29 February 2024

The Supreme Court Weighs In On trump's Side

donnie is running for president mainly because he thinks he can use various aspects to being on campaign to impede, hinder and delay the multiple criminal charges that have been brought against him.

He is also running for the office because, if he wins, he can wriggle out of those criminal charges.

In that context he is doing everything possible to delay everything he can every way he can until 5 November when he hopes that he is going to re-gain the presidency and then be able to make all his indictments go away by firing the justice department and have his newly appointed department throw out all federal cases against him and making the State judgments against him (E. Jean Carol and NY Fraud) go away by getting Congress to pass laws to pay his judgements.

Yesterday the Supreme Court showed its colors.

They set up a schedule for review of whether or not donnie is exempt from prosecution for his myriad crimes such that, once they have spoken on 30 June (and there is no one that I have heard of that believes that it is possible to find an ex-president exempt from felony crimes, so the delay will only have served the trump delay, delay, delay tactic serving the rundown to 5 November)  will not leave enough time - after all the requisite pre-trial milling around - for any trials that actually might get started to be decided until after the election.

That will leave off the table the near certain conviction of donnie for felonies as an election issue.

That may be enough to tip the balance.

That balance, once tipped, leaves donnie in charge of Justice.

SCOTUS hopes so.

They have done their job.

In this dawning era of un-separation of powers they have masterfully served.

If there was any question (remember Bush v Gore was decided in a day) about whether the jig was up for America and its Constitution, we got the answer yesterday.

As further evidence, trump's lawyer recently commented about the loyalty of the court for the donald: Alina Habba stated: “I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court. I have faith in them. You know, people like Kavanaugh ..."

Finding that VIDEO has been amazingly difficult, but I did finally find it; it's in a potpourri page of stuff, but if you scroll down a little bit and click on the image of Ol' Alina you can watch it; it's about twenty seconds long.

The first time I saw it a few weeks ago I was surprised at the unintelligent bravado of the thing.

Now that I have seen SCOTUS' delay, delay, delay strategy in supporting trump, I realize that it was actually bald-faced prophesy: "the fix is on".


 

28 February 2024

Pig In Poke Again: A Judge Speaks


Today a New York judge rejected former president donald trump’s request to delay enforcement of a judgment totaling at least $450 million while he appeals that order.

The judge did modify the judgement slightly by allowing donnie to get the money for bond from New York banks; the order forbids trump doing business with New York banks for three years.

So we are all gonna see if any bank is stupid enough to give donnie half a billion dollars to appeal a judgement for a half billion dollars, when donnie, unless he wins the appeal won't pay it back - his business plan doesn't include paying debts - and even if he wins I would bet that he would slow walk any repayment  (a half a billion in hand is better than half a billion in somebody's bank, he always says).

We shall see.

The clock is still running down so he better get his go talk to the bankers suit on pretty quick.

He has less than 30 days to get the bond money, get the appeal scheduled and get the appeal upheld.

Otherwise, the grim reaper of New York State starts selling off his stuff.

It gets really interesting then because his stuff is so heavily leveraged that it's probably not worth much.

Then we bring in Shylock.


27 February 2024

Update To Pig In A Poke

 


Since I wrote Pig In A Poke, a few things have happened.

I saw yesterday that donnie is appealing the fraud judgement ($455,000,000).

I can't find anywhere, including doing AI assisted searches, that he has posted bond or put funds in escrow.  

The silence on that subject is deafening.

So I don't know what's going on there, but it would seem that, if donnie had come up with $455,000,000 from his own checkbook and put it in escrow that would been news.

It would have been even bigger news if some bonding agency had put up 4455,000,000 in bond.

And it would have been cosmically bigger news if the stupid, but real, billionaire that I hypothesized in Pig In A Poke actually materialized.

So I have to take the silence on the subject to mean none of those things have happened.

(I heard of a candidate that I hadn't thought of when I wrote Pig: MBS; he gave Jared Kurchner two billion dollars; and MBS isn't stupid; I'm pretty sure that the Ts & Cs he would get donnie to commit to would resemble deals known to have been cut with the devil, so MBS would get value - the go ahead to make nuclear weapons, or, donnie being donnie - "brilliant bidnessman" - a multi-year volume purchase agreement for nuclear warheads to buy them from donnie; the unitary executive, after all owns all the inventory.)

My best guess is that he is indulging in what he thinks is a brilliant financial/legal finesse - starting the process and waiting for someone to ask for the money - that will buy him a little time while the judgement with the earlier suspense date gets taken care of.

That judgement is the E. Jean Carol $83,000,000 one.

There he has made a faux move toward appeal but is saying he won't post bond because he is too rich to need to post bond.

That judgement comes due on March 12.

There is more.

The investigative journalist and Syracuse Law lecturer, David Cay Johnston, has suggested that donald trump is likely to declare personal bankruptcy on March 12 in order to delay paying the fraud damage awards. 

Mr. Johnston also pointed out that the deadline for trump to appeal the order to pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll is Monday, March 12.

So that is the last day for him to declare bankruptcy and fend off for a while both the E. Jean Carol judgement and the fraud judgement.

I heard Mr. Johnston talk about this this evening on a You Tube video podcast.

It seems that the donald has found another way to delay.

Delay for what, you might ask.

According to Mr. Johnston, to delay everything he can every way he can until 5 November when he thinks he is going to re-gain the presidency and then be able to make all his indictments go away by pardoning himself and judgments go away by getting Congress to pass laws to pay his judgements.

Kinda like the family business.

And once he gets that out of the way he can get on about ruining America.

Completely and permanently. 










24 February 2024

A Pig In A Poke


 

donnie has some bills coming due.

In fact, one of them has already apparently been paid.

Here are the Bills:

  1. E Jean Carol - $5,000,000
  2. E. Jean Carol - $83,000,000
  3. New York Fraud Judgement: $355,000,000
  4. Interest on New York Fraud Judgement - $100,000,000
That adds up to $543,000,000.

That shouldn't be a problem for donnie, because as we have so often heard from the mouth of the donald himself, he is "really rich".

Apparently he has put funds in escrow so he can appeal the E. Jean Carol $5,000,000 judgement.

Since, as we have constantly heard, from the mouth of the donald himself, that he is "a brilliant bidnessman", one would suppose he was carried cursing and screaming to his checkbook for that payment; one would suppose that, if there had been any chance of it, he would have used somebody else's money; he would have posted bond.

Since he didn't post bond, one might assume that nobody was willing to put up $5,000,000 for a bond for donnie.

One might not be surprised at that lack of willingness; donnie routinely stiffs anybody to whom he owes money.

Further, one might assume that if no one was willing to go a bond of $5,000,000, $538,000,000 is a bond too far.

That puts donnie in an interesting situation.

To appeal his other judgements, which he has said he is certainly going to do for the $83,000,000 and the $455,000,000, he needs to either put the entire amount of each judgement in escrow, or post bond for the entire amount, such amount coming from - somewhere or someone licensed to do that sort of thing.

As we have seen there don't appear to be any bondsmen standing in line.

The appeal clock is winding down in both cases.

He has less than thirty days.

It appears that he may not have enough cash of his own to put in escrow for even the $83,000,000, let alone the $455,000,000.

"Brilliant bidnessmen" don't let cash lie around in banks idly earning almost nothing.

"Brilliant bidnessmen" leverage themselves to the hilt and live off of credit cards with gold plated terms and conditions that only "brilliant" ultimately leveraged "bidnessmen" can obtain.

(It was in pursuit of those kind of terms and conditions that donnie, by submitting lies for financial information, got himself into the $455,000,000 pickle in the first place.)

So "brilliant bidnessmen" don't have a lot of cash lying (interesting coincidence-word) around.

There is, therefore, a school of thought that donnie, in less than thirty days, likely is going to come up short of escrow on at least one of his two intended appeals.

And, as we have already seen, he doesn't appear likely, in any rational world, to be able to find any source for bond.

So, I guess he can't appeal.

In his world of awful news, that is the neutral news.

Here's the awful news: those judgements don't go on pause after thirty days just because donnie can't appeal them.

They are due and payable when the clock strikes "pay me".

If he doesn't, the Attorney General of New York will start selling off donnie's assets to satisfy the un-appealed judgements (both cases are in the State of New York).

There is a school of thought that says, since donnie is a "brilliant bidnessman" he is so leveraged that even all of his assets haven't enough equity to cover $543,000,000 in judgements.

If so, what then?

Shylock is my hopeful suggestion.

But seriously, somebody, somewhere is surely going to bail out poor little donnie, history's most hapless victim.

I guess some real billionaire is going to be able to buy a US president on the cheap.

At least that's what the truth social ad, to be posted tomorrow, puts on offer.

The only problem is that said billionaire is going to need to put up the money in less than thirty days; that's a long time before the election, so donnie isn't president yet.

I'm going to be interested to see who turns out to be the billionaire who is stupid enough to buy a pig in a poke.

I find it difficult to suppose that there will be one. 

Real billionaires, unlike "brilliant bidnessmen" don't do stupid shit.

23 February 2024

Voters React To The republican House Of Representatives

 




I can't find any copyright information in the metadata.  If the creator of this GIF sees my use of it, please contact me so I can give proper attribution.

22 February 2024

Boeing: The Problem Is Not Quality Control


Quality control is a symptom of the problem.

And the problem is that a few years back a cadre of executives having no cultural or hereditary relationship to the Renton Culture decided that they needed to remove themselves from the sweaty stench of the managers and workers.

They moved off to Chicago and began thinking great thoughts in tall buildings.

They did that because they weren't Boeing people.

They were McDonnell Douglas people who came to Boeing in the Boeing buyout of McDonnell Douglas.

They knew nothing of Boeing and its history, heritage and culture: great organized labor, great entrepreneurial management and great get-your-hands-on-the-products-and-processes executives, all three of whom were imbued with deep scientific curiosity, engineering ability and fanatic commitment to quality, and a mutual respect for and intense belief in the team.

McDonnell Douglas people came from an environment of cost-plus DOD contracts: you get paid whether or not you deliver quality, whether or not you deliver it on time, and at a price established by adding an outrageous uplift to an already bloated "cost".

Financially that's a hard environment to fail in.

Trying to transfer that method to a Boeing passenger plane is both impossible, and has been proven to be, disastrous. 

The main solution to the problem of crashing passenger planes, midair fuselage failures, de-icers that can only be run for five minutes or the engines might blow up and vertical stabilizers that might not work right has been for the thinkers of great thoughts in tall buildings to move from Chicago to Washington DC.

Until that crowd are either fired or retired and Boeing returns to its heritage, Boeing will continue to lose market share and leave the way open for China to be the only competitor to Airbus.

And unfortunately, there may be more mid-air disasters and deaths waiting to occur in the interim on the company's path to oblivion.

Octavia Butler

 

I just finished Parable of the Sower.

What a great book.

It was published in 1993.

Why didn't I hear of it until recently?

Probably has something to do with the that same blank page of history that has made the Tulsa Massacre, the Wilmington Coup and Juneteenth new news to me.

Anyway, I have found her and her thinking and writing, late but at least not never.

One good book deserves another, so I have begun the rest of the Parable, that of the Talents.

Sower starts out with a bang: chapter one has a date in the year 2024.

Talents starts with an explosion: the date (not part of the explosion) is 2032; the explosion is the brief statement by Franklin Taylor Bankole, a key character from Sower who summarizes, briefly, recent history.

Octavia published this in 1998 so she was writing it between 1993 and 1998.

An unseen but palpable presence, part malignancy, part amazement descended upon me as I read these words:

"I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as “the Apocalypse” or more commonly, more bitterly, “the Pox” lasted from 2015 through 2030 – a decade and a half of chaos.  This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if a civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger and disease become inevitable for more and more people. 

Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs – wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it had once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself."

*******************************************************
Parable of the Talents, Octavia E. Butler, Copyright 1998, ISBN 978-0-446-67578-9

18 February 2024

A New Hat For The Fray

 


Black Americans saved us in 2020.

I think the Democratic Party National Committee should issue this hat in commemoration of that historic event.

SAVE AMERICA FROM trump AGAIN!    

16 February 2024

This Is Not A Gibson




Why Trump and the GOP are burning the entire system down

Opinion by Thom Hartmann

Today’s Republican Party is dedicated to destroying what they call the “deep state” and the rest of us call the American government. From Trump followers in MAGA hats at rallies to Republican US Senators, they’ll all tell you this without a moment’s hesitation.

Steve Bannon even proclaimed it as the main goal of the Trump presidency in their first months in the White House, saying Trump’s goal was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

*******************************************************

This snippet got me thinking.

In a book published in 2020, Kurt Andersen fills more than 300 pages with clear, concise and frightening documentation of how, starting in the 1970s, a small group of mostly old, old money (names like Koch and Olin) set out to dismantle the New Deal and return America to its founding roots: a few obscenely wealthy and a vast mudsill of compliant, fear ridden and manor house dependent workers.

We used to call that feudalism.

The primary means to achieving that goal as the Second Founders saw it, was to dismantle as much as possible the Government.

Where but from the government came the largess, equity and tendency toward equality that had grown into American Society since 1932?

The means of dismantling that New Deal Nightmare was to dismantle the Government.

So, they formed Heritage Foundations and Federalist Societies and took over or infiltrated major colleges and universities and on and on.

They assembled lists of malleable candidates for the judiciary at all levels.

They lobbied existing, not yet part of the CABAL members of the legislatures, federal and state, and got a gradual commencement of disintegration of all the laws and regulations underpinning the New Deal.

"Framed" issues were promulgated: "keep 'em barefoot and pregnant" became "Pro Life"; Jim Crow became "War On Drugs"; immigration became "Rapists and Drug Addicts"; there were many, many more.

Armed with all the newly "framed" issues they wove a cloth of prejudice, half-truths and lies, and with that cloth thrown over them, state capitol after state capitol became majority red.

They unleashed an abnormally vicious and toxic form of christianity upon the land.

They engulfed and co-opted the NRA and turned it into a heavily, militarily armed leader in resistance to the Government.

 They monied up the NRA so that it might create the judicial and legislative infrastructure to arm all of America, at least all Americans who had been told that they were victims.

They began to dismantle the Public Education System.

To name a few of their activities.

They were and are a clandestine group for the most part.

And they really didn't expect to get very far with their agenda.

But any retrogression is better than none, they all agreed.

In 1980 the American people picked the perfect useful idiot for the agenda of the few, the rich and the powerful.

Ronald Reagan had eight years in office, and starting with busting the Air Traffic Controllers Union he handed the keys to feudal resurgence to those few, rich and powerful.

As life happens, the 80s became the 90s and then the 00s and so on; and now we are here: 2023.

Some time back in that continuum the few, rich and powerful became increasingly amazed at their continuing success and at the magnitude of their achievement; then they became pensive, and then somewhere in the teens, they became outright alarmed.

Much though they fantasize that vast, docile, fearful, serf-like mudsill they knew there is a soft underbelly of fatal flaw in really achieving that goal: serfs have no buying power.

There is only one way to keep corporations getting bigger, fewer and more powerful.

That way needs to be a way of enhancing and advancing the quarterly growth of profit, enhancing shareholder value ("shareholders" being another term for the few, rich and powerful) using most of that quarterly profit, however, not for distribution to the shareholders, or research and development, or employee income and benefits, but for stock buybacks - fewer shares are more valuable shares and what more enhances shareholder value than more valuable shares; and given the universally assigned corporate CEO mission - stock price enhancement, not silly things like product development or employee well-being, the CEOs prospered; and having your value held in an unsold asset is the finest form of tax avoidance - and increasing size and corporate heft vertically and horizontally gives corporations a choke hold on the existence of unions (oblivion for them, they said) and cost of labor (wages shall serve shareholder value, they said) and of keeping the whole cycle virtuously careening toward Valhalla. 

That way (the one way to keep corporations getting bigger, fewer and more powerful) is to keep the mudsill buying and buying and buying causing the economy to grow and to grow and grow, and causing the few, rich and powerful to be richer and richer and richer.

On its face it's a Ponzi.

At its core it's a chimera.

You can't get blood out of a stone, is an old saw that comes to mind.

No value but shareholders' and no wages but permanently low are two factors on a collision course the few, the rich and the powerful could see.

But what results from the collision?

Just as the few, rich and powerful were getting nervous about all of that they got thrown aside by some of the mudsill that they had been prodding back to feudalism and they found out what the results of that collision was going to look like.

And it was grim.

The inmates took over the asylum.

For all their innate viciousness, meanness and, at times, outright criminality those dismantlers of American Equity and Progress, the few, the rich and the powerful, were and are still men and women of substance: they all went to the right schools, and they all know the difference between a Martini and a Gibson.

So they have some idea of how things work and why they are the way they are.

They just didn't like the way things had become since 1932, and they are now beginning to worry about how things are becoming, since 2016, and they are terrified of what might be the shape of things yet to be.

Lauren Boebert wouldn't know a Gibson if one crept up behind her and bit her on the ass.

And that pretty well describes the republican party of today.

They want to dismantle the deep state - we call it the Government - not because that is a means to the end envisioned by the few, rich and powerful, but because Q said to do it.

And because it gets clicks and makes them social media influencers.

And what could be better than that?

For the millions of MAGA, they constitute a lofty role model.

MAGA are idiots and they cheer the idiots they have elected as they say predictably idiotic bullshit.

They cheer when a low horsepower wannabe Don - named don - raves about exterminating the vermin.

They bow down and worship en masse when a gigantic empty suit topped with a mass of yellow flying matter is crane-hoisted on stages across the land.

One would prefer of golden calf.

But not everyone who has brought us to this sad state of affairs is MAGA.

Always remember and never forget: the few, the wealthy, the powerful and the deeply invested started this thing.

But they lost control.

And that may be fatal.

For the old money - the few, the wealthy, the powerful and the deeply invested - MAGA is a monster let loose upon the land.

Or maybe it is not a monster, maybe it is Madame Lafarge.

Listening to Margery Taylor Greene would support that possibility.

Except Madame Lafarge was smart.

However: maybe pondering what is now Place de la Concorde sends shivers through whatever passes for spinal cords in the few, the wealthy, the powerful and the deeply invested.

Or maybe their feelings are parallel to Oppenheimer's fears and thoughts a few seconds prior to Trinity.



14 February 2024

America Is Not Even A Player - Anymore

 Back in the 90s, I read an article in Foreign Affairs about internet connectivity world-wide. The net message was that Asia, particularly South Korea was doing it at a breakneck pace, and the United States, due to its need to maximize shareholder value, was opting out of the game.  Even then it was obvious that GB and faster internet was the underpinning to the economies of the near future (even then there were 3D printers - if you wanted to print a new prototype back at HQ, probably conjured and designed in some employee's home, due to the fact that GB and faster obviously would eliminate the need for people gathering in congregate workplaces, you needed a way to get it to HQ). 

That being the case I was quite alarmed about Maximizing shareholder value and its future impact on our economy and our position in the world.  For example, when would we have landed on the moon if we had been maximizing shareholder value?

However, like Pogo, I said "my. my" and moved on.

I was sitting here just now with little to do, wondering the state of internet connectivity in South Korea today.

Here is a status report: "In South Korea, internet speeds are remarkably fast compared to the global average. Urban South Korean homes typically enjoy 100 Mbit/s services as the standard. Moreover, the country is rapidly rolling out 1 Gbit/s (1,024 Mbit/s) connections, which cost approximately $20 per month".

What are y'all paying Comcast for maximizing their shareholder value?

And for what "speed", speed being a contractual aspiration, not product feature in American ISP-land?

There is a day a'comin' when Americans are going to be heard muttering in unison "how did we lose world leadership, on all levels, from geopolitical to cultural to economic?"

Here's How: maximizing shareholder value, refusing the contributions - even trying to nullify the existence of - a young, vibrant, creative, risk taking and diverse population in favor of adopting delusions of the good old days, the 1850s when men were men, and they were mostly white, and consciously, at the policy level, moving the majority back to feudalism.

How's that for broken-field, non-sequitur ridden ranting?

13 February 2024

E Pluribus Unum

 


If I had turned out to be a dystopian future fantasy fiction writer, I'm pretty sure I would never have come up with a scenario similar to trump's recent remarks about NATO.

Nor could I have imagined the degree of stupidity, hate, ignorance and malignity that has come to affect and infect so many of our fellows, allowing a huge baggy empty suit to engage their deep, deep affection.

Without them we would still be muddling through like always instead of being on the brink of catastrophe.

I am a onetime supporter of an all-volunteer military; in the interim I have come to an opposite point of view.

As I have contemplated the experience of having once been thrown into a randomly selected, huge, and heterogeneous segment of America's young male population, all of whom had been assigned the mission of "figure it out and make it happen" and having watched and participated in the interesting and chaotic sociology of us trying to "make it happen", I have come to the alternate viewpoint:  the draft was the right way to "make it happen; and the draft should exist as a basic part of the national fabric, non-respective to whether the nation is at war or not; that chaotic sociology is how many become one.

That was what I observed as having been "made to happen" by the draft.

Could the loss of that draft-driven forced amalgamation of disparate human components be the root cause for the rot that now besets us? 

09 February 2024

The Maggots Are Slithering

 



This guy slithered into politics by writing "Hillbilly Elegy".

Made a lot of money too.

Sounded good on Public Broadcasting.  

Now he's hyper maga, and not 80 years old. 

Ohio elected him senator. 

The dildo is likely to select him as running mate (Elise Marie Stefanik has fat ankles; donnie doesn't like fat ankles). 

Watch out, America.  

This is your next nightmare and it's coming to a ballot box near you in November. 

And always remember, and never forget, no matter the ballot count, the election has already been fixed and they're all after little donnie the dildo.