Mixed Signals from the Yield Curve. 

The Treasury yield curve (redux)

I’ve written before about why the Treasury yield curve matters. It shifts every day as rates move, and when it inverts, meaning longer-term yields fall below short-term yields, a recession usually follows.

Most analysts watch the spread between the 2-year and 10-year Treasury. That spread has been narrowing, which raises the possibility that the 10-year could soon yield less than the 2-year. That kind of inversion has historically preceded U.S. recessions.

But there’s another spread with an even better track record: the gap between the 3-month Treasury bill and the 10-year. Between 1969 and 2020, every time that segment of the curve inverted, a recession followed. That’s eight straight recessions without a single false positive.

So here’s the interesting part. While some are sounding the alarm over the shrinking 2-year/10-year spread, the 3-month/10-year spread has been widening. In other words, the most reliable recession predictor on the curve is currently saying “no recession.”

I asked Claude to chart both spreads, and the picture is clear: they’ve moved in opposite directions over the past year.

The 10-year/3-month spread has steepened sharply. A year ago it was essentially flat at 0.05 percentage points. On September 28 it reached 0.96, the steepest level of the past year.

The 10-year/2-year spread has done the opposite, flattening to 0.37 as of September 29. When the two spreads diverge like this, it means the 2-year yield has risen relative to the 3-month bill. That usually signals the market has scaled back how many near-term Fed rate cuts it expects, even as long-term yields have held up. Importantly, neither spread has turned negative at any point during the period.

The monthly figures come from the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database (series T10Y2YM and T10Y3MM). The last point on each chart is a single day’s reading rather than a monthly average, so it’s a bit noisier than the rest of the line.

Which predictor will prove right? We’ll have to wait and see.

Musing on Baseball’s Playoffs and the NIL Legislation, too.

My love for baseball is well known. I am one of those few people who find the NFL and the NBA boring. I will try to watch an NFL game, but on Sundays I’d rather be outdoors on a beautiful day. On Sunday and Monday nights, I might watch the first half but invariably find myself working a jigsaw puzzle. I don’t even bother trying to watch the NBA. I don’t care for college basketball either, but I do like college baseball. As to college football, I am almost like Wade, who said he is “out.” But I still love my Dawgs and my Buckeyes and hope for a Tennessee win – so long as they are not playing Georgia or Ohio State. I still go to three Georgia games a year, but not to Columbus to see Ohio State like we used to. The travel and logistics have become too much. I only go to Neyland Stadium if the Vols are playing Georgia, and the next time they meet there (in 2029), I might be dead. But even going to Athens for a game is getting more and more difficult. It is now a year-to-year thing.

NIL and the money grab by the SEC and Big “10” (math not apparently it’s strong suit), in expanding their conferences have upended college sports and turned some of us off. Now athletes often show up at four different schools in search of bigger dollars or more playing time. The Senate just passed, by a vote of 77–22, a law to deal with this, and like all laws, it will probably make things worse. It now will to go to the House. The president will sign it. Basically, it limits an athlete to only one transfer, which limits their ability to earn income in what are the highest-earning years of their lives. Colleges will now be able to pay their players $49 million, up from the current $21.5 million – even though many already pay $40 million. Players will be subject to the NCAA’s five-year eligibility rule, with the clock starting the academic year after they turn 19 or when they first enroll full-time in college, whichever comes first. It caps agents’ fees at 5% of players’ earnings and bars college football coaches from bolting for another job in the middle of the season (the Lane Kiffin amendment). Scholarships would be guaranteed for ten years after eligibility ends to allow athletes to complete their degrees. (Which of the colleges would provide the guarantee? Likely the last one.) Schools generating $80 million or more in revenue must keep at least the same number of roster spots and grants-in-aid for non-revenue sports as they did in 2024–25. Conferences would also be capped at 20 members. In addition, any school moving between the four power conferences (the ACC, Big 12, Big “10”, and SEC, or any other conference with $700 million or more in annual revenue) would have to be independent for three years before joining a new power conference one – a sort of athletic witness protection program. The pushback from some senators included the limit on the number of transfers and the limit on the player compensation pool. The bill is said to face an uncertain fate in the House.

Personally, I would have liked to see the number of schools in the conferences reduced and regional rivalries renewed – Georgia/Tennessee, for example. I would also have liked two additional provisions: first, mandating that the power conferences share revenue with the smaller FCS conferences, and second, requiring that if an FCS player transfers to an FBS school, the FBS school must compensate the FCS school. In the end, like Wade, I’m mostly opting out of college football. Exhibit A: the weekend headlined by Georgia–Oklahoma, LSU–Texas A&M, USC–Oregon, Texas–Tennessee, and Ole Miss–Florida – an all-you-can-eat buffet for a college football fan. I watched exactly one of those games, Georgia–Oklahoma. In my defense, I was there in person, with my son, my grandson, and my great-grandson. Four generations, one row of seats, and two knees of varying reliability.

As fate would have it, I found myself on the receiving end of some hero worship. The fellow in front of me had graduated from Georgia in 2006. He spotted my 2018 Rose Bowl T-shirt – the one commemorating Georgia’s overtime thriller over Oklahoma – and asked whether I’d been at that game. I said yes. Then he asked when I graduated. I told him to go ahead and guess, and not to worry about insulting me. He said, “1988.” My son chuckled and said, “Only off by 22 years.” (I have chosen to hear that as “You look fantastic” rather than “You are still alive!”) He said, “What! What’s your name?” I told him, “Harold Black.” A few minutes later – you could almost hear the wheels turning – he turned back around: “Not Harold Alonza Black?” I said yes. He said he couldn’t believe it and announced to his friends, “They named a dormitory after him!” From then on, the praise never stopped. He was from Athens and said he had learned about me in elementary school – which is a remarkable thing to hear while you’re still around to enjoy it. He told his wife and friends that without me he couldn’t have gone to Georgia. He kept saying he couldn’t believe it was me, shaking my hand, hugging me, and thanking me over and over. It was almost embarrassing. But at least my great-grandson was impressed.

Back to baseball. What about baseball? Isn’t it like college football, where the richest teams simply buy the best free agents? I used to like the Dodgers. No more – they’ve become the Yankees with better weather. But baseball can still produce a Tampa Bay winning a division that includes the deep-pocketed Yankees and Red Sox. It can have a Milwaukee winning the division over the big-market Chicago Cubs. It can have the big-payroll Mets being perfectly, expensively awful. And how does a team that had Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani for six years fail to make the playoffs? That takes a special kind of talent. Still, if they stay healthy, the Dodgers should win it all. I don’t have to like it. I want the Braves to win.

Sadly, the season is winding down, and only the playoffs remain. I’m a Braves fan, so my fingers are crossed – anything can happen in October and usually does. They’re playing the Phillies and took game one, so by the numbers they’re now heavy favorites to win that series, though the Braves have humbled better mathematicians than me. One thing I don’t like about the playoffs is that teams from the same division can be paired up (the Yankees are playing the Red Sox, too). They’ve already seen each other thirteen times this season – at that point it’s not a playoff series, it’s a family reunion nobody wanted. I wish MLB would change this. I also don’t like a team with a worse record getting home-field advantage just for winning its division – like the 81–81 Astros, who are being rewarded for perfect mediocrity. I think I’ll pass that along to my youngest granddaughter, who works at Major League Baseball in New York. I’m sure the commissioner will be calling any day now. So go, Braves! I’ll miss you, and I’ll circle the date when pitchers and catchers report for spring training. Until then, there are always more books to read and more jigsaw puzzles to ponder.

The president’s tariffs have cost the average American household about $2,000. His war with Iran has pushed gasoline and diesel prices to record highs. Together, these will likely cost the republicans the House and possibly the Senate. It’s no surprise that the republicans are panicking and feel they must do something — anything. But few are willing to confront the president over the policies that created the problems in the first place. So they need someone else to blame. When it comes to fuel prices, the obvious target is the big refiners.

And so, in a strange reversal of roles, it is republicans who are eager to show voters they feel their pain, calling for a ban on diesel exports and pinning the blame on the market and not on the president, where it belongs. The president considered an export ban himself and, at last check, decided against it. Nevertheless, the idea is widely accepted by republicans including our own representative, Tim Burchett who actually introduced two bills on the matter. 

Tim (we’re on a first-name basis) and I go way back. On January 11, 2022, on the House floor he gave me recognition when the University of Georgia announced the naming of its new freshman dormitory in my honor – along with two others.    https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-168/issue-7/house-section/article/H19-1

But the congressman and I differ on some issues including this one. When he went after the oil companies, he sounded more like a liberal democrat rather than a Reagan republican accusing the major refiners of making record profits by shipping American diesel to European buyers instead of prioritizing fuel for Americans. “Price gouging by greedy oil companies is causing hardworking Americans to struggle to fill their tanks,” he said. “President Trump has already called on the Department of Justice to open an investigation into this abuse.” Sure sounds like a liberal to me. I am somewhat surprised that no one has called for a freeze on diesel prices. Now that would really make Bernie proud!

The first of Burchett’s bills would impose an outright, temporary ban on diesel exports through January 2027. The second would create an automatic trigger: if the national average price reaches $5 a gallon, overseas diesel sales would stop, and the restriction would remain until prices stay at or below $4.50 a gallon for 30 consecutive days. 

The question is whether either bill would actually lower the price of diesel. Industry experts and economists say no. In fact, the opposite could happen. Before I get to their arguments, if the congressman had asked me — and he obviously didn’t — I would have told him we already have real-world evidence of what an export ban does. Look at Russia, which has banned diesel exports due to its war with Ukraine. Its refineries cut output, and prices went up! If that happens in a tightly controlled economy like Russia’s, why do republicans think that the outcome would be different here, with output rising and prices falling? 

Much of our diesel comes from the Gulf of Mexico, is refined on the Gulf Coast and moved to other states by pipeline. States without pipeline connections on the East and West Coasts import diesel instead, because the Jones Act makes shipping it from the Gulf expensive more expensive than importing it. The president has at least temporarily suspended the Jones Act. In the North, fuel is imported from Canada.

The United States is the world’s largest producer of crude oil and exports about 4 million barrels a day. Even so, the country still imports more crude than it exports, both to meet demand and to match refinery specifications that call for “heavy” crude. About 60% of the crude processed in US refineries comes from domestic production, with the remaining 40% coming from imports. Canada supplies over 60% of crude oil imports approximately 4 to 4.7 million barrels per day via pipelines from Alberta and Western Canada. Mexico ranks second at roughly 8-10% of imports, followed by Saudi Arabia at about 7%.

I haven’t read Tim’s bills, but I wonder whether if he also calls for more imports to lower prices, which would run counter to the president’s mercantilist policies? After all, prices fall only when demand drops or supply grows. And the problem isn’t a shortage of diesel. Individual stations may run out now and then, just as they sometimes run out of a grade of gasoline, but no shortage is driving up the price of diesel fuel in the US. Diesel is expensive worldwide, largely because of Iran and, to a lesser extent, Russia. And Russia has shown that an export ban can reduce refinery output and raise prices rather than lower them.

Then there are the regions that import their diesel. We don’t have the supply chains to deliver fuel to them in volume, so they would still depend on imports, which the president’s whimsical tariff policies could make more expensive. At best, diesel prices might fall temporarily in states served by Gulf Coast pipelines, because refiners don’t have the storage to hold fuel they can no longer export. After that, expect output to drop and prices to rise.

A ban could also raise the price of the things we import. Take Mexico. It is the largest buyer of U.S. diesel, and it is also our largest supplier of agricultural produce. If the U.S. stopped exporting diesel, Mexican growers and shippers would have to buy fuel at higher prices, and those higher costs would find their way back into the food Americans buy from them.

One analysis put it this way:

“U.S. refineries do not produce only the amount of diesel Americans consume. Gulf Coast refineries in particular have been built around access to international markets. They process crude oil into a slate of products that includes gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, propane, and other petroleum products, then sell those products into the markets. S&P Global Energy CERA modeled a complete export ban from October through December. Its analysts estimated that U.S. refiners would have to absorb or eliminate about 1.48 million barrels per day of expected exports. Once commercially usable storage filled, they estimated refiners might have to cut crude processing by roughly 1.9 million barrels per day, or about 12% of total U.S. refinery throughput. That would have impacts well beyond diesel. A refinery cannot cut crude throughput by 12% and continue producing the same amount of gasoline and jet fuel. Lower refinery runs mean less production of all those products. Thus, a policy intended to reduce diesel prices could eventually tighten supplies of gasoline and jet fuel as well, putting upward pressure on those prices.”

Export markets allow the “greedy” refiners to run at high utilization rates and sell the diesel that exceeds domestic demand. Closing off those markets would quickly depress Gulf Coast refining margins, leading refiners to cut production and, in the end, pushing domestic prices even higher. That would be the real effect of Congressman Burchett’s bills. The solution is to increase the world’s supply, not reduce it. That means reopening the Gulf, something the congressman and his colleagues need to pressure the president to change the policies that caused the problem in the first place. 

Still, the bills show that the congressman is trying to do something, even if that something ends up making the situation worse. I can’t call this “unintended consequences” since the consequences in this case are well known. But these two bills, like so many of those passed by the congress end up creating more harm than good. Someone once said that the only laws that the congress tries to repeal are the laws of supply and demand. This is just another example of the truth of that axiom.

Fly Overs: Look Up!

Some so-called elites like to call East Tennessee “flyover country.” Well, turns out they were more right than they knew. When the President came to town for the UT-UT game, Air Force One literally flew over the stadium. So we’re not just flyover country, we’re flyover-worthy country. Here’s the view from the plane as it swooped over the University of Tennessee.

One of my neighbors managed to snap a picture of Air Force One right over our neighborhood and promptly sent it to me, officially and permanently branding our little corner of the world as flyover country, too. I’m thinking about putting it on the welcome sign.

Meanwhile, I was at the Georgia–Oklahoma game, where our flyover was a formation of F-35s from Moody Air Force Base. Sure, it wasn’t Air Force One, but I’m not about to complain. It was pretty impressive in its own right. 

The last time Georgia and Oklahoma met was the 2018 Rose Bowl. It was on my bucket list, so my other half and I made the pilgrimage. It was a great game – unlike the current affair, which we will not be discussing – with future NFL stars sprinkled all over the field: Baker Mayfield and CeeDee Lamb for Oklahoma, Nick Chubb and Sony Michel for Georgia. Georgia won 54–48 in double overtime (Go Dawgs!), and my blood pressure still hasn’t fully recovered. The flyover that day? A B-2 Stealth bomber. Here’s the picture I took. You may need to squint a little as it approached the stadium. 

And here is the photo as it went over my head. Now THAT was a thrill!

Nuke the filibuster (redux)

The Big Anon has commented: “As for Trump, I have lost interest in him. I find nothing in him.” And also: “As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve lost all interest in President Trump. I do not think he is a wise person.” The president’s latest tirade underscores the Big Anon’s point and I’m moving in the same direction. All the shouting, cursing, ranting, threatening, bellicosity, flip-flopping and TACO stuff is wearing me down. I don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome. I have Trump Fatigue Syndrome.

The president is back on his kill-the-filibuster rampage. In a pair of late-night posts on Truth Social, he wrote: “It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” And: “Well, now WE are in power, and if we did what we should be doing, it would IMMEDIATELY end this ridiculous, Country destroying ‘SHUT DOWN.'”

He went on: “If Senate Republicans don’t TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, the Dumocrats will, and I will be, despite how well our Party is doing, the last Republican President. The Dumocrats will vote in Puerto Rico (4% Republican Vote), and Washington, D.C. (3% Republican Vote), pick up 4 Senators, 8 Congressmen/women, tremendous numbers of Popular and Electoral College Votes and, importantly, control the Voting Mechanisms and Systems, both Legal and otherwise, throughout the United States. It will be impossible for Republicans to ever win an Election again. In other words, it will be THE END OF AMERICA! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Excuse me? As per usual, the president is out of control. This is (pardon me) dumb and ranks right up there with his pronouncements on trade. For some reason, the president has pushed all his chips into the middle of the table to save the SAVE Act. I won’t burden you with another analysis of the bill, but the president is assuming that if the filibuster went away, the act would pass. He’s wrong. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitch McConnell and Thom Tillis have all openly opposed it. So if only one more republican – Rand Paul – joined them the bill would not pass. Trump doesn’t have the votes. The president is obviously math-challenged.

What’s more, the democrats are playing the “please don’t throw me in the briar patch” game. They act as if they oppose ending the filibuster, when in fact they’re cheering Trump on. The democrats know, and Senate republicans know too, that without the filibuster, the next time democrats hold the trifecta of House, Senate and presidency, they’ll enact everything Trump warns about. Why can’t the president see this? Killing the filibuster now just to pass the SAVE Act would bring about the very future he’s predicting: statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico, repeal of the SAVE Act and democratic control of the voting systems.

Senate republicans understand this, and most will defy the president on it. Majority Leader John Thune has said as much: “At some point, Democrats may try and steal the car, but we’re not going to hand them the keys. We would enable all the crazy stuff they would do, whether it’s adding Puerto Rico and D.C. as states, whether it’s federalizing elections, or packing the Supreme Court.”

So why does the president want to nuke the filibuster. It is one of the few instruments that encourage bipartisanism. Please tell me the president isn’t this stupid.

Trump’s Anti-Trade Nativism

I have mostly left the defense of free trade to others, such as Don Boudreaux. But the president’s latest statement is too egregious even for me to ignore. He posted: “If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year. The word ‘Deficit’ is nothing more than a fancy word for LOSS. We are ‘carrying’ almost every country in the World, and that cannot go on any longer.”

To put it kindly, this is one of the dumbest statements I have ever seen. It is almost inconceivable that a president of the United States believes it. Has Chauncey the Gardner moved into the White House? The president’s claim is that when we trade with a country and run a deficit with it, we end up poorer. Really? At this point in my life, I run a trade deficit with practically everyone: Publix, Walmart, my mechanic, the HVAC company, the plumber, the electrician, my pharmacy, my doctor, the dentist, Tractor Supply, the hardware store, and every restaurant and entertainment source. None of them buys anything from me. If the president were right, I should be impoverished and barely getting by. Instead, my standard of living is probably in the top 5 percent on the planet. I simply have nothing to trade except my money for the goods and services of others, and I am far better off for it. How can that be? The reason is simple: the president is wrong. If trade made us worse off, we would not do it. As Mr. Spock would say, “That would be illogical.”

I have made this point over and over again. People and countries trade because both sides benefit. Economists call the principle behind it comparative advantage. When another country can make something at a lower cost than we can, both sides gain from trade. We buy that good and put our own resources into producing what we do relatively best, rather than tying them up making things we could have bought more cheaply. Some critics reply that this just means we get inferior goods from our trading partners — cheap junk. That is false, too. Cheaper goods widen the market and let poorer households afford things they could not afford before. Perhaps the elites would rather the poor go without. Let them eat cake!

The president implies we are not being ripped off when we run a trade surplus. But by his own “logic,” a surplus only means we are being ripped off less, since we are still importing. That is pure mercantilism: exports are good, and every import is a loss. And given how large and wealthy this country is, it would be close to impossible for most countries not to run a surplus with us. So if trade deficits really are losses, why doesn’t the president simply order trade with a country halted whenever the balance tips into deficit? Or end trade altogether?

The president also assumes that if we imported nothing, we would have trillions of dollars more. He ignores what happens to the dollars we spend abroad: one way or another, they come back to us. Foreigners use them to buy American goods, or to buy American stocks and bonds and invest in American businesses. I thought the president wanted more foreign investment in this country. Where does he think that money comes from?

Don Boudreaux, who writes mostly about trade on his blog Café Hayek, puts it well: “Trump is as clueless to complain about the so-called U.S. ‘trade deficit’ with each of many individual countries as would be an individual American to complain about her ‘trade deficit’ with a supermarket.” His point is that whenever more than two parties trade — individuals, firms, towns, states, or countries — there is no reason to expect any pair of them to buy and sell equal amounts with each other.

Boudreaux illustrates this with a world of just three countries. Suppose the U.S. buys $1 million of maple syrup from Canada each year, paying in dollars. The Canadians use those dollars to buy $1 million of coffee from Brazil, and the Brazilians use them to buy $1 million of corn from the U.S. By Trump’s reasoning, Canada is ripping us off to the tune of $1 million a year, and we would gain $1 million by cutting Canada off — while we, in turn, are ripping off Brazil. In reality, cutting off Canada would break the whole chain: Canadians would no longer have dollars to buy Brazilian coffee, Brazilians would no longer have dollars to buy American corn, and we would lose both our maple syrup and our corn sales. And as Boudreaux notes, once you allow foreigners to invest their dollars here instead of spending them all on American exports, the absurdity of Trump’s argument only grows.

So please explain how cutting off trade makes us wealthier. It would make us poorer. We would be forced either to go without goods or to produce them ourselves at higher cost, which means lower real incomes. Is that really a good thing? The president apparently thinks so. He has said: “We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries. We lose with the European Union $200 billion a year. If I didn’t trade with them, we’d lose nothing. Just one swipe of the pen. We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year…They have nothing we have to have. I mean, hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things.”

So Mexico is ripping us off to the tune of $195 billion a year? And what “couple of things” do we get for that money? Hot tamales? Try vehicles, machinery, electronics, and farm products that American businesses and consumers rely on. Is that $195 billion worth of cheap junk? Hot tamales indeed. 

Ronald Reagan knew this was nonsense. As he put it: “Homegrown industries start relying on government protection…They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets…High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation…The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition. People stop buying. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.”

Trump has done his best to paper over Reagan’s legacy. This anti-trade nativism is just his latest effort to do so.

RFK Jr. on the Campaign Trail?

 

Remember the midterms of 2022? It was the red wave that wasn’t. Republicans regained the House, but nowhere near the numbers everyone predicted. The country had turned against Joe Biden, and so the red wave was supposed to arrive — instead it was a trickle. Republicans were blamed for fielding a slate of unattractive, “radical” candidates who made even the democrats look good by comparison.

Is history repeating itself? Most of country has turned against Donald Trump, and we’re being told this time to expect a blue wave even though the democrats are the ones fielding a slate of candidates who would traditionally be called unattractive. Some are just plain weird. Consider that in the races for the Senate, democrats are polling ahead in eight states: Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Maine, New Hampshire, Alaska, Georgia, and North Carolina. Texas and Michigan are the real eye-openers. Could Abdul El-Sayed and James Talarico actually pull off the improbable and win in Michigan and Texas? Has Trump made these races “lean democrat?”

Tariffs and gas prices have hurt Trump and by extensions the republicans. Will it be enough to propel the two democratic socialists to victory? We will see. Meanwhile, republicans have responded with all the urgency of a committee meeting — floating a federal gas tax holiday and a ban on diesel exports. “Voters aren’t happy, and we’re in charge,” warned Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.), who — mercifully for him — isn’t up for reelection this cycle.

Being gutless, none of them are calling on the president to suspend his tariffs or wind down the war in the Gulf, which are the real culprits behind the pain at the pump and in the pocketbook. Instead, the president still blames Joe Biden and has found a scapegoat several time zones away, blaming the Russia-Ukraine war for high gas prices. Trump posted that the conflict has taken Russian diesel refineries offline, adding that “this ridiculous and never-ending war with Ukraine must be ended.” Few believe him. In a let-them-eat-cake moment at a North Carolina rally, he even said high fuel prices were “a very inexpensive price to pay” for the Iran war, and that prices would come down “like rocket ships in reverse” — an image that raises more questions about rocket science than it answers about gas prices. Again, few believe him, and North Carolina’s Senate seat — which might have had a better shot had Thom Tillis not been pushed out — looks all but lost to republicans. 

What I find surprising is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is out campaigning for republican candidates, having traveled to Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Florida. Republicans apparently believe Kennedy can boost turnout by energizing supporters of his Make America Healthy Again agenda. One MAHA activist put it this way: “He’s going to be unleashed to talk about his issues because it’s always wildly popular.” In Iowa, for instance, Kennedy campaigned in a vulnerable republican’s district to talk about threats to children’s health, rallying alongside GOP gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn, a MAHA-endorsed farmer who has made the health risks of pesticides part of his platform. Huh? Can’t the farmers choose not to use risky pesticides? Why is this a campaign issue?

So while the democrats have turned Kennedy into a political boogeyman, highlighting his weirdness, vaccine skepticism and the agency decisions that may have undermined public health, republicans apparently see it very differently. Which side has it right? We will find out. Kennedy has campaigned for Reps. Tom Barrett of Michigan, Gabe Evans of Colorado, and Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, and with Sen. Ashley Moody of Florida, who doesn’t appear especially vulnerable. “The MAHA movement is one of the most important forces in American politics right now,” said Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee. “RFK Jr. has been a powerful force on the campaign trail as he helps our Republican candidates get their message across to voters who prioritize making America healthy again.”

Kennedy’s overall approval rating stood at 39% in one survey conducted this spring, but that number climbed to 68% among voters who identified themselves as MAHA supporters. Honestly, sixty-eight percent feels like a modest showing for a man whose fan base treats him like a folk hero. You would think the number would be higher among the anti-pesticide, raw-milk, Prozac causes school shootings, vaccines cause autism, anti vac, man-made chemicals in the environment are making children gay or transgender crowd.

World’s Sickest Children? Prime Air. New Cat!

The US Has the ‘Sickest Children’ in World History?

The president’s taste for hyperbole seems to be contagious. At the republicans’ midterm convention, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared: “This country pays two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays, and yet we have the sickest children in the history of the world.” What! Even a casual listener would know that this can’t be true. Perhaps he meant the sickest children among developed — not developing — nations. That’s at least a testable claim. But sicker children than in Sudan? South Africa? Yemen? Sicker than children born in any century before ours? Hardly. Childhood mortality and infectious disease have fallen dramatically since the 19th century. In 1900, one in five American children died before age five. Compared with children in developing countries today, American children fare far better — the U.S. under-5 mortality rate is roughly 80% below the global average, and causes that still kill children worldwide, like diarrhea and malaria, now cause almost no deaths here.

Where the U.S. does fall short is against its developed-world peers. A 2025 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that from 2007 to 2022, the mortality rate for Americans ages 1 to 19 ran 80% higher than in other high-income countries — driven not by disease, but by gun violence and traffic deaths.

Kennedy is lying but why? He surely knows better than to make a claim this untrue. And the MAGA press simply repeated it, unchallenged. Why make such outlandish claims in the first place?

Prime Air

Amazon’s drone delivery service, Prime Air, now operates in eleven cities: Phoenix, Tampa, Kansas City, Kansas; Baton Rouge, Detroit, Omaha, Houston, San Antonio and Waco, Texas. Amazon plans to expand to nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026 — which presumably includes Knoxville, where the drones will likely be shot down. Packages weighing five pounds or less that fit inside a large shoebox qualify for drone delivery: free for Prime members on orders of $50 or more, $2.99 for smaller Prime orders, and $4.99 for non-members.

The skies are about to get crowded. In the New Haven, Connecticut area, Prime Air has proposed up to 1,000 MK30 delivery flights per day from a single Prime Air Drone Delivery Center — roughly 365,000 flights a year. The New York Times reports that residents of one Texas suburb now describe living on a “drone highway.” Recently, an Amazon delivery drone crashed into a residential backyard in Richardson, Texas, sparking a small grass fire. No one was hurt, but the scorched earth, scattered debris, and rattled neighbors left a mark. Federal regulators, local officials, and aviation safety experts are now investigating.

The drones run on lithium-polymer batteries, which can become volatile when damaged or punctured — lithium fires burn intensely and are notoriously hard to put out. (Recall the lithium fires from EV batteries exploding during last year’s Florida hurricane.) What happens when a drone goes down on a wooden deck, near a gas line, or in a drought-stricken area full of dry brush? The consequences could be serious. Is Prime Air really ready for prime time? This seems like an advertising opportunity for Deion Sanders.

Here, Kitty Kitty

A new species of cat has turned up in the cloud forests of Bolivia’s Yungas region. Smaller than a house cat and marked with leopard-like spots, it’s been named Leopardus Tilcayo. 

The discovery was pure accident. A man found the kitten and brought it to a wildlife sanctuary, where staff noticed it didn’t quite match any known tiger cat species. Genetic testing confirmed it as new — one that likely diverged from its closest tiger cat relative around 1.4 million years ago. It makes me wonder two things: first, what would have happened if the man had raised the kitty as a pet? When it matures the ticayo will be smaller than the average house cat. On the other hand, while in South Africa on safari, my outfitter had rescued a leopard kitty and raised it as a pet (see photo). Second, how many more undiscovered species are hiding in the Bolivian Yungas?

Random thoughts #86

Mail-in ballots

I can’t quite make sense of this mail-in ballot kerfuffle. The Constitution leaves elections largely in the hands of the states and a president can’t simply rewrite state election laws on his own. Yet that seems to be exactly what Trump is intent on doing. If the rules for federal elections are going to change, wouldn’t that have to come from Congress, not from an executive order?

As a reminder, the new rules would have required states to redesign their ballot envelopes, hand lists of voters over to the federal government and get sign-off from postal officials before ballots could be mailed to those voters. Doesn’t that sound burdensome? The Postal Service adopted the rules last month, and state and local officials sued, arguing they were unconstitutional and went beyond the Postal Service’s authority. They may be right but this will have to be settled later in another Supreme Court decision.

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling seems to rest on timing. Some states already have sent out ballots and there simply isn’t time to change course. Brett Kavanaugh said as much, writing that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the election.” So does that mean the president can impose these changes for the next election? And couldn’t the states just tell him to pound sand?

As far as I can tell, the court never ruled on the constitutional question at all. In his dissent, joined by Thomas, Alito argued that the Postal Service has “broad power to regulate the delivery of mail.” Okay. But what does that have to do with the heart of the matter, which is the White House forcing states to follow its mail-in ballot rules?

Don Jr. certainly isn’t broke

What’s with this Russian oligarch bankrolling Don Jr.’s wedding celebrations? Junior confirmed that Umar Kremlev paid for two nights of post-wedding festivities on a secluded Bahamian island. (How does an island get secluded, anyway?) I’m sure Kremlev did it out of the goodness of his heart and asked for nothing in return. Hasn’t Junior made enough money off his father’s name and influence to pay for his own wedding? Either way, it’s a bad look.

Meanwhile, the president said, “I have no idea who Umar is, never heard of him.” Yeah. Right. Any boxing fan knows the name: Kremlev took over the International Boxing Association in 2020. And isn’t it strange that neither the president nor the first lady made it to the wedding?

AI in the Gulf

Did you know Iran has crippled AI data centers in the Gulf? Drone attacks have knocked the Amazon Web Services facility in Abu Dhabi and another in Bahrain mostly offline, and clients have had to move their data to other regions while the sites are repaired. As one expert put it, “The value proposition that the Gulf states made to the U.S. government and U.S. tech companies was that they will provide abundant capital, cheap energy and easy construction. The Iran war has really flipped a lot of that math on its head.”

Trump beat the NFL?

Another day, another idle boast. In his speech in Dallas at the GOP’s midterm convention, the president bragged that he “beat the NFL.” Like so much else he says, we all knew that wasn’t true. His speech drew 2.5 million viewers, fewer than Fox’s regular programming. Now the NFL’s numbers are in, and the league is apparently reeling from ratings that are so low: the game drew “only” 25.1 million viewers, the lowest since 2020.

Irish unification?

The president has called for merging the Republic of Ireland with the United Kingdom’s Northern Ireland, saying it would be “fantastic.” When Ireland won its independence from Britain a century ago, it became a self-governing, Roman Catholic-majority country, while the six counties in the north, which had a Protestant majority, remained part of the United Kingdom. Many people are too young to remember the three decades of violence that followed in Northern Ireland, involving paramilitary groups on both sides as well as British troops. Some 3,600 people were killed in bombings, shootings and other attacks.

Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Micheál Martin said it shouldn’t be a surprise that Trump “takes a different sort of perspective on things.” British politicians, meanwhile, insist that Northern Ireland is indisputably part of the U.K.

Then again, the leaders of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have called on the British government to “prepare for, plan and facilitate” constitutional change that could lead to the breakup of the United Kingdom. “Westminster’s time is coming to an end,” Scottish First Minister John Swinney, Welsh First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth and Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill said in a historic joint declaration. The latest British prime minister, Andy Burnham, has said he would not stand in the way of a breakup.

If that happens, Northern Ireland’s future will be settled in Belfast, Dublin and London, and Trump’s wish will hardly matter.

By the way, what’s the deal with the Welsh language? It looks like it was brought to Earth by aliens. It’s a minority language even within Wales, spoken by only about 18 percent of the population. How about translating that to Welsh?

Beth yw hanes yr iaith Gymraeg ‘ma? Mae’n ymddangos fel petai wedi’i chludo i’r ddaear gan estroniaid o’r gofod. Mae’n iaith leiafrifol hyd yn oed yng Nghymru, gyda dim ond tua 18 y cant o’r boblogaeth yn ei siarad.

Fall. Texas. Equal Earth.

Fall

Today is the first day of Fall with the equinox arriving at 8:05 p.m. Eastern. The equinox is an exact global event being the moment the sun crosses the celestial equator. I marvel that Hipparchus of Nicaea, the Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician made this discovery of the precession of the equinoxes – the gradual cyclic wobble of the Earth’s axis – around 130 BC.

Goodbye summer! I knew that Fall was on its way by all the leaves falling (no pun intended). Almost every day, I am having to blow the leaves off my driveway. I live in east Tennessee, which is one of the most scenic places in the country. It is not as spectacular as parts of California, but as a friend of mine said when he moved from California to Knoxville: here the scenery is accessible. It is right out the front door not someplace on the horizon. The changing colors at my home and in the Smokies, along with deer hunting and college football, make this my favorite place to be in the whole wide world. BTW, the first week of deer hunting (bow) in Georgia was a total bust, marked by days in the mid-90s. The mornings were tolerable, but the oppressive heat later in the day made hunting completely out of the question. If I had stayed in Knoxville, I would have seen many more deer who enjoy relaxing near my carport and wandering through my backyard. It is also college football season, and games should not ever be played in 100+ degree weather. Maybe that is why my Ohio State Buckeyes lost to the utter embarrassment of us all, withering in the Texas heat. Speaking of which…

Why Texas?

Texas has experienced stunning growth over the last 40 years or so. Its population has increased by 86 percent, to 31.7 million, since 1990, making it the second-most populous state in the country after California. Texas will overtake California as the most populous state by 2050. Its population growth has mostly been due to domestic migration from other parts of the U.S. (especially California), rather from outside the country. Apparently U-Hauls leaving California have basically become the new state symbol. If current voting trends continue – which is a huge assumption – the country would be affected by California losing many of its 53 congressional seats (46 Democrats) to Texas, which currently has 38 (24 Republicans).

Why are people leaving California to head to Texas? It certainly isn’t for Texas’ scenic beauty. California is one of the most spectacular states in the union. It is geographically diverse with a wonderful climate. Mountains, oceans, beaches. It is the nation’s largest agricultural producer and is resource rich. Texas – not so much. Its idea of scenic beauty is a Buc-ee’s on the horizon. Texas has crappy weather and unspectacular scenery. Okay, there may be some isolated spots that are not so bad, but they are rare and far between. But Texas’ mere existence as a growth leader demonstrates the power of less government, fewer regulations, and more freedom overcoming the desire to live amid breathtaking beauty. Can you imagine what the consequences would be if California’s stifling economic climate were suddenly transformed into Texas’? Here we clearly see the superiority of economics over aesthetics. To somewhat quote the Temptations: Beauty is only skin deep but a favorable tax code is forever.

This more points to the stupidity of California than to the genius of Texas. Sometimes winning is just showing up while the other guy trips over his own shoelaces. Me? Given the choice of California or Texas, I’d rather live in east Tennessee.

Equal Earth

A while back I wrote about the Mercator map was used by European ships’ captains because it allowed navigators to plot a straight-line course from point A to point B. That was awfully important in the days of rickety sailing ships navigating oceans especially when worried about sailing off the edge of the planet. But when the map translated a three-dimensional shape like the Earth into a two-dimensional projection like a map, it distorted size and distance as you got closer to the two poles. As a result, Greenland and Antarctica look huge. Greenland looks bigger than Africa, even though Africa is fourteen times larger. I made the conjecture that the wrong-sized map was part of the president’s obsession with Greenland. He said in 2021, “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’” Nothing says diplomacy like coveting a piece of ice because it looked big on a map.

Oops.

For centuries, the Africans were rightly miffed and wanted a more accurate picture of their continent. Well, the UN just adopted a map called the “Equal Earth projection,” created to show more accurately the sizes of the continents and intended to replace the old Mercator map in schools and on government websites. The map is a mathematical projection of the land and sea, without human-made borders. I had mentioned earlier an alternative – the Gall-Peters model – which was more accurate than Mercator but is not very esthetically pleasing, looking somewhat elongated, with some saying that it looks like clothes hanging out to dry (something that we can appreciate in here in East Tennessee). The Equal Earth map is more esthetically pleasing, but would not be very useful to navigate by for a 16^th century captain of a sailing ship. Watch out for that edge! Somewhere, Columbus is refusing to update his GPS. 

Oh, and the vote at the UN for adoption? It was 124-1, with only the US voting against. The US deputy UN representative, Yaryna Ferencevych – a good Irish name – said resolutions such as the “correct the map” effort were “barnacles on our work here.” Here is her statement: 

“This resolution mocks the work and purpose of this institution. While this initiative is presented as an anodyne effort to update cartographic proportions, the United States clearly sees it cannot be separated from the much larger and more radical ideological project it belongs to – as its most vocal and committed proponents plainly and openly state.

Instead of focusing on genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations, this body is debating map projects from the 16th century, and their role in promoting reparations and “cognitive justice.” Resolutions like this and the ideological agenda they promote, are barnacles on our work here, and the reason this institution is losing its credibility. When the United Nations questions why it is losing legitimacy in the world, and is not taken seriously, time and again, we point to resolutions such as this.”

Huh? What does that mean? Did the US vote against it because the US appears smaller on this map than on the Mercator? Was it because Greenland is significantly smaller, belying Trump’s idea that it is “massive”? No. The statement is clear: the US voted against it solely because it is called the EqualEarth projection.