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The thing to remember about Elon Musk is that *he* is the brand. Not Tesla (whose P/E is an order of magnitude higher than Ford and GM), not SpaceX, not Twitter. The valuations of these companies are intimately tied to the public perceptions of Musk. Yesterday, Musk showed us the future of Twitter by re-tweeting an anti-LGBT rumor about Paul Pelosi. Advertisers, who account for ca. 90% of the money-losing budget of Twitter don't want their brand associated with nutjobs. And Musk has already fired the Twitter leadership that had been steering this sinking ship until now. "ELON MUSK (and his consortium of much smaller investors) now owns Twitter. We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened. "That’s because as of this moment, it looks like Musk dug a big hole in the forest, carefully filled it with punji sticks and crocodiles, and then jumped in." As teh kidz say, read the rest here: https://thein...

 Exxon just posted their highest quarterly profit in the history of the company. "Faced with calls to share the oil industry’s 2022 windfall with the American people, Exxon CEO Darren Woods says he’s doing just that — in the form of a big dividend payout to shareholders. No really. I’m not kidding. “There has been discussion in the U.S. about our industry returning some of our profits directly to the American people,” says Exxon Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods. “That’s exactly what we’re doing in the form of our quarterly dividend.” In case you live under a rock, shareholder dividends are not actually sent to the American people. They’re sent to the owners of Exxon, shareholders. So Exxon is sharing the wealth with the American people in the sense of making a lot of profits for Exxon and sharing it with the company’s owners." https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/exxon-chief-were-getting-rich-on-behalf-of-the-american-people

While our recent move has, and continues to have, significant sources of anxiety, one benefit it that--for the first time in my life--I live in a blue state. Which means a majority of my fellow citizens share my ethical and moral values. To be fair, University City was a blue enclave in a red state, but my bike rides in unincorporated St. Louis County, as well as other areas of outstate Missouri confronted me with confederate flags and other reminders that I lived in an island of civilization surrounded by a sea of anti-American hostility. So while we continue to try and establish our little homestead in New England, at least I'm no longer surrounded by cretins.

The Republican candidates are desperately trying to misdirect from their pro-forced birth and anti-Social Security/anti-Medicare agenda by bleating about crime. Ask yourself (and them): how do you feel about the crime of insurrection at the Capital, desecration of the People's House, and the seditious interference with American democracy. If they don't admit that 6 January was a crime committed in the name of Trump, they don't really care about crime, they just care about Republican power.

How is this different from the claims Vladimir Putin is making about Ukraine? [Menachem Begin's] election represented the confirmation of the fears Kapeliouk expressed in Not By Omission: that Israel would fail to critically examine its responsibility in the 1973 War, deciding instead to double down on its confrontation with the Arab world. Shortly before being elected, journalists asked Begin about his intentions for the Occupied Territories. He replied, “We do not use the word annexation; you annex foreign land, not your own country.”" https://www.juancole.com/2022/10/kapeliouk-omission-israeli.html

If you’d asked me thirty years ago what I thought of Glenn Gould, I would have recalled that he was a Canadian pianist who recorded an extended monolog about Petula Clark. I have three or four Gould recordings on LP, including his famous interpretation of the Bach Goldberg Variations. Since we moved, I’ve listened to these LPs again. While I’m certainly no expert on keyboard performance practice, I do appreciate the novelty of Gould’s approach. In some ways, his keyboard attack reminds me of another favorite keyboard performer, Keith Jarrett. Setting aside the fact that both emit random vocalizations during their performances, they both have a percussive style, albeit using very different biomechanics. Today, I’ve been listening to some YouTubes about Gould—his biography and his critics. In some ways, he was the Bobby Fischer of the keyboard—eccentric, grandiose, narcissistic and consumed with his art. Despite his odd performance practice, using a low chair and flat finger technique, h...

The SS taxes paid by current workers are used to fund current beneficiaries. Any excess must, by law, be invested in US treasuries, which are loans to the general fund that must eventually be paid back with interest. Social Security funding is separate from the regular budget. Thus, Social Security *does not* contribute to the deficit or the national debt. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant or lying. The GOP is threatening cuts (yes, raising the eligibility limit is effectively a cut to benefits) to SS on the grounds that the national debt is too high. This is a phony argument (see first paragraph). If the GOP were really concerned about the national debt, it would be pushing for tax increases--rolling back the Bush and Trump tax cuts--and for taxing investment income like regular income (the 1% get most of their wealth from investments, not salary). The GOP will bleat that this will tank the economy, because the 1% are the "job creators." No, the job creators are the midd...

Read this article, then replace "Ukraine" with Vietcong and "Russia" with United States. Regardless of how you feel about the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese were fighting on and for their own land. Ukraine is fighting on and for its own land. If you don't like that analogy, replace "Ukraine" with Afghanistan and "Russia" with the USSR and the United States. The Afghanis were fighting on and for their own land. Asymmetric warfare. Yeah, Curtis Lemay thought we should nuke North Vietnam. Destroy Vietnam to save it. Is Putin the Russian incarnation of Curtis Lemay? Let's hope he doesn't think the revanchist Russian Empire consists of a radioactive wasteland. But if he shrinks from that vision, he's doomed to lose.   https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/19/europe/ukraine-war-bakhmut-struggle-intl/index.html

The GOP is already announcing that when they take over the House, they will hold the debt ceiling hostage to cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Here's Kevin McCarthy: "“You can’t just continue down the path to keep spending and adding to the debt. And if people want to make a debt ceiling [for a longer period of time], just like anything else, there comes a point in time where, okay, we’ll provide you more money, but you got to change your current behavior. We’re not just going to keep lifting your credit card limit, right?” he said. “And we should seriously sit together and [figure out] where can we eliminate some waste? Where can we make the economy grow stronger?” First of all, there is no analogy between a personal credit card and the national debt. The US has a sovereign currency and you don't. The US creates and destroys dollars every day and you don't. But wait, won't creating more dollars mean hyperinflation? Uh, no. The dollar is the world's reserve...

From a comment thread over at jabberwocking.com: "March of Dimes, Easter Seals, etc. did a lot to help get biomedical research started in this country. The military funded a lot too. Howard Hughes looking for a tax dodge boosted basic research. The initial War on Cancer built out the modern biomedical research complex. The fight against AIDS, once the government got fully involved, built upon the cancer research and helped us understand our immune system. That understanding of the immune system helped develop immunotherapies. The fight against AIDS and Ebola pushed vaccine research--though funding a fraction of treatment research. Along the way, a stoner playing with extremophiles gave us PCR. A woman studying microbes gave us CrispR. The Human Genome Project pushed sequencing techniques. Another women didn't get tenure looking at mRNA kept at it to give us a new class of vaccines."

  One of the things I'll miss about St. Louis is Shakespeare in the park. Staged on the hillside below the Art Museum in Forest Park, the productions were uniformly excellent. The actors lived their roles, the costumes and sets were clever, the sound system was excellent, and except when it rained, the outdoor setting was delightful. We'd pick up sandwiches at Saint Louis Bread Company (the origin of Panera), toss a bottle of wine and some cups into a canvas bag, and find a site close to the stage. Of course, I'd been exposed to Shakespeare in junior high and high school, both the plays and the sonnets. But there was always something ossified in reading the texts. There was a film version of Romeo and Juliet that came out in 1968 that managed to bring the words of that play to life, but of course that wasn't on a theater stage. The many Shakespeare in the Park performances were the times when Elizabethan text came alive and I found myself emotionally engaged. Thanks to ...

I've changed my mind about lots of things in my life. One of them is capital punishment. I took a couple of religious studies classes in college from Charlie Reynolds. In one class, Dr. Reynolds said he was opposed to the death penalty because he believed it was immoral/unethical to kill an unarmed person. That was the moment of my conversion. Reading where Nikolas Cruz was sentenced to life in prison without parole for his horrific crime. Whether or not a lifetime in an American prison is worse than death is a separate issue. Since a death penalty verdict must be unanimous, there may have only been one juror who did the morally correct thing, but I'm glad of the outcome. YMMV. https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/nikolas-cruz-sentencing-decision/index.html

I'm pretty much a 1st Amendment absolutist. I've been a card-carrying member of the ACLU for over 40 years, to which we've contributed tens of thousands of dollars. I even supported the right of American Nazis to march in Skokie. But Alex Jones crossed a line in his Sandy Hook lies--they weren't just obnoxious speech, they were broadcast terrorism and they had terroristic consequences. The SCOTUS says the 1st Amendment doesn't protect shouting "fire" in a crowded movie theater. That's reckless endangerment. Jones recklessly and selfishly took what remained of the suffering, diminished lives of parents who lost their children away from them and made them fear every day for their lives. For that, he should pay. Giving up his immense wealth won't undo the years of suffering and fear he inflicted on bereaved families, and the pain he'll feel by losing his wealth is in no way commensurate with the suffering he inflicted on others in order to gain th...

  The bleating from professional slob Steve Bannon and his sound-alikes about a civil war if Trump isn't back in the White House in 2025 has me all meh. From a comment over at angrybear.com: "The wannabe authoritarian-backing wing-nuts want a civil war, but they are not very good at math. Just having a big mouth does not make one deadly and just toting around an assault weapon does not make one a warrior."

The first step is to choose your parents well. "Their experiment showed that having average talent but ample luck is better than lots of talent and little luck. And the most successful people in their simulations were the ones with moderate talent and magnificent luck." https://www.wsj.com/articles/nobel-prize-luck-success-talent-11664903787?st=zek3nlunnvc9cxp&reflink=article_email_share

Not only is America facing higher prices for oil and natural gas, but also fertilizer. And there's nothing the Federal Reserve rate increase will do to improve the outlook into 2023. "What to look for: "Higher dairy (milk, eggs, cheese, lattes) as feed prices increase dairy herds will decrease. "Higher meat prices. All meats. Almost all livestock is fed grain silage. Only grass grown and grass finished beef will escape those confines. "Higher cooking oil prices. Soybeans or “vegetable oil” will be more expensive. As will anything containing soy or any derivatives. "Food overall will remain high priced, no matter how much the fed ratchets. The rate of incline will start this fall as harvest truths get sold into the market. The USDA WASDE report will start to reflect the poor yield. Plant ’23 will start in earnest in the south around April, and northerns folks will pull out their planters in May or June much like we saw this past spring, to the tune of higher...

I've had lobster a couple of times in the distant past. The experience didn't repay the effort. Mostly, it seemed like a vehicle for garlic butter. This is another boycott for which I'll make no difference because I wasn't gonna eat it anyway. But if you do, keep this in mind: " It’s a debate about science and sustainability, and it gets pretty technical pretty fast. But with the population of right whales declining 30 percent over the past decade, there’s a fundamental question facing restaurateurs and their customers: Is eating lobsters worth risking the extinction of an entire species?" https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/10/08/business/whales-are-dying-ropes-lobster-traps-are-partly-blame-thats-put-lobsters-people-who-catch-them-crosshairs-conservation-groups/

  Long overdue Glad to see that the US military is finally getting around to removing taxpayer-funded honors for traitors and treason. Having grown up in the American South at the end of apartheid, I'm familiar with all the euphemisms: 'heroes of the War of Northern Aggression," "Preserving Southern Tradition." Uh, no, it was treason to preserve slavery. "These symbols don’t exist as a result of accidents or coincidences. Nor were they part of efforts in the immediate wake of the war to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” as President Abraham Lincoln described it. They were created in the early years of the 20th century and remain echoes of a decades-long campaign to recast Confederate history. The real Big Lie, these efforts taught that the Confederacy was a noble “lost cause” attempt to maintain traditional American values, rather than a treasonous insurrection seeking to preserve slavery and the economic engine powered by the forced labor. The commission itsel...

It has become fashionable among self-styled "Christians" to assert that Christians are under attack these days. I don't see it, and I'm pretty well-informed. Yes, superstitions like Creationism are under attack (actually, pretty much falsified) by science, but that's the superstition, not Christianity or Christians. The science of evolution isn't an attack on Christianity; plenty of Christians accept that all life on earth is related by descent and evolved over billions of years. There have been Christian predictions of "the end times" for centuries based on a discredited reading of Revelations, but pointing out how wrong they were and how they were manufactured to raise money is not an attack on Christianity, just on some dumb and sometimes pernicious beliefs held by some Christians. Jesus didn't teach about "the end times." Jesus didn't rally Christians to establish the state of Israel in order for it to be destroyed to fulfill t...

I’ve long held that one of the greatest blows to American democracy was the disappearance of the Soviet Union. With the advent of the Cold War, as the USSR went from ally to adversary, the US was shamed into embracing civil rights and to improve public education. I personally benefitted from the updated public school STEM curricula driven by the space race. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the US has been in retreat in these areas and increasingly has embraced crony capitalism. In my personal quest to understand the Cold War, I’ve read books on Russian history, the Russian revolution, and biographies of Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky and Rasputin. I’ve been to Moscow twice and the former GDR three times, and I’ve discussed this history with Russian, Polish and East German colleagues. One of my Polish colleagues recommended “The Future is History,” by Masha Gessen. It gave me plenty of useful insight and helped refine my understanding of post-Soviet Russia. The book mostly follows the lives o...

Katie Halper was fired from her gig at The Hill TV for supporting Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib in her comments pointing out that you cannot claim to be progressive and also support the apartheid policies of Israel. Of course, Tlaib's comments cause howls of "anti-semitic" from the usual suspects. But in addition, Halper lost her job for supporting Tlaib's honest and frank statements. Halper had prepared a monolog explaining her views for her show. This monolog was censored and she was fired. Fortunately, Halper posted her monolog on YouTube. Juan Cole, a Middle East scholar, linked to the YouTube video at his blog Informed Comment and wrote: "I urge everyone with any interest at all in Israel-Palestine to watch her whole program, below. It is like a whole semester’s worth of a university class on Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, presented with clarity, excellent graphics and exciting pacing." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a7d4Qa8M6I...