When I was growing up in East Tennessee in the 1960s, there was a local grocery chain owner and right-wing politician named Cas Walker who railed about, among other things, water fluoridation. Water fluoridation was alleged to be a communist plot. If so, then God must be a communist, since water in some parts of the country is naturally fluoridated. In fact, that natural fluoridation, and its correlation with lower incidence of tooth decay, helped...

Firearms and Public Health in the United States David Hemenway, Ph.D New England Journal of Medicine I have added things I know of to this article. I have an aversion to the word gun or guns by themselves. So get used to it if you expect to comment on this issue. Firearms are killing tools. If you shoot targets like I did pre-USMC, you get really good at staying in the black at various distances. This is a good article. It keeps the...

Robert Farley has replied to my recent post on the obsolescence of naval power. Unlike our previous exchange, a pile-on where I was (as he points out) in a minority of one, Robert’s tone is mostly civil this time, and I intend to reciprocate. Our disagreements have narrowed a fair way. On many points, it’s a matter of whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. For example, Farley observes that despite Houthi attacks, 2 million tonnes of shipping per day is passing through the...

I told you this was coming.

Work Harder, Less Money?

Aussie Miracle or Time Bomb?

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog The bifurcation of the new vs. existing home markets continued in March, per the report on existing home sales and prices yesterday. Remember that, unlike existing homeowners, house builders can vary square footage, amenities, lot sizes, and offer price and/or mortgage incentives to counteract the effect of interest rate hikes.On a seasonally adjusted basis, existing home sales declined from 438,000 to...

Revealing Economic Crisis Warning Signs

by Katherine Bindley Wall Street Journal AB: I have a partial subscription to WSJ which I keep on forgetting. This article popped up. I agree with the author, the LED Headlights are too bright. Not only are these my thoughts. Mechanical Engineer Victor Morgan, in South Carolina has a light meter on his dashboard. He has been taking readings of the glare from no less than 156 oncoming cars and analyzing the contents of FMVSS 108 table XIX. FMVSS...

from Lars Syll No sooner had I finished my comment on the irrelevancy of economics but I had confirmation — albeit unwittingly — in this morning’s Financial Times.  There on the editorial page was a short column by Soumaya Keynes talking about the rise of Hank. For those of you not on the cutting edge, “Hank” stands for Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian, as in a complicated model of the economy. Hank is a whole new way of looking at model economies, with the really big breakthrough being...