The Angry Bear

the total nonsense coming out of Washington D.C.? When I wake up in the morning, I retreat down stairs to the kitchen, turn the coffee pot on, and grab an oat, oat bran, and grd flax seed muffin loaded with fiber. I make these for myself (although my wife of 49 years grabs one on occasion) to combat cholesterol and add fiber to my daily diet for other purposes. In combination with extended  walks outside or on a treadmill, I maintain. Bears eat a lot of...

I am going to attempt a briefer clearer version of this post I am interested in critiquing (and mostly praising) the CARES Act and discussing what still needs to be done. I think my points (if any) are that an extraordinary unforseen crisis simplifies some issues and relaxes some constraints. I will now go by topic 1. Aid to the unemployed. There are sudddenly many more people without market income. They need help. Here I applaud the decision to give...

In the last two weeks of March and the first week of April, 2020 16.5 million new claims for unemployment were filed in the U.S. After the novel coronavirus is successfully contained some but not all of those jobs will return. The post-pandemic economy will not be the same as the economy before and to assume a return to business-as-usual economic growth would be folly. There will need to be immediate share-the-work policies along with basic income...

This is interesting. In addition to the two huge multi center phase III trials of Remdesivir for Covid 19 with estimated completion some time in May 2020, there is a smaller but very large trial in Beijing with estimated completion May 1 2020. The East is Remd ! May Day May Day May Day “Estimated Study Completion Date : May 1, 2020” Finally there is a very large trial in Hubei province with estimation completion date April 27 2020 “Estimated Study...

Trump All Over The Place On Oil Prices Indeed, are we surprised? But POTUS has reached a new level of hypocrisy on all this. So a while ago when oil prices began falling sharply, Trump bragged about how much this was going to help consumers, and he should get credit for it, of course. More recently, since WTI crude and even Brent fell below $30 per barrel (with WTI just over 20 right now, and Brent just over 30), he became worried about his pals in the...

I have had this re-posted today because I believe it is as relevant today as when I wrote it in May, 2009.  My hope is that this event we are living moves enough new people to realize the society we built is not sustainable.  My hope is that one of the basic questions I was trying to answer in a more completely when I started blogging at AB is answered in a manor such that the nation and ultimately humanity becomes more inclusive: Why do we have an...

Thinking about the coronavirus is bleak, so let’s do some political philosophy to cheer ourselves up. Libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan has a new post up claiming that our obligations to help strangers are much weaker than we might think they are, and may not exist at all, because most people are “morally very bad”. Brennan begins with this question: To what degree are our moral obligations to provide help and assistance to strangers reduced because...

Coronavirus dashboard for April 13: Plateauing and stasis Here is the update through yesterday (April 13). The bottom line is that infections and deaths appear to have plateaued, while there has been no progress towards any “test, trace, and quarantine” regimen that is the necessary next step; and to the contrary Trump appears to be bound and determined to try to reverse lockdowns anyway. Number and rate of increase of Reported Infections (from Johns...

A thought for Sunday: a brief history of Republics anticipates Trump I just finished reading William R. Everdell’s “The End of KIngs: A History of Republics and Republicans,” which was originally published in 1983. It was interesting to read a book that treated Watergate as recent history! I want to write at more length about this book, but for now, consider the following excerpts and consider how they relate to our current situation. In his chapter about...