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Welcome to the party, pals The Atlantic this morning delivers a full spread of articles announcing the imminent demise of the Late Great United States of America, all part of its “If Trump Wins” series. There is growing alarm about another Trump presidency and reason for it. But it’s not as if Robert Kagan’s, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” just last week did not give many of us sleepless nights already. Conventional wisdom has finally caught up with what Ruth Ben-Ghiat (“Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present“) and Timothy Snyder (“On Tyranny“) have warned about for years. This Trump guy whom sane people treated as an ignorant, loudmouth jerk, and his red-hatted band of equally loudmouth sycophants and Beltway collaborators, are a genuine threat to the country’s existence. Have you heard? They ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There’s video. Trump is out for revenge, writes David Frum. He will dump NATO, warns Anne Applebaum. His second term will be all loyalists, lapdogs and cronies, explains McKay Coppins.

. Yours truly has for several years been conducting a doctoral course in statistics for students in educational science where SPSS has been used. Unfortunately, Bayesian analysis has not been available in that program. With version 29 of SPSS, things have changed.  So, next year, there will be a new addition to the course!

That’s one explanation That Statista chart is from May 10, 2022. A followup from Oct 18, 2023 reports the market has cooled somewhat since last year. Nevertheless: While house prices have continuously grown in recent years, incomes have not followed at the same pace. That means that for aspiring homeowners, purchasing a home has become increasingly unaffordable. In a survey among people actively looking to buy a home, one in three millennials cited the high house prices as the main barrier to homeownership. Meanwhile, inflation is on the rise and has forced the Federal Reserve to introduce a gradual increase in interest rates, leading to a double increase in the cost of borrowing. As a result, homebuyer sentiment plummeted, Americans across all age groups agreeing that the current time was not a good time to buy a home. Home ownership is still one of the main ways Americans build wealth. If I were Gen Z, I’d be pissed too. The Redfin chart above is also from summer 2022.

To help celebrate our twenty-fifth year of being on the information superhighway, we have reached out to some of our former columnists for check-ins and updates. Today’s featured columnist, Susan Schorn, is a former Column Contest winner. She wrote sixty-one essays of Bitchslap, her column about women’s rights and self-defense, from 2009 to 2015. We’re pleased to have her back on our pages with her sixty-second installment.

Bitchslap debuted in 2009 as “a column about women and fighting,” because they say write what you know, and what I knew was that I always seemed to be fighting—for safety, or autonomy, or simply to not be pushed around—and most of those fights were related to my identity as a woman. The column’s premise was apparently novel enough to sustain an audience: that fighting is not without its costs, but it works surprisingly well against bullies, and even when it doesn’t work, it’s preferable to helplessness. Sometimes it’s even fun.

When the narrative is dominated by people who look different and don't share ethnic minority experiences, the system will continue to fail, writes Ramandeep Kaur

1. “Go back to sleep, let me drive, let me think, let me figure it out.”

2. “I can’t get around the river in front of me.”

3. “I don’t know, the cookies make me nervous.”

4. “I’m so sorry, but the motorcade will have to go around me this time.”

5. “Why did you listen to that man? That man’s a balloon.”

6. “Karen, I know where we are and where we’re going to be. How can you trust this stupid app more than you can trust me?”

7. “I’d rather walk all the way home right now than to spend one more second in this place.”

8. “So blame it on me. I really don’t care.”

9. “Turn off the light. I don’t want to die tonight.”

10. “It’s half your fault so half forgive me.”

11. “Stop backseat driving for once in your life.”

12. “I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders.”

13. “Can’t you find a way? You are in this too.”

In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Rick and Morty, FOX "News"/Greg Gutfeld, Doctor Who, The Powerpuff Girls, Supernatural/Mark Sheppard & more!

The job of journalism is not to reinforce a pre-existing bias, writes Nafeez Ahmed

More than just catchy, Beethoven’s Fifth is a true Romantic masterwork that channelled self-expression and inner turmoil

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

Devon, 1970s: I’m a rector’s son, hanging out with Boz the biker. My life is about to open up – what does it promise for him?

- by Tim Pears

Read at Aeon

Wishing trees, jewels, unfading flowers – what place do these sensual pleasures have in the ascetic life of Buddhist monks?

- by Simran Agarwal

Read at Psyche

An analysis compares the level of unauthorized border crossing attempts by different source nations before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump’s brazen climate denialism is being ignored or downplayed — have news outlets given up on even pretending they care about climate chaos?

UMass.edu Journalist, author and antiwar organizer Norman Solomon presented the second annual Ellsberg Lecture, titled “The Madness of Militarism: Nothing can be Changed Until it is Faced,” on Nov. 15 in the Integrative Learning Center, room N151 and via Zoom.

On November 27, 2023, the Economic Affairs Committee of the British House of Lords completed their inquiry into the question – Bank of England: how is independence working? – by releasing their 1st Report after taking evidence for several months – Making an independent Bank of England work better. The report is interesting because it…

I saw a man on the street interview this week in which an RFK Jr fan was going on about the “Kennedy legacy.” RFK Jr is a certified nut who was pulled into the race by ratfucker Steve Bannon. Let’s just hope he doesn’t get on the ballot anywhere important.