So: Take a look

[degringolade]

Dentist yesterday.  Since I am tightwadding up and letting a student work me up as one of his third year projects, I get to take it slow and easy and cheap.  Not as bad as I thought that it would be (ten plus years of benign neglect) but will still be less than fun.  Lots of x-rays yesterday, next thursday is the poking and the prodding and then the joy of joys, the cleaning.

After which, I headed over to the Blues fest second day, spent more time at the big stage listening to blues-tinted rock and roll.  Good stuff. 

1. Karl Denson's Tiny Universe was Awesome
   
2. Larkin Poe is going to be effing huge in a couple of years, best girl band I have ever seen.
   
3. California Honeydrops are technically solid but veryyyyyy California self-absorbed.
   
4. Luscious Spiller was good, not outstanding but well worth watching
   
5. Birch Pereria and the Gin Joints were on the lower edge of solid, but still good.
   
6. Harpdog Brown need to stay home
   

Today's Screed

I have been thinking about the Trumpy Tantrum Tariffs the past couple of days.  As I mull things over in my head, I am coming to the conclusion that what he is doing its the right thing for all the wrong reasons.

The Asshat-in-Chief is trying to get the trade imbalance straightened out.  We export funny money and import crap from China is the current trade relationship.  This is based on American companies fucking over their workers, offshoring the jobs, paying management huge, unearned bonuses, and jacking up stock price for becoming a hollowed out shell company that doesn't actually build anything.

So, when I wandered over to Gail Twerberg's excellent site "Our Finite World", I came across a couple of charts and a discussion that I found enlightening.  This chart specifically caught my attention:

Our energy use in actual productive capacity is a quarter of China's!!  The main whiner's about the tariffs have been the soybean farmers because after all, the mills in Manchester needed American cotton as a feedstock.  I am of the opinion that American agriculture, with it's emphasis on large quasi-corporate and corporate farms serve as the modern equivalent of ante-bellum plantations can suck it and figure out how to provide for us in an environmentally sustainable and cost effective manner.

Nope, read Gail's article and figure out for yourself your own opinion.  But cutting ourselves off from China's current system and the future problems it presents might be the best idea we could have.  We need to figure out how to restart doing shit for ourselves