The Angry Bear

by David Zetland This book by Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR) came out in late 2020. It’s a CliFi story about The Ministry FOR the Future, a (fictional) UN agency based in Switzerland with a mission to protect future generations from our current (climate-changing) selves. The book is long (577 pages; my page numbers are from the digital version), with interwoven stories that sometimes peter out and sometimes take up more space than you’d expect....

Q2 2021 GDP: goodbye recession, hasta la vista recovery, hello expansion Nominal GDP before inflation increased 3.1%, while real GDP for the 2nd Quarter increased 1.6%. The real annual rate of growth was thus 6.5%. Real GDP is now 0.8% higher than its last quarter before the onset of the pandemic: The recession is over, as was declared by the NBER last week. In fact, so is the recovery, if one measures by GDP, since once all of the...

In their testimony before the Committee, all four of the witnesses described the rioters as being supporters of the Recently Disposed one (t·R·D·o). More than one of the four said that many in the crowd told them, the police, that they had come to DC at the invitation of t·R·D·o to stop the steal; and, — maybe overthrow the government while they were at it. With invitation in hand, come they did. By mid-day 6 January 2021, as many as 30,000...

Farmer – Economist Michael Smith talks crop prices, Will History Repeat Itself?, AG WEB Farm Journal, Jerry Gulke High crop prices, like much what is going on in the greater economy might be transitory. The author keeps up the tone that high prices in the silage department usually only last a few months. We are seeing this with lumber. We should see this in corn as well. I would venture to even go out on a limb and posit that climate change...

Taken from: July 30, 2021; “Letters From An American,“ Professor Heather Cox – Richardson The bigger story beyond the DOJ releasing six years of trump tax returns to the House . . . “Today’s bigger story is that the House Oversight Committee released notes taken by the acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue during a phone call between former president Donald Trump and acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen on December 27, 2020....

Tags: Covid 19, covid vaccination

Coronavirus dashboard for July 28: you’re reading the right blog, ghoulish edition In writing about the economy, I make use of long and short leading indicators to forecast coincident indicators. In writing about COVID, the template isn’t much different: cases lead hospitalizations by about 2 weeks, which in turn lead deaths by about 2 weeks. Put another way, cases lead deaths by about 4 weeks. Four weeks ago I wrote: “we have to start...

Dan sent this article to me and I scan-read it as it is done in generalities. This not a criticism of the content as much as my pointing out it is done in brevity. The push is big for some form of Single Payer healthcare if one were to call it “insurance.” At some point and with the implementation of Single Payer healthcare, insurance could conceivably disappear. Medicare for All Rallies in 50 Cities Show Big Support for Universal Health Care,...

Has The Arab Spring Finally Come To A Full End?  Arguably the Arab Spring ended a long time ago.  It was, after all, Spring 2011, to be precise in terms of when the spring was.  It had arguably started a bit earlier, in December 2010 when an informal street vendor in Tunisia set fire to himself and died as a result of unhappiness over corrupt authorities demanding bribes from him he could not pay.  This led to massive demonstrations against the...