The Angry Bear

Kamikaze anti-vaxers, Infidel753 blog INFIDEL753, Portland, Oregon, writes at a blog of his own name Infidel 753. Describes himself as an individualist, transhumanist, socialist, atheist, liberal, optimist, pragmatist, and regular guy — it has been my great good fortune to live my whole life free of “spirituality” of any kind. I know Infidel from Crooks and Liars. He posted many of our topics at Mikes Blog Round Up whenever he was in charge....

Economist Farmer Michael Smith continues his take on Agricultural Economics. The Golden Seed . . . “Drought Resistance by Engineering Plant Tissue-Specific Responses” ____________ I’ll cut to the chase, for centuries we have been searching for the golden goose to lay the golden egg. This search for perfection in an imperfect world leads our collective minds to continue to seek out this perfection, or some amalgamation or imperfect things that...

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by David Zetland Review: Shop Class as Soulcraft I can’t remember who recommended this 2009 book (subtitle an inquiry into the value of work) by Matthew B. Crawford, but I have been recommending to many people — whether they have rough or soft hands. The hook: Crawford got a PhD in political philosophy (U Chicago). After getting a job at a think tank, he decided that work was neither tangible nor useful. So he bought a motorcycle repair...

Antivax Memes  Based on various sources, including the recent NY Times podcast with interviews of vaccine resisters/hesitant, here’s my list of common elements. 1. Assuming the sole criterion for whether to take the vaccine is its effect on your own health—not taking into account whether you may infect someone else.  Antivax people nearly always justify their choice in terms of their perceived risk of getting Covid and the personal risk posed...

The most common proposals for pressuring people to vaccinate involve either vaccine mandates or vaccine passports.  As some of the comments on my previous post suggest, there is another option, viz., making the unvaccinated responsible for the cost of their covid treatment. In theory, this can be done either by denying insurance coverage to people who are unvaccinated without medical justification, or by raising health insurance premiums for...

Initial jobless claims continue in range, while continuing claims sharply decline Initial jobless claims declined another 14,000 this week to 385,000, still 17,000 above their best pandemic levels of 368,000 set on June 26 and July 10. The 4 week average of claims declined by 250 to 394,000, also 9,500 above its pandemic low set on July 11: Significant progress in the decline of initial claims remains stalled, as it has for the last 2...

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time VIII: Capital, volume one, chapters 6, 7 & 8 Chapter six, the buying and selling of labour power, contains neither “socially necessary labour time” nor “labour time socially necessary.” Instead it has a few synonyms: Suppose that in this mass of commodities requisite for the average day there are embodied 6 hours of social labour, then there is incorporated daily in labour-power half a day’s average social...

Peter Singer: The reason is that we are not good at protecting ourselves against very small risks of disaster. Each time we get into a car, the chance that we will be involved in an accident serious enough to cause injury, if we are not wearing a seat belt, is very small. Nevertheless, given the negligible cost of wearing a belt, a reasonable calculation of one’s own interests shows that it is irrational not to wear one. Car crash survivors who...

July jobs report: more like this, please While the NBER has declared that the recession ended in April 2020, and income, sales, and GDP have all fully recovered, two of the series that the NBER uses have yet to have made a full recovery: Industrial production, still down -1.2% compared with February 2020, and employment, still down -4.4% as of the jobs report last month. So the main questions for this month’s jobs report for July are how much...