Iran's "sharp escalation" today involved less than 200 missiles and, apparently, zero casualties.
It's barely conceivable that this wasn't intensely deliberate. Twice now, Iran has lobbed missiles at Israel, and both times they've done it with plenty of warning, small numbers, and ineffective targeting. They might as well be wearing a sandwich board announcing that the whole thing is purely symbolic and not meant to do any real harm.
I have no love for Iran. If its theocratic rulers could be snuffed out at a stroke I'd shed no tears. They are living proof that there are way worse things than a thuggish and corrupt shah.
Still, this is obviously not worth a wider war. Netanyahu can't possibly not understand that, from a politics of cynical self-survival if nothing else.
With the port strike in the news, you may be wondering how much money unionized longshoremen really make. It turns out this is not so easy to suss out. Pacific Coast shippers are represented by the PMA, which publishes a relatively straightforward list of average annual earnings. East Coast shippers are represented by the USMX, which does no such thing. However, they do publish their master agreements, which provide contracted hourly wages on an annual basis. These can be roughly converted to annual earnings on a PMA basis, which allows a reasonable comparison.
After adjusting it all for inflation, here's my best guesstimate for an average worker with moderate seniority and around 32 hours of work per week:
A few things are obvious:
West Coast workers earn way more than East Coast workers.
East Coast workers average around $60,000 per year, which is OK money but hardly a king's ransom.
Neither coast has seen much of a pay increase over the past 20 years. East Coast workers, in fact, earn less than they did in 2000. In addition, the East Coast has a tiered pay scale, with new workers earning considerably less than the average.
The ILA is asking for large wage increases on East Coast ports, but much of this will just make up for past losses plus the recent inflationary spike.
NOTE: The West Coast figures show some volatility because they're based on actual earnings. During a recession, when hours of work go down, so do earnings. The East Coast figures are extrapolated from hourly wages with an assumption of 1,600 hours of work per year. They're probably volatile too, but since we don't know actual hours worked there's no way to incorporate this. If I had to guess, I'd say that actual annual earnings show similar volatility on both coasts.
Republicans in disaster-prone states, eager to present a united front during government funding talks, are shrugging off a disaster aid cliff — even as a storm barrels toward the Gulf Coast.
....“Disasters happen,” said Florida Republican Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, chair of the State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, when asked about Johnson's continuing resolution.... “I'm not too concerned at this stage.”
Lawmakers from disaster-prone states — on both sides of the aisle — were aghast this week at the lack of additional dollars for FEMA’s already depleted disaster relief fund and other federal disaster programs.
As the House and Senate’s top four leaders met last weekend to negotiate a deal to keep the government funded, they were forced to acquiesce to the demands of Congress’ most conservative fiscal hawks, whose votes were thought to be pivotal for passage.... The funding omission was made all the more striking by the fact that lawmakers were leaving Washington two days ahead of schedule, in part because of the hurricane.
Still no disaster aid, even with Helene barreling toward the coast. Today, though, the leader of the Republican Party is playing a different tune:
Intelligent.com is a college prep company that, among other things, promises to "equip students with the tools they need to smoothly transition from academic life to professional success."
Guess what? In a recent report, they say that recent college grads are unprepared for work and and getting fired in vast numbers. They need help from Intelligent.com! Employers need their help too! Isn't that a coincidence?
This got randomly picked up last week by the Daily Mail. A couple of days later the Washington Examiner got in the act, citing the Mail for some reason instead of the original report and going on to lay the blame for this sorry state of affairs on American colleges with their "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" and other woke folderol.
As it turns out, though, the Intelligent.com survey tells us nothing. It says that (a) some indistinct number of recent grads haven't been successful; (b) 60% of employers have fired "some" of their recent grads; and (c) there are various reasons for this. There is no comparison with the past. Nor is there anything about these numbers that strikes me as unusual in any way.
I encourage you to click the link if you think I'm slanting this in any way. I'm not.
So in the end this is just another entry in the genre of poll slop that's become so common these days. Companies have found they can get some good free PR by running a cheapie online poll and banging out a press release about it. In this case, it was a self-selecting survey done by Pollfish, a "DIY market research provider."
Who cares, right? In a world of skyrocketing slop, this is probably the least of our worries. But it reminds me of a genuine curiosity: why is it that we have no idea how many people get fired? We have things that circle around it: How afraid are you of being fired? How many layoffs have there been? How many total job separations? What's your current employment status? But no plain household survey that asks if you've been fired in the past year.
That seems odd to me. Even if the feds aren't interested in this, you'd think maybe Gallup or some other private outfit would be. But not that I can find. Why not?
BY THE WAY: After all this, are you curious about how many Gen Z workers are getting fired? I can't tell you, of course, but there are a few related statistics:
Job tenure figures haven't budged. Young workers are staying with their jobs about the same as always.
Among all Gen Z workers, unemployment has spiked slightly compared to previous years and older generations, but that's probably just the usual consequence of a slowing economy: .
Among Gen Z college grads, the unemployment rate in 2022 was 2.7% compared to 4.8% in 2012.
Among all ages, the fear of being let go hasn't changed recently: .
Take this for what it's worth: not much, but not nothing. There's no particular evidence that Gen Z is having any more trouble in the workplace than previous generations.
Mike Braun, the MAGA candidate for governor of Indiana, took an old photo of his Democratic opponent at a small rally and replaced all the signs her supporters were holding. For some reason, he also gave everyone teal jackets, which seems unrelated. But what do I know? Maybe teal is the secret token of Bilderburg overlordship understood only by those in the know.
As it happens, this might violate Indiana law, but I find it hard to take seriously. It's a sign of the times, if you'll pardon the pun. I think every MAGA politico in the country has followed their leader into gibbering idiocy.
We've all been there: You check into Twitter, find some roiling meme in full fury, and say to yourself, "ffs, what now?" You shouldn't be forced to care, but because I'm bored; and it's the start of a long, dull dex night; and I'm just not a nice person, here's the latest:
Another FAKE and STAGED photo from someone who has no clue what she is doing. You have to plug the cord into the phone for it to work! Biden and Harris abandoned Americans in Afghanistan. They sacrificed Americans to an Open Border, and now, they have left Americans to drown in… https://t.co/HzDpJO6XOa
Huh? But after a bit of cogitating, I got it: Trump is claiming that Kamala Harris's earphone isn't plugged into the phone on her desk.
The problem, I think, is that Trump is still stuck in the glorious years of his first presidential campaign, when smartphones had dedicated earphone jacks on the side. But Apple removed them and Android phones followed suit, and now earphones plug into the multiport at the bottom of the phone. In the photo above, you can see a bit of the cord exiting the phone, dropping under the desk, and then reappearing to the right. It looks just like the edge of the desk, and there's really no way to tell them apart, but there's no reason to think the cord isn't there.
Conclusion: Trump is a moron. Nonetheless, thousands of his MAGA fans are now convinced Harris staged a scene she had no reason to stage.
Don't worry, folks, I've got hours more mindless drivel like this on tap before I manage an hour of sleep. Don't say you haven't been warned.
"This is hard to watch," says Noah Rothman at National Review. Give me break. A reporter yelled out a question over a noisy tarmac that President Biden couldn't make out, hearing only the word "strike." So he said a few anodyne words about using collective bargaining to settle the looming port strike and then walked off.
As it happens, the question was about Israeli air strikes in Yemen. Biden misheard but that's all. Yet Rothman insists this is further evidence of mental collapse:
The president’s continued deterioration is more than a curiosity. Those near him knew his absence of mind could affect his performance in the event of a crisis — and a crisis is now upon us.
Hurricane Helene cut a 600-mile swath of devastation across the American southeast.... The stakes are high, and all eyes will be on the administration’s response to this disaster. The nimbleness of that response could weigh heavily on voters’ minds in impacted swing states like Georgia and North Carolina. Perhaps the president and his subordinates will earn high marks. But given Biden’s condition, that is a gamble.
Over-the-top stuff like this probably helped keep me a little too optimistic about Biden's condition over the summer. Can't give in to wackos, after all.
Beyond that, this happens to play into a longstanding pet peeve of mine: the president who rushes back to Washington when disaster hits so he can be photographed in the Situation Room looking stern and directing the response.
In reality, of course, the president has no more influence over disaster response than he does over a trip to rescue astronauts at the space station. It's all handled by FEMA and the Army and other agencies who have plans locked and loaded and ready to go. The president barely even has to give the order.¹
All the real presidential action is long over by the time a disaster actually strikes. The reason George Bush was eviscerated over his handling of Hurricane Katrina wasn't because of a silly dance he happened to be doing the day the levees breached. It was because he had spent the previous four years decimating and privatizing FEMA, eventually hiring the incompetent Michael "heckuva job" Brown to run it. When disaster hit New Orleans, it didn't matter if Bush was on the job or not. FEMA had fallen victim to ideological neglect and it was too late.
The same dynamic is true for every disaster. Either the president has long since put effective response teams in place or he hasn't. He could be on vacation on the far side of the moon and it wouldn't make a difference when disaster finally strikes. We should all grow up and stop pretending otherwise.
¹Although he can withhold the order, as Donald Trump was fond of doing to Democratic states hit by disasters.
As we all know, Elon Musk went nuts a few years ago. Nobody seems to know quite why, but it seems to have been brought on by frustration with California business rules; his dealings with unions; and liberals making fun of him. Since then he's become obsessed with the "woke mind virus," childbirth rates, and.......illegal immigrants voting for Democrats. The latter has produced a tsunami of tweets and retweets like this one:
Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!
Let me explain: if even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast… https://t.co/u3HBdd5Bv0
This particular tweet is a sober-minded graduate thesis compared to most of them, but it lays out the argument in simple terms:
Democrats are deliberately opening the border to an army of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers.
???
They will all vote for Democrats and democracy will be over.
The magic in the middle is that somehow all these illegal immigrants become citizens and start voting in large numbers. How? That's something of a mystery, since even the most liberal immigration legislation requires a waiting period of 10-20 years for citizenship. That might as well be the 30th century. The politician who risks his career over a possible advantage a decade away hasn't been born. Most of them think of the "long term" as next year.
Want more? Virtually all naturalized citizens have been in the country for many years and almost none of them arrived illegally. And anyway, of those who did most aren't even big fans of Democrats. A KFF poll suggests that among immigrants who are "likely undocumented," only 18% say the Democratic Party represents their views. This is not the stuff of landslides.
Musk seems like he's too smart to believe his own nonsense. Does he, really? Or is it all an act? But if it is, what's the endgame? Quicker FAA approval for his rocket launches? Starlink expansion into the hinterlands? Letters patent declaring him Emperor of Mars?
