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Count on one thing: in some almost unimaginable future, no American president (if we even have them anymore) is going to rename a mountain for Donald Trump as he’s recently tried to do with North America’s tallest peak. He wants Alaska’s Mount Denali (to hell with Native American names!) to be called Mount McKinley in honor of President William McKinley, the man who, in the 1890s, launched this country as an imperial power of the first order. Of course, it’s just possible that someday someone running (or do I mean: walking, hobbling, limping?) this country might rename the Bertha Rogers Borehole, the deepest hole (now plugged and abandoned) in North America, for President Trump. After all, it should be clear... Read more

Source: D Is for Donald (and Decline) appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Αυτές οι γερμανικές ομοσπονδιακές εκλογές μόνο ως ένα αρνητικό παράδοξο μπορούν να χαρακτηριστούν: Ταυτόχρονα ασήμαντες – με την έννοια ότι θα καταλήξουν σε μια άλλη παραλλαγή του ίδιου, σχεδόν μόνιμου, συνασπισμού Χριστιανοδημοκρατών και Σοσιαλδημοκρατών, ίσως με μια μικρή δόση ψευδο-Πράσινων – τον ίδιο δηλαδή συνασπισμό που έβαλε τη Γερμανία στο δρόμο προς την συνεχόμενη αποτελμάτωση. […]

The post Το απεχθές παράδοξο των γερμανικών ομοσπονδιακών εκλογών του 2025 – Euronews appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

This German federal election is a paradox: Simultaneously irrelevant – in the sense that it will result into another variant of the same, quasi permanent, coalition of Christian & Social Democrats, perhaps with a splattering of the pseudo-Greens – the same coalition that put Germany on the road to a secular slump, will continue to […]

The post The sordid paradox that was the 2025 German federal election – Euronews appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

The BBC has bowed to pressure and removed the documentary “Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone”. An Israeli soldier shows affection to a Hamas fighter on release. The Jewish Council of Australia shares an excerpt from the interview between Dr Gabor Maté and Emeritus Professor Andrea Durbach about Zionism, trauma and the Palestinian experience. Continue reading »

Enrique Tarrio, a domestic terrorist is wandering around Washington getting in the faces of Capitol Police officers: Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio—released last month after Trump pardoned him along with 1,500 other Jan. 6 rioters—confronted ex-Capitol police officer Michael Fanone, who was injured defending the Capitol from criminals like Tarrio. Fanone: “You are a fuc*ing traitor to… pic.twitter.com/HKGXVJzgnq — Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) February 23, 2025 Fanone responded: “You are a fucking traitor to this country.” He actually is a real life seditionist, convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Trump pardoned him. Now he’s stalking people who defended the Capitol. That happened today at the Never Trumper Principles First confab: Meanwhile, check out who’s manning top jobs at ICE: Fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids began to spread the day after President Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time.

Peter Dutton’s minister for home affairs, Barnaby Joyce, has demanded that the Government put together a plan to bail out American ‘restaurant’ Hooters and potentially nationalise it, as the chain enters administration. ”What sort of a World are we living... Read More ›

So – Germany has elected, and the results look grim: a huge shift the right, with large wins for a party, the AfD, parts of which have officially been declared anti-constitutional (but a ban does not seem on the horizon). I spent the first few hours after the polls had closed with a group of […]

Remember when Trump ordered that nursing babies be yanked away from their mothers during the first term? Yeah, that was really popular. Now they’re going after the unaccompanied minors who are in the U.S. usually living with relatives: The Trump administration is directing immigration agents to track down hundreds of thousands of migrant children who entered the United States without their parents, expanding the president’s mass deportation effort, according to an internal memo reviewed by Reuters. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo outlines an unprecedented push to target migrant children who crossed the border illegally as unaccompanied minors. It lays out four phases of implementation, beginning with a planning phase on January 27, though it did not provide a start date for enforcement operations. More than 600,000 immigrant children have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or legal guardian since 2019, according to government data, as the number of migrants caught crossing illegally reached record levels.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 23, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

Trump’s assault on the Constitution

Friday Night Massacre in the Military

Joyce Vance, Feb 22, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

Doctor Who star Jodie Whittaker on the responsibilities that came with playing the Thirteenth Doctor, advice for Ncuti Gatwa, and more.

A smattering of the egregious tap-dancing from the Trumpers to give Putin the big win they all want him to have. FOX: But fair to say Russia attacked unprovoked into Ukraine? PETE HEGSETH: Fair to say it's a very complicated situation. pic.twitter.com/GyXUJQc4uJ — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 23, 2025 FOX: But fair to say Russia attacked unprovoked into Ukraine? PETE HEGSETH: Fair to say it’s a very complicated situation. Witkoff: "The war didn't need to happen. It was provoked. It doesn't necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians. There were all kinds of conversations back then about Ukraine joining NATO. That didn't need to happen. It basically became a threat to the Russians." pic.twitter.com/ZimoQk7wbV — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 23, 2025 Trump’s special envoy to hell Steve Witkoff, real estate developer. He says: “The war didn’t need to happen. It was provoked. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians. There were all kinds of conversations back then about Ukraine joining NATO. That didn’t need to happen. It basically became a threat to the Russians.

One key fact was absent from virtually all of the reporting around the astonishing events of this past week. It was scarcely mentioned in stories about the Munich Security Conference, the call between Presidents Trump and Putin, the freezing out of the Europeans, the jaw-dropping statements by US Defence Secretary Hegseth, the ending of cherished Continue reading »

Air Vice Marshal John Blackburn RAAF (retired) noted in his 2014 report on fuel security that Australia only had sufficient stores to supply service stations and hospital pharmacies for three days, retail pharmacies and chilled/frozen goods transport for seven and dried goods for eight. The social and economic consequences of such a collapse in our Continue reading »

. In case you want to solve the problem yourself, here’s a Python script yours truly made (assuming the utility function is of the natural log kind and with some explicit numerical parameterization):

Dastardly robots, unfriendly skies, and more from The Lever this week.

Here’s an executive summary for a potential primer on ZIRP. I invite you to share any thoughts or suggestions on Discord if there are areas that need further detail or clarification

A science that fails to reflect on its own history and neglects critical methodological and theoretical questions about its practice is a science in crisis. As early as 1991, a commission led by Anne Krueger—featuring esteemed economists such as Kenneth Arrow, Edward Leamer, and Joseph Stiglitz—highlighted a fundamental weakness in graduate economics education. Drawing from […]

Quick quiz. Suppose you read a headline in the online version of the Wall Street Journal (or NY Times etc) stating that, from now on, US Treasury bonds would be redeemed in crypto. Would your response be (i) That’s absurd. Either it’s April Fools Day or someone has hacked the website (ii) That’s unlikely. Surely […]

Despite a slow-burning start, once I got pulled into writer-director Maura Velpero’s intimate World War 2 family drama Vermiglio (winner of the Silver Lion at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and Italy’s Official Selection for the 2025 Academy Awards), I didn’t want it to end. Imbued with shades of The Leopard, The Last Valley, and Little Women, this tale is set in an Alpine hamlet in Italy. Save for the occasional sound of a passing aircraft, the war doesn’t intrude directly into on the villagers’ daily life. That said, the effects of war are palpable; food is scarce (money even more so), infant mortality is high, and most of the young men are off serving at the front. Valpero frames her narrative around a year or so in the life of the populous Graziadei family. The patriarch is Caesare (Tommaso Ragno). Caesar is the village’s resident schoolteacher, conducting general ed classes for children and reading classes for illiterate adults.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

I highly recommend this piece (gift link) by Adam Serwer about the right wing crusade against DEI. It’s the best thing I’ve read on the subject and it’s profoundly distressing: The nostalgia behind the slogan “Make America great again” has always provoked the obvious questions of just when America was great, and for whom. Early in the second Trump administration, we are getting the answer. In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end multiculturalism is proceeding apace. Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender.