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

Low-Information Voters

“But that is what he ran on, what the people who elected him wanted him to do,” the TV journalist said in response to the interviewee’s criticism of some of a deluge of executive orders.  If what he ran on grants license, Trump has license to do almost anything. Say a presidential candidate runs promising […]

Did COVID-19 begin with raccoon dogs?

The weight of evidence—scientific and epidemiological—points to a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 with the epicenter at the Huanan wet market in Wuhan, China. Although the virus is endemic in bats, there’s little evidence for a direct jump of the virus from bats to humans in Wuhan. The most parsimonious hypothesis is that some other mammal […]

Perception of Business, Military, Education, and Religion

The differences in Republican and Democrat’s views can play out in how they view certain aspects of the US. For example, small businesses versus corporations. Both appear to perceive small business as being positive and take a negative view on corporations. I suspect it is one having a greater impact versus the other. Americans overwhelmingly […]

What is the Reality in the US Today?

Certainly, it is not what I and others were expecting to see and hear. If I read this commentary properly and understood? Prof. Heather Cox Richardson accuses todays’ US citizenry of living in some fantasy land, disregarding vaccines, taking on fascist activity and symbols, and having a lack of understanding of what the United States […]

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 […]