The Angry Bear

According to Our World in Data, as of February 25, 2022, cumulative COVID deaths per million in the United States were 14 times higher than in Australia and 259 times higher than in New Zealand.  Most of this difference was undoubtedly due to the border controls and internal lockdowns these countries used to keep COVID cases at very low levels for the past two years.  A crude comparison based on cumulative death rates suggests that these policies...

Consumers still spend, but real income declines, leaving them increasingly vulnerable to price shocks Nominal personal income was unchanged in January, while spending rose 2.1%. In real terms after inflation, personal income declined -0.5%, and personal consumption expenditures rose 1.5%, completely reversing December’s decline, and adding about 0.2%. I have stopped comparing them with their pre-pandemic levels (they are both well above that)....

Expressions that pass from hand to hand like sealed containers… In Herbert Marcuse and Planned Obsolescence I undertook to develop a theoretical foundation for ‘planned obsolescence’ from Georg Simmel’s analysis of the “preponderance of objective culture over subjective culture that developed during the nineteenth century.” My intuition has proved to be uncannily prescient. Besides the indirect influence of Thorstein Veblen — by way of Vance...

Original Sin And Planes In The Air  The original sin of the current catastrophe in Ukraine was the failure of the US and UK to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine when Putin’s Russia seized control of Crimea as they promised to do in the Budapest Accord of 1994 when Ukraine gave up the third-largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world.  They are also now in violation of that Accord now by their weak effort to save...

It is unusual for Prof. Heather Cox Richarson to have posted last night. The good Prof. of History typically rests on the weekend. Further down this post, you can read her latest. Just a bit more of my comments, some news, and then Prof. Heather. It appears the wheels of a global political and historical change are turning in a direction which “may” impact us for years to come. Global leader, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has managed to...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for February 21 – 25 at Seeking Alpha My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has added some elevated risk to a few of the numbers, but there is nothing that indicates any economic crisis. In general, there are accumulating signs that last year’s Boom is over; but on the other hand, no accumulating signs that a recession is anywhere near. In short, a...

Will Kyiv Become Like Aleppo?  There are reports that many Russian soldiers are lacking in morale for the invasion of Ukraine. They were told repeatedly like the rest of us that there would be no invasion. The Ukrainians are very similar, and most of them know Putin has exaggerated the things they have supposedly done or not done wrong.  And rather than welcoming them as liberators and throwing down their arms to surrender, the Ukrainians have...

War Comes to Kyiv | The New Yorker, Joshua Yaffa Interesting article that showed up in my inbox. This is a copy and paste ot it with minor editing. If you follow the link, there are other short articles to be read. I believe the takeaway from this article is the courage of Zelensky. The Ukraine will fall apart without him. Can the Russians be this bad militarily? The road into Kyiv is lined with military checkpoints, many of which are manned by...

RJS, Focus on Fracking, SPR at a 19 year low: total oil + products supplies, including SPR, at a 7 3/4 year low, distillate supplies at 26 month low Overall oil inventories finally rose after a million+ barrel per day jump in oil imports; commercial crude supplies saw their biggest increase since October 10th after pulling ~350k barrels per day out of the SPR, i.e. switching the deck chairs on the Titanic . . . other trends remained in...

One micron is about ten gold leaves thick. The gilded age, one. Since, and yet, there are those who would return the nation to that time. To their minds, it was the best of times; that all that need be done was rid the nation of the odious Progressive and New Deal Era laws that in fact had had nothing to do with the age’s demise, and the labor unions that formed up during the period; then let the laws of capitalism and of free markets take their...