EconoSpeak

A twitter exchange worth following up: the thing about a guy like joe rogan is that his style of podcast — endless, full of banter — is a friendship substitute for people. completely orthogonal to politics, fans who think he’s been hard done may rally emotionally around him as if standing up for a personal friend.— Steve Randy Waldman (@interfluidity) February 9, 2022 Right—amiable neighbor/bar mate/co-worker is his secret. He’s not a dick like Tucker or Limbaugh. Just an genial, widely...

 In this Sunday's Washington Post, columnist David von Drehle suggests that a way out of the difficult Russia/Ukraine situation would be for Ukraine to become like what happened with Austria in 1955 and since; it formally became officially neutral, not joining either NATO or the Warsaw Pact, and has remained so since.   For Ukraine this would in effect grant Putin his demand that Ukraine not join NATO, although it would not involve pulling NATO back from such nations as Poland the Baltic...

I am finding it difficult to proceed with writing about free time because I am not having enough opportunity to talk out these questions with people in person.

 I shall be having a parathyroid removed tomorrow at University of Virginia hospital. Will be going over this evening to avoid freezing fog.  So, I shall be out of commission for awhile.Barkley Rosser

 I note that on 1/19/22 The Intelligent Economist released its annual list of the top 100 economics blogs.  Both Econospeak and Angry Bear, which we feed into, are on the list, us again as one of the financial economics blogs while AB is in the general economics section.  They again say we are not for beginners due to the "complexity" of things we post and talk about.Barkley Rosser

The hare was a child so badly treated and offended by the other people because he had such long ears that he went off to live alone.When he sees someone, he puts his ears back; for when he hears a man's call, he thinks they are talking about his long ears. He doesn't have a tail because he didn't have one before.Walter Benjamin's "Program for a proletarian children's theater" was not published during his life. According to Jack Zipes, the editors of  Alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur...

 Should I not be posting on the ongoing threat by Putin against Ukraine that is current dominating the news? Nobody is talking about Kazakhstan.  Yes, that is right, which means maybe somebody should, if just to sort of check up on what was The Big Crisis very recently.So indeed it looks that the uprising that cost quite a few lives and resulted in a lot of damage is completely over, along with having several thousand people get arrested.  The Putin people are all praising him for bringing...

Illustration by Tom Seidmann-FreudIn the beginning, none of the animals was endowed with intelligence. When they saw a hunter coming towards them who wanted to kill them, they stopped, looked at him and were shot. So our Lord sent someone who put all the senses in a sack and put it under a big tree. The weasel noticed this, ran to the hare, told him about it and said: "Brother hare, let's go there, and if you want to take the sack, I'll give you good advice." When the hare tried to carry the...

 A long time ago, sometime before the 2008 crash, prices of Brent crude oil and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude ran close to each other.  WTI would from time to time would exceed Brent, with them kind of bouncing around as they moved along. This changed with the financial market crash of 2008, with Brent becoming chronically higher than WTI, nearly always by several dollars per barrel. For various reasons arbitrage did not operate fully to bring those prices back together again.But today...

 An article about me and my wife, Marina, has just come out at the cover story at Madison Magazine, the alumni magazine of James Madison University, where I work.www.jmu.edu/madisonmagazine.Barkley Rosser