If not, this is just fine. Carry on. Former President Donald J. Trump’s golf courses will host three tournaments this year for the breakaway league that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is underwriting, deepening the financial ties between a candidate for the White House and top officials in Riyadh. LIV Golf, which in the past year has cast men’s professional golf into turmoil as it lured players away from the PGA Tour, said on Monday that it would travel to Trump courses in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia during this year’s 14-stop season. Neither the league nor the Trump Organization announced the terms of their arrangement, but the schedule shows the Saudi-backed start-up will remain allied with, and beneficial to, one of its foremost defenders and political patrons as he seeks a return to power. This man, his half-wit spawn and all of his followers are trying to turn Hunter Biden’s old business dealings into a major corruption scandal and he’s doing this right in front of everyone’s eyes while he’s running for president.
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Lula's visit to Argentina, during the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) meeting, brought about a brief discussion of the possibility of a common currency. I have discussed here (as well as many guest bloggers) both currency unions, in particular the euro, and it's consequences. Note that the FT piece linked suggested that the common currency was the first step in a long process. I doubt it, in part because, if the end goal is a real currency union, it would be a terrible idea. The actual proposal by the current finance minister, Fernando Haddad, and one of his collaborators, Gabriel Galípolo, falls short of a common currency area. It is still a bad idea....
In my view, the point of this announcement was purely political, and to suggest that the integration between the two countries, one with a threatened economy [Argentina], the other with a threatened democracy [Brazil], is a priority. Both left of center presidents stand together.… There is no circumstance in which a movement in the direction of a common currency makes any sense.
The big growth in this century is expected to be in Asia, including Central Asia and Southeast Asia, and Africa — unless the West can either control the regions or disrupt their growth. Growth requires increased energy use and alternative energy other than nuclear is not there yet. And even with nuclear energy, much of the planet's uranium now comes from Kazakstan and Russia. Russia also constructs nuclear power plants.
This article is mostly about natural gas along with the geopolitics and geo-economics involved.
India Punchline
Russia’s gas union eyes Pakistan, India
M. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service and former ambassador.
India Punchline
Russia’s gas union eyes Pakistan, India
M. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service and former ambassador.
McSweeney’s mourns the passing of Paul La Farge, a brilliant writer, teacher, and scholar. We were lucky to publish an early novel by Paul called The Facts of Winter, and he contributed often to our Quarterly and The Believer. He was one of the most gentle and genuine of colleagues, and we miss him dearly.
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My favorite memory of Paul is when we were all very young, and he lived in San Francisco in an apartment of artistic friends they called Paraffin House. I forget why—a sign they stole somewhere? It was the kind of generous, joyous bohemian life I’d come to San Francisco to find. And Paul brought me into it. His intelligence and talent were evident to the world, but his kindness is what everyone will remember.
— Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less is Lost
With apologies to Gillian Flynn. And Jim Henson.
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Cool Pig. Frogs always say that’s what they want. Cool Pig is cold. Cold-blooded, that is. A feat managed by sheer willpower overriding her mammalian biology and also regular ice baths. Cool Pig never gets embarrassed by the way her Frog dances, flailing his arms in the air as if he’s experiencing a grand mal seizure. She simply smiles and karate chops the bejeezus out of the evil fast-food chain owner chasing him down for his delectable frog legs.
A little over 75 years ago, a Japan-designed Asia-Pacific community collapsed, leaving not only Japan itself but much of the region in chaos, millions dead, cities in ruins. The lesson the world – and the Japanese people – took from the catastrophe was incorporated in the constitution of Japan agreed one year later: under Article Continue reading »
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the referendum on the Voice will be won not as a virtually unanimous offering to First Nations Australians but narrowly in an ugly, bitter and divisive brawl between older and younger Australians. Even a win will have the capacity to leave divisions in the nation, and Continue reading »
On the faint memory of the smell of an oily rag, John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations public policy journal daily publishes a range of opinion and insights that shames the lack of diversity in our much bigger and better resourced media. Most importantly, P&I provides viewpoints now rare in MSM – alternatives to the groupthink Continue reading »
The Timor-Leste March 2022 Presidential elections gave a resounding win in the second round to Nobel Laureate Jose Ramos Horta, and this provided leverage for Xanana Gusmão in his efforts to wrest back the executive power he apologetically relinquished in February 2015. But Gusmão and his National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT) must still win Continue reading »
Student outcomes in literacy and numeracy continue to go backwards. Why? Missing from the list of causes for poor learning outcomes, as it is from every such list, is the ineffectiveness of the Learning Assistance Program. Student outcomes in literacy and numeracy continue to go backwards, according to the Productivity Commission in a report released Continue reading »
Recently, I had a catch-up conversation on climate change and November’s UN climate change conference (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh with one of Hong Kong’s most conscientious students of the subject. As we began to wind up, I asked what we should be taking away from the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal – confusingly called COP15 – Continue reading »
NATO support for the war in Ukraine, designed to degrade the Russian military and drive Vladimir Putin from power, is not going according to plan. The new sophisticated military hardware won’t help. Empires in terminal decline leap from one military fiasco to the next. The war in Ukraine, another bungled attempt to reassert U.S. global Continue reading »
A big spender on right-wing causes, investor Andrew Intrater gave seed money to a group formed to oust a reform-minded district attorney.
The post George Santos Benefactor Bankrolled Group Opposing LA’s Progressive Prosecutor appeared first on The Intercept.
He’s back and angrier than ever. I’m talking about Donald Trump, of course. In what is being billed as his first official event since he announced his run for the 2024 GOP nomination, Trump said so himself: “They said he’s not doing rallies, he is not campaigning. Maybe he’s lost his step. I’m more angry now and I’m more committed now than ever.” He was referring to the fact that most of the media have been commenting on his lackluster performance ever since that boring announcement speech more than two months ago. The growing consensus is that he’s lost his mojo. So when he scheduled two small events this past weekend, first in New Hampshire at the annual GOP meeting and then at South Carolina’s Capitol building, both before crowds of about 400 people each, it reinforced that assumption. Gone were the days when he would land in his shiny Trump jet or Air Force one to rapturous crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. Now he’s just another Republican presidential hopeful hanging around diners and glad-handing the local officials.
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Hovertext:
I just worry kids will never know the pleasure of convincing your exhausted mother that you'll shut up in exchange for the king size candy bar and 6 pounds of Ninja Turtles episodes.
Today's News:
NATO support for the war in Ukraine, designed to degrade the Russian military and drive Vladimir Putin from power, is not going according to plan. The new sophisticated military hardware won't help.
The post Chris Hedges: Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong appeared first on MintPress News.
Why Australia bottles up its air
Alex Williams recently wrote “What Is ‘Core PCE Services Ex-Housing’ Anyway?,” which dissects the measure that the Fed is using to get a handle on “underlying” inflation. The most interesting bit (for me) is that about 1/4 of this measure is an imputed price index, based on wages. This means that this component will track wages (giving a convenient analytical relationship) by definition.
The logic of following this measure is that the Fed convinced itself that the core (ex-food and and energy) personal consumption expenditure is the best measure of “underlying” inflation, but it turns out that the housing part of that has construction issues (too smoothed to pick up current events), and so they wanted to strip that out of the measure.
The helpless and their power-ups Why do people believe what they do? Why are conspiracy theories so attractive? Slate’s John Ehrenreich examines the persistence of the Wuhan lab leak theory behind the emergence of COVID-19. Yes, “Running Man” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)* is one of the first to suggest it. But in the end, why did the story take off on the right when most scientists find the disease’s animal origin more plausible? For one, Ehrenreich suggests, the lab leak theory plays into the right-wing distrust of “experts” and elites. Plus: People also generally prefer simple, straightforward stories that give them a sense of control over complex ones filled with ambiguity and complexity that foster a sense of helplessness. The lab-leak story is simple. Short version: Someone in a lab in China doing research on deadly viruses screwed up. The actions to take are clear: Blame China. Demand reparations. Tighten up regulation of laboratories doing research on disease-causing microbes. Bar gain-of-function research that alters viruses to make them more deadly.
“This is what makes Ron DeSantis so dangerous, quite frankly,” he said.
Conservatives are ready to die for gas stoves. Yes, you read that correctly: They aren’t...
The timing of a Blinken interview and a RAND paper release points to elite splits over Ukraine. Sadly the warmongers are still in charge.
Your next infection could be the one that permanently disables you. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 26th January 2023 You could see Covid-19 as an empathy test. Who was prepared to suffer disruption and inconvenience for the sake of others, and who was not? The answer was often surprising. I can think, for […]
The question is what will? McKay Coppins presents a gallery of Republican donors and operatives eager to see Donald Trump gone before he can do more harm to the Republican Party. What’s left of it anyway. They just lack the guts to take on Trump and his (proven violent) cult members frontally. Their strategy is to hope Trump, 76, just dies. As his mother did at at 88 and his father at 93. Plying him with hamburgers and fried chicken may be a sounder plan. Former Michigan Republican congressman Peter Meijer “termed this strategy actuarial arbitrage.” Other Republicans hope indictments will take Trump out of the picture. Not a good plan either (The Atlantic): Michael Cohen, who served for years as Trump’s personal attorney and now hosts a podcast atoning for that sin titled Mea Culpa, grudgingly told me that his former boss would easily weaponize any criminal charges brought against him. The deep-state Democrats are at it again—the campaign emails write themselves. “Donald will use the indictment to continue his fundraising grift,” Cohen told me. They are hoping for a deus ex machina to appear.