A Topical Depression

And MTG's mind was at work on Monday:

In the real world, the actual news is (Ars Technica): NOAA drops scientist’s ashes into the eye of Category 5 Milton.

So, <voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">good news, Floridians!</voice>. NOAA can't manipulate or control your weather, but it can add dead scientist ashes to it. In case you needed another reason to evacuate.

Also of note:

  • Toward a new definition of insanity. No, Einstein didn't say "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." But if he were still around, he might offer this headline from Eric Boehm as an example of insanity: Budget Deficit Hit $1.8 Trillion After Huge Increase in Borrowing Costs.

    The only good news contained in the Congressional Budget Office's latest revenue report is that the federal budget deficit did not get significantly worse during the most recent fiscal year. The deficit increased by a mere $139 billion when compared to the previous year.

    But the fact that the deficit increased at all in a year when revenue from federal tax collections climbed by 11 percent—from $4.4 trillion to $4.9 trillion—suggests something about the nature of the fiscal problems facing the federal government. Specifically: that it's a spending problem. The federal government spent $6.75 trillion last year.

    More specifically, it's a borrowing problem. While spending increased by about 10 percent from the year before, the interest payments on the national debt ballooned by 34 percent—from $710 billion to $950 billion. That sharp increase reflects both the size of the national debt, which is now roughly as large as the nation's annual economic output for the first time since World War II, and the rising interest rates that have been a feature of the economy for the past few years.

    Add that to the list of things "your government" can't (or won't) control, MTG.

  • Not literally. Jeffrey Blehar observes (at least) Category 3 stupidity: Nobody Needs Kamala Harris’s Help with Storm Response, and It’s Killing Her. After he wrote for publication on Sunday that, as VP, Kamala had no role to play in hurricane response. (MTG interrupts: "Other than to point the hurricanes at Republicans!")

    Yes, immediately after I finished trying to patiently explain to readers — conservatives, no less! — that it’s hypocritical to hold someone as powerless as Harris responsible for disaster responses, here comes Kamala to demand that people pretend she is in charge or has any meaningful role to play in this whatsoever. Not only that, but for once she actually deigned to lodge the complaint in person, speaking to reporters about it on the tarmac between campaign stops and whining that she tried to call Governor DeSantis and he “refused to speak to me.”

    Ron DeSantis has utterly no time for any of this nonsense — he has a Category 4 hurricane on his hands — and said as much in the most brutally effective way possible yesterday. I hope everyone gets a chance to watch this excerpt from yesterday’s storm-preparation press conference, where the governor bats away, with visible disgust, the attempt by reporters in the room to insert Harris into a hurricane briefing. It’s a masterfully persuasive performance precisely because DeSantis isn’t trying to make a political argument at all — he goes out of his way several times to emphasize that he’s spoken with the president and received full cooperation from the federal government. You just can tell how insultingly inappropriate he considers it to be talking about anything other than weather predictions and evacuation protocols. (His facial expressions convey disdain eloquently.)

    As a bonus, see the WSJ's Notable & Quotable: Biden vs. Harris on Florida’s Hurricane Response. Compare and contrast the quotes. You would not expect doddering Joe to outclass "joyful" Kamala, but there you go.

  • What do hedge funds do? Also at the WSJ, the editorialists point out CNN and Sen. Bob Casey’s Economic Illiteracy.

    You can tell the Pennsylvania Senate race is tightening because CNN on Wednesday rolled out a hit piece on GOP Senate candidate Dave McCormick’s record as former CEO of Bridgewater Associates. The story happens to fit perfectly with Democratic Sen. Bob Casey’s campaign strategy vilifying private business.

    “Senate candidate Dave McCormick led hedge fund that bet against some of Pennsylvania’s most iconic companies,” reads the headline, which Mr. Casey tweeted. The Democratic incumbent and his allies in the press can’t find any wrongdoing during Mr. McCormick’s five years (2017-2022) running Bridgewater, so they’re peddling economic illiteracy disguised as investigative reporting.

    The piece claims that Bridgewater under Mr. McCormick shorted the stocks of roughly four dozen companies headquartered in Pennsylvania, including Hershey Co., U.S. Steel, Comcast and Penn National Gaming. Short-selling is when an investor borrows a security and then sells it with the intent of buying it back at a lower price.

    Well-diversified investors take short positions to hedge risks in their portfolio. As the Biden Securities and Exchange Commission explained last year, “short selling provides the market with important benefits, such as providing market liquidity and pricing efficiency.”

    Short-selling would scare the crap out of me, but there's nothing wrong with it. I don't think CNN is economically that illiterate; they're just trying to exploit the ignorance of Pennsylvania voters.

  • NSF delenda est? At the Free Press, Rupa Subramanya highlights some shameful news: DEI Is Transforming the National Science Foundation.

    If you thought the august National Science Foundation focused only on string theory or the origins of life, you haven’t spent much time in a university lab lately. Thanks to a major shift endorsed by the Biden administration, recent grants have gone to researchers seeking to identify “hegemonic narratives” and their effect on “non-normative forms of gender and sexuality,” plus “systematic racism” in the education of math teachers and “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.”

    A new report from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation made available to The Free Press says that DEI considerations now profoundly shape NSF grant decisions.

    “In recent years, we have seen a sharp increase in actual scientists—that is, people with degrees in the hard sciences from major universities who regularly receive money to conduct actual scientific research—using their credentials to parrot the talking points of the woke neo-Marxist left,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the ranking minority member of the Senate committee, said in the report.

    The report, titled “DEI: Division. Extremism. Ideology,” analyzed all National Science Foundation grants from 2021 through April 2024. More than 10 percent of those grants, totaling over $2 billion, prioritized attributes of the grant proposals other than their scientific quality, according to the report.

    Gee, maybe fund some Alzheimer's research instead? Or work on weather manipulation/control! If you're going to be accused of it anyway, why not?