Covering Up The Coverup I keep thinking that Fox News cannot get worse, but there seems to be no bottom to how low they can go. New lows are being exhibited in their coverage of the current Senate impeachment trial. They are fully involved in covering up the Trump administration coverup of what Trump did […]
The US-China Nothing Burger Trade Deal There has been much hype about the signing of Phase One (and probably only) US-China trade deal. However based on a front page story in today’s Washington Post, there is not much there. The US did not raise tariffs as planned, but tarifsf still remain on two thirds of […]
Further Followup On The Soleimani Assassination I wish to point out some matters not getting a lot of attention in the US media. An important one of those was reported two days ago by Juan Cole. It is that apparently it has not been determined for certain that the initial attack that set off this […]
Can The US Assassination Of Qasem Solemiani Be Justified? We know from various Congressional folks that briefers of Congress have failed to produce any evidence of “imminent” plans to kill Americans Soleimani was involved with that would have made this a legal killing rather than an illegal assassination. The public statements by administration figures have […]
Are We Living In The “Capitalocene”? I also attended the last session listed in the program at the ASSA at 2:30 on Sunday, an URPE session on “Ecology, the Environment, and Energy,” chaired by Paul Cooney. He presented on “Marxism and Ecological Economics: An Assessment of the Past, Present, and Future.” Lynne Chester presented on […]
Might We Be On The Verge Of An “Upswing”? One of the more dramatic sessions at the just-completed ASSA meetings in San Diego was an AEA panel on “Deaths from Despair and the Future of Capitalism” on Saturday at 2:30. Chaired by Angus Deaton, it focused on the book by him and his wife/coauthor Anne […]
Is The Chinese Economic System the “Mandarin Growth Model” or the “Chinese-Style Keiretsu System”? The first term in this choice was the title of a paper presented this morning (1/4/20) at the ACES/ASSA session at 8 AM in San Diego by Wei Xiong of Princeton University. It was a highly mathematical model I shall describe […]
Killing Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis Most of the attention in this recent attack by a US drone at the Baghdad Airport has been on it killing Iranian Quds Force commander, Qasim (Qassem) Solmaini (Suleimani), supposedly plotting an “imminent” attack on Americans as he flew a commercial airliner to Iraq at the invitation of its government and […]
Forward Creeping Excessmass Wins The War On Christmas “Excessmass” is a term neologized in a column in the late 1990s in the Wall Street Journal (sorry, unable to find precise date) by my JMU colleague, Bill Wood. A devout Brethren, he was and remains disgusted by the crass commercialism associated with the Christmas holiday in […]
Thiessen Balances His Policy Defense Of Trump Several days ago I posted on Marc A. Thiessen’s defense of 10 policies by Trump in WaPo. I must now credit him with today on New Year’s Eve in the same venue publishing a column “The 10 worst things Trump did in 2019.” Good for him, some balance […]