The Angry Bear

Florida’s Surgeon General Is Sending a Dangerous Message | MedPage Today, Thresia B. Gambon, MD, MBA, MPH March 15, 2022 There is a lot of unclear and purposeful misleading messages coming from politicians, pundits, and the internet. Doctors are also not clear in explaining Covid prevention. The result being the public not understanding whether to be vaccinated or not. Get the shots, the jabs, the boosts, whatever you may call it. It will not...

1974 Redux?  The stock of Thomas Robert Malthus rises and falls with the real price of food. He was not the inventor of his theory of population, a point that Karl Marx threw at him among other criticisms, with such people as James Anderson and Benjamin Franklin preceding him with pretty much the entiretly of his theory. But his timing was much better, publishing the flawed first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, a year...

At the Atlantic, Ed Yong reminds us that COVID has not disappeared, and that our governing institutions are hardly covering themselves in glory on this issue: This week, Congress nixed $15 billion in coronavirus funding from a $1.5 trillion spending bill, which President Joe Biden then signed on Tuesday. The decision is catastrophic, and as the White House has noted, its consequences will unfurl quickly. Next week, the government will have to cut...

RJS, Focus on Fracking; Oil prices went on another wild ride, but i’m going to copy what I wrote on the monthly OPEC report here. The oil surplus, albeit small, surprised me. If it was going to happen, it would be during the winter for most of the planet’s driving population. Note this is for February, before the Russian sh*t really hit the fan . . . February global oil surplus of 360,000 barrels per day is first in 13 months, despite OPEC...

Green grass is growing finally down south as some rainfalls are being received east of the Colorado River, not that Colorado River, the other one that moves through Austin, and has very little to do with it’s namesake. Grass growing in the spring brings on the grazing and let’s the ranchers get off the expensive feed. Now is also the time to sow sorghum for the herds to clear in the next few months. Net, net it’s still an expensive business to be...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for March 14 – 18 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The economic indicators are coming under pressure from both ends. The long leading indicators are being buffetted by inflation and the Fed, as interest rates generally rise, and the yield curve gets very tight. Meanwhile the coincident and short leading indicators have been hit by the exogenous event of the war in...

Really Awful “Rhetoric”  “Rhetoric” in quotes because it may not be just that.  I have not been posting much, partly because I had a wedding for daughter, Sasha, last weekend, but also because I am seriously demoralized by the current situation, and every time I think I have something intelligent to say about the economics of it, that seems to keep changing, although I shall soon. Anyway, I have to get off my chest what I have heard from my...

First, a twitter thread on war reporting (click through if interested): A thread about how we report supposed victories in war (this one and others), why they dont matter nearly as much as people claim, and how they actually deceive us into understanding what really matters. Partly motivated by this @nytimes headline. pic.twitter.com/oGRK4Niac2— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) March 20, 2022The pictures coming out of Ukraine have played an...

RJS, Focus on Fracking, Commercial crude supply rise as SPR falls to 19½ year low, total oil + products supply at new 95 month low; exports of distillates at a 20-month high after largest drop in domestic demand in 18 months The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending March 11th indicated that even after a big increase in our oil exports, we...