I don’t know if the rest of ya’ll are 100% clear on the weird workings of my marriage when it comes to politics. Not that there was a reason for you to be, but for this post it is necessary to understand it.
When we first got married Dan was well…. in eighties terms, a Reagan democrat. I shoved, argued and seduced him considerably to the AMERICAN-right from there, but he retained the conviction that “politics isn’t quite nice.” So, 99% of the time, he’s a LIV (Low Information Voter). His instincts are in the right place, but he pays zero attention to politics until it obtrudes on his consciousness, sometime around three months before an election. And then he starts by asking me a lot of questions before proceeding to research his options. Because he assumes I know what they’re up to, and he doesn’t.
His department in this marriage is popular culture outside politics, movies, songs and also what the heck is going on in the neighborhood. When I wave incoherently at a house he goes “Oh, Joe and Tish, yeah, they’re nice. Three kids, and their dog has been sick.” I don’t understand how he does this, as he doesn’t even talk to neighbors that often, but he knows them and they all like him. (I think some of them think I don’t speak very good English, considering how hard I avoid them.) He also keeps an eye on the kids unless it’s something complicated, in which case I do, and figures out money and investments.
My job is almost solely politics. (Okay, and cleaning and cooking, because I’m faster and better at it. As well as minor home maintenance and gardening.)
… Younger son and I are ROUTINELY sucker punched by his reaction to something. Like we’ll be ranting about oh, Swallwell, and he says “What an unfortunate name. Is he a Republican?” Or he finds out that Trump’s Mar-a-largo was raided two years after it happened, and is hopping mad, and gets upset when we go “Oh, yeah, that” because well…. we’ve processed it already.
That was at least the deal until recently.
This morning I woke up to news that a CNN poll (CNN – Snort, giggle) said the Republicans are in trouble for the midterms. Also that everyone is displeased with the Trump economy.
Okay. Maybe this is true? Who the heck actually knows? I’ve not been particularly impressed with polls in a long time, and I take them to be “Battle space preparation for how much fraud the left intends to perpetrate.” I remain convinced that without fraud, the left would routinely get a solid 25% of the votes, and half of those would be people too old to know better.
As for the economy…. It’s better than under Biden. I don’t feel we’re about to crash. BUT I UNDERSTAND people’s short memories and impatience.
And to give people their due, I wish Trump would stop making like Obama and Biden and drawing red lines for Iran that he later erases. Look, I understand his not wanting to destroy the production capacity for oil, because of how that affects the world, but it’s obvious we’re going to have to, so do it quickly, then get back to real stuff, and we’ll cope. (Respectfully, Mr. President. Truly.)
BUT again, for decades now polls have been more corrupted than voting, and you know what voting is like.
I’m not seeing any of this hostility to Republicans here on the ground, or amid my acquaintance (note I didn’t say my friends, who tend to be on the right. Acquaintance is more mixed.) There is in fact a growing horror among all but the crazier about what the democrats have become.
And then there’s this sense things have shifted.
I suspect even if the left wins the elections, they’ll find it’s a phyrric victory. I actually expected them to b eable to do a lot more while they had 4 years of autopen, but instead what they actually accomplished only served to hurt them more in people’s eyes.
I think Trump has created a lot of change not just in how things are done, but in the culture. So where the “left” is now is not where it was among the people. (Among the politicians it’s apparently now the CCP but that’s something else.)
How changed? Well, there’s my beloved LIV. You guys don’t know how I’ve suffered. I’ll sit here, next to him, setting up the memes, chuckling to myself. And of course he asks why. And I show it to him. And then I have to do a half an hour lecture on “How we got here” before he gets why the meme is funny. (Unless it’s a non-political meme.)
And then there was last week. We started with the Rubio as Helen of Troy. And he GOT IT immediately. Not just the Helen of Troy (his dept in the household includes movies, after all) but he GOT THE RUBIO thing. Immediate belly laugh. And as though this weren’t enough, he got three others, immediately.
Our younger son did due diligence in searching the basement for pods. There were none.
Here’s the thing though, you guys have no idea what a seismic shift this is. I keep telling you we know how outrageous the left is because we’re political animals and extremely online. That we have to have patience witht he normal, let alone low information voter.
BUT– Oh, he’s still a LIV compared to me. But–
Maybe the LIVs are paying more attention now. And maybe the Earth has moved (for everyone. ;) )
Just a ray of hope as you face all of the left’s attempts at discouraging you well before the elections.
So. Don’t be discouraged. Get out there and work instead. Because the current left is worse than ever (and that’s saying a lot.) And we have a future to work on.
Be not afraid.
According To Hoyt 
Strange days…………. Maybe all the efforts by the left to sell their BS are really starting to backfire to the point where people who normally pay no attention to politics can no longer ignore it?
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Yeah, there is a reason I go “I dunno” and “we shall see” so often. It is not /only/ that I am a bit of a short bus student, and have trouble finding new ideas or things to say.
The future has genuine uncertainty, and I am not sure how to discard and discount the contamination by the information warfare.
Many of my psychological problems in response to ‘news’ about ‘current events’ was simply trusting in models that I did not actually know.
I am not the apex of sanity, good decisions, or particularly sound life choices.
I’m ninety percent sure that we have had some unknown-as-yet nonlinear shift in American politics. What? So many possibilities, imma just gonna sit in the corner with the dunce cap, thank you very much.
What Trump promised in 2015, I think he may have actually pretty much delivered, and everything from here is for bonus points.
It is about the hopefully avoided civil war, and the fallback the Democrats have in Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
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No one seems at all bothered about the Hanta outbreak, so now the media et al are yelling about Ebola. The national news is interviewing people who say that the rising gas prices are forcing them to stop buying groceries, and that food pantries supplies are OK … for now, and that Trump and “the American people” don’t want the reflecting pool in DC redone [what the huh?]. Most people seem to be ignoring the arm-waving and hand-wringing. Two refineries on the Gulf Coast having to shut down temporarily after accidents, plus the annual shift to summer blends, probably has as much to do with the price of gas jumping so fast as does the Iran stuff.
Too, the midterms are still more than six weeks away. The media and doomcasters* seem to forget that.
*But I repeat myself.
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I’m deathly afraid of hanta virus, and ebola, which is why I dug a bunker thirty years ago, and sealed it beneath an antartic glacier, and have not ventured out since.
Everyone else says ‘just do not drink the corpse water at funerals’, but I am pretty sure that is just because they do not have the advanced scientific knowledge.
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The reflecting pool thing is so dumb. Honestly, we’ve been living the last ten years in the fable of “The Press that cried Trump” and I think even LIV are sick of it.
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NewScum posting a mid-renovation picture and pretending to clutch his pearls over the “final result” was almost funny, though the twitx reply showing the high speed railroad’s Not-In-Progress was an appropriate rejoinder.
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Everybody who sees pictures of the reflection pool pre-renovation say, “OMG! What a disgrace! That looks horrible! Why aren’t they using chlorine??”
People were extremely skeptical of an older video claiming that the algae blooms were “harmless” and “safe,” because that’s definitely not always the case with common algae in water features. The gunk that looked gray or brown struck people as even more dubious.
Similarly, everybody who found out that the White House had to have porta-potties outside for formal dinners, because the old ballroom didn’t have restroom coverage, was appalled and horrified. That stuff never should have been allowed once, much less for years and years.
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In order to preserve the historic character, the government buildings in DC should have /never/ had AC, electricity, or running water installed.
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I’m with you on AC – going home at the end of May and not coming back to the Swamp until October would, theoretically, reduce the Mischief.
Former VP Cactus Jack Garner supposedly said “No good legislation ever comes out of Washington after June.” Apparently the August recess is a leftover from pre-AC times. Grok tells me those dweebs started getting AC in the Capitol in 1928.
I’d bend on running water; even if the laws are sh*t, no reason the buildings should smell like it.
And I’m ambivalent about electricity. No microphones, no TV interviews sounds like a benefit. But lighting and at least ceiling fans sounds beneficial, too.
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never have installed running potable water?
PIKER!
When was the first sanitary sewer with household connections built in DC?
(likely well after John Snow’s tracing of the London Cholera epidemic of the 1830s, I’m sure!)
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There are still those insisting that the next Democrat president MUST destroy the ballroom.
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Because they’re effing insane.
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Irrational regime hypothesis, on its own, explains Democrat behavior very neatly.
The only parts of American politics that then might need different explanations are the stupidities and clevernesses of the Republicans.
“Don’t get cocky” is maybe repeated too much.
These explanations are so neat, so just so, that I find myself wondering how I am tricking myself, and what I am missing.
Part of the explanation is that withdrawing from a lot of media means that I way over sample Babylon Bee, and Redstate, and live far too much in my own internal sense of things.
I am definitely too insular, and too focused on my own fringe interests.
OTOH, we have like six months until the election. Five and a half?
I can maybe get through almost forty iterations of weird fixations on one model, and running around with my hair on fire, in that time. Most of which will not have any long term utility.
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Sometimes it fits because it actually is correct. I believe that this is one of those times. (But eh, what do I really know anyway?)
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The truly fun part? The same conditions leading to the algae blooms can also support various types of the brain eating ameba!
Which is why smart parents won’t let their kids wade in the water, as was common just a few decades ago during sultry DC summers!
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And the other half are too young to know better. The rest is just noise.
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The real thing to watch is the special elections and the primaries. They have not been saying Trump is bad.
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Well I live in the People’s Republic of California, and just got my vote-by-fraud ballot in the mail a few days ago. I occasionally glimpse a political ad on TV–all by Democrats of course. Every single one tries to outdo the others with how much they hate Trump and will defend us poor Californios from evil orange man bad. I think it was Becerra who boasted that he’s already sued Trump 120 times. Others are all, “We shall fight him on the beaches. We shall fight him on the fields and in the streets.”
Alas, California, we barely knew you. I really though Heinlein was stretching it with Friday.
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I really hope there’s a strategy to this with Iran. This is getting annoying.
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I think Trump really thought the Mullahs would fold or be overtaken by a revolution. Problem is, they’re not sane by our lights; their apocalyptic beliefs mean they *can’t* surrender and can never, ever be trusted. No deal can be made, no deal was ever possible. And then there’s the thing where they recently killed everyone who even gave rebellion a sidelong glance. And now there’s no way out of widespread economic damage, because they’re still holding on, they’ve got a chaos veto on commerce through the Strait of Hormuz, and hurting everybody is their entire raison d’etre. They’re all going to have to be killed, the sooner the better.
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Maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised. But I admit, I thought he had their measure better than it seems he does.
:looks at watch: I wonder if/when I may end up eating those words…?
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I dunno, really. That’s what it looks like to me, but as some people pointed out below, it could be that Trump has a better read on this than we’d think right now. There’s still a lot of variables in motion, and I would be very happy to be wrong.
We (I, via the pundits) keep assuming that the situation has to be resolved well before the midterms or it’s a failure, but that’d only be the case if the voting public cared enough about it to turn congressional elections into a negative referendum on that one piece of foreign policy, and a Democrat wave swept in and derailed everything. And that’d derail a LOT more than just the attempt to lance the Iran-shaped boil on the world’s butt, including a lot of things that are closer to home. I just hope the people who showed up for Trump in 2024 realize that he needs Republican majorities in Congress if he’s going to keep doing the things we elected him to do.
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Democrats are treating this as a combo of ‘all out attack’ and ‘we can campaign against Trump on the issues’.
Lots of people are going ‘these are issues, the Democrats can run on them’.
Conventional logic, for typical circumstances.
Who knows?
I think post Biden Afghanistan, Americans are really cautious about what bets DC is making on troops in foreign policy.
No idea what Americans will think about the specifics, or how they will jduge important priorties.
Trump kinda has two competing analyses.
One is the domestic, of earning enough legislative votes to push on his domestic policy agenda.
Second is whatever timescales of the military.
military history wise, I am an entitled instant gratification whiner. “Was it over when the Quds force helped the tranny go on a spree shooting at Fort Sumpter?” Wars take time, sometimes years. Even if we stick to reasonably constrained modern wars.
Quagmire is a common talking point, and could be advanced here.
Certainly, something has not gone to plan, but some of that is being too cautious in predicting the more or less victory in the air war. (If I understand correctly.)
But Trump no longer has executive power to act in 2028, and he may be worrying more about that in the wider picture, than what military policy means for the midterms.
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The Iranian people are more afraid of the MadMullahs than of us. Unless that changes, no revolution.
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Okay, I should be working anyway, but did anyone else hear Carole King’s single from her “Tapestry” album (which I bought a half-speed vinyl copy of years ago in Wake Forest, NC oddly enough)?
*LIV= low information voter
Got it. Took me a minute. Sigh. That’s me when it gets down to the judges. I need to see if you’re allowed to take cheet sheets with you.
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Shoot.
^cheat
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Oh, good. I was wondering how Roman 54 had anything to do with this.
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Those of us of a certain age, certainly.
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Thank you, I was NOT certain what “LIV” meant… :D
But I did used to be one. Until Obama happened, sigh.
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Figured someone would define LIV. Thanks.
I be guilty. Although not as much lately thanks to Sarah, and everyone here.
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Maybe I’m more of a political junkie than I thought. OTOH, back in the Rush days, he’d use the “Low Information Voter” to explain his (er, forgot the Sacramento River town name) joke. LIV gets used in the VRWC* blog sites I’ve read.
And yes, I have vinyl [I think, not going to check tonight], CD, and and Tapestry Revisited. The song would launch a too obvious joke after every California earthquake.
(*) Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (the noun may well be different).
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My sons say I AM the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. (Pronounced Very Wick) Which I find very hurtful. 36 lbs down, fifty to go. Will I be the Svelte Right Wing Conspiracy when I’m done?
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Rio Linda. Northern Sacramento semi-rural suburb that had its last major architectural renovation overhaul in the 1960s. Used to work with a guy who lived there and he said there was a neighbor he had who was Greek or Albanian or something and kept trying to convince him that what he really needed was goats.
In other words, a place just ripe for “hey, rube” style humor, and right next to the state capitol, to boot.
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Thanks, I could not recall the name. Not a town I used to pass through, so it’s faded from memory.
On a different note, I talked to the surgeon, and we’re going to go with the total knee replacement. (There’s a new study that says going from ‘scope to TKR in a year may be suboptimal, but he wasn’t sure it was applicable. I’d be at 8-9 months, and the current state is unacceptable. Worst case is slower healing, but I’d prefer it getting better than the slowly getting worse.)
Up to TPTB for insurance buyoff, then 2-4 weeks.
Side note: the sole skilled-nursing center in Flyover County has been blacklisted by the hospital. A look at nursing home ratings explains why. Home recovery or bust. Will be day surgery.
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According to TES you always use the full version of a phrase followed by the acronym or abbreviation in parentheses no matter how HFCK the acronym/abbreviation is.
*The Epador Stylebook
**Holy Effing Common Knowledge
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thank you. I’ve actually been pouring through the comments, hoping someone would tell me what LIV meant. Makes perfect sense now that I know.
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So 64 is right out. :) :) :)
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As to Iran, the only endgame that matters is mullah-removal, the de-loon-ification of the Iranian government. Absent that, whoever is currently winning the Game of Peacock Throne will continue being the bandit kings of the Hormuz Strait and diligently developing nukes. The Iranian Guards are crazier than the senior weirdbeards, so the current decentralized mayhem leaves them running things.
Either trump got bad advice on Iranian reality, or chose to disbelieve good info.
They, the bosses of Iran, don’t think like us, don’t believe like us, don’t negotiate like us, don’t plan like us, and don’t desire outcomes like us.
No, they don’t. Yes, “human”. No, not the same sort of human. They have -chosen- how they think, and are very happy with it.
Our major problem is that we have loudly and continually telegraphed that we will not seriously harm the Iranian -people-. This was -stupid-. And we have been doing it since 1979.
The Iranian people choose either 1) ‘Yay Mullah Ocracy!’ or 2) ‘I am far more terrified of angry Mullahs in my neighborhood, and the Ayatollahs in Tehran, than those snice, friendly, softie Yankees overseas.”
Which means, unless and until the Iranian people are more afraid of -us- than the Ayatollahs’ Crew, they will -never- overthrow them. Of course if -we- do they will happily come up with some other pride-fulfilling regime. But unless they face -far- greater pain from us, the very real threat of angry weirdbeards will keep them subjugated and obedient to the weirdbeards.
it is Dom/Sub culture. Either we are the baddest dom on the block, or they will stick to the ones they know. Which means…
We have to get nasty as eff to win this. Yes, wreck the place., Yes, drop bridges, yes zorch power plants. Yes wreck oil output infrastructure. Worse. Hello, dark ages calling. Hello, Four Horsemen. Watch the rubble bounce. Yankees are A-N-G-R-Y.
Else the weirdbeards remain in control, eventually to gain nukes.
Folks, its -that- simple. Either we throw off this bullshit idea we can be the nicest opponents on the planet, and we go back to régime change on the European and pacific Theater models-, or they get nukes someday, soon. Either we convince the locals we are the biggest scary, or we must personally Conquer their asses and put acceptable yes-men in place to keep us placated, old sytle.
And since this particular mob is dedicated to ending our existence, nuclear version, enslaved and/or extinguished, heavy on the rape and pillage and organized humiliation, …
we had better get our act together and crush these idiot lunatic weirdbeards and anyone who isnt willing to toss them out. These are not Soviets or Chicoms. They don’t care if they collapse their own world back to the 7th century. Many would prefer it that way. We have to convince the locals that there are worse things than weirdbeards. Far worse. And we is it. And BOHICA why haven’t you tossed out the ones annoying us yet?
or sure as the sun comes up, we lose DC, NYC, and some other choice real estate to nukes. Gar-Ohn-TEEd. Then they demand we stick our asses in the air for them. Prison style.
Once upon a time in the Army, I lost my temper with an annoying bully wannabee, busted him one good punch in the mouth. The weird SOB became my biggest fan. He -liked- me. (ew)
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I’m starting to think Trump is genuinely not grasping the whole “armageddon cult” thing that BOTH the weirdbeards AND the Iranian Guard have going on.
Which is also why the local Iranians are still more afraid of them than us: the loonies have ALREADY STARTED the human sacrifices amongst them.
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The thing is, whether or not the thirty-fourth tier surviving junior-grade mullahs and their captive “civilian” government is negotiating in good faith, it’s the IRGC that is running the show, and that organization does not appear to have any negotiate in them. The strikes on IRGC bases, the banks that were paying the IRGC troops, and on the IRGC-owned industrial assets late in the kinetics were on the correct axis, but did not do enough damage to get a balance tip.
The thing that was impressive about the Venezuela operation was how going in with no losses, slicing up and through the Cuban praetorian guard, and grabbing Maduro from his bed completely tipped the balance and allowed the replacements who took power to openly negotiate with the U.S.. Talk about Schwerpunkt.
They tried to do that in Iran, but from my safe half-world-away chair I think perhaps the joint targeting overemphasized the mullahs and underdid the IRGC. And while I agree with listening to the emerging local U.S.-aligned Arabs being mandatory and otherwise beneficial, I don’t think any delay will end up yielding anything of use as long as the IRGC is still driving that bus.
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The WeirdBeards have been planning this fight since 1979. They built a decentralized cellular org for just such “decapitation ” strikes as worked in Venezuela.
It will take mass casualties of the “guard” to break their hold.
Think VC with guaranteed support and a greater fanaticism.
Defeatable. But may involve woodchippers.
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Agreed re insurgency from the other side. From what I hear there are lots and lots of angry Persians with Close family killed earlier this year, but nothing they can do with that anger against the IRGC and the Basiji. Send in the green beanies to do what they were stood up to do in the first place.
We also have lots of hard earned easy-to-invert COIN expertise in the ranks, and lots of nastiness that the EOD folks, both individually and institutionally, know very well how to make since they had to unmake it all live for the past twenty years. And those folks are creative, so new and tricksy splodeyness is not beyond them at all.
The only time we ever tried to be the side with the sanctuaries, we won (in Afghanistan vs. the Red Army). Do that.
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Same, same.
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“became biggest fan” … similar high school experience. Bully/tough guy/gang leader in my gym class decided I looked like the sort of bookish dweeb who made a fun target. So he started picking on me in various ways, and I did my best at deflection, which seemed to sort of confuse him. Until one day he reached around and sprayed deodorant in my face, and some got in my eyes. He had somehow overlooked that I had grown up on a farm, and had a somewhat ODD reputation. He had caused me SIGNIFICANT pain, so I temporarily stopped thinking (and thus, stopped worrying over ‘I might hurt him’); picked him up and THREW him against the lockers on the opposite side of the hall. He picked himself up, backed up a good ten feet, and started in with “you want to fight, me, eh? You want to fight me now?” except he didn’t really sound like HE wanted ME to fight him. But I REALLY blew him away when my reply was ‘Heck, no, Harry, I don’t want to fight you. I know you are a MUCH better fighter than me, so trying to fight you would be stupid. But why did you think hurting me was a good idea?!?’ He kind of stuttered a bit. looked completely lost for words, and went ‘Uh, OK, then!’ and left. Several weeks later, we ended up waiting in the Guidance Counselor’s vestibule at the same time (totally different reasons, of course) and he blurts out ‘hey, you’re pretty OK!’. Now I probably looked pretty stunned. Apparently being able to throw him that far (and probably being a bit scary for a change) meant I couldn’t REALLY be a dweeb. And we ended up having a decent conversation. He wasn’t actually stupid, just had an UNBELIEVABLY shitty homelife, where being a gang leader was a big step up. He started treating me with respect, and I offered any tutoring he wanted. It was kinda weird. Only downside was this pissed off the Biggest bully in the school, who then took it as HIS duty to make my life miserable. Somewhat different story on that one; George was NUTS. When he finally cornered me and made me hurt enough, his gang ended up in a circle around us yelling ‘Kill him, Kill him!’ except they meant that I should kill George. Which snapped me out of the blind rage, so I dropped him instead, but was still running on enough pure adrenaline that I ended up holding him down till someone started yelling that the vice-principle (and chief disciplinarian) was coming. George apparently still hated me, but decided he had proven who was tougher to his own satisfaction. (He had pulled similar stunts with the biggest guys on the football team, one time ending up with broken bones; this proved he was ‘tough’.) I am eternally in debt to the wrestler I had tutored in math, who then tutored me in physical function; his training probably saved my ass THAT day. But Harry seemed to think of me as near to a friend as he understood how to have. I wouldn’t go ‘ew’, but it was still pretty weird.
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In my case, I could respect he also volunteered for 11B. and was one of my fellow A-6-1 crew, but I sincerely hoped we were deployed to different continents. We were.
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I felt like a low informed victim of acronyms
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Hey, TLA* threw me when I first heard it.
(*) Three Letter Acronym.
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C4C
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Trump exposed and reduced the left NGO racket. Even I, cynic that I am, am shocked at its extent. Both the exposure and the reductions are percolating through society and like percolation I expect Twain’s slowly, then all at once. That said, Musk buying twitter is every bit as important.
word is that Space-X is going public toward the end of June. I’ve told the wife that I’m buying shares for a not strictly economic reason for the first time and I’m never going to sell them. I’ve waited my whole f-cking life for this and I want to own a piece of going to Mars. Surprisingly, at least to me, she agreed completely. Our spouses often have unexpected depths
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Someone pointed out that Trump cut off USAID funding and the Left suddenly started losing elections in South America. Curious, that. Apparently, not only our elections and spending are rife with fraud, but geopolitics as well.
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space X IPO June 12, 2026. I’ve been waiting all my life for this. Exiles to Glory is being realized in our lifetime. Sorry for the gush, but I’ve been waiting all my f-cking life for this.
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Yeppers!
“Shut up and take my money!”
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word is $1000+ per share. That’s reasonable given the expected size of the IPO and how many shares are privately held, but they might issue more shares to bring the price per share down. Institutions don’t care since they think in Dollar volumes, but high per share prices make it hard for the small investor. We’ll know more when the prospectus drops, which should be fairly soon, perhaps as early as next week.
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Isn’t this great!
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Will they pay dividends?
Hmmm, buy immediately or wait?
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Elon is doing all his companies on the Silicon Valley tech company model, and tech companies do not pay dividends, under a philosophical position of reinvesting what would be paid as dividends back into the company’s operations for growth.
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if the growth is sufficient then that’s the best strategy. Elon continues to outperform so that’s likely what’ll happen. MY purchase of space-x isn’t economic, a first for me since I’m a hardheaded SOB where my business is concerned. That said, it might be turn out to be a lollapalooza bet, if small, I’m not getting the house on it. It’s pure sentiment.
The overall valley model, though, had shifted to share buybacks. Academics praise this as more efficient than dividends, which it sorta would be ‘cause taxes, but the share buybacks were offset by the massive volume of management stock awards — essentially looting the company.
Now big tech is looking at several years of negative cash flow to fund data centers that may or may not ever turn a profit so probably no buybacks but the looting will continue.
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THere’s a small but similar parallel to the data center thing in H’wood production. After the first season of The Mandalorian came out, there was a boom in constructing “Volume” shooting set facilities, with high res screens all around and overhead for virtual set shooting. But all thos productions did not materialize, both for technical reasons and because productions left California en masse, so the word is those things are all over the place and sit empty. Lots of money sunk into those encoded up wasted.
I wonder if Elon’s space-based solar powered distributed data center thing will make all these huge surface data centers being built similarly useless.
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^ended^ up wasted
It astonishes how many brain cycles get used up checking to make sure the autocorrect automation didn’t helpfully autocorrupt things. Any original typos it “corrected” would be easier to deal with. I should just turn that all off again.
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I do not allow Otto Corrupt to change what I type, only to flag things. Then I decide whether that’s really what I mean. 🤔
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That’s how I thought I had it set, but the clanker decided otherwise.
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I let autocorrect AI inform. I do not ever let it correct anything automatically.
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I truly look forward to your word on that. I think we should buy too and my beloved is big on SpaceX but I think he’s figuring it will be out of our reach.
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Please keep me aprized.
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Prospectus just dropped about half an hour ago. It can be found on EDGAR, the SEC website. Search for Space Exploration Technologies S-1. It’s mostly boilerplate, but I now know how I’m spending my evening.
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OK, I took a quick look into IPO investment and there’s a whole long process you have to go through, and apparently the shares are sold in lots of 100 shares.
It just so happens that a batch of T-bills matured today so I’ve got over $100,000 on hand. Gotta talk to my brokerage advisor.
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it’s very speculative. Very, very speculative. Don’t wager what you can’t lose, You don’t have to buy blocks of 100 on the secondary market and you won’t be part of the primary offering anyway.
Not investment advice, but I plan to buy a week or so after the launch when I can see how it’s going and am planning to buy no more than 5% of my liquid asset value, not total, liquid, Your mileage may vary.
Looks as though Chat GPT is going to go public too. Old Sam is very, very envious of Elon. I have no intention of touching it because Chat GPT is sh-t and I suspect it’s never going to make any money, leaving aside that Old Sam has, shall we say, character issues.
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The secondary market — that’s when it just starts trading normally, right? That was my other thought. At least that way I can buy less than 100 shares.
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Yep. Sorry for the jargon. The IPO is the primary market, not for the likes of us unless you have the right friend at Goldman Sachs, I have several as it happens, but that still won’t help me. Everything after that is the secondary. You could buy one share there if you wanted. I “advise” a number of the family knuckleheads on their money and I’m “advising” them to buy one share and never sell it. I want everyone in the family to open up their brokerage statements and see Space ExplorationTechnologies …. Forever. Who knows, maybe it’ll be CHOAM.
Like I said, I’m not entirely rational about this it’s a very speculative thing and could easily be a total disaster, or not. I’m not really making an economic decision, though an economic case can be made and it’s a compelling one with many pitfalls and outright chasms in the way.
make sure you can afford losing it all because I suspect it’s a binary outcome, zero or infinity.
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We would like to get two shares, because I think it’s a LONG bet. So I’d like each of the boys to inherit one.
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Me too, brother mine. Me too.
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I too was shocked out of my head.
Okay, we’re buying shares too. This is the Heinlein: buy shares of shipstone, keep them forever.
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I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that Trump’s “weakness” on Iran here is because I’m not sure he genuinely groks people who don’t care about making money, having nice stuff, and getting along because it’s good business and so he is still trying to find the sweet spot to get Iran to deal. On that front, even China is ten times more sane than Iran. Not actually sane, mind you, because China, but they aren’t “we want to kick off the apocalypse by dropping a nuclear bomb on someone, preferably Israel or America” insane like Iran is (or, at least, the mullah part of it).
But Iran’s “government” is certifiably bonkers, and it’s taking longer than it probably should for Trump to realize this isn’t just chest-beating-dick-measuring-until-we-get-some-nice-things-and-then-we-play-nice, it’s full on crazytown. The only “nice thing” they want is a nuclear bomb, which they will immediately turn around and drop on someone. Possibly not successfully (at least not on Israel or America), but SOMEONE they hate is gonna get it up the behind. And really, they hate EVERYONE.
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I wish he’d read about the end Imperial Japan and the so called gang of six. Even the bomb wasn’t enough, they would rather everyone in the country die than “shame” themselves. When Toyoda sent Yamato on its death ride in 1945, one of her officers asked why, if this was so important, Toyoda himself didn’t command rather than staying in his bunker. And that’s where the lesson is, Trump wants to kill the leadership and the leadership is now much harder to get at. Hmmm, maybe he has read about it.
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They made a desert and called it peace.
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Uncle Ghengis was good like that.
We may have to follow his example, leaving a note saying “Don’t make me do this again.”
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Uncle Ghengis was good like that.
We may have to follow his example, leaving a note saying “Don’t make me do this again.”
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The argument I’ve made since October 2001 that the U.S. should have made a desert and called it “Afghanistan” seems only more prescient. Whether said desert featured patches of green glass goes mostly to how loud of a lesson we wanted that desert to be.
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We’re probably going to need to do that to somebody before the world is much older, and sad as it would be for the people who aren’t among its (probably exaggerated) Islamic 35%, that somebody might be Iran. Aside from Gaza/Hamass, few people have ever made a better case for its necessity. Before they try to nuke a city would be preferable.
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It is very, very hard to effectively nuke a mountain range. Thus North Korea and Afghanistan.
Now, persistent VX is quite effective in such terrain.
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There are some large valleys here and there, and then the flats down southeast from Khandahar to the Iranian border. The Indians and Chinese would be annoyed by the fallout, but maybe that would motivate them to keep their neighborhood more quiet.
Persistent nerve agents are really nasty, so maybe. There was a study I read back when that said the Soviets using their persistent chemical munitions to cover a Fulda Gap push would have been vastly more damaging, with severe environmental effects persisting a lot longer across the Northern European plain, than if they used their tactical nukes for the same push.
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Every bug and worm in the chemical impact area dies. Nothing new can replace them until the agents break down. For persistant agents, this takes years to decades. Soil needs bugs and worms, or is useless for farming. It’s far worse than nukes.
oops.
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Clancy had a scene in Red Storm Rising about that.
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He understated the problem, actually.
Thinks without nervous tissue can live. Fungii and plants for example. The system gets -very- imbalanced before it gets resolved.
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Online politics no longer has any independents, undecideds, or whatever other term you want to use for the people in the middle who actually decide elections. It’s a team sport played by bloody rules and that has driven off the very people it is useful to try and persuade. In real life terms it’s hard to tell what those people are thinking, because their opinions are determined individually, not according to the TEAM PLATFORM. Trump has done a lot of things that the more libertarian minded dislike, and his foreign moves have created a fairly weak economy (not nearly as weak as Biden), so I can see polls showing him doing poorly, but I think the Democrats may get a shock come November because I don’t think mad at Trump translates into willing to vote for mass immigration from the Middle East, and Drag Queen Story Hour, and the Democrats have not toned that stuff down at all.
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One thing that seemed to be happening last night is the “online right/groyper Influencers,” don’t have much influence among actual voters. Good.
Also, Erick Erickson was reporting Georgia voters refused to vote for the slate of Soros-approved Supreme Court justices, also very good. And the winner of the Democratic primary is a woman who presided over the 2020 riots in Atlanta and blew it so badly she couldn’t run for re-election as Mayor. In other words, don’t count the Republicans out yet.
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I took a look at Oregon and Flyover County election results, and they were mostly satisfying.
Tina Kotek (“the unfortunately named”) had her pet tax hike clobbered. There were a bunch of shenanigans (see the PJ Media Messed Coast article on Oregon for the gory details), with some not necessarily legal. Pissed off a lot of people, so it got clobbered 17% yes to 83% Hell No statewide. Even Portland’s county said 75%% No. (The best was a nearby one, where it got 28% yes. Too bad, not sad.
Locally, the multi-term incumbent county commissioner got curbstomped. The big problem (seems we get some good commissioners for a while, then the Establishment takes over) is the strong focus on issues dear to Flyover Falls people, ignoring the other 2/3rds of the county. At least one rural meeting was a shock to the board, with all three incumbents looking at trouble brewing.
Only one was up for re-election. Long term member of various Do-Good organizations, 2 or more terms as commissioner, but no outside focus. Revenge time!
Result: Incumbent: 29%. Challenger: 60%.
2028 will be hell for the remaining two, unless Recall gets on the menu. Maybe for one of them…
Minor disappointment: The GOP rep is pretty much a RINO, but nobody can get traction trying to replace him. Sigh. 75% win. At least it’s a safe R seat.
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Most of the groypers are NOT right or even in the US.
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RE: Iran. Trump might like things the way they are. The longer the blockade lasts, the worse Iran’s position gets. Their weapons factories were blown up, their trade has been reduced to a trickle, and their economy was in bad shape to begin with. No one is coming to help them. And other countries are bypassing the Strait entirely (e.g., with new pipelines), removing that leverage going forward.
Meanwhile, US fuel exports are booming. China lost its access to dirt-cheap fuel, which hurts its plans. I’m not sure about Europe, India, etc., but I get the impression the current situation gives us a lot of leverage.
I’m anxious to see the mullahs toppled, but it’s hard to tell whether Trump got snookered or he has a plan. Given his track record and how the blockade benefits him, I’d bet the latter.
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I have heard that India isn’t fond of Islamic radicals because they’ve had their own problems in that area. As for Europe, I’ve been cynically wondering which European head of state will be the first to convert to Islam.
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Charles already did, years ago, according to rumor.
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Hindus generally -loath- moslems.
India managed detante with nuclear Pakistan. The Pakis and Indis are both basicly sane.
I suspect that -the- day Iran declares or demonstrates nukes, India launches a general nuclear strike. And weirdly, Pakistan may -help- or at least look away.
Because both understand who is effing insane, versus distasteful.
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Supposedly Pakistan has sent fighters and crews to either Saudi or Qatar.
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To Saudi. Also 8,000 troops.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2644094/saudi-arabia
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Yet they’re opening truck routes for Iran according to other reports.
Is this called talking out of both sides of one’s mouth or what?
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It’s called Muslims. Culturally this is what they do.
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Sunni vs Shia
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Macron and Starmer. France and the Welsh Co-Prosperity Sphere. Two of the permanent members of the security council, alongside China, and Russia.
The US has one philosophy about military secrets and public disclosure, and Israel has another.
Israel, around the time of the start of the skirmish, told their newspapers that Bibi had come to Trump with the intel, and a plan for something like a May or June start to operations. Trump had a) moved the time table up b) come to some sort of decision after the Iranian negotiators said that they would be getting the bomb.
Then Macron and Starmer did what they did.
Macron has the defense that France is France, and the French are French, and we expect the accordion.
We had been in Five Eyes with the UK.
Starmer had had a long term interest in screwing us on Diego Garcia, and he did take the opportunity.
The conventional logic, on the public information, is that Trump needs normalcy in order to do well in the congressional cycle.
It doesn’t make any sense to consider this a normal situation, that must unconditionally follow normal logic.
I know, it lacks contrast coming from me. But what if the rest of the world, or for the first world their governments put in place by the CCP and the departmetn of state, are our enemies?
If Trump is acting on borrowed time, and needs the current governments of the first world to fall and collapse by 2028, and if Starmer basically tipped him off to this during the Iran war, then basically it does not make any sense to finish the war now. And destroyed pumping capacity takes the uncertainty out of the market’s pricing.
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Okay, this hangs. I’d still consider it an outside chance, but it makes sense, and there was certainly a “Wow, we can’t even count on you that much” reaction to what Europe did.
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Meanwhile, US fuel exports are booming.
I don’t understand this.
Gas prices are high and getting higher than even Autopen could manage.
What fuel are we exporting and if it’s anything we ourselves use, why is it not being sold in the US first?
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California is a special case.
Which is too concise of me.
California has been on its own blend for a while, as everyone knows.
To put domestic crude into California gas tanks, there are at least two intermediate transportation steps, and a refining step.
Seemingly by pure accident, my understanding is that Iran screwed California significantly worse than the rest of the US.
We have crude production in the Gulf of Mexico, but we can only move the volumes by ship. US port to US port means jones act, means we don’t have a huge number of US owned and manned tankers.
I forget the sourcing I had for this info, it might have been a vid involving both habitual linecrosser and fat electrician.
That said, I think this was a theoretical prediction, in advance of later developments.
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Yep. No pipelines for crude or refined gas from the rest of the US to California, they are closing the refineries here, and that stupid “unique” blend means nobody else has any to ship us anyway. Apparently most of our $6.49/gal regular is now being imported as refined gasoline in tankers from Japanese refineries.
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Oregon gets its gasoline from refineries in Washington (yikes!) via pipeline, and that has mapped into prices for Regular about $5.00 a gallon. It’s cheaper in Ontario (next to Idaho), otherwise consistent west and eastside of the Cascades.
My tractor (offroad diesel) and non-oxy gasoline (various small engines, plus the UTV and emergency stash) supplies need to be replenished. The gas has been sitting a while, and it’s time to use up the old stuff. Whee, 50 gallons of spendy gas, plus a third of that for diesel. OTOH, the Subaru loves it some sweet, sweet non-oxy premium gasoline. An extra 10% mileage is nice.
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California will California.
I’m not there – not even in a blue state – and the gas prices are still higher than Autopen managed. $4.69 for regular and $5.19 for diesel and non ethanol.
A lack of pipelines from American refineries to American distribution depots would explain a fair bit of the gas prices.
If the news is counting as exports anything that leaves American ports, even if it returns to other American ports, merely because if does so on a foreign ship… * throws up hands *
All I know is it’s expensive enough that I’m biking to work now. I don’t know that it’s enough to get people to screw themselves by voting Dem, but it’s a problem.
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Apologies about that, my error and or memory issue. I think it was another regular I was remembering, who is I think in California.
I think weather in the gulf may have been a later development.
The steps are pump, transport, refine, tranport, sell. And, both oils and gases can be transported.
I understand that we were in the middle of switching to summer blend, anyway.
If weather had dropped the refinery capacity, then we would expect the possibility that the gasoline supply in the US could be tight, and at the same time there is enough crude to export some. We can’t make natural gas into gasoline, so that is another fraction that could have a reasonably exportable surplus.
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Could be enough.
I don’t know the actual circumstances.
The commodities markets are I think fairly aggregated, but are maybe also a theoretical value or estimate. Lots and lots of the volumes changing hands will be doing so at a specific price that is not being cleared on the commodities market.
There’s a wikipedia article on ‘fractional distillation’. It is at or above my level of understanding where one of the major technologies in refineries are concerned.
The different hydrocarbons in petroleum go from long to short. Longer is heavier, and more solid. The refineries cook ‘raw’ crude that is longer into a product that is lighter. (The octane rating on automobile fuel is a comparison to octane, a hydrocarbon that has eight carbons, and is very light compared to stuff in crude. But, butane, ethane, and methane are lighter than octane.)
(The liquid and gas fossil fuels are all from algae, which collected carbon in heavy chains and was buried. The magma ‘cracks’ the heaviest chains and they float back up.
The stuff we pump was all trapped and slowed on the way up.
The liquid stuff we pump from liquid and or tar sand formations, has had a lot of the lighter gases ‘boil off’ and surface long ago. We don’t turn the gases into heavier/longer chains like are in gasoline. )
The refineries have to be built to cook stuff at a certain rate. So, we can generally cook X volume of crude into Y volume of gasoline per day, and then we have the shipping delays.
The refineries could take the choice of scheduling crude to use domestically away. But, I definitely do not follow the industry or the markets enough to understand the reality.
It could absolutely make sense to hurt America a little with higher gasoline, if the alternative was total collapse in Europe, Taiwan, or South Korea. Inflicting pain on some of those regimes is probably worthwhile, but the dutch make the equipment which makes semiconductors, and we use Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to make a lot of chips.
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Light crude is more suitable to vehicle fuel production. Heavy crude require smore cracking.
Sweet crude has minimal contaminants, such as Sulphur. Sour crude is loaded with it. You have to remove Sulphur from fuel, or its combustion is vile and highly destructive.
The further form “Light sweet” is the crude, the more refinery and effort you need to get to gasoline and diesel and jet fuel. The latter two are similar to kerosene. Basically the fractions of octane, nonane, and cetane, and stuff in that neighborhood. Heavy remnants are paraffin and asphalt. Light remnants are “natural gas” (methane) and propane.
Every single fraction has industrial use. Manu of the ‘contaminates” are also useful when separated, Sulphur for example.
“Fracking” involves shattering oil-bearing rock that is otherwise unproductive, allowing extraction. This opens up vast reserves trapped in oil shales. it also revitalizes many played out conventional wells and fields.
We can crack coal to oil, also.
The industrial refining of petroleum is simply amazing.
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Great explanations, both of you. Very helpful having this stuff laid out.
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In Oregon, while the usual suspects blame Trump, due to TDS, the state democrat super majority is taking a lot of hits. Trying to force even higher gas prices by doubling, or more, the gas tax, drove home as to “who is at fault”. Initiative 120, gas tax increase, went down 80 to 20.
Personally, my ballot had votes for all the initiatives. But the primaries? I crossed off to show the non-vote was intended. Most were single incumbents.
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That, I’m not sure about. The data points I have are (1) the disruption in the Strait hurts Asia and Europe way more than us because we don’t import much fuel through there; (2) there’s been a surge of tankers redirecting to the US for oil and natural gas; and (3) the domestic price increase may be due to other factors. (Two refinery accidents, IIRC, but I don’t have the tweet handy and haven’t seen corroboration.)
I’d be curious to see an expert breaking down the whole situation, but I’ve only seen piecemeal commentary.
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What I’ve heard (no, I don’t 100% understand), that oil is a “global market”, so the price per “barrel” reflects the total amount of oil available, even for oil barrels produced and used domestically. So higher oil costs still affect our domestic market even as we are providing the oil.
Not so much that China is getting cut off from oil, they aren’t. Just they are getting cut off from subsidized inexpensive cheap oil from Iran. Getting oil directly from the US means they have to pay dividends to get it. Which means removing the money for shenanigans. Plus we control the flow of oil to China. A lot easier to cut off oil, should it come down to that. Same with Russia and Cuba.
In other news. Oregon Initiative #120, is, baring last minute cheating, is going down in flames. No $0.46 fuel tax increase. In addition, looks like good enough voter turn out; over 50% eligible voters turned in ballots.
Good because Oregon has a requirement of initiatives does not pass if voter turn out is less than 50% of ballots mailed are returned. Given how initiative 120 (gas tax increase) came about, not having over 50% of the ballots returned causes our lovely governor to get her way (increase fuel tax), regardless of the actual vote.
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Mostly. Price also depends on what else is in the crude and how thick it is, which is really at vase how expensive it is to refine. The “North Texas Light Sweet Crude” trading value is one reference for a low sulphur content not very viscous oil, which is a pretty easy to refine crude oil. Other oil from other places varies. “North Sea Brent Crude” is another widely quoted reference price with slightly different characteristics.
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Fuel prices always rise this time of year as the switch-over to summer blends happens.
Squeezing China and Cuba out of the Venezuelan oil market, clueing Europe into just how tenuous their energy supply chain is, and downgrading OPEC’S ability to set global energy prices are going to have more of a long-term effect on energy prices than most suppose.
But in the short-term we will have to ride it out.
If congress doesn’t get smarter about reining in government spending, overall inflation will swamp, (literally) the economy. If they can get a trillion a year in waste and fraud eliminated, we might have a chance.
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Only one $trillion? Based on what the Trump administration has uncovered so far, there must be 5 $trillion in corruption. Most of which never gets outside the D.C. sewer.
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One trillion a year.
The 37 trillion deficit, which seems to be mostly fraud, kickbacks, general waste and Democrat campaign funding is already flushed down the sewer.
Congress needs to be leashed to make a long-term difference. Otherwise we are toast no matter what the price of gasoline is.
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THIS THIS THIS THIS.
I thought you’d typed “Congress needs to be lashed.” But you know, that too.
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I do mean $5 trillion a year. Trump has shown that up to 80% of the government’s $7 TRILLION+ budget is fraud and corruption.
That’s bigger than the combined budgets of the next 9 most spendy countries.
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When you find that much is bogus, at what point does he say “We hereby reupdate this bullshit…”
Note, that while this kinda crashes our system due to doubt, it absolutely and totally effs our global rivals. Just one example is a pile of old bonds from the Republic of China pre CCP. They, of course, repudiate it. But if enforced its worth now about 6 Trillion. Cancelling or demanding it has an impact. So we just kinda let it sit, unmentioned.
If the CCP hit Taiwan, we can easily and within existing precedent just zero out anything they hold. We did this to Imperial Japan, and Germany twice. The enabling laws are still on the books.
Oopsie.
Much as we would induce chaos on a global scale by repudiating, we also would be almost the sole survivor of such an act. Remember the adage:
Owe the bank a thousand dollars and they own you. Owe the bank a billion dollars and you own them.
Scale is power. Leverage works both ways.
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If you owe the bank $500 and can’t pay, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $500 million and can’t pay, the bank has a problem. 😁
We need to take all those “NGO”s and “nonprofit”s that have grown up like fungus around D.C. and cut ’em off. Cold turkey.
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THIS THIS THIS THIS.
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I’ve basically been full stupid in not just saying ‘there are a bunch of different oils, and time and place matter, so lots of these things that may seem fungible actually are not’.
Just now, it has occurred to me that not everyone understands that proven reserves in the reservoirs are not fungible.
There’s extraction cost, and it changes over time as we develop the technology.
Saudi had a lot of cheap reserves, and so they could drive the price down before they were losing money on extraction.
This was basically causing busts in a lot of the domestic US extraction industry.
The situation now is basically a transportation uncertainty, that partly impacts the saudi exports.
and, as you say, the fall outs will be significant
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OPEC would overproduce whenever we tried to develop new sources, making it unviable to do so. The frakking boom happened so fast, and so cheap, they could not adapt in time. Now, we can do unto them.
Provoking Iran into doing stupid, and British insurance into doing -very- stupid, may long term put the US as the single global hegemon of petroleum. And to toss us out requires -massive- production, which only makes our industry cheaper.
Oh please Br’er Fox….
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Has to do with refinery setups, and what type of crude is then needed. Can be cheaper to export our crude and import crude to refine, because very different crude.
Trump has made western hemisphere crude cheaper than mideast, which hasn’t been so since WW1.
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Because economics. The oil market is global.
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yes, provided one understands that “crude oil” has “flavors” by region, thus forms submarkets, thus not instantly fungible. There is a significant cost to change, so once changed, there is resistance to reversion. The river cuts a new “easy” channel and doesn’t go easily back.
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Even if we refined it all ourselves, we produce more than we need. The foreign sales bring in money which offsets costs here.
And we are nowhere near max capacity.
And higher prices drive new exploration and drilling at a furious pace. What isn’t worth doing at $40 a barrel is WhooHoo!!!! money at $80. Once that field is actually producing, it s far more tolerant of down markets. The inital costs being something of a small hurdle to clear, then costs are lower until late int he life of the field.
Mideast oil was cheap because it is close to the surface, in a country with cheap labor and almost no “environment” laws, Is near decent ocean ports, and is the type of crude most suited for easy vehicle fuel production. (“Light sweet crude”)
Now that Hormuz is closed, or worse bat-guano insane, the cost became very high. Suddenly USA oil is cheaper. Folks are redirecting tankers and establishing new contracts. Low-risk-certainty is worth X dollars a barrel, so dealing with us becomes the new norm. No one is going to blockade our ports. Not longer than the afternoon it takes the USN to sink the hostile fleet and wreck their homeports.
If the Strait stays closed two years, Iran is done as a major oil producer. The business will go to all the new production elsewhere. The shut down fields and storage will have startup costs. If the loons still rule, few will go along with that. Folks we sanction might, which is why US sitting on that Strait playing “Navy May I” is so dang funny.
The CCP is -boned-. They were getting below market fuel due to cheating various sanctions. Now they get above market fuel. In about another 60 days, the wheels come off.
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60 days? What’s the calculation there?
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The CCP have been furiously papering over impending disaster for a decade. Cheap fuel helped. Their huge economy lacks any significant buffer. They do not, for example, have anything the size of our strategic petroleum reserve. They had deals. We just wrecked them.
$5-6/gallon fuel hurts us. It kills them. Look at their real GDP and real per capita income. Small fraction of ours. thus $5 here is $25 there, or even $50.
I think Trump is playing for 1989-1991 again. He wants the Chicoms -wrecked-.The man who thrived in the rigged game of NY real Estate has likely figured out how the “real” game is played, and is moving to overturn the board.
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Yeah, this is the safest possible semi-conventional bet on what Trump’s thinking, goals and actions are in all of this.
Maybe Iran is directly funding the Democrats. Maybe PRC is directly funding the Democrats.
But unless the Democrats are utterly dependent on furrin-commie-narco-terror funding (which the banks ‘should’ already be interdicting), it maybe doesn’t stop them from volunteering for their own campaigns.
The smart money is just that Iran is a bad regime, but PRC is the more vital one, and this could matter more than the midterms.
Between everyone here, we have probably predicted 1000 of the last zero PRC economic and regime failures.
As an aside, if someone wanted to do a start up to replace SPLC in selling criminal intelligence to banks, it is remotely possible that Soros DA are proximate enough to count as the sort of people that SPLC was telling banks about.
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Trump just did a round of nice doggy with them.
The point is maybe less trade concessions from them (which will be fraud), and more about relaxing their CCP’s anxiety enough to keep the collapse more peaceful.
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I find this the funniest option and thus choose to believe it.
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Unknown state of the Chinese strategic reserve, and how much that had been stolen by selling it off.
EVs are enough of a crock that everyone still needs fossil fuel, or /maybe/ trains for inland logistics.
China does have trains, and does have interior rivers. But, they need real fuel for invasions, and real fuel for the tasks that they don’t have good back up logistics for.
And, PRC has been running their design margins (Fernandez sense, how they do all business) down for a while, doublign down on totalitarianism.
We can sell them some, but maybe we can’t sell them enough, and at a low enough price, to let them unfuck their backlogs and meet their economic needs.
There was speculation that they were on a twenty day supply, but maybe we have sold them enough to ease that, or maybe the estimate was wrong.
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Weirdly enough, Pennsylvania prices started dropping a couple weeks ago; We are down to 4.38 at a dozen regular stations right now, though I was surprised to see the one ‘discount’ station near the Costco go UP to 4.49 (Costco is still at 4.29). We got CLOSE to Biden prices, but not quite over. And when we WERE up to 4.79, the Dems were all cheering, because that would convince more people to go electric! Now that enough electric makers are getting better range, Dems are weirdly silent on the issue. (Which adds weight to the argument that their REAL goal is to keep us all stuck near our present residences.) Are we getting ready for another ‘bounce’ ?
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Even in the Formerly Golden State there are glimmers – look, even in a state where every R vote is at most a protest, DJT got 6 million votes in 2024. That’s only 38% vs Kammy’s amazingly amazing mail in “vote” totals of 9.3m out of 23m registered “voters”, but it’s still six million votes. They clearly think “TrumpTrumpTRUMP” is effective as a hammer here, but they are loudly using that on Pratt down in LA and he keeps climbing in the public polls anyway (so the internal polling must be horrid for Bass and that self-destructing no-grilling chick).
The LA D machine votes will still likely put Bass back in (see “margin of fraud” discussions in Sarah’s archives), but it’ll put the skeer in them. The job is to kept it in them going forward.
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Sadly, some people, good-hearted and otherwise intelligent, have misplaced their trust and are not likely to ever make it out of the leftist/legacy media loop. Everything the D-captured media says about Trump and people who aren’t Democrats is Truth. Everything they say about themselves and their own good intentions is also true, because why would they lie? Wash, rinse, repeat.
I really wish I could feel that ground shift under my feet. I hope for all our sake that it IS shifting, even if my little sphere of acquaintances remains locked in the old pattern.
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It is a slow thing to change a culture. Especially one so vast as America. I have seen the shifts from the 1980s and Reagan, where there was then hope and so much driving force for exceptionalism. Seen the growing corruption that was but an ongoing alchemy of an earlier stain: Communism spreading throughout the minds of the bureaucratic state. Seen the growth of the internet, 9/11, America’s first black president (part II, if you remember the Clinton era), the great loss of hope, 2016, the steal, and all.
Change is inevitable. Human nature is eternal- both the good and the bad. The shock of 2020 jostled many a sleepy citizen awake, not a-woke. Change we desire never moves fast enough. Change we abhor always arrives too quickly and overstays its lack of welcome.
The Democrats- and the Republicans who find more common ground with their opposite numbers than their constituents- are currently led by fossils. Influenced by crazies. Whispered to by morons (not of the AOSHQ tribe). Their intelligent and cunning types are fewer than they’d like, though more than we would prefer. They run on the soggy wet software of yesteryear, long exposed as auncient Soviet agitprop.
It can be hard to see the change. Hard when looked at through a magnifying glass. Difficult when only seeing what is close and familiar. Especially when that familiar is depressingly static. But, with the speed of filling graves at the least, the change is happening. The Trumpening bulls forward, juking and spinning by every clumsy tackle the left and it’s trained media arm try and throw.
What concerns me is not just today. We build the foundations of tomorrow today. That tomorrow, as every sci-fi fan knows, is going to have some awesome stuff in it. I want to live to see that. It’s going to take a lot more of Trumpian energy spreading to, not just other candidates hoping to ape his tactics, but the individuals that vote said candidates into office. That’s happening, in little ways, here and there.
In some ways, this is the inevitable evolution of the TEA parties and suchlike of yesteryear. Some of the same people are now going about doing the same things with MAGA hats on today.
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Sometimes, things change -fast- here.
In 1849, there were zero political parties demanding abolition.
1n 1850, the Republican party formed with Abolition as Plank #1. They were considered crazy cranks.
In 1860, the Republicans won the Presidency and had significant representation in House and Senate. (granted, very odd circumstances where hot-heads split the national vote regionally)
(NOTE: Stay away from other aspects of this topic. Off limits per Hostess.)
Ten years from cranks to President.
We went from Obama to Trump in 8 years.
We went from Bush “Republicans” to MAGA Republicans in 8 years.
The change here in the USA in the last 10 years has been -gigantic-, we just haven’t seen the endgame yet.
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Having long since noticed that government and federal reserve numbers on the economy are meant to obscure more than to inform, I’ve developed a simple heuristic to know how the economy is doing–at least in my area.
It’s simply this: how friendly and helpful are the people I meet?
If people are optimistic about the future, it shows through their actions. And around here, at least, things are looking very positive.
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Massie got a thumping and has already conceded.
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Side thread on the Iran war, I don’t think Iran is the primary target any more. Squeezing them throttles China’s oil flow far more than it does us, so the longer the conflict drags on, the more of a defacto embargo we have on China’s oil imports.
Though that may well have changed since I first heard that floated.
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I may have gotten modded, or otherwise screwed up. I do not see the actually fairly concisely edited ramble I had on this, I think responding to Stan.
Iran and China are both a narrow focus.
France is France, but St@rm3r is actually significantly concerning.
Narrowly targeted wars, and ‘we win fast’, ‘they are put down hard’ are basically positing a mid-term that is a very normal status quo in terms of logic.
If we want the wider economic damage to hit a bunch of nominal allies in the first world, to topple their governments, that would match the actual abnormality of our circumstances.
The abnormalities of now definitely do not only correspond to the the example proposed.
(Which is more concise than my previous attempt.)
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Okay, I’ve been reading the impact on Europe as a side effect. One that fits our goals of disrupting the old arrangement and forcing them to deal with us on more favorable terms, but (a) not the main purpose of the war and (b) harder to control than the tactic of “Slap on a tariff -> Strike a deal -> Kiss and make up” that Trump seems to like.
Are you positing that Trump is deliberately using the crisis to accelerate political change in Europe? Or just that this is part of the process of cutting us loose from them?
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Well, he found out more things about St@rmer during the actual events with Iran, didn’t he?
With Iran talking about Iran’s future nuke inventory, no less.
Democrats and the CCP have had a lot of time to cultivate fellow travelers in EU academia and politics.
The Democrats are suggesting that they are personally all out.
Do we actually know that the English, the French, or the Germans have not been helping the Iranians with the nukes, for example?
I am speculating that maybe the EU is more dangerously hostile than previously understood, and also that Trump could realize this mid-conflict, and then decide that unblocking the oil supply did not serve US interest. But, also that destroying the Iranian infrastructure quickly would clarify the economic situation too quickly, things reprice, and then US no longer has influence that way with Iran shouldering some of the blame.
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Oh, right, all the caving they did. Europe proved Trump right about wanting to shake up/replace NATO.
I’m not sure if the blockade was because Trump suddenly realized Europe was a threat, but they certainly didn’t give him a reason to hurry. I suspect if they had backed his play, sent some token ships, and volunteered to help clear the Strait, he wouldn’t be dragging his feet now.
The negotiations are consistent with your theory, or one like it. Iran’s offers are a joke. Trump has every excuse to resume bombing whenever he feels like it. The fact that he’s still playing along means either he has no dismount (possible, as discussed upthread) or drawing out the blockade suits his purposes.
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I was surprised really only by the Italians. All the others in Europe behaved exactly as expected. I wonder what the decision driver really was in Italy for playing the “airbase use denial” card there.
It all certainly does make the case for a few more CVNs and air wings in the budget, if we can’t rely on European “allies” for airbase use.
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Meomi looked as though she’d been physically beaten after making that anouncement. Utterly exhausted. I just wonder what the EU oligarchy did to her to make her fold. I suspect heavy blackmail involving removing financial support for Italy as a whole.
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This.
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The announcement of a new BB then the change to make it a BBN will help in other ways. With a couple of reactors, you could get some pretty impressive use from railguns and lasers even before the missiles launch.
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The point I made elsewhere was, yeah, BBGN gets railguns and antidrone autocannon and frikken lasers, but also has sufficient white space in both deck space, compute capability, and power budget for the future things as yet undreamt.
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What if…
We pull the museum Iowa class ships into drydock, and strip them down to the hulls. then build four BBGNs our of them?
Those BB hulls are actually pretty dang good, Panamax, and quite fast in aspect ratio. They get faster when we strip off the obsolete torpedo blisters. With nuclear propulsion, they easily keep up with carriers.
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The hull is not the hard part – getting through the armored decks would actually be somewhat tricky, plus they can’t even make that armored steel anymore, so putting them back would be a challenge, and things that were still around in the 1980s, like 16” barrel sleeves, are no longer still around.
But the main issues that the guys I have talked to who manned those BBs toward the end complained about were the 1930s-designed systems buried deep in those hulls. At the end all the years of baling wire and duct tape on top of 1930s engineering were really catching up with them.
So yeah, rip out the armored decks and everything out to the hull, and install all modern systems and infrastructure and a couple standard nuke plants…and in the end you will have spent pretty much what new-build ships would cost.it would look cool though.
Leave the Iowa class BBs as museum ships and lay down new keels.
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Trump has let the mullahs act so badly that they’ve got Pakistan Seriously P*ssed at them. Pakistan–home of jihadis, sponsor of terrorism. Yes, their government is factionalized, but enough of the factions are backing the US/Abraham Accords side that Pakistan is sending troops to fight Iran if/when things get hotter
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They are sending a full Air Force fighter unit with ground support and logistics, an air defence unit with same, and 8,000 ground troops. Not a minor deployment for the Pakis.
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We should already be closing all of our European military bases. Definitely all the ones located in countries that denied permission for U.S. planes to even fly over them. Bring all the troops, equipment and supplies home and leave them a bunch of empty buildings.
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I really like the idea of moving some basing to Poland. I like the Poles, they like us, they are a geographically reasonable halfway point to stuff as anywhere else in Yoorup, and real-world it’s way more likely we’d both want and need to go support them than the ungrateful krauts.
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And the even more ungrateful Frogs. ☹️
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Also, the Russians would Lose Their Minds. (grin)
Poland has been arming up as if they expect to face Russia by themselves. based on the fiasco in Ukraine, the Poles could take Moscow if they have the necessary trucks.
Yes, the Poles have been faking numbers. They are hiding more spending than admitted. Absent NATO, Poland can take Germany in a few weeks. Germany is -that- effed right now. Poland’s readiness percentages rival -ours-.
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But why would they want it?
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Just remember the basic tenets of Polish foreign policy:
“Because F- Russia, and F- Germany”
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Bless Poland.
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I like Poland and the Baltics. They know where they stand, and why. They are also realistic about the problems they face (especially Lithuania and Latvia, based on the people I talked to when I was there.)
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That the Poles named their F-35 variant the “Hussar” is just the chef’s kiss [or single-digit salute] to, well, a lot of other countries.
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Yeah, I’m guessing the ummah spreading in Eurabia was not amused.
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You are being polite. Leave the building? No. Any building that can’t be recycled, should be burned or knocked down and pulverized. Not quite scorched earth. Alternatively? Country in question pays the US to keep the base open. There are some countries who would willingly pay.
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”Oh, yeah, lots of antimatter-asbestos and infra-PCBs and other nasties in those buildings and hospitals and runways and roads. We had them all safely contained when we could keep all the rocks painted white and lawns mowed and stuff, but when we leave we have to leave it safe. We’d love to leave it for you to use, but we just can’t. We’re going to bulldoze it all, then bury the rubble ten feet deep, maybe twenty feet. That’s about six-seven meters in the obscure French system you use. Sorry about that, krauts.”
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Trump is always trying to change the conditions to his favor.
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Thus conditions usually favor Trump. This is called making your own luck.
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Never let a crisis go to waste.
Right?
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That would not surprise me in the slightest. Trump’s two big strengths seem to be the ability to keep dozens of irons in the fire at the same time, and the ability to shake boxes and see what actually happens.
I can very much see him using Iran to shake the box on Europe, then just rolling with it when they decided to go full ideolog.
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He’s an ADD multitasker. I know how that works.
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He has this high-order if-then loop running. and he reacts very well to surprises. They do not demoralize him. Anger? Sure. And he lets Anger drive his payback engine. But he does not let it override his judgement engine. Thus he seemingly turns on a dime to welcome former opponents and smooth over prior tiffs. he knows he can turn on a dime back to effem mode. And now they are closer, yes?
Dang good thing he is the patriot he is. Else He would have likely become our first Emperor, by running as a Donk.
You did see how that would have worked, yes? How the heck did a child become Augustus? Because he had “shrewd” to make Gaius Julius Caesar weep. Trump with no scruples runs as Donk, grabs on to the reins of the donk graft machine, and gets crowned President for Life in two terms. (Certain donk wannabees go to the wall, or Guantanamo.)
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You might remind Dan of Pericles’ quote “you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”
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That’s what got me. Not the quote, but the realization that even though I’m a simple leave-me-the-hell-alone-ist at heart, the world is chock-full of people who are utterly incapable of leaving other people alone, and they will have to be MADE to back the F off. I started spending time reading and evaluating politics as a form of self-defense.
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Our Independence drives their insane need to control us. They cannot -not- enslave us.
That, ultimately, is why we have the 2nd Amendment.
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Yeah, I had much more of a libertarian streak in my twenties and early thirties than I do now.
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I was still in school when I realized a lot of the folks who said they supported the “leave folks alone” thing had a very… er, special definition of leaving others alone, which was basically “as long as nobody gets in my way I won’t hurt them but if they get in the way of me doing anything I want then they crossed me so I’m just hitting back.”
I don’t actually remember, but the deciding event was probably one of the “how dare you stand where I was swinging” things.
IE, “they couldn’t leave other folks alone.”
That was when I got a political formation as a republican–note lower case– because established ground rules let you know what is crossing a line, and what isn’t.
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Different process, but very similar reasoning for me. In reevaluating my previously unquestioned center-left assumptions, I went from probably standard-issue idealistic libertarian to libertarian-minded conservative pretty quickly, because I realized that you need a consistent (i.e., conserved) set of cultural and legal ground rules and a certain amount of organization and collective action if you want to win. And we, the liberty-enjoyers and would-rather-not-joiners, MUST WIN, or else we’ll end up dwindling into an ideologically pure cadre of permanent losers (which is what the capital-L’s are) at the mercy of the collectivists and totalitarians and the “how dare you be there when I decided to swing my fist” types.
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