The women in my family more or less appreciated The Three Stooges and despised Jerry Lewis. They said Lewis was making fun of toddlers and mentally deficient children and the Stooges came across as stupid adults behaving like children – and getting punished.

His delivery reminded me of Chaz, a long ago friend of mine who had no discernible sense of humor. Which for everyone else was a great source of humor.

Now if uh, 6 turned out to be 9
Oh I don’t mind, I don’t mind

–Jimi Hendrix, “If 6 Was 9”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQCM2vHIZ3o
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I thought this song was stupid back in the day, but it has grown on me.

Sing it, Jimi!

It’s worse than I thought. Here’s Jared Bernstein’s response to a question about the deficit and bonds:

Well, um… the… uh… so the… I mean… again, some of this stuff gets… some of the language that the MM… some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money and it definitely lends that money. Which is why, uh… uh… the government definitely prints money and it lends that money by uh… by selling bonds. Is that what they do? They… they… um… they… yeah… they… they… um… they sell bonds. Yeah. They sell bonds, right? Since they sell bonds and people buy the bonds and lend them the money. Yeah. So, a lot of times, a lot of times, at least to my ear with MMT, the language and the concepts can be kind of unnecessarily confusing, but there is no question that the government prints money and then it uses that money to um… uh… eh… uh… so… um… yeah… I… I… I guess I’m just… I don’t… I can’t really ta- I don’t… I don’t get it. I don’t know what they’re talking about, like… cuz… it’s like, the government clearly prints money. It does it all the time, and it clearly borrows. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this in.. this conversation. I don’t think there’s anything confusing there.”

At least he and Biden will be able to communicate with each other.

Recently some part-of-a-city in Louisiana (or was it Mississippi?) after several years of court battles, finally won the right to secede from the larger city they were a part of, and form their own, new city.

Don’t know if the legal methods they used are applicable to other states, but I would venture to guess that the majority of counties in Illinois would love to free itself from the shit hole that is Chicago.
Ditto for many places in NY State, Washington and Oregon, Maryland, etc.

Secession from a state or a state seceding from the nation does not have to be violent. The Civil War became violent because the hot heads in South Carolina decided to bomb a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, Ft. Sumter, basically declaring war on the USA.
It is interesting to speculate how things would have unfolded if the Confederacy had not started the war.

Don’t trust your heart to Dr. AI.

OT READY FOR PRIME TIME: Study: AI is unreliable in assessing heart risk in emergencies. Though after Helen’s heart attack, the ER EKG’s expert system flagged her as “likely recent MI” and the cardiologists looked at her, a fit, slender young woman, and said “naaah.” It was a couple of more months before she was diagnosed.

https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2024/05/02/artificial-intelligence-emergency-room/3771714655609/

HT Glen Reynolds at https://instapundit.com/

“Watts up with that” has an excellent article on the looming electrical power shortage. The US has managed to hold its consumption flat since 2007, but that’s no longer going to be sufficient, because of all the Net Zero requirements to transition from fossil fuels to electric vehicles and appliances.

So if we are going to increase demands for electrical power, where does that power come from? From what I can tell, it was supposed to come from solar and wind, which we were assured could handle the burden and economically, but our authorities gamed the studies to reach that answer. Quelle surprise!

Now we are discovering that mustard won’t be cut. Even Elon Musk has been caught pants-down and Tesla sales are stagnating because of the charging problems.

All that’s bad enough, but AI is going to kill any further wishful Net Zero thinking:
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But the electricity needed for the new artificial intelligence (AI) revolution will be greater than that needed for EVs, electric appliances, and green hydrogen combined. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and dozens of other firms are building massive new multi-acre data centers. In addition to new facilities, servers in the nation’s 2,700 data centers are being upgraded with new high-performance processing cards, boosting data center power consumption by six to ten times. Today, data centers use about 4% of US electricity, but the AI revolution is expected to boost that demand to more than 20% of US electricity consumption within the next ten years.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/05/02/the-looming-electrical-power-shortage/
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The AI stakes are Mt. Everest high. AI’s power demands are non-negotiable.

Unless our elites imagine they can starve and freeze half the world’s population in favor of their Net Zero fantasies, that dream is over until we have the tech that can make solar and wind work. Which frankly I doubt, for the next few decades anyway.

I’ll skip the adjectival rigmarole concerning the old Irish priest with the Barry Fitzgerald brogue. Rework to suit.

Skeletally:

Priest visiting the classroom: “Now children, we are going to discuss “faith”. Can any of you be telling me what it is that “faith” is?”

Tommy, brightly: “I can Fadda!”

Priest: “That’s a good lad. Tell the class what “faith” is, Tommy.”

Tommy, “Sure, Fadda. Easy! ” To class: ” ‘Faith’, means believing in what you know aint true!”

Like I said, stale.