Today, amid the rubble of his ill-advised peace plan, Trump was blabbering about the price of gas going down once things have settled a bit. Is he kidding? Gas prices are going nowhere but up for the foreseeable future. All the fools think gas prices went up because there was a shortage caused by the closing of the Hormuz Strait. Bullshit! There has never been a shortage and there isn’t one now. Not yet. The supply process moves so slowly that the closing of Hormuz hasn’t been felt yet in actual shortage terms. What we are seeing in rising gas prices is simply the greed of the oil producers . With the world press screaming “SHORTAGE!!!!!”, they simply nodded their heads, smiled, and shoved up the prices. Wait until you see what happens next, when the shortage actually starts, and before the reopening of Hormuz refills the tanks. That date in the best of all possible worlds will be at least three months down the line, but I have good money that says it will be at least six.
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Today, Trump was asked one of the key questions about the deal that is not a deal.
“There is nothing enforceable in the deal, is there?” he was asked in reference to Iran’s misile capability. His answer, “Does it have to be?” YES, GODDAMN IT! That’s what the damn war was about. He babbled something about everything doesn’t have to be written down. Sure, that’s the way he likes his deals, so he can screw them up any way it suits him. Trumpian logic dictates his needs, not the deal’s needs. As if this blundering idiot has any idea of the requirements of logical thinking.
There is no more important sentence in the whole deal than the one that should say, Iran allows inspectors into their most hidden areas to check that no nuclear enrichment is going on. Why else did we fight this war? Why did we cause the Strait of Hormuz to be shut down and give license to ruthless petroleum producers to raise gas prices to criminal numbers?
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The rise of AI has led to a sweeping panic over its potential as a job killer. Relax! Sure, AI is going to lead to the replacement of a few jobs, the kind of jobs that require a skill level way below normal technical hiring requirements, but that is only a small sample in the huge job market that exists out there. The picture painted by a look at our usually reliable job market history is quite different. It shows us a job picture that is rife with industrial expansion on the heels of scientific invention. Look what has happened in the past following the invention or development of some primary tool. How about the steam engine, the spinning wheel, the telephone, the typewriter for a starter. Almost any kind of farm machinery was predicted to cause job loss but instead just expanded acreage under cultivation. The steam engine was predicted to end the horse business, putting drivers and handlers out of business, and it did, but it created hundreds of thousands of new jobs on railroads, in factories and in the trucking business. It will be the same with AI. Much of hhe new work is already happening in the field of computing, and it is already such an expansive invention. that the increase in employment will have multiplied many times by the end of the decade.
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As I write this, July 4th is right around the corner. By the time you read this, it will probably be past, and while Trump may be celebrating his reign as emperor, the rest of us will be looking forward to the mid-terms and hopefully a change in the balance of power.
The big question is if the Dems win, will Trump be immediately impeached? I hope not. Sure, I’d love to see him on the garbage heap or even actually in jail. He has earned both, but that would give the GOP a chance to recoup for the ’28 elections. Better Trump gets to play out his term with no power, under the thumb of a strongly Democratic congress. That will keep the other Republicans under a Democratic thumb and weaken them for the ’28 election.
The GOP may be giving up as a party under Trump, but the Democrats aren’t exhibiting enough strength that they will be able to sit back and relax when it comes time to compete. I see no strong front runner in the Democratic ranks. It’s a time when we should already be fighting over which of 5 or 6 candidates are best suited for the presidential run, and I only see a couple of rather soft-hearted inquiries. That’s just not good enough.
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Lindsey Graham made some serious sense today in his on-camera discussions of Iran, Israel, Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia, and a host of other Middle East problems. The big question is can he get his golf buddy in the White House to listen to him long enough to get anything done. The surprise prediction: We will take Hormuz from the Iranians if they continue to open and close it. The current situation is no way to run a planet. Although he didn’t say it, Lindsey intimated that the best way to deal with Hezbollah is to eliminate it and that Trump would consider such a move if that terrorist organization didn’t back off in Lebanon and Iran didn’t get functional in how it ran Hormuz.
I’ve always thought Lindsey was a lot smarter than he appeared, but the intelligence he was hiding was because he had an over extended sense of survival. Luckily, he doesn’t mind losing at golf.
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One of the big questions that is begging to be answered this election is: What’s more important in a candidate, platform or personal morality? In the pre-Trump era, it was always personal morality. Yes, they are politicians, so platform is foremost in consideration. but if they attain office, they will be making decisions guided by their sense of personal morality or lack of it, and all you have to do is look at Trump and his coterie of loyal scum to see how that works.
To answer this question, we should all take a good long look at Maine, where the race for the Senate gives us the ideal examples of the twisted version of what we are discussing. Susan Collins, a Republican with moral standards, is running against Graham Platner, a Democrat who appears to have abandoned his moral principles and now wants us to overlook that small aspect of his character. Collins, who because she is a Republican, has retained many of her parties’ criminal concepts, is still running as the good guy, while Platner, who has managed to generate a history of sexual violation in his relations with women, cannot seem to disguise it with his functional political platform. Voters are faced with an honest woman who believes in the wrong stuff and a degenerate who understands the needs of his voters but can’t overcome the fact that he is such a sleazeball.
The results so far indicate that the sleazeball is going to win, but Maine is a small state where every vote counts. so it behooves us not to get too far ahead of ourselves.
There was a time when Platner’s platform wouldn’t have been strong enough Io overcome his lack of morality. It would be kind of nice if we haven’t wandered too far from that time.