The Angry Bear

The important trend in retail sales that Redbook’s weekly report is telling us about  – by New Deal democrat This is the first of hopefully two posts I will put up today. Tomorrow retail sales for December will be reported. In advance of that, I wanted to discuss their comparison with the weekly high-frequency data of Redbook consumer sales, which I have been paying heightened attention to in the past several months. Here is what Redbook...

“GOP Rep. Ronny Jackson Throws Ridiculous Shit Fit Over the Prospect of Losing Gas Stove,” Vanity Fair, Bess Levin I can remember when someone else said something else along the lines of: I’ll give you my gun when you pry (or take) it from my cold, dead hands.” Charleton Heston In his own unoriginal words . . . “If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!.’” Ronny...

COVID endemicity: 100,000+ (mainly needless) excess deaths per year – by New Deal democrat I suspect these updates are going to be much less frequent from now on; for example, if a significant new wave is evident.  That’s because, as we start our fourth year of the pandemic, the good news is that it is far less lethal than it was during its first two years. From March 2020 through March 2021, 500,000 Americans died of Covid. Another 500,000...

“Open Thread January 6, 2023,” Angry Bear, angry bear blog

by David Zetland (originally published at The one handed economist) I had heard of Douglass, but man oh man, I had no idea of his brilliance. His “Composite Nation” speech is full of wisdom and hope, offering a path to that “shining city on a hill” that Americans have had such a hard time reaching — mostly due to a desire to preserve “tradition” over “progress.” (Listen to this Malcolm Gladwell episode on a segregationist in the 1970s — a...

And the news Media is waking up to this? In December 2022, NPR wrote, “Medicare Advantage plans overcharged Medicare by millions,” Health News : NPR Citing an April 26, 2016 example of US government auditors asked a Blue Cross Medicare Advantage health plan in Minnesota to turn over medical records of patients treated by a podiatry practice whose owner had been indicted for fraud. Medicare had paid the Blue Cross plan more than $20,000 to...

Article Author April M. Short, an editor, journalist, and documentary editor and producer. Presently she is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon, and many others....

One reason politics is so hard is that our words are often heard by different audiences, and a message that is well-calibrated for one type of listener may work poorly for listeners with different roles, values, or interests. To illustrate:  Phillips O’Brien has a piece in the Atlantic with the headline “Time is on Ukraine’s side, not Russia’s”.  He did not choose the headline, but this morning he defends it.  He argues that it is important to...

Weekly Indicators for January 9 – 13 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. One thing that comes with the territory of high frequency indicators is that they can be noisy. And at no time of the year can they be noisier as during and right after the Holiday season. That appears to be the case this week, as a number of coincident indicators in particular displayed volatility. This should...

“Peter Drucker Sets Us Straight,” January 12, 2004 (cnn.com), Peter Drucker and Brent Schlender This is an oldie from 2004 which still has relevance to what has occurred and is occurring in the world today. Any number of times I have found myself fixing supply chain operations globally for various companies of different countries. Ninety-Four year-old guru says most people are thinking all wrong about jobs, debt, globalization, and recession....