The Angry Bear

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...

Construction Spending Rose 0.2% in October after Prior Months Were Much Revised Higher, MarketWatch 666, RJS The Census Bureau’s report on construction spending for October (pdf) estimated that the month’s seasonally adjusted construction spending would work out to $1,598.0 billion annually if extrapolated over an entire year, which was 0.2 percent (+/-1.2 percent)* above the revised September estimated annual rate of $1,594.8 billion...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource II — Labour is not a commodity  Labour was conventionally regarded as a private good by both classical political economists and conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke, who argued, “labour is a commodity like every other, and rises and falls according to the demand.” The counterpoint to that view, since the early 19th century is that labour (power) is not a commodity because it has characteristics that...