The Angry Bear

Running on Empty tonight. VA sent me a letter asking for all the information I believe was already sent to them. Some I have found rather quickly by exploring U of M records. Platelet counts for certain periods when they just almost disappeared. I need to talk to them tomorrow and see what the issue is or was. I have been in some of the little towns near Switzerland Rietheim-Weilheim, Germany comes to mind. Nice read . . . enjoy. Villages...

– by New Deal democrat Initial jobless claims will be up against some very challenging comparisons for the next 6 months or so, due to some unresolved post-COVID seasonality. Which means that the headline numbers this week, which look very benign at the surface, are not quite so good as they have been for the past year. For the week, initial claims rose 6,000 to 225,000. The four week moving average declined -750 to 224,250. Continuing claims,...

Somewhere, there is a correlation between the two . . . The Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico dockworker strikes are over. The strike by tens of thousands of dockworkers on the East and Gulf coasts has been called off, after the International Longshoremen’s Association and the U.S. Maritime Alliance, representing ocean carriers and port operators, reached a tentative agreement on wages. The two sides also agreed to extend the existing contract...

– by New Deal democrat I wanted to follow up on a point I made yesterday: although manufacturing is no longer a big enough slice of the US economy to bring about an economic downturn on its own – unless for some reason the manufacturing downturn were unusually severe – when it is paired with a downturn in construction, that historically has been a reliable (but of course not perfect!) harbinger of recession. And while yesterday’s construction...

This was the only question and answer that mattered. The Times and various other news outlets are elsewhere on the topic of losing the 2020 Election. I remember William Saletan writing articles for Slate Magazine “The Fray” while I was in the comments section reading them and then doodahman;s comments picking Saletan’s commentary apart. William is picking up on an important topic which The Times and other news outlets are purposely ignoring....

The recurring bleat of vaccine denialists is that COVID should be addressed through “herd immunity.” Well, OK, a vaccinated population has herd immunity, but that’s not what they mean. They mean herd immunity in the sense of the Black Plague—the people who didn’t die were immune.Apart from all the deaths caused by COVID infections in unvaccinated people, there’s the issue of long COVID. While its etiology is poorly understood, its reality is certain....

I am not sure I would call this similar to Chicago politics. Which is something I lived with or observed for a number of years. It is a bit of crooked mixed with a bit of silly. Read on . . . Low move by high court may nullify Arizona votes on Make Elections Fair Act, AZCentral The Make Elections Fair Act would flush Arizona’s partisan primary election system down the toilet. It will be on the ballot in November. And we all will vote on...

Largely speaking direct labor is not the issue of costs have I have presented in another post. It is the overhead such as healthcare insurance which can better handled in another manner. Inflation grows and minimum wage income is stagnant. Studies have found little or no job loss due to Minimum Wage Laws, Economic Policy Institute There is always political heat around minimum wage increases, largely driven by concerns about job losses. The...

As Category 4 Hurricane Helene approached the Florida Panhandle, a number of Republican senators and representatives voted against supplementing disaster relief in a government funding extension which was passed by both houses of Congress. Many of the Republican lawmakers voted against the provision of additional necessary funding to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) represent states that were hit particularly hard by Hurricane...

I just finished reading “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq” by Steve Coll. By the onset of the US invasion and military occupation, I was convinced that (a) Iraq had no WMDs or active WMD programs, and (b) there was no collusion between Saddam and al Qaeda. The idea that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were allies was facially absurd. Bin Laden was a religious zealot and Hussein was...