December 7

 Well, Old Spineless finally got his wish to be Speaker of the House. It only took 15 votes and his giving away most of the power of the Speaker. The next two years should be continued theater and chaos from what used to be the Republican Party. The Former Guy's sycophants are pretty much in charge.

I wasn't paying much attention to the latest unemployment data on the news this morning. They said it was at a very low 3.5%. Really?? I confirmed that with a quick Google search. However, I also did a quick check of Shadowstats. They confirmed he headline number but the U6 number, which includes the "short term discouraged" and "marginally attached workers" excluded from the official number is about 3% higher and, if they measure the unemployment as it was in 1994 and before, the unemployment is at almost 25%. The only way we have low unemployment is by excluding large parts of the labor force.

I found this by way of NakedCapitalism which is interesting given the layoffs announced by Amazon and some tech companies. The stealth layoffs mean the company doesn't have to announce job cuts. Makes me wonder how much of this kind of thing is going on and how much it affects the unemployment numbers.

Found this one from the Asia Times also by way of NakedCapitalism. Almost none of the info presented in the article has appeared in the mainstream news.

Gizmodo continues the sad saga of the cryptocurrency meltdown.

Since I am no great fan of The Former Guy I loved this story from the Oilprice.com. Though I don't believe there is any more chance of the anything coming of the arrest warrant against him (any more than expect to see Putin in the dock at The Hague for war crimes) it did bring a smile to my face.

January 6

 Well, the D.C. soap opera continues. The House will be back in session at noon today after failing for the 11th time yesterday to elect a speaker. I wonder what more the dissidents can extract since Spineless McCarthy has given up almost every bit of power the Speaker has. Who ever gets the Speaker's gavel will be crippled.The next two years are going to be VERY interesting. It might even be very painful depending on what, if anything, actually comes out of the House and whether it gets through the Senate and passed the President.

Today is the second anniversary of the insurrectionary assault on the Capital which we watched in disbelief as it happened on TV. And then in the following days were aghast as right wing pundits and politicians gaslighted us with the notion that nothing really happened, that it was simply a peaceful demonstration hijacked by "Antifa", that the rioters were really generally orderly tourists (in a government building closed to visitors), or any other idiotic  dismissal that might get us to disbelieve our "lying" eyes. Those (choose your own epithet) empty heads are still at it. And many of the people on the Republican side of the House of the Representatives egged those rioters on.

Slate has an interesting account of the longest deadlock over a Speaker in 1856.

We got rid of our non-stick cookware because the fourth set in about 12 or 14 years started pealing. We took a step "backwards" and replaced them with stainless and cast iron. Those don't peal and, without much special handling, they are nearly as non-stick as the "modern" cookware. This little piece from Doomberg, which isn't the full article because the rest is behind a pay wall, actually shows exactly what is the primary fault of "capitalism." At least modern Capitalism which is more of a religion masquerading as an economic theory. When profit is the ONLY measure of value companies will sacrifice the health, safety, and welfare of people to continue making profits. That happened with lead in gasoline, with air and water pollution resulting from production, with ozone depleting refrigerants, with DDT, and any number of other things I could cite. And sometimes the companies making the products are aligned with the customers who want/need their products.

Janueary 5

 The Republican soap opera continues today. Yesterday's installment continued the stalemate with Spineless McCarthy losing his 4th, 5th, and 6th votes and the party barely able to squeak through and get a final adjournment til noon today. The story today is that Spineless has offered to lower the threshold for a vote to vacate the chair (in other words a vote to fire him) to ONE Republican member. Someone asked yesterday when the threshold had been reduced to FIVE how many speakers might we see over the next two years. Another commentator said that when you try to sell your soul you need to make sure there is a buyer. Evidently, Spineless has no reliable buyer. I would go a bit further and note that, when you sell your soul, you inevitably sell cheap. It looks, to me, like Spineless has should his for nothing. He has promised everything and gotten promises for nothing.

Robert Reich has a piece this morning on what would be a sane strategy but I don't think it has a chance in hell. Neither side is in the mood to consider it.

An interesting question came up on Morning Joe just now. Compromise has become a dirty word implying that whoever compromises has betrayed his principles. The question was how to move the conversation away from that either/or dichotomy. I think the answer Sherrod Brown provides is a side step that doesn't really answer the question: find common ground. When principles are involved sometimes there is no common ground.

The 7th vote in the House trying to elect a Speaker. Results:Jeffries--212; MCCarthy--201; Donalds--19; Other (Trump)--1; Present--1. No Speaker elected. The 8th round of voting is just beginning.

The 8th round of voting  has ended with no change except a new name entered during the voting. No election.

They are going into round 9 but I am closing this for the day.

January 4

 Nice and sunny today after a cloudy and wet four days. The soap opera of electing a Speaker of the House. Three votes yesterday and McCarthy still waiting. Will Rogers once said "I don't belong to an organized party. I'm a Democrat." Well, that might be edited nowadays from Democrat to Republican. One of the commentators on the news this morning noted that this is the culmination of a decades old process of "neutering" the legislative leadership.

This CNN article is another cautionary tale about the airlines and luggage. And the airline involved providing lousy customer service until the media becomes involved isn't Southwest. If, and that is a big IF, I will ever fly again, not likely since I haven't flown in 50 years, I would take carry on only. If I had too much to do that I would ship the excess ground to my home.

Michael Campi at Medium has an interesting post. I have suspected for some time that we are long past the time when we (as a world society) can do anything to either stop outright or even roll back the damage we have done and are still doing to the environment/climate. He says

There are an ever growing number of fluffy people trying to see if they can capture some market share by writing, seemingly endless, articles on how we can “save the planet” or how we can “make a difference” or how we can “make better choices” and the simple truth is…

…we can’t.

The sooner that sinks in the better. There is nothing we can do.

We have several problems. First, there really isn't a "we" to do the job. Too many who want a standard of living like what the richest nations boast and have an argument that the West grew rich on the backs of the rest of the world. And we have industries and those who have interests in them whose status and wealth depend on a continuation of "business as usual." Second, even those who are loudly proclaiming that "we" need to change aren't showing much willingness to sacrifice their comforts to make that change. The "we" they are talking about is everyone else. Third, even if, by some miracle, people managed to go to zero carbon emissions it will be several decades before the levels of CO2 in the  declines. But we also have to deal with other greenhouse gasses that the warming temperatures are releasing. Also, the Amazon rain forest, which was a carbon sponge, is now releasing more CO2 than it absorbs. Our entire lifestyle depends on heroic consumption, wasteful production using dwindling resources, and releasing greater amounts of CO2. Changing a culture is like changing the course of a supertanker--it doesn't happen all at once.

January 3

 We had rain last night. That plus a restless cat meant I had a fitful night so I am a bit sleep deprived. I will probably doze off and on today. The temperatures are a bit above usual.

The news is covering the battle for house speaker which may turn out to be quite a soap opera. I say "may" because as Yogi Berra (I think it was) said: it is difficult to make predictions especially about the future. As things Spineless Kevin "has" a 222 seat majority (the number of Repthuglicans in the House. That means that he can't lose more than 4 votes to meet the 218 threshold to gain elections to the Speaker's seat. At this moment 5 members have indicated they won't vote for Spineless no matter what. Another 9 or 10 want more concessions to buy their vote. It will be fascinating to watch whether Spineless wins the vote or not. He has already agreed to allow as few as five members to call for a vote to remove him. Wasn't he watching when the Democrats in the Senate had to deal with a similarly narrow margin and found their plans side tracked by one.

Robert Reich has a good assessment of the current condition of the Republican Party. It is no longer recognizably conservative.

Responsiblestatecraft has a good article on the "zombification" of national security. The author says in different words what I have said before. We use our military to handle foreign affairs problems that aren't really nails and we think we have to handle everything all by ourselves. And where we question throwing money at any other department we love to do just that for the Pentagon.

January 2

 Good Day-After-New-Year's Day Though for some ( some govt. workers, the stock market, and such are closed) the holiday continues.

Robert Reich made an observation he refers to today and notes that he got some push back. He wrote that when the U.S. had an expanding middle class, strong unions, and a good education system we were protected from fascism. He didn't specify what arguments were made against his conclusion promising to go into it later today. I can think of one line of critique. This is a case of "that was then; this is now." Conditions have changed. Since around 1985 labor unions declined, the percentage of national income going to labor began to decline, middle class status was maintained by borrowing, and investment in education stagnated while the political intrusion into what is taught and how increased. But all of his rose-tinted view of the past was built on an expanding economy and the economy isn't expanding as reliably (if it isn't actually contracting.) And I would also contend that all of the measures we use to gauge the health of the economy are skewed to show growth and any contradictory stats have been dismissed.

Naked Capitalism has a good, sobering post on the hype around that "successful" fusion experiment a couple of weeks ago. I don't know how many out there are old enough to remember the hype over nuclear power generation. It was supposed to provide electricity "too cheap to meter." It never did. And it never really made a profit without the government subsidies it got. And we still haven't solved the problem of the waste. Note in the article that the notion that the experiment yielded more energy than was put into it only if you carefully select what you count as the energy input. And any possible scaling up to provide reliable energy to large numbers of people is decades away (if ever). Another "subsidy dumpster" (credit the term to John Michael Greer).

January 1

 Happy New Year

Well, someone was happy the year has turned. Neighbors woke us with their fireworks and fire crackers. I wondered if they had acquired a small cannon.

I saw this first off this morning and my first thought was the old saying: the more things change the more they stay the same. I am a boomer and I heard the same criticism of my generation. I am sure my mother heard that about hers and grandnieces and grandnephews (children of Millennials). 

I wonder how many remember (or for those younger than 30 ever learned of) the "Ozone Hole" debate. I found this on BBC which recounts the history of the international efforts to ban HFC refrigerants and describes the results. A few thoughts come to mind. First, clearly concerted international action is possible but it has to be focused and provide help for poor countries to enable their cooperation. Second, enough people must feed that the situation affects or will likely affect them in the short to medium term. Cancer and other such conditions have a tendency to focus people's minds. Third, people can support changes most easily if they don't really have to change. In this case, substitute refrigerants were available so no one had to scramble to find a substitute for the refrigerator or the freezer or the air conditioner. Changing our driving habits is far more difficult when cars are central to our way of life and our self-image. Fourth, it has taken a long time to get the agreements in place, to phase out the original technology (HFC refrigerants), and to see any results from the policy. And the ozone hole won't be fully repaired for a few more decades. We are not patient people. Climate change is a far more complex problem.