Wait, What?

      It's a cold, wet morning in Indianapolis, and checking on Indiana fuel prices has led to a chilling discovery: while the state has suspended the 37 cents-per-gallon gasoline road tax, the corresponding 63 cents-per-gallon tax on gas-station diesel* remains in effect.  The road tax money is earmarked to be spent on just that, and the reason for the disproportion will be found hauling freight trailers on the interstate.  The overall state budget has been running a surplus and it will supposedly be used to make up the lost revenue.  Indiana drivers will be well aware that our usual road spending is, um, thrifty, and so I'm not sure if this will make driving much worse.

     I was hoping to sweeten the pot for a field technician planning a swing through the state; we've got a widget he's far more qualified to look over than I am (the book for the thing is more of a user's manual) and we'd like to see him sooner rather than later.  You'd never guess what the powerplant in his service truck full of test equipment, replacement parts and tools runs on, not in a million, jillion years -- but it ain't ethyl.
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* "Red dye diesel" is not taxed by Indiana; it's intended for use in off-road farm machinery, though the Governor has decreed farmers can now use it in their on-road transportation.  Everyone else needs to stick with the undyed version and pay the tax.  If you pull up at the Co-Op in your Benz, they're going to send you on your way unfulfilled.

Y'know What I Want?

     I want to get back to a country where it's (mostly) safe to (largely) ignore politics.  The problem is, of course, that politics isn't doing a very good job of ignoring us.

     No matter who or what you blame 'em on, fuel prices, inflation, various kinds of food contamination, a slow-growing measles epidemic, simmering war in the Gulf and Ukraine (and a few other smaller hot spots) is affecting all but the most wealthy of us, every day.  Meanwhile, those rich people keep on getting richer while the rest of us are running as fast as we can to stay where we are.  I know I am; adjusted for inflation, my pay has gone steadily down for the last 25 years, and probably longer.  There's nothing "trickling down."

     If a politician ran on a platform of Make America Boring Again, I'd be seriously interested.  We've had way too much excitement.

A Staggering Own-Goal

     Through misadventure, misjudgement and incompetence, the United States has led the way to a global shortage of diesel fuel.  Prices have skyrocketed -- and there are service stations in the U. S. where you can't buy it at all: they're out.

     This is bad when you go to top up the VW Golf and approaches catastrophic when the Super Duty pickup has run nearly dry, but you ain't seen nothin' yet.  Every single item on the shelf at the grocery store and the five and dime, every drug in the pharmacy and most children in the schools got there by diesel.  The box and tractor-trailer trucks and farm machinery all run on it.  The trains run on it.  The river barges are moved by tugs burning it.  Most school buses burn it.  The electrical peaking plants that keep the grid up on especially hot or cold days?  Diesel.  And speaking of cold days, fuel oil still runs many furnaces, and it's the next thing to diesel; if refineries adjust to make more truck fuel now, there'll be less heating fuel as winter comes in.  Jet fuel's another cousin (though even closer to kerosene), so close that hospitals and TV stations that fly helicopters sometimes get the emergency generators set up to run on the same fuel, sharing their supply.  And there have already been rolling jet fuel shortages.

     Big ships still run on thick bunker oil, which is pretty much at the bottom of the stuff refineries distill, what's left after they pour the diesel off -- but wait, some of them switch to clean-burning diesel as they approach port.

     Bottom line?  Everything you buy is going to get more expensive, and will stay that way as long as diesel fuel remains scarce and costly (and probably long after, until inventories turn over).

     The problem here is not Orange Man Bad.  Sure, he is, but we've had absolute bastards in the Presidency before (Jackson, Wilson, Nixon...); it's not actually a disqualification.  Nope, the problem is Orange Man Dumb and Orange Man Have Poor Impulse Control. Not to mention Orange Man Not Listen To Qualified Experts, of which his administration has vanishingly few anyway.  We're all going to pay the price for it -- all of us who are not high-and-mighty Federal officials and politicians, anyway.  They're still tucking into nice steaks and rick, thick Senate Bean Soup,* the ingredients for which were carried to the Capitol by train and/or truck, and paid for with your and my tax dollars.

     They've shot themselves in the foot, but we're doing the bleeding for them.
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* Apparently, it's not all that great.  My own 15-bean soup is undoubtedly better, though I rarely have time to make it. It's based on the Hurst packaged beans but uses a different recipe and is served with raw chopped onions and celery for toppings, and generous amounts of fresh cornbread.  And you'd never guess what fuel brought all that wonderful stuff to the grocer's.

Forward-Looking Perspective

     Data centers are the abandoned Kmarts and dead malls of tomorrow -- and tomorrow is right around the corner.

It's A Kind Of Genius

     Oh, it's crude.  And it's not possible, not to mention illegal.  But it's absolutely an example of how the man works: the President of the United States has promised to pay each and every American* a middling-large sum of money if his party retains control of Congress.  He's made similar payoff promises before, which somehow never materialize.

     It's the same appeal as a one-armed bandit, only with far less chance of a payoff: pull lever, get money.  And there's a group of voters, ranging from low-information to so deep in the fantasy they'll take it on faith, who will be moved by it.  Is the size of that group decisively large?  Is greed a stronger motivation than high prices for everything and stagnant wages?  Stronger than the reaction to an increasingly authoritarian Federal government whose masked secret-police thugs act with impunity?

     I don't know.

     The truth is, the money's not his to spend; it's Congress's.  And Congress doesn't have it; the payout would run to more than 1.3 trillion dollars and they're already deeply in the red funding his don't-call-it-a-war with Iran, the same one that's driving up the price of oil, fuel, and everything that relies on oil-derived stuff to be made or grown and transported.  I suppose they could just have the Mint print it -- that's what the Left calls "Modern Monetary Theory" and the Right mocks (so does the center); it's inherently inflationary, meaning by the time you get your money, it'll buy fast-food dinner for two and a daily newspaper as long as it's not the Sunday edition.  And it's illegal in the U.S. to pay people for votes, not that illegality is much of a deterrent.  (And it's the actual paying for votes part that is illegal -- candidates and everyone else can talk about it all they like.)

     It's money no American will ever receive, no matter who they vote for.

     Politicians have been selling pie in the sky for years; Mencken called elections a kind of advance auction of stolen goods, but the modern, jet-propelled GOP version auctions off the stolen goods -- and then keeps them.

     I beg people to choose a better class of crook.  I have no faith left that they will.

     Update: The "dividend" headlined every TV and radio newscast I saw or heard today.  It'll never be paid -- but using it as a lure is indeed a kind of genius.  Flim-flam genius we should be ashamed of falling for, and yet....
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* Citizens, presumably, given his party's positions, not resident non-citizens.

Wow

     It's harder and harder to jump back in the hopper of the daily grind.  I'm not sure if I'm more hopeful or more worried about November's elections and whatever follows.  I suppose if all that happens is an economic crash, we'll be getting out easy, but man, do I loathe interesting times.

Distraction Screens

     It's no secret that I don't think much of Mr. Trump, or of how he and his gang of Republicans are running the federal government, ringing up unprecedented debt, yanking the rug out from under the poor at home and abroad, handing out tax breaks to their ultra-wealthy pals who do not pay it back in the form of increasing employment* and engaging in wars of choice with murky and/or immoral victory conditions.

     But I do try to limit myself to substantive criticism about issues of importance.  I might think the way he combs his hair looks stupid, but so what?  That hairstyle isn't picking anyone's pocket or breaking their leg, and in the course of a busy day, you can find five or six more at least as dumb.

     So the recent fuss about sneaking the President out of Turkey in the wake of a credible threat (and leaving the Press as sitting ducks -- the very same sitting ducks they'd be if they were sharing the plane with him) or an aide who appears to have an unhealthy devotion to the President (as have many, to many Presidents, and it's never a good sign) strikes me as silly-season distractions, running while there are at least two and half wars on, and our country is well involved with all of them, and while the economy continues to teeter dangerously.

     This August isn't a slow-news month.  There's plenty of real stuff to report on, none of it reflecting any glory on the clod infesting 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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* The thing about trickle-down economics is, something's got to be trickling down for it to make sense, and I don't mean job cuts.  Otherwise, it's just a trick.

"Alexa, Get Out Of The Uncanny Valley."

     Amazon keeps sticking her in a hang glider and flying her into the Uncanny Valley, and I have to coax her back out again.  Alexa goes from useful and mildly entertaining to unnerving when the online giant turns her A.I. functionality back on.  They do so just about any time the software is upgraded.

     Like all of the big enterprises pushing so-called "Artificial Intelligence," they cannot conceive of anyone not enjoying a predictive text engine biased to suck up to the user.  This failure of imagination comes down from the top: the big-boss-and-owner class loves being catered to, and they don't care if there's any genuine respect or affection behind the tonguebath as long as they get the faithful appearance of deference.  There's nothing at all behind a large language model.  All it does is pick the most likely word or phrase that comes next, based on the prompt and context you and the setup have fed in.  You're talking back to the sounds your garbage disposal makes, not interacting with a creature like yourself -- or even a creature like a hamster, let alone a dog or a cat.

     It takes very little communication for Alexa's A.I. responses to become jarringly off; if you ask her if she and the HAL9000 are friends, instead of the old Easter-egg response, "I know him, but we haven't talked after what happened," the robot muses about HAL's "calm voice and cool demeanor," and wonders if she'd "be a bad influence on him," what with her being so chipper and all.  Never mind, I guess, that if we're treating HAL as an entity she might know, he has committed multiple murders and the bad influence is more likely to go the other way.

     We've got far too many organic sociopaths as it is, and nobody knows how to make 'em feel for others; we don't need to build new ones out of silicon and software.  That stuff is never going to have a theory of mind.

     A.I. is the The Wave Of Thirty Minutes Ago, and after the bubble pops and the economy crashes and recovers, spellcheck-on-steroids will be found to have only a few useful functions, including as a source of lowest-common-denominator entertainment and some non-critical agentic assistance, and it will otherwise be deader than optical disc recordings or analog audio on magnetic tape, as cringe as tailfins.  The unfixable problem is that it is empty at the core; it cannot love, it cannot feel pain or loss, and if a hiccup in the learning process has it considering turpentine a viable cocktail ingredient, it'll pour you a martini that can literally strip paint, without hesitation.  Bottoms up! 

About Those Supposed Communists

     The President of the U. S. has been fuming about "communists"* winning primaries in New York City and Colorado.  He appears to be peeved about a subset of Democratic candidates for Congress, who won in very blue districts and who go by "Democratic Socialists of America" and whose politics is, generally, considerably less socialist than Upton Sinclair, Eugene V. Debs or the general trend of the governments of Nordic countries. (All of which just happen to have capitalist economies.)

     We've already got a couple of DSA-affiliated Representatives in the House, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and here's the thing: voters are entitled to pick their representatives.  Indiana regularly sends an assorted bouquet of conservative Republicans to the House, along with one or two big-city Democrats for contrast.  You might deplore the politics of some or all of that delegation, but the majority of voters in their districts wanted them, and so off they go to Congress, to butt heads or collude with their opposite numbers from the various states.  That's how it works.

     In a country with a strong two-party system, and ours is about as entrenched as they come, you're going to find a diversity of opinion within the parties.  Maybe not as much as there used to be; my parents used to shake their heads over that wild liberal (but nominally Republican) Nelson Rockefeller, and express concern at the most stick-in-the-mud of the conservative Southern Democrats.  It really does take all kinds, and ideally, we're going to get all kinds in Congress, where -- maybe! -- they'll actually address substantive issues and try to find some path to accomplishing the things that really need doing.

     I'm not especially hopeful that the members of the House and Senate are going to do much besides make pretty speeches for their bases and assume various traditionally partisan postures, but if sending in a few younger people, who owe less to lobbyists and big business and aren't in lockstep with their party's orthodoxy, will shake 'em up and at least produce some substantive debate, I'll be happy to see it, no matter what it takes.  I'm not too worried they'll pocket the good silver, not while the Executive Branch is all but looting the Treasury and daring anyone to notice, and with all of their seniors in the Legislature giving them the hairy eyeball.

     It's high time we stopped giving away special tax breaks to the rich, especially on Social Security and Medicare.  Chumps like you and me, the more we earn, the more we pay -- but there's a threshold, low by millionaire standards, where those withholdings plateau, and as fewer and fewer people hold more and more money (and income), the shortfalls in those programs grow in direct proportion.  Removing or at least modifying those limits on Medicare and Social Security pay-in for big incomes isn't making the one or two percent pay extra, it's just asking them to pay the same rate as the rest of us.  If it takes a few firebrands with wacky notions to move the needle in that direction, hooray.  If they get too obstreperous, they can always be voted right back out. Try that with a sticky-fingered gazillionaire, and see how far you get!
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* He used the term "godless communist," which is an oldie from 1950s or earlier, popular during the Red Scare, but the two DSA reps presently in Congress consist of one Muslim and one Catholic, neither of which faith lacks in a Supreme Being.  Atheists are screamingly rare among American office-holders and whoever wins in November, you can all but count on 'em being a member of some theistic religion.  Our Congressthings have many flaws, severally and each, but an insufficiency of God ain't among 'em. 

Omininousity

      Things didn't end well for Cassandra, but they were bad long before they got worse: the thing about prophecies of doom is, even if they're right, they're a downer.

     The downer at present is that we're in a "K-shaped economy," which feels preposterous to most Americans: how can a rising tide not be lifting all boats?

     But that's how it's working: if you were well-off to begin with, came out of the pandemic with money to play the stock market and not worry, a bit in crypto, maybe dabble in prediction markets, you're doing fine.  The trade war (wars?) haven't bothered you; the un-war with Iran hasn't been an issue, and while there's a whole lot of oil and gas (and aluminum and ammonia plus nitrates for fertilizer) bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz, those chickens are still scratching in the yard, and aren't due home to roost for weeks yet.  The top half of the K is going up, up, up!

     But this K is a fancy font: the bottom half is a quarter circle.  If you started out just okay, you're still mostly okay; if you were worse off, you can already feel the pinch of high gas prices and grocery prices that have barely budged down or even gone up, of rising energy costs....  And the people near the bottom, where the curve is getting steep?  They're hosed.  (Welcome to Calculus 001, by the way.  Oh, we've reached my stop already.)

     There are a lot more of us in the bottom of the K than the top, but we don't make colorful news copy; we're not part of the "AI boom" and some of us have lost jobs to it; still, one of the biggest groups is right there where the curve is barely sloping: they're not feeling it much so far.

     But the big dip in the road is coming.  There is no magic restart for the lost months of global trade in oil and all the stuff you can make with it.  Fertilizer is in short supply and expensive, and that's what grows the crops you and your entree eat.  Aluminum -- beer cans, soft drink cans, all manner of consumer and industrial goods -- is getting scarce and costly.  And oil prices -- well, you buy gas; you know how that's trending.  There will be a "capture transient" as it ends, prices ramping up beforehand, undercut by the sudden bump in supply that may result in a nasty fall.  A saving grace as the problem continues is that idled refineries and oil wells (etc.) don't start up quickly; but it's a bitter pill, since it will mean lingering shortages and higher prices until it's all back up to speed.

     Nobody liked Cassandra very much.  They liked her predictions less.  And in a K-shaped economy, you can see the party is roaring!  Look at 'em, in their Rollses and Bentleys, with BMWs and Mercedeses (Mercedii?) for the kids, and all their outrageous costumes -- surely you, too, will soon join them!  It's right there, online and on TV, glittering and shiny, nearly close enough to touch.

     Thing is, you're not gonna get there.  In a K-shaped economy, very few cross over.  The odds it'll be you or me are lousy.   I'm not Cassanda; I'll be happy to have missed my mark.  But that's not how I'm betting. 

Kerosene Burners

     The war between the United States, Israel and Iran has bumped up fuel unavailability and prices.  Some of it it is easy to understand: crude oil is traded globally, and tends to flow to where the dollars are.  Gasoline works the same way, and a lot of that crude oil input comes out the other end of the refinery as gas for your car.  We expect diesel to work the same way, and mostly it does, but there's a catch.

     See, diesel's down at the heavy end, with jet fuel, kerosene and home-heating oil (and past that to bunker oil, the tarry stuff they burn in big ships and old steam locomotives that didn't run on wood or coal).  And much of that gets "pre-bought" in bulk.  Airlines especially prefer to hedge their bets by buying months and months of jet fuel in advance (it's rarely a bad bet that fuel prices will go up over the long term), and a lot of it gets refined not too far from the source -- which for a lot of Europe, is in the Middle East, and you'd never, ever guess where those refineries are.... No, I'm kidding.  Of course they're located around or near the Strait of Hormuz.  There's not a lot of jet fuel refining capacity within the EU itself.  Why should they bother when Middle Eastern countries are happy to host those big, smelly, polluting refineries?  The answer to that question is coming home to roost.

     Jet fuel is a knotty problem.  The airlines have already bought it; it just can't be delivered.  And the refineries away from the conflict zone that are set up to make jet fuel are well able to make diesel -- which is not a clunky bulk-sold-in-advance market, and where the free flow of fuel to where prices are highest* leaves companies chasing after a distribution network and customers who are, however unhappily, already set up for and accepting of highly variable prices.

     Meanwhile, the economics of airlines are screwy.  Outside the U.S., many of the largest carriers are subsidized by their governments, instruments of national prestige as well as effective transportation.  By some measures, the U.S. airline industry as a whole never makes a profit: there are few losers every year, often cannibalized by their peers or propped up by past earnings, a handful of winners, and the rest break even.  Disruption in fuel supplies throws a wrench into this tipsy balance -- and prolonged disruption tosses in a stick of dynamite after it, the fuse fizzing.

     You will note an absence of hand-wringing assignment of blame.  Sure, Donald Trump's a bull in a china shop on his best days, his Secretary of Defense is a bloodthirsty pinhead with a weird take on religion, and the majority of Congress is a craven bunch of spineless losers being led around by the nose (not to mention the pompous ambition and negative charisma of the Vice President, which I won't) -- but the Middle East is a powder keg with a load of lit candles on top.  If it wasn't Mr. Trump's "splendid little war," it would be some other war in the region, and if it wasn't right now, it would happen next week, or next month, or next year.  It's going to happen, and it's going to keep on happening, as long as a politically unstable region produces such a large amount of the crude oil and its refined products that our entire civilization runs on.  The network of global trade in oil cannot be disassembled by any amount of domestic production: oil will always flow towards money.  Smart politicians would be working to reduce dependence on oil, especially as a primary energy source; this is the only controllable variable.  And guess what?  Our politicians are no smarter than the rest of us -- and our business leaders may be even less so.

     Get ready to ante up.  Again.  And if you were planning to fly anywhere soon, better count pennies.

     Update: The Strait of Hormuz is now, according to the Trump administration Iranian government, "completely open."  We'll see if everyone with a practical veto agrees -- but don't expect the worst parts of the mess to magically clear up overnight even if it's olly-olly-oxen-free.

     Further Update: No, it's a day later and the Strait is closed again.  And apparently the U. S. blockade -- as opposed to the Iranian closure -- never stopped.  They can keep this up all year folks, and they might.  This doesn't bode well for the price of pretty much everything.
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* This simplistic formulation ignores that it's a gradient, with high prices but excellent supply at one end and lower prices but low supply at the other.  The U.S. is (on average) rich, and if you've got the bucks, fueling up the Benz is no problem no matter what it burns.  A Third-World farmer might not even be able to find any to buy.  In between, countries are rationing fuel, requesting or requiring people work from home, asking "Is this trip really necessary?" and taking other economizing measures.  And airlines?  If things go on, some of 'em are going to get grounded, or go under altogether.
 
† Still the name of it.  Congress named it and only Congress can rename it, which they have not.

Over $5.00 A Gallon

     I had put off filling up my car.  I started out the non-war war with a full tank and who knew, maybe it would all be over before I ran out.

     It isn't.  I nearly did.  I had too much fun this weekend to remember to get gas, and when I set out for work today, the tank was much lower than I like.  The only name-brand station on my way downtown that I'm comfortable at is at 49th St., and it's rarely the cheapest.

     But an $85.00 refill is painful.  Gotta have it, and it's not like I can't cover the cost, but it's a bigger bite than I'm used to and indications are that the price of oil isn't done going up.  Almost anything that happens in the Middle East right now, especially around Iran, is going to reduce the availability of oil.  Some events will have longer lasting results, but over the next thirty days, you can count on the stuff costing more, even if there's a sudden outbreak of peace, goodwill and brotherhood: damaged refineries and seagoing traffic jams don't get sorted out overnight.

     My present bet is that we're headed for a recession at best.  Oh, our country and the planet keep lurching towards them, and dodging at the last minute by shoving one industry or sector into the mud for awhile as everything else goes roaring past; but sooner or later, someone's going to miss a step, and the damage will become widespread.  Wars, declared or not, have a tendency to break the rhythm.  That can be helpful if things are already really bad; but if they're on edge, not so much.

     Me, I'm going to get my motorcycle tuned up, and shop for saddlebags so it can be more a commuter vehicle.  Mechanic's fees are a one-time cost; gas just keeps on going up.  The motor scooter will follow -- I love it, but 10" wheels and Indiana roads after a harsh winter aren't a great match.  Unlike my car, the motorcycle and scooter will burn regular gas, too.

War! What Is It Bad For?

     You can't see the dead people from here.  But even ignoring that horrible toll, war is bad for a whole lot of things beyond the obvious, from beer cans to electronics to plastic doodads like...uh-oh: your phone.

     Tamara settles in for a look at the facts. Gas prices ain't even half of it.

It's A New Year's Miracle!

     Okay, it's a "miracle" in the Adam Smith sense, anyway.

     I was looking around for blackeyed peas starting last week, and coming up short.  In my one trip to the vast Multi-Mart, I...well, I forgot.  Tam strove to bring some home from the grocery last weekend and they had no version of blackeyed peas.

     This morning, I needed to go gas up my car and on the way home, I stopped at the other foodie grocer to check.  Nope.  "They ran us right out," one of the clerks told me.  Tam had offered to make another swing by our closer grocery store today in case they'd restocked, but I cautioned her we shouldn't get our hopes too high.

     Surprise!  They had set out the remaining stock.  And so, thanks to the relentless pursuit of sales, we've got one of the great miracles of modern civilization: the stuff we wanted to buy, when we wanted to buy it. 

It's Still The Economy, Stupid

     Governments have a pretty good history when it comes to screwing up economies.  Fixing them, that's another story.  Herbert Hoover (eventually) and Franklin Roosevelt expended enormous effort trying to claw their way out of the Great Depression, and only blunted the worst of it while the whole planet rode the roller-coaster.  Subsequent presidencies bobbed around like a cork on stormy seas as various economic troubles came and went, and frequently lost elections over them.  The government -- any government -- doesn't run the economy, but the economy sometimes runs government, and can run it right out of town.

     Viktor Orban's experiment in "illiberal democracy" in Hungary, which has looked a lot like a more-polite version of one-party autocracy with fancy trimmings to keep the EU from more than mild disapproval, may be about to relearn that lesson.

     Here at home -- how 'bout that promised prosperity?  Have groceries gotten any cheaper?  How about utility bills?  Has anyone's gazillionaire boss handed out big, fat raises, or are most of us fretting over our chances of being swept up in an Amazon-style massive layoff?

     Promises of pie in the sky only work until the pie fails to arrive.  And wow, is it ever failing.  When the AI/data center bubble pops -- which it will -- the fallout is liable to be messy.  Just ask SNAP beneficiaries, presently unbenefited thanks to the government shutdown. 

About That Economy

     Okay, it's just one set of hoofbeats.  Might be a horse, might be a zebra.  But it doesn't seem like a good sign when a major candy distributor files for bankruptcy shortly before Halloween.

     Sure, SNAP benefits have been shut off by the shutdown (there is, of course, a lawsuit.  Wonder if you can cook that up and eat it?  Nope).  Sure, ACA subsidies are expiring and there's no plan to bring 'em back; if you got your health insurance through the Feds or one of the state exchanges, the price is going up, and possibly by quite a lot.  And there's a whole big mess around Federally-subsidized flood insurance, too.  But candy at Halloween?  The people who usually couldn't afford it still can't; this is result of people who once could deciding they'd better not.

     Oops. 

What, No Monday?

     I was up late Sunday night for no good reason, and slept in a little Monday -- but I have to admit it, the strangeness and unpleasantness of current events leaves me spoiled for choice and lost in the noise.  Which strain of awfulness is so dire as to invite further comment, and what stands on its own, inherently horrible?

     There's a giant hurricane headed toward Jamaica (and Cuba afterward), the eye moving slowly but circulating wind gusts inside the storm in excess of 200 miles an hour; at the same time, Indiana's Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, who has picked up a reputation for condemning every rainbow flag or lapel-pin listing pronouns as "grooming," has found himself right next to a real case of felony child exploitation charges involving the son of his podcast partner, and has nothing whatsoever to say about it.  Both of these are tragedies, one of unthinkable scale, the other of unspeakable harm, and yet they're nearly lost in headlines clamoring things just as bad, if not worse.

     Most of it defies easy remedy.  If you want to do something, donate to your local food pantry -- money, time and/or food.  With SNAP and WIC funding unavailable (and the Feds too busy dreaming up new Hatch Act violations to find creative solutions) and Federal employees not getting paid, they're about to be hit by a flood of need far in excess of their resources.

     We are careening towards a precipice -- and there are many, all far too near: economic, weather (or climate; go argue with the dead about terminology), politics, and that unlovely extension of politics, war, all of it on both national and global scales.  Which will pop first -- and how many of the rest will follow -- is a fool's bet and will eventually be a career for historians.  "Events leading up to..." and we are in the middle of them.

Lift The Curtains

      Canada ran a TV ad in the US that included excerpts from a Ronald Reagan radio speech about trade barriers, back when he was President, and the ad leaves the impression the late President was no fan of tariffs.

     President Trump was annoyed, firing back on social media, "The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs. [...] Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED." (You can go read the whole thing on "Truth Social" if you like.)  And indeed, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute said the ad “misrepresents the Presidential Radio Address.”  As CNN notes, they didn't explain just how.  It's a whole Dance of the Seven Veils, over something that is part of the public record.

     Why take someone else's word about it?  Newsweek published the entire text of the radio address and you can read it for yourself; Mr. Reagan makes it clear that he's opposed to tariffs in general, greatly prefers free trade, and has imposed very specific tariffs on some Japanese products in response to their failure to abide by a previous agreement -- and that he hopes to resolve the issue soon and return to free trade.  But see for yourself.

Hurtling Though History

     Photographs of the destruction at the East Wing of the White House from yesterday and today suggest that this Administration is speedrunning the notion of "ruin value."

     Or perhaps it's the boast of Caesar Augustus, who claimed to have found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble -- only, you know, the average Roman was still living in a flimsy apartment house, hoping the lightweight upper stories wouldn't catch fire while the Emperor was fiddling around with his building plans.

     Hey, did you hear about the anthrax outbreak in Argentina -- the country our Federal government just bailed out and is talking about importing cheap beef from?  Dig in!

     It's like someone threw Atlas Shrugged in a blender, only with no John Galt.

The Great Crash, 1929

      I finished John Kenneth Galbreath's book about the stock market crash and, almost in passing, its connection to the Great Depression that followed.

     He closes with some interesting observations, listing major contributing factors.  At the top of the list, extreme income inequality.  The problem as he sees it is that the whims of a few major players can make an impression that the chaotic urges of thousands of lesser lights cannot -- unless they're following the lead of the big guys.  There'd been booms and busts during the era of the "robber barons" a few decades earlier and the phenomenon of extreme wealth for a very few came back even harder in the 1920s.  Look around: we've got that again.

     He follows that with "bad corporate structure," the kind of trusts and holding companies that concatenated during the boom years before the Crash, companies that existed only to own the stock of companies that also existed only to own stock and so on: while they amplified gains, they also amplified losses, so that when things went bad, they kept getting worse.  While that kind of thing is a lot less likely today -- and you can thank New Deal reforms and regulations for the reduced risk -- any novel financial instrument carries similar risk, as the sub-prime mortgage crisis awhile back revealed.

     "Bad banking structure" comes in for censure, and that got a post-Crash restructure, too.  Some of it has been rolled back.  Good, bad?  I don't know; ask an economist.  Ask three of 'em, and you'll get four different opinions. 

     Next, "the dubious state of the foreign balance," and Galbreath credits high tariffs with helping to create the problem.  They were not nearly as high then as they have become in the last few months.  Ouch.

     The stock market has "circuit breakers" these days: if prices start plunging, trading is suspended.  While that may sound like a cheat, one of the main reasons for it (past putting brokers in time out to ponder their actions) is to let the record-keeping catch up.  On multiple occasions during the 1929 crash, the decline and subsequent trading, sell-outs, bankruptcies, etc. got so far ahead of the data coming out of the stock market that nobody knew what was going on until hours after the close of trading; some people "lost everything" not once but multiple times.  They ended up in holes too deep to claw their way out of.  These days, the market can still crush you -- but it's a lot less likely to keep trying to wring out more afterward.

     We're certain to see abrupt dips in the stock market -- if not today (seems to be mildly up so far), then eventually; we're unlikely to have another Great Crash.  Unlikely does not mean impossible, and no matter how carefully a thing has been made foolproof, new and more ingenious fools arrive every day.  Have they once again become too clever for their -- and our -- own good?  Time will tell.