The Angry Bear

Senate Republicans are being dispicable as usual. They manage to combine bad intent and pathetic incompetence in a display which must delight all right thinking people. The issue is the debt ceiling. For months Mitch McConnell has asserted both that the debt ceiling shall and must be raised and that he plans to blame Democrats for raising it. Your not supposed to say that out loud Mitch. He tells journalists that he will trick voters into...

One non horrible effect of the Covid 19 epidemic is that people have become interested in immunology. I am pleased by this, but have the sense that journalists over-simplify. Roughly they act as if the immune system consists of circulating antibodies and killer t-cells. I think this post might be of some interest to some readers. First acquired immunity does indeed come in two types called cellular and humoral. That does refer to killer...

On November 10, 2021 (I think), the Brownstone Institute posted an article entitled “20 Essential Studies that Raise Grave Doubts about COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates” by Paul Elias Alexander.  Alexander’s essay featured selective quotations, misleading spin, and (arguably) fabrication.  I wrote up a lengthy response to Alexander’s article, but never finalized my take.  Then today I was trying to decide what to do with my piece, which is long and...

Many months and many mutations ago, I argued that one shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was enough to protect against the original Sars Cov2. Since then delta. It doesn’t especially evade, but is more generally fit and I thought (and probably didn’t post) that two shots are needed given delta. Now omicron. Pfizer just claimed that three shots are enough against omicron, although two are not. Putting my shoulder where my mouth wasn’t (until...

Coronavirus dashboard for December 7: since further mass vaccination could only happen at gunpoint, the Biden Administration had better come up with a ‘Plan B, New Deal democrat No significant economic news today, so let’s catch up a little bit with Covid. There are still distortions in the 7 day average data, as States did data dumps of deaths and new cases throughout last week, after not reporting over the long Thanksgiving holiday. That...

Peter Dorman, Econospeak, A Racist Screed in the New York Times Really bad, misguided, even malicious writing serves a purpose, showing in extreme form the faults that, more subtly expressed, can pass under the radar.  That’s my reaction to this execrable column from today’s New York Times on the violation the author felt when her front lawn mini-library was perused by a white couple. In a nutshell: Erin Aubry Kaplan lives in a historic black...

Blogger RJS, Focus on Fracking, Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at an 18 1/2 Year Low; Gasoline Supplies Rose by Most in 22 Weeks on a 22 Week Low in Demand The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA Weekly U.S. Ending Stocks excluding SPR of Crude Oil (Thousand Barrels) (eia.gov) US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending November 26th showed that after a switch of “unaccounted for crude...

Blogger RJS, Focus On Fracking, OPEC Decides to Increase Production, Natural Gas Prices Fall by the most in 8 years and maybe most ever Oil for the sixth consecutive week this week, as OPEC decided to increase production even as a Omicron surge loomed . . . after falling 10.4% to $68.15 a barrel last week after the discovery of a new Covid variant sent global markets tumbling, the contract price for US light sweet crude for January delivery opened...

Disposable time as a common pool resource IV — disposable time as a common pool resource In his Grundrisse, Marx identified surplus labour time as a form of disposable time. That is to say that, under capitalism, it is labour time at the disposal of capital. “The whole development of wealth,” Marx wrote, “rests on the creation of disposable time.” “In production resting on capital,” he continued three sentences later, “the existence...