(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)
Guess what? More people with jobs in this country is bad, very bad, very, very, verrrrrrrrry bad. From Politico:
The U.S. economy added 339,000 jobs in May, blowing through Wall Street’s expectations that employment growth would slow as higher borrowing costs and tighter credit conditions take hold.“The labor market and the economy it supports will just not go gently into that good night, despite policy efforts to cool both,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, after the Labor Department released the report.
Jesus H. Christ on quantitative easing, is it supposed to go gently? Are we supposed to be happy when it does? Sometimes, I think it would be a good idea if every economic analyst would take a few plays off.
The labor market’s continued strength gives Biden a much-needed boost as he enters the 2024 presidential campaign against a backdrop of lingering pessimism and economic uncertainty. Even with unemployment near record lows, fears of a recession — which swelled after three regional banks collapsed amid surging interest rates — have dogged the White House’s attempts to spotlight the economy’s underlying strength.
This seems like an example of what Paul Krugman was talking about back in April in The New York Times.
Furthermore, it turns out that there are large benefits to full employment beyond the fact that people have jobs. Full employment also turns out to be a powerful force for equality, on multiple dimensions. The gap between Black and white unemployment is now a fifth of what it was when Ronald Reagan proclaimed “morning in America.” A tight labor market has led to big gains for low-wage workers, sharply reducing overall wage inequality. The big question now is whether the good news on jobs is somehow a mirage, based on an unsustainably hot labor market that will have to cool off drastically to contain inflation.
But maybe the important point is that almost every measure of inflationary pressure I’m aware of has improved substantially over the past year, with no increase in the unemployment rate. And there’s no hint at all of the much-feared self-reinforcing inflationary spiral, in which rising expectations of future inflation feed into current inflation. In fact, most measures of expected inflation have declined over the past year.
So there’s good reason to believe that we can sustain the incredibly good job market we have right now, even while getting inflation under control. And it will be a real tragedy if exaggerated fear of inflation causes the Federal Reserve to push interest rates too high for too long, leading to a gratuitous recession that throws away many of the gains we’ve made.
Subsequent job reports, including the one released on Friday, seem to back up Krugman's analysis and, anyway, I choose to be happy that more of my fellow citizens are picking up a check and fck the begrudgers.
The government of the state of Texas is being clever dicks — emphasis on the latter — in its assault on the voting rights of our fellow citizens in Harris County, in which lies the city of Houston, and which is a hugely Democratic area. From the Washington Post:
The measure gives the secretary of state under certain conditions the power to run elections in Harris County, home to Houston and 4.8 million residents. It follows a bill approved days earlier that shifts the oversight of elections from its appointed elections administrator to the county clerk and county assessor.
Harris County officials at a news conference last week said they would bring a lawsuit challenging the measures as soon as Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signs them into law. “These bills are not about election reform,” said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county’s chief executive. “They’re not about improving voters’ experience. They are entirely about suppressing voters’ voices. The reasoning behind these bills is nothing but a cynical charade.”
However, there is a provision in the Texas constitution that forbids the legislature from passing laws aimed at specific jurisdictions. Consequently, the words "Harris County" appear nowhere in these new measures. However...
The legislation does not mention Harris County by name. Instead, one bill is written to apply to counties of more than 3.5 million and the other to counties of more than 4 million. Harris County is the only county that meets those thresholds.
Oho! What fun. I'll bet some ambitious young conservative lamprey got a raise off that one.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Dead Man's Bone" (Gypsy Elise): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1956, are some Swiss dairy farmers who got sick of bringing their milk down 2600 feet to market. So they rigged up what appears to have been the prototype for the Keystone XL pipeline to transport the milk. This seems to have caused some controversy among the cows. History is so cool.
I have to confess that HBO's White House Plumbers came to an unsatisfactory conclusion. It seemed rushed and incomplete, and its turn into being the Hunt family drama was a surpassing bummer. (Also, and I say this of a lifelong Warren Commission skeptic, the nudge-nudge wink-wink about Howard Hunt and the Kennedy assassination was throughout a cheap and gaudy dive for attention.) Nevertheless, the acting remained more than fine, and I neglected to mention how good Lena Headey is as Dorothy Hunt, whose key role in the early days of the cover-up, and whose background as a CIA officer herself, was probably unknown to a lot of people who tuned in.
The children of Republicanland are having a tantrum that is audible on Mercury, and it may, horror of horrors, prevent us from having 2395 candidate debates or whatever the GOP planned to inflict on our innocent land. From Axios:
Debates can make or break a presidential candidacy. And who hosts those debates can have a significant impact on which contenders chose to participate, and how they perform. Trump's campaign believes his opponents need the primary debates more than he does because they're behind him in polls. And Trump — feeling slighted by Fox News' coverage of DeSantis, has indicated that he's wary of the network hosting debates, two sources told Axios. DeSantis, running second in GOP polling, has been pushing back against the Republican National Committee sanctioning a debate with CNN or NBC News, which are both salivating over the chance to host a 2024 primary debate, sources told Axios.
Folks, you're network executives. Don't salivate. Have some pride. Jesus.
But DeSantis in particular has been wary of places like CNN and NBC even as he has said he is eager for the debates. While not naming the networks, DeSantis told Glenn Beck last week that “corporate media…shouldn’t be involved in our process because they’re hostile to us as Republicans. Asked if DeSantis would commit to showing up to the first debate in August with Fox News, a DeSantis spokesperson declined to comment.
Seriously, tell them to pound sand. Let them debate on Newsmax.
Discovery Corner: A while back, we talked about the discovery of an ancient bar. Now, in Armenia, they've found a 3000-year old bakery. Complete with 3,000-year-old flour.
“We knew it was something organic and collected about four to five sacks worth of the material,” Krzysztof Jakubiak, an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw who led the excavation, tells Live Science’s Jennifer Nalewicki. The team assumed, at first, the material was simply ash. After all, charred remnants of the building’s reed roof and wooden beams indicated it had met its end in a fire.But upon closer examination, the substance was “decoded and recognized as remains of wheat flour,” says Jakubiak to Artnet’s Vittoria Benzine. “The samples were examined by an archaeobotanist expert, who confirmed this preliminary supposition.” These findings solved both of the team’s mysteries at once. The powder wasn’t ash, but wheat flour. They had unearthed an ancient bakery.
And not just a mom-and-pop, but an Urarat manufacturing hub.
After conducting a chemical analysis, the team determined that the substance was wheat flour used to bake bread. They estimated that, at one time, approximately 3.5 tons (3.2 metric tons) of flour would have been stored inside the 82-by-82-foot (25 by 25 meters) building, which contained two rows of 18 wood columns supporting a reed roof with wood beams. Researchers estimate that the bakery was operational between the 11th and ninth centuries B.C. during the early Iron Age, according to Science in Poland.
That's a lot of loaves. The Uraru weren't too worried about their carbs, I guess. Hey, look what we found!
Hey, Good News Network, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
The paleontologists who discovered the beast completed a CT scan on the partially-completed skull and revealed these keratin bristles, described as giving the animal the appearance of having a “brush cut.” The animal is called Platytholus clemensi, and is a type of pachycephalosaur discovered in 2011 in Montana’s Hell Creek Formation. It was a plant-eating dinosaur that grew up to 15 feet long and walked on two legs. Dinosaur skulls sport an amazing variety of bony ornaments, ranging from the horns of Triceratops and the mohawk-like crests of hadrosaurs to the bumps and knobs covering the head of Tyrannosaurus rex. There is a theory that pachycephalosaurs bashed heads in courtship rituals much like some mammals do today. But despite a gash being discovered on the skull which had healed up, the researchers say there is no real evidence to support this, and the discovery of bristles is currently considered more like an elaborate headdress.
Nice to know that the dino head was designed for style and not for combat. Also that the mighty T. Rex was a knobby-headed goober makes it a little bit less fearsome and closer to more proof that they lived then to make us happy now.
I'll be back on Monday as we come into the annual Supreme Court horror show of ring-and-run decisions. Things already appear ominous. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line. Wear the damn mask. Get the damn shots, especially the damn boosters. And spare a moment for the people of Ukraine, the people in the earthquake zone in Turkey and Syria, the people in Alberta and now Nova Scotia, who are faced with wildfires, and, of course, our LGBTQ+ fellow citizens who demonstrate their bravery every morning in which they go out into the world.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
