The Angry Bear

This Life: faith, work, and free time The blurbs on the first few pages of Martin Hägglund’s This Life are so surprisingly accurate that it would be hard to describe the book with an original superlative. “Monumental!” “Powerful!” “Important!” “Electrifying!” “Profound, thoughtful, compelling, and insightful!” Those blurbs were not idle puffery. All that is left for me to add is that I liked it very much. Oh, just one more thing… Hägglund’s...

Agricultual Economist and Farmer Michael Smith, Sherman Act, Part 2: The Small Farmer Pitchfork Army Most are now aware of the Biden Administrations recent announcement and press briefing for a plan to combat prices in the meat industry. If not, you can find a bit of information here:  Readout of President Joe Biden’s Event with Farmers, “Ranchers on his Action Plan for a More Competitive Meat and Poultry Supply Chain“ And you can also see...

To say that the Republican Party since Nixon had pandered to the lowest common denominator isn’t quite accurate, is it? Probably because the term is derived from the arithmetical least common denominator which makes one think of a unique number. Perhaps lowest common denominator was a more polite way of saying that the Republican Party would thenceforth pander to lowbrows, to their basest; to ignorance. Theirs was a war on elites, and, of course,...

Almost everything wrong with the libertarian approach to covid policy has been on display at the Brownstone Institute recently:  misrepresentation of facts, misdirection, revisionist history.  The bad faith is almost beyond belief, except, well, it’s exactly what we have come to expect from the fine libertarians at Brownstone.  The 6 essays I discuss here were published by the Brownstone Institute from December 4 to December 12, 2021.  This post is...

First data releases of 2022 confirm manufacturing strength, construction slowdown The first December data, the forward-looking ISM manufacturing report, has been released. Yesterday construction spending for November was also released. Let’s take a look at both. The ISM index, especially its new orders subindex, is an important short leading indicator for the production sector. In December the index declined from 61.1 to 58.7, as did the...

Oil prices rose 55% in 2021, the most since 2009, while natural gas prices rose 47%, the most since 2016, Focus on Fracking, RJS Oil prices rose for a second week after the initial Omicron selloff, as oil traders and most everyone else have become convinced that Omicron poses little risk to oil demand . . . after rising 4.3% to $73.79 a barrel last week on trouble in Libya, a big drawdown on US crude supplies, and on a refinery explosion in...

Opinion Piece this morning comes from retired U.S. Army General Steven Anderson, CBS News I do not necessarily put-up military commentary. This brigadier general appears to have his “stuff” together on the topic. It is a good read. Forty-three years ago, I swore an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Back then, who could have imagined the domestic attack on our democracy a year ago this week? In the...

Grading my 2021 forecasts Critical self-examination is, or at least ought to be, part of the process of making forecasts. After all, how can you learn if you don’t see how earlier hypotheses panned out? As I have usually done, let’s take a look back at how I forecast 2021 was going to look, to see how well I did. To make a long story short, according to the long and short leading indicators I track, there was never any real doubt that the...

RJS, MarketWatch 666, October’s Case–Shiller HPI; Advance Economic Indicators for November With the major month end reports already released last week, the only widely watched report released this week was the Case-Shiller Home Price Index for October from S&P Case-Shiller, which doesn’t even report any prices of homes, but just a index generated by averaging relative sales prices of homes that sold during August, September and October against...