Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

18 thoughts on “Up Ship Creek”

    1. Back up three+ months, and we weren’t out of ideas, we were just on a completely different road, with different rules and destination. The more-or-less free trade + soft diplomacy approach we’d been following under Dem and Rep leadership for decades helped lead to lower prices for consumers, improvements in world health outcomes and overall economic satisfaction, with safety nets to help reduce the worst of the growing income inequality in the US. Biden had some re-industrialization ideas, got some legislation passed, was growing important parts of the economy and workforce while taming self-inflicted inflation. But now we’ve totally torn up that map and the roads that were on it, and have a map straight into authoritarian rule. Trump++ have plenty of ideas to support this notion, and are implementing them 1, 2, 3 as fast as they can, both here and abroad. No lack of ideas here, just dominated by hateful, hurtful ones that cement Trump’s growing power at a frightening rate. I’ve avoided protests all my life, from my youth during Vietnam until now, but I’ll be heading out for my second one tomorrow.

      Lol, on a side note, I had a JH visitor at my porch door this morning, and asked him how he reconciles his churchy beliefs with politics… he said he doesn’t because Jesus says yada yada, and I cut him off and asked, sure but you vote don’t you? and no, he said, absolutely not, because Jesus says yada yada, and I said well I hope you appreciate your freedom to come visit my porch door to talk about your religious beliefs today, because that freedom is far from guaranteed especially under this administration that you didn’t care enough to vote against, and even now anyone with a Muslim point of view has to be damn careful what they say in public if they want to keep any of their freedoms. He walked rather quickly back to his car after that.

      Like I said, they have plenty of ideas, they’re just bad ones.

      1. btfl,
        I don’t agree with your logic; hypothetically if I abstain because I don’t like either candidate, that has no effect on the result. It only has an effect in your eyes because you think I should have voted the same as you.

        1. I should probably just leave this alone but with a two-party system like we have in the US, if you do not vote or vote for a third party, it is a vote or the winner of the election. So if you did not vote in the last presidential election, you are a Trump voter because you did not care who won the election. You need to live with your choice not to vote. I am getting really tired of listening to all the nonvoter excuses, you voted for Trump.

        2. Not voting is also voting. Trump winning a plurality is as much the non-voter’s fault as it is MAGAs. It is literally a requirement of being a good citizen to understand current events and vote in elections.

          You can say not my fault all you want but if you had voted because you read Heisenberg and knew better, we wouldn’t be here.

          Learn from it and don’t make the same mistake again, if you ever get the opportunity.

    2. We have been increasingly out of ideas for decades, at least. One of our biggest problems is that we are so lazy we even started hiring “outsiders” to create our ideas for us. Fifty percent of the graduate school professionals have been coming from overseas for over forty years. I know because I taught many of them. Physicians, researchers, engineers, professors, the list goes on. I subscribed to the Chronicle of Higher Education for decades when I was teaching. They published this information annually. I even know what schools were involved, how much they paid their faculty, where the students were from, etc. I taught at a regional state school in the Midwest. Half of the MBA students at my former school are enrolled in our two of our MBA programs housed in China. In more than 50 years in academics I taught hundreds of students from China, Russia, many European countries, many South American countries, India and SE Asia. I have served as a reviewer of hundreds of articles and case studies written by profs from many of these countries. Recently, more than half of this work has been written by international authors, allowing me to see that folks from other countries know, how they teach, what they teach, and so forth. These folks are getting much better at what they are doing, and quickly. Many folks who like to whistle past the graveyard on this topic, will say but what I’ve seen is the creme of their crop. Perhaps, but so what because their creme is as good or better than ours. Who’s running the top of Tech? A large proportion are foreign-born, trained in the US. We are no longer self-sufficient, nor can we ever be again, regardless of what MAGA thinks. We are, by some measures, the richest country in the world, mostly because we have been the most effective globalists. That will all be ending soon under our rising regime.

  2. The one upside to it is that all Americans get to feel the pain of needing our own domestic shipbuilding now, rather than just Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Hawaii who’ve been punished for decades under the Jones Act and had to carry the burden all by themselves.

  3. Part of the problem here is what accomplishable through EO’s. Because if a solution can’t be implemented through EO I doubt trump wants anything to do with it. It’s. It that congress couldn’t or wouldn’t craft legislation at trump’s direction. They most certainly would. It’s that trump absolutely doesn’t want to share credit for anything, or have the public be reminded of the existence of any other branch of government.

  5. Many American ships are flagged Marshall Islands. Reagan’s luxury tax was aimed at Yachts but shipbuilders survived by building anything that’s on the drawing board. That work went overseas, the rest followed.
    We are not undoing anything we are starting from scratch, which is a bit absurd, especially when the administration is making the United States uninvestable. 80-year-old man with 100 year plan.

  8. Having been involved with ships and shipping I don’t see this being anything but another inflationary move since it is tied to only Chinese built ships, it would be disastrous if applied to all non-US ships. However, it will be a boon to those owning Japanese, Korean and European ship built ships. Chinese ships do not just ship goods from China and they will only be taxed for entering US ports. Their containers can be moved to non Chinese ships at another port and sent on to the US. But this will increase the shipping costs and ship day rates as a major competitor has been removed from the bidding. All this means another expense for the average US consumer. But if you have 10 million or more in the bank it is not a big deal.

Monthly Letters

Monthly Letter

Dope

Monthly Letter

The Great Depression

Monthly Letter

The Devil’s Greatest Trick

Order Now

NEWSROOM crewneck & prints