The Angry Bear

My brother lives in Lucca, Italy ( near Florence) and sent the following report. We’re not quite at the “Bring Our Your Dead” stage. Schools & museums are closed, flights are being canceled, but all in all life in Lucca is quiet & normal.  Many shops are closed for their usual breaks this time of year. There are virtually no tourists, but this is the slow season. Nancy just spent the weekend in Florence and found it to be delightfully empty....

Now Tired Joe gets to sit, relax a bit….not worry about record players and 150 million gun deaths…. https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/486553-rising-march-9-2020 Of course the DNC has now changed the rules again! Tulsi will not be allowed to debate….oh….but “she has no real support,” you say! So what? Rules can be altered for billionaires….what a party for the rich and privileged. DNC is Trump-light. As Hillary said, “Rules are rules”….except when...

February jobs report: a blowout HEADLINES: +273,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate declined -0.1% to 3.5% U6 underemployment rate rose 0.1% to 7.0% Leading employment indicators of a slowdown or recession   I am highlighting these because many leading indicators overall have strongly suggested that an employment slowdown is here. The following more leading numbers in the report tell us about where the economy is likely to be a few months from now. These...

When I was commenting at Slate’s  Moneybox and Best of the Fray sites at least a decade or so ago, Dahlia Lithwick had taken over Jurisprudence. She always gave a sound and fair analysis of court decisions, the impacts of those decisions, and the resulting politics coming out of them. Fast forward   .  .  .  I was reading Schumer’s “reap the whirlwind” comments wondering why he would make such and then wondering why Chief Justice Roberts had not winced...

Good overview from the CDC.

Hey, I am stealing one (or at least a partial) from another blog. It is on target as I would say and it will provoke comments or at least some thinking about the issue. Dying of Whiteness, How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland Lawyers, Guns, & Money, Erik Loomis (Blog writer and Reviewer) I have not read this book; but it appears to be interesting enough to read. A couple of paragraphs in the review caught my attention...

“…we have seen a calculation… which shows that the fixed charges, for machinery and the general management of a mill, are as nearly as possible equal to the cost of wages in the process.” In my earlier post on the “Wild and Dangerous Scheme” I teased the “egregious accounting error” committed by the author of the 1844 article in the Economist. In plain terms the error was double counting — the author deducts 16.5% from wages to compensate for a decrease...

I want to weigh in briefly on the Biden/Sanders debate that’s been going on here over the past few days. No links, this is a quickie. There are two issues for Democratic primary voters to consider: 1) who will be a better president and 2) who is more electable in a race against Trump. Both questions are hard to answer. It is very difficult to say who would be a better president, even for people on the left of the Democratic party. Presidents have very...

(Dan here…Late to AB posting…what a difference a day or two can make.  Elizabeth Warren has withdrawn from the election process and is not endorsing either Biden nor Sanders at the moment.  Peter weighs in speculating on what is next.) 1. Biden benefitted from a wave of (orchestrated) last minute endorsements. One effect of this wave was to divert attention from Biden the candidate to the endorsers and their combined bandwagon effect. Particular...