Continuing unemployment claims make new 45+ year low – by New Deal democrat New claims increased 23,000 last week to 230,000. The 4 week average of new claims increased 6,250 to 210,750: The big increase is likely affected by seasonality. It’ll be another week or two before we can tell if there is any real change […]
Commenter and Blogger RJS, Focus on Fracking, Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a new 19 year low; commercial crude inventories fall to 45 month low, total oil supplies lowest since January 20th 2012; implied gasoline demand at 11 month low The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week […]
Last time in Denver and some observations. My youngest son and I took off to the Little Big Horn to see where Custer made a fool of himself. He died for it and took a whole bunch of others with him. We spent the night in Hardin, Montana in a cheap, yet clean hotel, in […]
What are leading Democrats trying to accomplish with their current push on voting rights? It’s far from clear. One approach to voting rights reform would have been to reach out quietly to Republicans and to try to negotiate a limited bill that could win bipartisan support. Biden could express optimism that reasonable Republicans would come […]
Consumer inflation lessens in December; real wages increase, but a consumer slowdown remains likely Consumer prices increased 0.5% in December, a deceleration from the past several months. But this is still well above the typical monthly increase in prices pre-pandemic: On a YoY basis, at 7.1% consumer inflation is the highest since the big Reagan […]
Today the conservative majority of Supreme Court Justices decided that federal vaccine mandates are unconstitutional, that states rights and employer rights are more important than the public’s welfare in this time of pandemic. It is likely that their decision will result in the unnecessary death of as many as 250,000 Americans. Let it be on […]
Some libertarians oppose vaccine mandates by claiming that unvaccinated people only impose costs on themselves. However, as I noted in an earlier post, we’re all paying for the vaccine hesitancy stirred up on the right. From JAMA (footnotes omitted): Findings suggest that insurers heavily subsidized the costs of ivermectin prescriptions for COVID-19, even though economic […]
The United States is currently recording over 700,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day and the number is rising rapidly. Fortunately, vaccines are quite effective at preventing severe disease, and Pfizer’s anti-viral drug, Paxlovid is remarkably effective at preventing death and severe illness from Covid-19. However, only 265,000 courses of Paxlovid are expected by the […]
One of those Matadors of the Culture Industry When Theodor Adorno referred to “one of those matadors of the culture industry,” in his “Free Time” radio lecture, he was presumably referring to the idols of stage, screen, television, or recording studio who are the staples of the supermarket tabloid personality cult. Oddly, though, his construction of […]