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The US-western-centric idea of fake news, waged by Republicans against Democrats and vice-versa, betrays a much larger, more ominous threat.

The post Lying about Lying: Why We Must Revisit the Definition of ‘Fake News’ appeared first on MintPress News.

“The celebration of LSU’s first-ever national championship is being met with unfair criticism of Angel Reese, one of the team’s star players… Reese first waved her hand in front of [Caitlin Clark, the Iowa Hawkeye’s leading scorer]…. then pointed to her ring finger… Sports and political commentator Keith Olbermann referred to Reese as a ‘fucking idiot’… In addition, Barstool Sports founder David Portnoy tweeted ‘Classless piece of shit.’” — Forbes, 4/3/23

Here is a second production report to announce an important milestone on the production of episode 38: yesterday, I posted on our collaborative tool a work in progress version for the Pepper&Carrot proofreaders and contributors. I quoted them all in a new thread, but our tool sometimes doesn't transmit well the notification or emails. So, this blog post is also a notification for them.

So, there’s constant talk about the problem of declining birth rates and how much of a problem they are. There’s some truth to this, but a lot of it is based on the argument that more people lead to growing economies and that argument is terrible. The part that is reasonable is the rising increase in infertility, including plummeting sperm counts. That’s not bad because it leads to less children, precisely, it’s because it indicates how badly we’ve poisoned ourselves.

But the simple fact of the matter is that the world is well past its carrying capacity for the type of society we have. The Club of Rome predictions from 1968 have almost all tracked the real world, and we’re just past the hump: we’re into decline, but barely.

Gustavo Petro doesn’t just want to transform his own country; he wants to change the world. The new leader of Colombia, who took office last August, is targeting what he calls his nation’s “economy of death.” That means pivoting away from oil, natural gas, coal, and narcotics toward more sustainable economic activities. Given that oil and coal make up half his country’s exports — and Colombia is the world’s leading cocaine producer — that’s not going to be easy. Still, if Colombia were to undertake such a pivot, it would prove to other countries similarly addicted to such powerful substances — including the United States — that radical change is possible. With the latest news that the international community will... Read more

Roger Reeves is an ecstatic poet, a poet of suffering transmuted into higher-order sound. Best Barbarian has the structure of a jazz number. The melody is the first twenty poems—starting with a whirling riff on Grendel and James Baldwin—then “Children Listen,” “Sovereign Silence, or The City,” “Echo: From the Mountain,” “So, Ecstasy” and others, each concerned with the nature of a kind of repeated or formal sound. Then comes the improvisation, the loosening spontaneity, which is section two, made up of two long poems as enriched by the Aeneid, Chaucer, and Dante as they are by the idea of a solo that tells a story. “Domestic Violence” is fierce but inquiring, in its seeing, in its sense of the hell that is a state that shoots down unarmed Black men.

A small, red train packed with toys for the children of a nearby village sat stranded at the base of a steep hill.

“Look!” shouted a toy clown, which wasn’t considered creepy within the context of the time period. The other toys hurried their heads out the windows of the red, marooned train to see a little blue engine puffing down the tracks toward them.

“You there, Engine,” the clown shouted. “We are, sadly, unable to crest this hill. Do you think you would be able to help us get to the other side so that we may bring joy to all of the children of the town?”

“Even though I am small, I think I can,” the Little Blue Engine said as the toys erupted in cheers.

“But I don’t think I’m going to.”

The cheering stopped.

“Why not?” asked a befuddled marionette, which was also a period-appropriate toy for a child and not yet a horrifying closet surprise.