"It is my solemn responsibility as President to ensure that, now and long into the future, America has a strong domestically owned and operated steel industry..."

"... that can continue to power our national sources of strength at home and abroad; and it is a fulfillment of that responsibility to block foreign ownership of this vital American company. U.S. Steel will remain a proud American company – one that’s American-owned, American-operated, by American union steelworkers – the best in the world."

From a "Statement" attributed to President Biden.

"We are eating predigested food...."

"To manufacture cheap, delicious food that is packaged for convenience, basic food crops such as corn, wheat and potatoes are dissembled into their molecular parts — starchy flours, protein isolates, fats and oils — or what manufacturers call 'slurries.' 'The bulk of what is extracted is starch slurry, a milky mixture of starch and water, but we also have extracted proteins and fibers,' according to a video explanation of the process from Starch Europe, part of the European Starch Industry Association. 'Roughly half of the starch slurry goes to produce starch-based sugars and other derivatives,' the video says. 'Those are created by hydrolysis, a process similar to human digestion.' Next, with the help of artificial colorings, flavorings and glue-like emulsifiers, those slurries are then heated, pounded, shaped or extruded into any food a manufacturer can dream up. Add in just the right ratio of sugar, salt and fat designed to tickle our taste buds, and an ultraprocessed food that’s nearly irresistible is born...."

From "You may be eating predigested food. Here’s why" (CNN).

"No automaker is anywhere close to making medical gear such as ventilators and remain months away — if not longer."

"Nor do the car companies need the president’s permission to move forward. Neither GM or Ford is building ventilators at present, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Friday that his company was 'working on ventilators' but he didn’t specify how long it might take.... 'When you are repurposing a factory, it really depends on how similar the new product is to the existing products in your product line,' said Kaitlin Wowak, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who focuses on industrial supply chains. 'It’s going to be a substantial pivot to start producing an entirely different item.'"

AP fact-checks Trump's optimism. I'm saying "optimism." The AP word is "hype": "AP FACT CHECK: Trump hype on auto industry and ventilators."

I get Trump's optimistic style, but it's not going to work on everyone. It may help keep the economy alive during its suspended animation, but it may make a lot of people very cynical. Who can trust what we are hearing? Maybe only people who already want to believe. But don't almost all of us — Trump haters or not — want to believe we will win, we'll conquer the virus, and the economy will spring back to life, as vibrant as ever?

The ceremony — as Naruhito accedes to the Chrysanthemum Throne.

Today, in Japan:



"I swear that I will reflect deeply on the course followed by his majesty, the emperor emeritus, and bear in mind the path trodden by past emperors, and will devote myself to self-improvement."

I'd like to know more about the devotion to "self-improvement." What is the Japanese word and what is the significance of the concept in Japanese culture? The "self-improvement" of the new leader is not an idea that has any prominence when an American takes a political office. Imagine a candidate for President offering to devote himself to self-improvement. Self-improvement? That sounds like an indulgence, a lack of interest in meeting responsibilities. I won't lamely speculate on the possible lack of actual work for the Japanese emperor. I'm going to assume there's a very interesting and government-related concept here that is puzzlingly represented by the English term "self-improvement."

From the Wikipedia article on the Chrysanthemum Throne:

Japan is the oldest continuing hereditary monarchy in the world. In much the same sense as the British Crown, the Chrysanthemum Throne is an abstract metonymic concept that represents the monarch and the legal authority for the existence of the government....

And an image of the literal throne:



Here's the Wikipedia article on "Self-help or self-improvement." From the "History" subsection:

Is this at all Trump-related? Bloomberg won't tell.

"Apple Inc. is designing and producing its own device displays for the first time, using a secret manufacturing facility near its California headquarters to make small numbers of the screens for testing purposes, according to people familiar with the situation....

The screens are far more difficult to produce than OLED displays.... The ambitious undertaking is the latest example of Apple bringing the design of key components in-house. The company has designed chips powering its mobile devices for several years....

So for several years, years they've been doing more in-house design. But the news is about manufacturing. How long has that been happening in-house?

The 62,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, the first of its kind for Apple, is located on an otherwise unremarkable street in Santa Clara, California... The facility also has a special area for the intricate process of producing LEDs. Another facility nearby houses technology that handles so-called LED transfers: the process of placing individual pixels into a MicroLED screen....

The complexity of building a screen manufacturing facility meant it took Apple several months to get the California plant operational. Only in recent months have Apple engineers grown confident in their ability to eventually replace screens from Samsung and other suppliers.

A year ago, Forbes ran a piece titled: "Are Donald Trump's Calls To Bring Manufacturing Back To The US Out Of Touch?"

I don’t know if it’s right to call that “out of touch.” It might simply be that Trump doesn’t really understand why manufacturing jobs have declined. It may be that he understands just fine but he’s just saying what his audience wants to hear. Either way, he is either ignoring or denying the reality of rising U.S. manufacturing output. He’s focusing on raw numbers of jobs, and seems to be assuming that trade deals are the reason those jobs have declined, and seems also to be assuming that better deals or different deals or no deals at all would bring jobs back, and not just bring them back, but bring them back to the exact same places where they were lost over the past several decades.

"In a defeat for organized labor in the South, employees at the Volkswagen plant here voted 712 to 626 against joining the United Automobile Workers."

"The loss is an especially stinging blow for U.A.W. because Volkswagen did not even oppose the unionization drive. The union’s defeat... was one of the most closely watched unionization votes in decades...."

The NYT reports — without mentioning the comments President Obama made yesterday, behind closed doors, to Democratic lawmakers in Maryland:

Obama said everyone was in favor of the UAW representing Volkswagen except for local politicians who "are more concerned about German shareholders than American workers"....

ADDED: "This is like an alternate universe where everything is turned upside down"...

... said Cliff Hammond, a labor lawyer at Nemeth Law PC in Detroit, who represents management clients but previously worked at the Service Employees International Union. "Usually, companies fight" union drives, he added.... "This vote was essentially gift-wrapped for the union by Volkswagen"...

But more workers were persuaded to vote against the union by the UAW's past of bitter battles with management, costly labor contracts and complex work rules. "If the union comes in, we'll have a divided work force," said Cheryl Hawkins, 44, an assembly line worker with three sons. "It will ruin what we have."...

"I just don't trust them," said Danielle Brunner, 23, who has worked at the plant for nearly three years and makes about $20 an hour—about $5 an hour more than new hires at GM, Ford and Chrysler plants.

"Is there anything more American than America?"

I laughed at what I considered a really dumb first line, even as Meade, seeing the opening back-of-the-head shot, identified Bob Dylan. Here's the ad, to analyze in the cold light of day:



On review, I understand the sense of the line that caught my ear as dumb. It's that all the foreign carmakers are only imitating what is essentially American, the car. Detroit carmakers were the "inspiration" for "the rest of the world," says the great genius songwriter who took his inspiration from plenty of others who came before him.

At 0:49, Dylan lumbers forward saying, "Yeah, Detroit made cars. And cars made America." His upper lip looks strangely fake. There's no mustache. Did he shave off his mustache or is it plastered down with some sort of flesh-toned makeup paste that's impairing the mobility of his mouth? He wants his mustache, I think. He's had it a long time. But Chrysler doesn't want a mustache image.

Near the end, Bob says, "So let Germany brew your beer..." and I take a little offense, because beer is a big part of the manufacturing segment of the Wisconsin economy. But Bob's a Minnesotan, and there's some interstate rivalry, even as he's talking up Michigan. It's the state that shares your state's border that you tend to disrespect. Once there's another state buffering the proximity, you can get a little fuzzy and romantic.

Meade says, as I'm playing this: "The background tune is 'Things Have Changed.'" He recites a line of that song — which is playing only instrumentally — "I used to care but things have changed." The vocal track enters at the very end, with only the line "things have changed" — not "I used to care." You're supposed to care — a lot — about America. At least when you're buying a car. There are no cars in that song. There's some waiting for a train and walking on a bad road, and...

Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet
Putting her in a wheelbarrow and wheeling her down the street

That would be a change, but what you need, in this unchanged America, is a car, and Bob recommends a Chrysler.

"For those many, many people who were raised on processed cheese, there is a memory connected with it that can’t be discounted in terms of its importance..."

"It’s a bite of the past, and that trumps flavor every time."

A quote from an article at Smithsonian.com on the history of Velveeta. That's just the next thing that interested me on line, not something I went looking for after that last post, which had food writer Michael Pollan giving us reason to enjoy some of the products of civilization (bread and other cooked foods), absolving us of the sense of obligation to return to whatever it is we imagine nourished the caveman, but not touching upon the mystic chords of memory of the more recent past, the days of mothers in aprons and the things that yielded so willingly to melting in that vividly golden childhood of yore.

And let's remember the psychology of environmentalism. Weren't we just talking about the problem of the industrial byproduct of all that Greek-style yogurt we've been eating? From the Smithsonian article:

[Emil Frey, a Swiss cheesemaker who moved from Switzerland to upstate New York, where he worked in cheese factories in the late 1880s]... figured out how... to help recoup some of the [cheese] factory's waste. He learned that by adding a by-product of cheesemaking called whey, which is the liquid released from curds during the cheesemaking process, to the leftover Swiss bits, he could create a very cohesive end-product. Frey named the product Velveeta....

"Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke is trying to make the case that Wisconsin voters should trust her..."

"... in part, because of the nearly 1,000 jobs created in the state by Trek Bicycle Corp., a firm founded and run by her family."

But now Burke is coming under criticism from some within her own party following a decision last week by the U.S. Department of Labor. The federal agency found that up to 20 former Trek Bicycle employees are eligible for special federal aid via the Trade Adjustment Assistance program because they lost their jobs due to foreign trade.

Actually, this is evidence that the Democratic Party does not exploit its power within government to affect electoral politics.

"Designed by Doofuses in California."

"Apple’s new ads make the company look lame."

Yes. And let me add: The slogan "Designed by Apple in California" is designed to keep us from thinking about how these things are not manufactured in California or anywhere else in America. You're not supposed to think of any possible suffering that has taken place making this things. You're supposed to imagine — ♫ imagine there's no factories, I wonder if you can — that these nifty items sprang fully formed from the minds of Californians.

Which raises the question: Are we in love with the Californian mind? If so, aren't we crazy?

"Especially in a bearish economy, entrepreneurs need to be able to operate without the fear that inadvertently breaking an obscure regulation..."

"... or unknowingly violating a foreign statute could shut down their company and land them or their employees in jail," wrote Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of Gibson Guitar Corp., in a WSJ column last month.

"Smoke juice."

A Wisconsin-made product.

"Traditional cigarettes don't actually taste like anything... They taste like cigarettes. What we hear over and over again from our customers is, 'I've been a smoker for over 30 years, and this is the first time I've actually experienced flavor.'"

Johnson Creek's smoke juice comes in a variety of flavors, including original, spiced apple cider, black cherry, French vanilla, espresso, mint chocolate, summer peach, chocolate truffle, Arctic menthol and Tennessee cured, a concoction with hints of vanilla and caramel.

Make something people want and...

"I really want people to understand what is possible in an environment like this. I know the economy is in the toilet, but it does not mean that a company such as Johnson Creek can't make something incredible like we used to."