Tag Archives: Hot Topics

January 21, 2022 in g’da said, Homeless On the High Desert, Ten Bears Once top-secret CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual … “Well this fun . . . Declassified June 16, 1976. “Regraded.” Ten Bears presents some methods I have seen work in business settings. Best bet, just nod your head and keep pushing. Organizations and Conferences Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite...

A Flip In Oil Markets, Econospeak, Barkley Rosser  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...

This one letter is only the beginning of what will be exposed upon reading the Trump presidential documents recently released by SCOTUS in an 8-1 decision. In case you have not been keeping up with the news, x-president (sigh . . ) lost his fight in SCOTUS to prevent those documents relating to January 6th from being released. I suspect other documents will be released as a need for such to happen is revealed. There has been so much being hidden...

Coronavirus dashboard: Omicron has peaked; now what?, New Deal Democrat  – by New Deal democratLet’s start out with the good, or at least less catastrophic news: it’s almost certain that the Omicron wave has peaked in the US. In fact, the only Census region it is still up week over week is in the Midwest: In almost all of the areas hit hard early – Puerto Rico, and the NYC and DC metro areas – cases are down sharply since peaking....

American capitalism has an everpresent desire for increased profits. Over the course of history, corporations had increased profits largely due to increased population growth. As we have seen from new data coming from the 2020 Census, population growth is beginning to stabilize and flatten, yet corporations are still expected to perform regardless of market conditions, and if population growth is no longer the cosmic funnel of operating revenues,...

Fox News and white grievance In his recent book “Kill Switch,” Adam Jentleson, a former aide to the late Senator Harry Reid, persuasively argues that the Senate filibuster arose by accident when a rule revision in 1805 failed to include the “previous question” resolution, which would require a vote on the issue pending because it was thought superfluous. He also shows by overwhelming evidence that for the past 200 years, by far the single most...

Housing ends 2021 with a bang Housing ended 2021 with a bang, as housing starts (blue in the graph below, left scale) increased to 1.702 million annualized, and permits (gold) to 1.873 million annualized, in both cases the highest level since 2006 with the sole exception of last March / January, respectively. Single family permits (red, right scale), which are the least noisy, increased to 1.128 million annualized, the highest reading since May,...

SCOTUS Denies Trump’s Demand To Withhold Docs From Jan 6th Committee DONALD J. TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES v. BENNIE G. THOMPSON, IN HIS OFFICIAL CAPACITY AS CHAIRMAN OF THE UNITED STATES HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE THE JANUARY 6TH  ATTACK ON THE UNITED STATES CAPITOL, ET ALThe application for stay of mandate and injunction pending review presented to THE CHIEF JUSTICE and by him re-ferred to the Court is denied.“To be...

RJS, Focus on Fracking, Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a new 19 year low; commercial crude inventories fall to 45 month low, total US oil supplies lowest since January 20th 2012; implied gasoline demand at 11 month low; largest jump in drilling rigs since April 1st as the Haynesville and the Marcellus are targeted for oil This Week’s Rig Count The number of drilling rigs running in the US increased for the 58th time over the past 69 weeks...

Yet another one of those Matadors  Adorno’s metaphor of the “matadors of the culture industry” didn’t fall out of the sky. Nearly four decades earlier — sometime between 1931 and 1933 — he had written several short pieces, one of which was titled “Applause.”  I came across mention of it when I was looking to see if Susan Buck-Morss had anything to say about pseudo-activity in her The Origin of Negative Dialectics. I didn’t find anything on...