The Angry Bear

I was looking for information on drug related murders and inadvertently stumbled on this old Bureau of Justice of Statistics report. There’s a lot of interesting information in it. One fascinating table is this: For context, here is the population breakdown over a period that includes the timespan in the table. I’m not sure this gives enough information to say what would happen if drugs were legalized, but I am interested in your thoughts....

Commentary 1. I was bouncing around twitter and landed on the following tweet. It may be the best commentary on where we are that I have read. (click to embiggen or to see the whole picture) Obligatory comment: I know nothing about the individual who left the tweet. To the best of my knowledge I have never seen a tweet by that person before. I haven’t checked his (her? zir?) other tweets to know whether I should endorse or denounce him (her? zir?).  But...

by New Deal Democrat Free Trade, the Primrose Path, and the Blinkered Blindness of macroeconomists Here’s what I learned today: the origin of the phrase “being led down the primrose path.” It turns out that in medieval times, one meaning of the word “primrose” was the “prime,” or first or loveliest, rose.  Thus taking the primrose path was a particularly lovely journey. At least by the time of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” where Ophelia speaks of the “primrose...

Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts Sure Abigail Hauslohner, Paul Duggan, Jack Gillum and Aaron C. Davis Sure I have trusted The Washington Post, since I learned how to read. However, By Abigail Hauslohner, Paul Duggan, Jack Gillum and Aaron C. Davis are testing me. In this article they assert that an American Nazi went over to that very dark side in spite of the well meaning efforts of Weimar. “Fields looked forward to soldiering in democracy’s most...

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Trump and What Army? Donald Trump is no stranger to outrageous public poses and statements, but his refusal to condemn white supremacists post-Charlottesville has apparently struck a nerve. Has he crossed some sort of new line? Here are some dark, speculative thoughts about the events of the past few days. I believe Trump’s impeachment is an option that political and financial elites are holding in...

“Mr. Trump’s advisers have privately said they are wrestling” [embedded content] “I don’t believe the allegations against the president are accurate,” Mr. Mnuchin said of the denunciations of the president, “and I believe that having highly talented men and women in our country surrounding the president in his administration should be reassuring to you and all the American people.” Mr. Mnuchin and Gary D. Cohn, the president’s top economic adviser, who...

Yves Smith notes on the Boston rally this Saturday: Thanks to a huge and well-organized police presence, as well as strict limits imposed on the participants, follow-up to the “Unite the Right” white supremacist event in Charlottesville, the “Boston Free Speech” rally on Saturday demonstrated that the community wasn’t about to cut extreme right wing agitators much slack: “We probably had 40,000 people out here standing tall against hatred and bigotry in...

Plan the time to take a deep breath and look at Steven Harper’s Interactive Timeline: Everything We Know About Russia and President Trump at Moyers and Company. When it comes to Donald Trump, his campaign and their dealings with Russia past and present, sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the players without a scorecard. We have one of sorts — a deeply comprehensive timeline detailing what actually happened and what’s still happening in the...

The United Nations peddles garden variety sexism and racism disguised as data. Case in point is the the 2014 United Nations Global Homicide Book. Figure 1.3 and Map 1.2 (which promote racism), or Figure 5.6 (which perpetuates sexist notions) are particularly problematic. I for one refudiate the report.