Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Democrats, Ignore your Marriage Counselors

Hello everyone. It has been a while but… Anyway, this is my thinking on the question asked here a few days ago: Do Democrats and Progressives need a marriage counselor or a divorce lawyer. It is long, so forewarned. First, let’s be clear on the idea of the Overton Window. Wikipedia notes the creator’s view […]

Somebody better call DOGE . . .

According to Kevin Drum, the Senate budget resolution earmarks $170 billion for border security; the House budget proposal ponies up $190 billion.  5 minutes of googling was not sufficient to figure out how this unimaginable pile of money will be spent.  Let’s assume half is for deportation.  That’s $85 billion, if we go with the […]

Ignore Pete Hesgeth

The current House and Senate budget proposals both include defense increases of about $100-150 billion over ten years, or about $10-15 billion per year in nominal dollars. Toy Sec Def Hegseth is proposing a cut in defense spending of -$70 billion per year. Anyone who thinks the House and Senate will pass a bill with […]

Poultry farms are America’s “wet market” for the next pandemic

“In the facilities—the artificial ecosystems—that now house much of Earth’s terrestrial vertebrate biomass, constraints on virulence that prevail in natural ecosystems are not merely removed. Virulence is actually favored. In the words of Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, the viruses are “a response to the selection pressures that exist in a […]

We Should Abolish “Capital”

– by Steve Roth Originally posted at Wealth Economics “Capital” is polysemous; it has multiple meanings. People, notably including economists (who should know better), constantly muddle those meanings together even within a single sentence, so that nobody including the speakers and writers themselves knows, or can know, what the speaker is saying. It’s a centuries-old dumpster fire — conceptual and […]

Associating Microplastics in Mice and Humans

We eat a lot of different products that are packaged in plastic packaging. Plastic content leaches into the water we drink from product packaging and throwaway garbage. Unless you are filtering it out in some fashion such as reverse osmosis or another membrane type of filter, microplastic content can buildup in humans. ~~~~~~~ Scientists observe […]

There won’t be defense spending cuts

For those who were duped into believing that DOGE is serious about defense budget cuts rather than centralizing control of spending and aligning spending with the political priorities of the Trump/Musk Administration, here’s Secretary of Defense Hesgeth: “Hegseth said beginning immediately, the Pentagon will pull 8% — or roughly $50 billion — from nonlethal programs […]

Trump FTC Cuts Ties with American Bar

Trumps FTC believes the ABA is corrupt. Having been around enough attorneys in my lifetime, they are not corrupt. They are smarter than we are on legalities. Reading the first sentence of Trump’s FTC letter reveals their beliefs: “federal antitrust enforcers and the private antitrust bar have enjoyed a cozy relationship facilitated by the Antitrust […]

Jobless claims: possibly the final “steady as she goes” report

– by New Deal democrat Let’s take our weekly look at jobless claims. These are a short leading labor market indicator. Also, it is likely that the firings in the federal labor force will shortly be reflected in this data. This week initial claims rose 5,000 to 219,000, while the four week average declined -1,000 […]