TL;DR:  Neocons seem to have pulled the wool over Trump. Don’t hold your breath yet on a Gaza deal.  And despite the Prime Big Deal Days, there wasn’t a scanner we liked.

Neocons Getting  Their War

On the surface it’s being soft-pedaled by the press:  Trump’s considered green light for Ukraine Tomahawks could ‘push Russia back,’ NATO minister says.  We think the official needs to be pee tested and sent down for some history lessons.

Here’s our take on it:  The Neocons – those slippery warmongers that slide between administrations and political parties – have convinced the CiC that very long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine is a good idea.

We vehemently disagree. Supplying “general arms” via NATO is one thing.  But long range offensive tools like the Tomahawks?  It’s like going from “Here kids, play with these matches” to more like “Here kids, play with this C-4.”

The BML (big media lie) is pretending that “retaining operational control” doesn’t constitute attacking Russia.

We call that…what’s the baseball term?  An Error:

“A baseball error is a judgment call by the official scorer that a defensive player made a mistake, such as a misplay, fumble, or wild throw, that allowed a batter or runner to advance an extra base or allowed a play that should have resulted in an out to continue. Errors are only charged when a fielder fails to make a play that an average fielder could have made, and they are recorded in the basic game statistic of “hits, runs, and errors” (HRE). “

Retaining operational control? That’s a fumble that will be seen as a wild throw. If the neocons hoax Trump into going through with it, the American homeland will be inserted back in targeting packages.

And Europe – whose sorry asses we have saved in two previous World Wars – still conducts government policy for the aristocrats and industrialists.

Not only has Congress abdicated on flimsy MAGA grounds, but with a GovDown persisting, neocons are stoking the future of defense stocks.

Skeptical of Peace

Who? Us?  You mean when reading Israel and Hamas agree ceasefire under US-brokered peace plan?

Here’s the soft-pedaled part:  There are 21 parts to the plan.  This is less than one-twentieth of a home run.  Israel, Hamas accept first phase of Trump’s Gaza ceasefire plan.  It’s like agreeing to “I won’t slurp soup while plotting to kill the other guys.”

Gaza is, oh.. How does inestimably deep shithole sound? It’s really deep.  We will keep our views muted. But we’ll be believers in the Peace Deal when all the Hostages are accounted for, Palestinians get good food and water.  And the Gaza Marine Energy assets are pumped for global benefit. Without the “rocket’s red glare.”

To borrow from Frasier “Hello, Washington. I’m listening.”

GovDown and Fed Leak

If your cable went out for two or three weeks, would you call and bitch about it? Maybe want a refund?

Obviously you don’t understand how this GovCon works.  Because in the “normal course of events” the Fools on the Hill will still pay federal workers. Trump to his (dwindling) credit understands it, but Ben Dover and Congressional Colleagues can’t have it any other way:  This is Bone-Us va-ca – and maybe it will stretch out to the opening of hunting season.  Super pay, separate retirement system, and more money than California min-wage – what’s not to love?

Meanwhile, Who’s to blame for the shutdown? All of the above, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds. I would regale you with the partisan yack-yack, but you have better things to do.  (Even your throne room visit is more useful and doesn’t come with as much poo…)

Meanwhile – with government statistics MIA, we did notice the Fed Minutes Wednesday.  But they were about what we explained, September Fed minutes reveal cautious approach to future rate cuts.  Other than TOTHS (time off ’til hunting season) our elected imbeciles are still selling “Tariffs are not a tax!”

“Where’s Ure’s typical optimism, then?”  IRS furloughs 34,000 employees as government shutdown continues nationwide.

It’s a start – maybe they can go hunting, too?

As long as we’re reading report cards? Bank of England Says Soaring AI Valuations Risk Sharp Market Correction.  Did they figure this all out without help?

A Newswork Orange

Let’s start with a kinder, gentler series of diabetic precursors?  Breakthrough as common ice cream and soda ingredient could finally solve hair loss.  Like we consumers haven’t been “balled” enough.

Some Theme Music for this one:  Ilhan Omar marrying her brother for U.S. citizenship. Why is she not arrested?  No time to click? Elvis Costello Watching the Detectives.  Which no one is.  GovDown, right?

We used to jest about people in the UK being “kneelers” but it’s no longer a joke. on X: “Joe Rogan’s face hardens with grief over the UK’s push for digital IDs and the arrest of citizens for social media posts. You could tell this was taking a toll on Rogan, who delivered a blunt explanation for why this is happening: “Once they do digital ID, they’re going to… 12-thousand arrested/cited for their social posting? [We trust you remember we didn’t base our screed on a social platform because freedom can’t be allowed to be free in End Stage Life…]

On to the Tale of Two G-men:  In one?  FBI Director: 110,000 Illegal Immigrant Gang Members Are Roaming Free In Chicago.  While in the other? Ex-FBI director James Comey pleads not guilty to lying to Congress. Yes, it’s like stepping into Superman’s Bizarro World, isn’t it?  So goes life down here on the surface of Htrae.

Around the Ranch: Scanners – Porking Consumers Good

One of the Big Themes in my book Downsizing – even if you (cheaply) avoid reading the book.

First point is that the Global economic system is based on an addiction to Growth.  Which means – listen closely, Bunkie – it BLOWS UP!!! when there’s no more growth.  I’ve been writing about this on the Peoplenomics side for years.  I call it SynGrow – synthetic growth – which is why the democrats wanted the borders open and the coal mines shut down.  Problem is, even with a few surviving “imperial religions” down on birth control, we have passed our ability to “screw our way to growth.”

The second point is (lacking people, and enough real shared innovation to re-engineer for ZPE and the like) we have instead started to “institutionalize obsolescence.”

Here’s where we arrive at Ure’s Bitch du Jour.

See, I had a dandy Fujitsu page scanner (duplex, color, dependable as hell).  Worked great.  BUT their software sucked eggs.  Would not play in Win10 and users of my series were “orphaned” in the support loop not because the product broke.  It was a software change to scam sales.  To my shame, I relented.

January 17, 2024 I purchased an Epson Workforce scanner.  Never got “down with it” because the software sucked.  Wouldn’t scale with Win11 right and – being in the declining vision part of life – I cobbled my way through with native Win11 apps. Kinda works. My point?

Horseshit has condensed – whole new planets worth – around Scanners.  Why, it was so bad, I asked the Ai stack (with far more expletives than we serve at breakfast here).

“Seriously? WTF?  Is this more evidence that the DDA – Digital Dark Ages  – are descending around us?  After a few minutes, “Electric George” and “Ara” came up with AI e-Truth, distilled.

Why Scanners Are Hopelessly Fouled Up

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, scanners were real engineering products—SCSI or USB 1.1 tanks with TWAIN drivers that actually obeyed standards. Companies like Fujitsu, HP, and Canon had small pro teams writing tight C code. You installed it once, it showed up in Photoshop, and it just worked. Then the accountants and marketers took over.

Margins fell, and scanners turned into razor handles for selling toner, subscriptions, and “cloud services.” Drivers that used to be 5 megabytes grew to 500. Every brand built its own “ecosystem”—cloud vaults, AI document naming, workflow automation. The once-simple TWAIN interface got buried under layers of Java, .NET, and telemetry daemons. Each scanner became a bloated “platform” with background services, tray icons, and update managers that hijack your CPU at 3 a.m.

Security paranoia made it worse. Scanners got HTTPS wrappers, signed tokens, and sandboxed permissions so your $300 desktop box now behaves like a bank server. HP and Epson in particular turned updates into subscription nags disguised as security patches. Fujitsu’s hardware stayed bulletproof, but its ScanSnap software still drags fifteen background tasks just to do what TWAIN did twenty years ago.

Then came cloudification. Every scan app phones home “to improve the experience,” so a simple scan-to-PDF lags while it waits for a server handshake you never asked for. They could have left us a lean offline utility, but there’s no recurring revenue in simplicity.  (– My point in Downsizing, exactly!!!)

Economics finished the job. A $400 scanner today should cost $1,200 if built to old standards. So we get cheaper plastics, outsourced firmware, and QA replaced by “let the user debug it” updates. The real engineers left when the margins did.

In short, the scanner market is hopeless because hardware margins collapsed, software became a marketing leash, corporate IT demanded lockdowns, telemetry replaced performance, and nobody can make money selling simple anymore.

If you want sanity, the fix is to run a minimalist stack—use good hardware and clean third-party software that ignores the vendor’s cloud circus. Pretend it’s still 2003 and just scan the damn paper.”

I’m back to eyeing an ancient edition of Windows 7.  Before the “call the Mothership” went big.  Then, my still dandy Fujitsu ix-500 could get back to work – and stop being a doorstop in the recording studio.

All of which is shared with heart and purpose this morning.  As Downsizing (and its tag-along compound debt service) piles into the world, you will notice a glaring error in Bible.

Sure —Four Horsemen get mentioned — but the Bible missed naming the fifth:  Compound interest and declining revenue.

That’s what will pay for the other Four Horsemen’s rides, shortly.

Those of us Old Enough?  We have feared it since the Divorce Rate went SpaceX in the seventies.  When permanence of Love and Relationships went, the long fuse to the blow up was lit.  If you’re alert enough, you can smell burning more every day now.

Octopussy Note: 

Thursday was World Octopus Day.  Did you go “armed?”

We see today is World Sight Day.  It’s also World Post Day – when celebrating “going postal” is OK.  And a word for Python programmers.  This is Panda’s Day.

If you remember, World Programmer Days was last month – on the 256th’s day of the year.  If you missed it, Pandas is a Python library for fast, flexible data analysis — it lets you easily load, clean, manipulate, and analyze structured data using powerful table-like objects called DataFrames.

Python and I were born around the same time in February.

Day Watch: Jay Powell speaks this morning. Watch for market reaction. Sand in the Vaseline or money used as gasoline?  Stay tuned.

Write when you hear thundering,

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