Things Tony Likes; Working from Home; Political Economy; Snow in Wuxi; Tiger King; Trump Wasn't Racist

• My son Tony likes Robot Chicken, the Home Alone movie, Malcolm X, Homicide Hunter Joe Kenda, The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, The Leon character in Curb Your Enthusiasm, the Slapshot movie, playing a cricket app on his phone and ketchup bread. I'll explain three of these likes. First, I was watching a documentary about Malcom X which featured lots of footage of him speaking. Tony watched parts of the documentary and told me that he really liked him. Second, Tony likes his sports. Somehow, he came upon Cricket and asked me about it. One thing lead to another and I was downloading a Cricket app for him to play on my phone. Third, Tony is a very picky eater. He likes to eat pasta without sauce. He likes to eat bread with ketchup.

• A friend in Winnipeg, Canada tells me that he is working from home. Thinking of something silly that I could say in response, I thought to ask him if he was using his computer or shouting very loudly.

• I don't know what to make of the economics of what is going on now. I studied economics back in my school days and read a lot about it after graduating. At one point, I had the libertarian's certainty of free-market economics being able to explain everything; but after the crash of '08, I found nothing about what was going on in the world of trade and finance made any sense. So, I gave up that certainty and freely admitted my bafflement at was taking place.. I also became more reactionary in my political and metaphysical leanings, and I saw the moral failures of capitalism, and began to realize that big corporations are things that need to be contained as much as big governments. The problems with economics as a field of study are that it is not a science, but pretends to be one; and that it somehow became divorced from the study of politics and an awareness of power relations and how elites can rig markets. Other then to say that good economics is not good politics, there isn't much economics can tell us about what is happening today. The solution is to bring back the study of Political Economy. Why it got divorced into two fields: political study and economic science could probably say a lot about how it was we got into the state of affairs we find ourselves in now. Economic theory that does not take into account the power relationships between groups in an "economy" is useless. That is why the elimination of economic science and political science, and their amalgamation into political economy is an absolute necessity.

• Snow on a Saturday morning in Wuxi. This was after there had been days when the temperatures had been in the mid-twenties Celsius and Tony & I had been playing baseball.

• I finished watching the Netflix documentary Tiger King. A crazy story. A celebration of American Weird. No one in this documentary comes off well and yet you can't help but sympathize with the Joe Exotic character and loathe his nemesis Baskin.

• If Trump was being racist, he would have made a point of calling it the Asian Flu. He didn't. And to those who would say that saying you can't trust Chinese numbers is racist: No one is saying that you can't trust the numbers coming out of Japan or South Korea...