After nine successive increases in the Reserve Bank’s cash rate, this article argues that it is time to pause. In addition, given the sources of increased inflation, more targeted measures are called for rather than the blunt instrument of further interest rate increases. Over the course of 2022 consumer prices increased by 7.8 per cent, Continue reading »
Reading
The march to maintain hegemony is pursued with a sense of ‘exceptional America’. But it is now taking place in a world without elbow room. The planet is imperilled. We have to call out folly, not run with it. I cannot see how, without regime change in Washington, trust in high level relations can be Continue reading »
In a recent article, the Hon. P.J. Keating berated the wretched Greg Sheridan for manifold errors in a typical The Australian Newsrag opinion piece. Only a fool provokes PJK on spurious grounds. Though enjoyable to witness the public dissection of a noxious Murdoch apparatchik, there is much more to note in Keating’s article. A phrase Continue reading »
Major General Kathryn Campbell, currently sitting in a fairly empty office in the Department of Defence on a miserly $900,000 plus a year, seems set to become, by acclamation as much as by the weight of the evidence so far available the chief bureaucratic victim of the Robodebt affair. Indeed, apart from the several hundred Continue reading »
Last week 4.8 million people contracted Covid-19 and 39,000 died as a result. The pandemic rages on around the world with, globally, cumulative cases of 675,565,574 and 6,873,798 deaths documented. In the USA right wing politicians desperately want wicked China to have created the virus and/or deliberately or carelessly let it loose from a laboratory Continue reading »
Over the last week or so, Australian politicians and representatives of the university sector got busy pressing flesh in India, hoping to open avenues that have largely remained aspirational. It was timed to coincide with G20 talks in New Delhi, which has seen a flurry of contentious meetings traversing security, economics and education, all taking Continue reading »
Wars are started by political forces. They are promoted by propagandists, fought by soldiers and it is always the ordinary people that suffer. Wars are almost never about principle and almost always about profit in one form or another. The war in Ukraine, like all other wars has been sold to us as a struggle Continue reading »
The Chinese currency has outperformed the greenback by volume of trading on the Moscow Exchange for the first time on record.RT — Question More (Russian state-sponsored media)
Yuan squeezing out dollar on Russian market – Kommersant
The Chinese currency has outperformed the greenback by volume of trading on the Moscow Exchange for the first time on record
Have US leaders thought this through? Have they a history of thinking things through?
Naked Capitalism
America’s Chips War With China: Another Sanctions Backfire Coming?
Yves Smith
Naked Capitalism
America’s Chips War With China: Another Sanctions Backfire Coming?
Yves Smith
Is CPAC done? Last Friday I took a look at the first day of this year’s CPAC gathering where it was obvious that the attendees were overwhelmingly Trump followers but the crowds were also thinner than usual, which says something —but nobody can agree on exactly what it is. Since that dispatch reporters and other observers of the event have characterized this CPAC as an unusually desultory affair that didn’t improve much as the days wore on. Speeches were sparsely attended and the presentation was lackluster. Everyone seemed bored with the outrage. Could it be that after seven long years of Trump-style politics, they’re finally getting worn out? According to this report from Laura Jedeed at The New Republic, attendees she spoke with felt that having the event in Washington was a mistake. They suggested that instead it should have been held in Orlando, as it was last year.
By replacing thousands of equations with just one, ecology modelers can more accurately assess how close fragile environments are to a disastrous “tipping point.”…
A recent breakthrough in the mathematical modeling of ecosystems could make it possible for the first time to estimate precisely how close ecosystems are to disastrous tipping points. The applicability of the discovery is still sharply limited, but Jianxi Gao, a network scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who led the research, is hopeful that in time it will be possible for scientists and policymakers to identify the ecosystems most at risk and tailor interventions for them.
Last August in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Gao and an international team of colleagues showed how to squish thousands of calculations into just one by collapsing all the interactions into a single weighted average. That simplification reduces the formidable complexity to just a handful of key drivers.
The city with a hundred private cable cars
‘Crazier and crazier’ supplemental Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke, the guy who dumps any woman who dares contradict him (see Pt. 1), means to bully Floridians into submission to his (they really are fascist) policies. That’s not BDE, as Kari Lake suggests, it’s a coward compensating (with lift shoes and or/bronzer). “DeSantis says ‘woke’ so often it begins to lose all meaning,” says John Oliver. Clearly. If there isn’t a Misanthropes Anonymous, there should be. With fewer than 12 steps. Digby covered some of this ground last night, but this Florida Man seems dangerous to more people than himself. Anyone ready to follow a guy like him might do anything. Other Florida Men already have.
At the London Comic Con Spring 2023, Tony Lee to talk about problems with the BBC with one of the first IDW issues of the Doctor Who comic book from 2009.
Previous Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall discusses how close the BBC came to pulling the plug on "Flux" during the pandemic and more.
The Prime Minister's law will stand in defiance of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, writes Brian Latham
“New infrastructure projects still threaten communities today, critics say” An occasional hiccup in canvassing neighborhoods near the interstate is having political software direct volunteers to street numbers that don’t exist. The list says to knock at 372 on a block that dead ends at 310. That’s because when planners put through the interstate decades ago, they cut the neighborhood in two. The street numbers pick up on the other side of the interstate. It’s most likely a Black neighborhood. It seems there are plans to “remedy” some of that, Axios reports: In an attempt to reverse the socioeconomic harm of planning decisions made decades ago, the federal government is doling out $1 billion over five years to remove highways that divide communities. Yes, but: That’s a modest sum compared to the billions the government is pumping into new highway expansion projects that critics fear will repeat the same mistakes. Why it matters: Highways and rail lines are supposed to help people get to where they want to go. Yet infrastructure can also be a barrier that divides neighborhoods and cuts residents off from economic opportunity.
There’s been a lot of grumpy commentary about this recent NYT op-ed by Adam S. Hoffman, a Princeton senior claiming that conservatives are being driven off campus. Its basic claims: In the not-so-distant past, the Typical College Republican idolized Ronald Reagan, fretted about the national debt and read Edmund Burke. Political sophistication, to that person, […]
Kate Denkinson looks at the background to Isabel Oakeshott’s Lockdown Files and the newspaper which Boris Johnson once claimed was his ‘real boss’
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“Michael Knowles—right-wing political commentator associated with the Daily Wire—said ‘for the good of society… transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely’ at the Conservative Political Action Conference Saturday afternoon.” – The Daily Beast, 3/5/23
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I, Jay Ludlow Martin, previously known as Laura Jayne Martin, until a legal name change, which likely still has not been corrected on my insurance card because of incompetence on the part of the insurance company—however, they did manage to pay for my top surgery, so fine, whatever—of New York, New York, revoke my former Wills and Codicils and declare this to be my last will and testament.
After industry cash flooded their war chests, Florida Republicans stopped requiring utilities from disclosing who they are punishing with power shutoffs.