Tag Archives: Hot Topics

Has The Arab Spring Finally Come To A Full End?  Arguably the Arab Spring ended a long time ago.  It was, after all, Spring 2011, to be precise in terms of when the spring was.  It had arguably started a bit earlier, in December 2010 when an informal street vendor in Tunisia set fire to himself and died as a result of unhappiness over corrupt authorities demanding bribes from him he could not pay.  This led to massive demonstrations against the...

RJS, MarketWatch 666, New Housing Starts Reported Higher in June, Building Permits 5.3% Lower The June report on New Residential Construction (pdf) from the Census Bureau estimated that new housing units were being started at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,643,000 in June, which was 6.3 percent (±11.5 percent)* above the revised May estimated annual rate of 1,546000 units started, and was 29.1 percent (±11.2 percent) above last June’s pace...

Commenter and Blogger R.J.S. brings the latest on Natural Gas and the impact on it from the heat wave. Focus on Fracking blogspot Natural gas prices rose every day this week in surging to a new 31 month high, as yet another continental heat wave loomed…after ending last week unchanged at $3.674 per mmBTU as strong export demand offset cooler weather and a bearish storage report, the contract price of natural gas for August delivery opened the week...

Farmer – Economist Michael Smith is discussing how people get into farming and the issues. There are three ways to get into faming, each with their own issues, pitfalls, and nuances. There are three distinct ways to get into farming and those paths are all not worn at all. After a few rainy and hot weeks of watching the Top Gear guy farm his land he previously was subbing out, he now wants to argue with his wife about Cartel Avocados, and...

In 1955, just past daybreak, a Chevrolet truck pulled up to an unmarked building. A 14-year-old child was in the back. The article is part of “Inheritance,” a project about American history and Black life.. It is a good offering by The Atlantic, “His Name Was Emmett Till,” Wright Thompson Depicted is the Barn where Emmet Till was strung up, beaten, and murdered on August, 28, 1955, What We Still Don’t Know About Emmett Till’s Murder – The...

Why Did Trump Initially Support The Saudi-UAE Effort To Overthrow Qatar’s Government?  One of the more curious things in 2017 in the first year of the Trump presidency was how when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) placed a boycott on Qatar and more directly attempted to overthrow the government of Qatar, President Trump openly supported this effort initially.  He would later be pulled back from this position as his first Secretary...

As if we did not have enough issues with the commercial healthcare insurance industry attempting to supplant single payer Medicare (minus setting hospital budgets, doctor fees, and pharmaceutical costs to the consumer) and the VA with commercial healthcare insurance and/or Medicare Advantage and ACOs? Commercial Healthcare Insurance and Medicare Advantage are “not” the equivalent of Medicare or the VA healthcare models. Some advocates are...

Coronavirus dashboard for July 21: brace yourself for the surge in deaths I have been warning since late June that the situation would likely look very different by the end of July. By 2 weeks ago, I wrote: “In the near future, there appears to be bad news and *relatively* “good” news for the US. The bad news is that the “delta wave” is spreading, and we should expect a real outbreak on the order of last summer’s by early August. The...

DUC well report for June, Focus on Fracking, RJS Monday of this past week saw the release of the EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report for July, which includes the EIA’s June data for drilled but uncompleted (DUC) oil and gas wells in the 7 most productive shale regions….that data showed a decrease in uncompleted wells nationally for the 13th month in a row, as both completions of drilled wells and drilling of new wells increased, but remained below...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]MarketWatch 666, R.J.S., June Producer Price Index Sets YoY Records for Final Demand and Intermediate Services; 46 year High for Prices of Intermediate Goods The seasonally adjusted Producer Price Index (PPI) for final demand rose 1.0% in June, as prices for finished wholesale goods rose 1.2% while margins of final services providers rose 0.8%…that increase followed a […] The post June Producer Price Index for Final Demand and...