The Angry Bear

I have no special insight on any foreign policy issue, but if you’re interested in a no-nonsense defense of Biden’s policy see this post by Scott Lemieux. His key points are (my interpretation/paraphrase): Long term low-engagement occupation was not a serious option, the only choices on the table were long term escalation or pulling out. (This is an important point to me. If low-engagement occupation could have worked long-term, that would...

Biden Follows Trump On Foreign Policy  We are now looking at a humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan.  It looks like the Taliban will probably take control of Kabul and thus Afghanistan in the near future. Reports already show that where they control women cannot go to school and appear in public without a veil in public and much more. Many women there are unfortunately going to suffer greatly as a result of this. I am so very deeply sorry. Yes,...

George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki has filed suit against GMU over its policy of requiring students and staff to be vaccinated against covid.  Zywicki does not argue that any vaccine mandate is unconstitutional.  Instead, he claims that GMU’s vaccine mandate violates his constitutional rights to bodily integrity and medical choice because he has recovered from covid and has natural immunity.  In his view, only a mandate with an...

Scenes from the July jobs report [Note: I haven’t put up a Coronavirus dashboard in almost a week. I’ll try to get around to that later today or tomorrow. It isn’t *all* bad news.] Last Friday’s jobs report for July was probably the most uniformly positive report I have seen since I started writing about them going on 15 years ago. Let’s take a look at a few of the most salient items.First of all, unemployment (blue in the graph below) at...

Disposable forces, disposable class Thomas Chalmers undoubtedly cribbed his “disposable population” from Turgot’s classe disponible. Turgot’s meaning seems to be different from Chalmers’s. Turgot uses the term to refer to the class’s revenue coming from a surplus of produce and thus being available for use however the proprietor wishes. That is the revenue could be used for luxury consumption or it could be used for the improvement of lands,...

for Final Demand Goods, Final Demand Services, and Intermediate Services; and a 46 year High for Prices of Intermediate Goods, Commenter and Blogger RJS, MarketWatch 666 The seasonally adjusted Producer Price Index (PPI) for final demand rose 1.0% in July, as prices for finished wholesale goods rose 0.6% while margins of final services providers rose 1.1%…that increase followed a June report that also had the PPI 1.0% higher, but with prices for...

June JOLTS report: at last, new hires (slightly) outpace record job openings This morning’s (Aug. 9) JOLTS report for May was the best we have seen since the immediate rebound from the pandemic lockdowns.  There was yet another record level continued all of the unfilled job openings, yet another new record low in layoffs and discharges, an enhanced number of people quitting their jobs, and finally – for the first time this year – a huge number...

Politics and the Pandemic: Why I Think Paul Krugman Is Wrong  Krugman has a piece in the New York Times today that offers an explanation for why Republicans oppose every measure—vaccination, masking, limits on indoor gathering—that could reverse the pandemic.  He says it’s because the Democrats support them and that Biden would take credit for reduced caseloads, hospitalizations and deaths.  Since owning the libs is the guiding philosophy of...

For months now, hard-core libertarians have been crusading against covid lockdowns in uncompromising terms.  This is a topic that merits careful study, but let’s take a brief look at some of their arguments, focusing on Australia. The libertarian case against lockdowns can be summarized as follows: Benefits:  The benefits of lockdowns are low, because 1) covid is not terribly dangerous to begin with (not much more dangerous than seasonal flu,...