Politics and the Pandemic: Why I Think Paul Krugman Is Wrong Krugman has a piece in the New York Times today that offers an explanation for why Republicans oppose every measure—vaccination, masking, limits on indoor gathering—that could reverse the pandemic. He says it’s because the Democrats support them and that Biden would take credit for reduced caseloads, […]
June Job Openings at Record High after May Record Revised Higher; Commenter RJS from MarketWatch 666; Record Low Layoffs; Hiring, Quitting, Retiring All Much Higher The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report for June from the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that seasonally adjusted job openings rose by 590,000, from 9,483,000 in May to 10,073,000 […]
Kamikaze anti-vaxers, Infidel753 blog INFIDEL753, Portland, Oregon, writes at a blog of his own name Infidel 753. Describes himself as an individualist, transhumanist, socialist, atheist, liberal, optimist, pragmatist, and regular guy — it has been my great good fortune to live my whole life free of “spirituality” of any kind. I know Infidel from Crooks […]
Antivax Memes Based on various sources, including the recent NY Times podcast with interviews of vaccine resisters/hesitant, here’s my list of common elements. 1. Assuming the sole criterion for whether to take the vaccine is its effect on your own health—not taking into account whether you may infect someone else. Antivax people nearly always justify their choice […]
The most common proposals for pressuring people to vaccinate involve either vaccine mandates or vaccine passports. As some of the comments on my previous post suggest, there is another option, viz., making the unvaccinated responsible for the cost of their covid treatment. In theory, this can be done either by denying insurance coverage to people […]
Peter Singer: The reason is that we are not good at protecting ourselves against very small risks of disaster. Each time we get into a car, the chance that we will be involved in an accident serious enough to cause injury, if we are not wearing a seat belt, is very small. Nevertheless, given the […]
There is another world and economy out there which we do not see or hear much from other than when we talk politics and then we wonder why views may be different than ours. Michael Smith has been adding an agricultural dimension to the Bear which I think we need to understand. Years back, I […]
Israel Pays For Bibi’s Successful Campaign Against The JCPOA Iran Nuclear Agreement In the last few days for the first time in many years, northern Israel has been on the receiving end of rockets fired out of southern Lebanon, the territory under the control of the Shia Hezbollah group long supported by Iranian interests, although […]
The American Right Schmoozes Hungary’s Orban Fox News’s biggest star, Tucker Carlson, is broadcasting this week from Budapest where a political festival is happening under the aegis of Hungarian leader, Victor Orban. As observers have noted, Orban has engaged in a gradual process of turning Hungary from a functioning EU democracy into an authoritarian state […]
What Does Vaccine Effectiveness Mean? by Peter Dorman When technical specialists adopt an everyday word, they often give it a meaning that differs from its everyday use. This can be misleading for nonspecialists, especially when little effort is made to explain the difference. A well-known example is “significance”, which means one thing when used in […]