, what with Texas and such. But this is, yet again, another ploy to hurt the faithful. Just what the Red States need: a dearth of weather data. These are, after all, more farmin, fishin, and huntin than the Blue States.

What is most appalling: these Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts clearly don't give a shit that they'll be handing their grandkids, and more than likely their toddlers, a burnt out cinder of a planet.

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

If you've followed the reports, soon to disappear, about the progress of climate change over the past few decades, the point that stands out like a sore thumb is that the predictions always turn out to be too rosy. The reality is worse than the forecast. So, Demented Dictator Don, through his minions, have axed more NOAA folks. These two, by accounts, were the ones who told Demented Dictator Don that his Sharpie Drawing of Hurricane Dorian was shit. I mean, how the fuck much does Demented Dictator Don know about predicting hurricanes? I mean, 6 bankruptcies!! He's "a fucking moron"^©Tillerson as we all know.

The other carrot in the stew, oft mentioned in these essays, is that the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts and Demented Dictator Don are wedded to the notion that no Social Goods or Services must exist. The Bible tells them so.

We can expect to find much, if not all, of NOAA/NWS sold off to the likes of The Musk Ox for One US Dollar. After, of course, SpaceX reaps billions for new satellites and such. After all of which, someone will have to pay a pretty penny for any kind of weather forecast. No global warming, of course; it's a hoax.

DEI - part the second

The name isn't familiar. I've been watching the biopharma space for some years, but his work there goes back some decades. His name is William Rutter, that's his obit.

So, one might ask, why is he the subject of a DEI screed? You would ask, wouldn't you? Well, here's why.

At 15, Bill, as he was known, left his local high school to enroll in college in Utah. While there, he was identified and recruited by Harvard University through a program aimed at finding promising students from underrepresented regions.

Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) would have a shitfit today, of course. But, may be not. You can't get more fishbelly white than Idaho and Utah. So, may be, Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) might have been OK with Harvard giving a deserving white boy from really White States a leg up. Or, may be not. How about today?

In 1968 Dr. Rutter, a biochemist, was recruited by the University of California, San Francisco, to help transform it into a research powerhouse with funding from the National Institutes of Health. He helped pioneer the science of genetic engineering — a foundation of the biotech industry that set it apart from traditional pharmaceutical development.

And, once again, the Damn NIH wouldn't dare boost the prospects of a West Coast woke college these days. Not in a million years.

Too bad that 99.44% of all progress comes out of the Coastal Blue States. If the likes of Demented Dictator Don succeeds in turning the USofA into the Dumb States of Mississippi, we'd best learn Mandarin. Not that the Dumb States of Mississippi comprehend real English.

The Laffer Principle - part the second

Once again, into the fire. Laffer's stupidity in spades. The fundamental argument for Supply Side Econ is that supply creates its own demand (orig. to Say). Now, anyone who's observed reality for even just a little while can see that supply, if anything, lags demand. Big Bidnezz doesn't start making more supply until after it's obvious that they're leaving revenue/profit on the table due to output shortfall. Then, and only then, does the Big Bidnezzman make more widgets. And a Damn Gummint Subsidy would be nice, too.

Which brings us to today's reporting that steel, for some reason unknown to the Right Wingnut Supply Siders, just can't seem to create yet more demand.

Of course it can't. Steel is an intermediate good (deep in the Leontief matrix), unlike a Barbie which is a consumer good. So, Big Bidnezz only buys as much steel as it needs to make all the Barbies it can sell. Not too much steel in a Barbie, but you get the point.

Amusingly, none of the interviewed Bidnezzmen brought out the age-old plaint of "ruinous competition" when free markets (co-called) lead to actual competition for product. Boohoo.

The Laffer Principle - part the first

Arthur Laffer's silliness has come up in the news, directly and indirectly, over the recent days (2019 - in the hopper for a while). Here's one that's particularly amusing. Of course, if Laffer's 'theory' were true, Samsung et al would keep spitting out LCD panels at decreasing average price since they 'know' that such supply will create new demand. Laffer says so.

LCD panels for various applications including computer displays, televisions, smartphones, digital signage, and other are produced at dozens of factories in China, Japan, South Korea, and other countries creating oversupply and cut-throat competition. Given macroeconomic uncertainties, demand for numerous devices such as TVs is expected to be weak during the year-end shopping season, which puts further pressure on panel makers.

Meanwhile, it looks like there are simply way too many LCD panels made these days.

I Told You So - 22 July 2025

Well... this didn't take long. As I, and most econ types, told you would happen, Red Blooded American companies piggy-backed (emphasis on Piggy) on the tariffs to jack up their prices. I guess that's the American Way, "Get your money for nothin' (I want my, I want my)" [Dire Straits]?

And, this time, it's steel, so it will percolate through the rest of the economy.

American steel makers are raising prices, forcing new costs onto domestic manufacturers that make everything from cars to military tanks. The increases come on the back of President Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum.

"You always see that as one of the traps of a tariff," said John O'Leary, the chief executive of Daimler Truck North America, which buys large amounts of steel to make Freightliner and Western Star trucks and Thomas Built school buses. American steel makers, he said, now have "more headroom to be able to raise the price."

Good ole patriotic American Bidnezz: ready to screw the rest of us to steal a buck.

The Greatest Threat - part the fourteenth

The Office of Data Integrity, in partnership this time with the Office of Policy Integrity (to tell the truth, it's almost always such), is shutting down the most significant source of long term climate data. This should come as little surprise, since Garfield 2.0 (a step closer) complained about Covidiot Infection^™ back in 2020.

If you don't test, you don't have any cases. If we stopped testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any.

And, of course, his sub-GED crowd of MAGAnauts nodded their empty heads in agreement.

The readings collected from Mauna Loa, starting in 1958, were used to create what is famously known as the Keeling curve. It's an upward-swooping line that charts the steady rise of carbon dioxide over the past seven decades — the result of nations burning oil, gas and coal.

But President Trump's proposed 2026 budget would put an end to Mauna Loa, along with three other key observatories and almost all the climate research being done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

We wouldn't want to keep an on-going record of the success of "clean, beautiful coal", now would we? Of course not.

As usual, The MAGAnauts care nothing about what sort of Mother Earth they leave their little ones, much less their little ones little ones. If these Bozos keep control long enough, today's MAGAnauts will, themselves, have to live on a Mother Earth that's scorching hot and oscillating between drought and flood. Bozos ascribe Hell to being As Hot As, and claim to have read Dante. Alas, the bottom of Dante's Hell is solid ICE.