The Angry Bear

Last time in Denver and some observations. My youngest son and I took off to the Little Big Horn to see where Custer made a fool of himself. He died for it and took a whole bunch of others with him. We spent the night in Hardin, Montana in a cheap, yet clean hotel, in a small room with double beds. There was not much to the town of 3600 people. It was not a dangerous place to be either. I felt more danger in Mesa AZ. We the gray-hairs, are viewed...

What are leading Democrats trying to accomplish with their current push on voting rights?  It’s far from clear.  One approach to voting rights reform would have been to reach out quietly to Republicans and to try to negotiate a limited bill that could win bipartisan support.  Biden could express optimism that reasonable Republicans would come to the table and work something out.  If that effort failed, Democrats could have blamed Republicans. ...

Consumer inflation lessens in December; real wages increase, but a consumer slowdown remains likely Consumer prices increased 0.5% in December, a deceleration from the past several months. But this is still well above the typical monthly increase in prices pre-pandemic:  On a YoY basis, at 7.1% consumer inflation is the highest since the big Reagan recession of 1981-82. My favorite measure, CPI ex energy, is also up 5.6% YoY, and tied for...

Today the conservative majority of Supreme Court Justices decided that federal vaccine mandates are unconstitutional, that states rights and employer rights are more important than the public’s welfare in this time of pandemic. It is likely that their decision will result in the unnecessary death of as many as 250,000 Americans. Let it be on their heads. Let history show for all times that these 250,000 unnecessary deaths are upon the heads of...

Some libertarians oppose vaccine mandates by claiming that unvaccinated people only impose costs on themselves. However, as I noted in an earlier post, we’re all paying for the vaccine hesitancy stirred up on the right. From JAMA (footnotes omitted): Findings suggest that insurers heavily subsidized the costs of ivermectin prescriptions for COVID-19, even though economic theory holds that insurers should not cover ineffective care. Wasteful...

The United States is currently recording over 700,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day and the number is rising rapidly.  Fortunately, vaccines are quite effective at preventing severe disease, and Pfizer’s anti-viral drug, Paxlovid is remarkably effective at preventing death and severe illness from Covid-19.  However, only 265,000 courses of Paxlovid are expected by the end of January, and Paxlovid needs to be taken early in the course of illness...

One of those Matadors of the Culture Industry When Theodor Adorno referred to “one of those matadors of the culture industry,” in his “Free Time” radio lecture, he was presumably referring to the idols of stage, screen, television, or recording studio who are the staples of the supermarket tabloid personality cult. Oddly, though, his construction of the paragraph leaves open the interpretation that Adorno himself is “one of those  matadors” and...

The Central Asian Alphabet Issue  It remains too soon to comment in detail on the current upheaval in Kazakhstan as it is simply impossible to figure out what is happening, with multiple conflicting accounts and claims coming from many sources. Rather I want to comment on a deeper question that has been brought up in connection with this, although not central to it, but one that affects Kazakhstan’s Central Asian neighbors as well: what alphabet...

When a fellow CNN correspondent asked their own Dana Bash what were the underlying causes of the nation’s partisan gridlock, Bash replied, “Three things: redistricting, redistricting, and redistricting.” Congress, let’s get it right. First off, Congressional Districts are under the purvey of federal, not state, law because the constitution says: Section. 4. The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives,...