Mike Pompeo is giving interviews showing once again just what a smarmy, arrogant prick he is: Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has cast doubt on President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, repeatedly praised Jan. 6 as an example of a “peaceful transition” of power in an interview Thursday. “We delivered a peaceful transition on January 6, 2021, exactly as our Constitution requires,” Pompeo, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, told Sky News. Pompeo was responding to questions about why his new book — “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love” — does not focus more on the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, because it reflects on his four years working in the Trump administration. Pompeo, who said the book was centered on “how we delivered security abroad,” condemned the violent aspects of Jan. 6 but defended the outcome in speaking with Sky News. “It’s terrible when folks commit these kinds of acts of violence, and I hope they’ll be prosecuted appropriately for doing that.
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What's next. Brad DeLong makes some observations and poses some questions. He suggests that the answers the future will provide are dialectical, that is, an attempt to deal with the various facets these questions suggest. The outcomes, yet to be determined, will be the results of political struggles.
It is a usual piece to provoke thinking but it is too short and summary to include all the relevant factors. After all, the world system is a complex adaptive system with many gears and these issues are, as hie points out, age-old. They now appear in a new form.
Where I think he is right is in saying to forget the utopian thinking. We are back to the old slog, arguing over production-distribution-consumption based on self-interest. What is needed to break out of this endless cycle is a rise in collective consciousness at the individual level sufficient to raise the quality of the culture and various institutions, here especially those that sit on the commanding heights of the world economy.
Over the past century, the theory that rational behavior involves maximization of utility has become central to Economic theory. In economics, this theory is established on axiomatic grounds, and supported by intuitions and speculations. However, When psychologists examined this theory of behavior by carrying out actual experiments on human behavior, they found that the theory leads to wrong predictions in many examples. By now, an overwhelming amount of evidence has emerged to show the strong conflict between economic theories of human behavior and actual behavior; a survey of is given in “Empirical Evidence Against Neoclassical Utility Theory: A Survey of the Literature,” This post provides the details of this conflict in one example taken from the paper, where four major predictions of economic theory are all in direct conflict with the experimental evidence.…
Values are non-rational but not irrational either. Values are the ultimate criteria of individuals, societies, and cultures. They shape worldviews. Worldviews justify what is accepted as "rational." Values provide specific criteria for judgement.
“The official curriculum for the [AP African-American Studies] course, released Wednesday by the College Board, downplays some components that had drawn criticism from DeSantis and other conservatives. Topics including Black Lives Matter, slavery reparations, and queer life are not part of the exam.” — Associated Press, 02/01/23
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The College Board is thrilled to introduce our new AP course in African-American Studies, filling a crucial gap in our course offerings. After incorporating feedback from various stakeholders like the Florida Department of Education, we are pleased to report that the AP African-American Studies curriculum will cover Black history from January 1996 all the way to December 1996.
There is universal assent that we are in a period of geopolitical tension and flux. In a rough chronology, 1815-1914 was the era of British hegemony, the not-so-peaceful Pax Britannica. What followed between 1914 and 1945 was a disastrous period of two world wars and the Great Depression. The end of World War II marked Continue reading »
There is in the American psyche, the Hollywood psyche, the false notion that any other major power will be just like America. The view can be terrible but wrong. Dostoevsky (if I may be excused for mentioning a Russian) wrote of how people only see a mirror when they converse. Sir Harold Nicholson, spouse of Continue reading »
The only place in our media landscape where I can get a well argued and penetrating alternative view to our overwhelmingly conservative mainstream media. The first thing I do in the morning is reach for my smartphone and open “Pearls and Irritations”, the only place in our media landscape where I can get a well Continue reading »
Treasurer Chalmers has the radical idea that economics is about human well-being; NSW Labor moves to the right of Coalition; and in spite of fires and floods, Australians have poor knowledge of climate change. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, reports, podcasts and other media on current political and economic issues Continue reading »
According to Australian news sources, 40,000 Chinese students are being forced to rush back to Australia incurring many thousands of dollars in costs, face difficult times finding accommodation and it’s all China’s fault. The reality is very different. From Australia’s perspective, if 40,000 Chinese students are going to suddenly arrive there, it would certainly boost Continue reading »
So we have just had our first presentation of Australian Honours under the new Labor government. Under the Morrison government, there was little recognition of artists in the national honours awards, any more than there was in arts policy (non-existent except by implication from in/action) and funding (in continuing decline). Artists even had to fight Continue reading »
There was a time when leaders fell on their sword when they were defeated in battle or lost their core beliefs, nowadays most do not even resign their privileged positions to resist the existential danger posed to advanced life, including human civilisation. It is long past time to declare a global climate and nuclear emergency. Continue reading »
Robert Hockett proposes essentially the same solution that I have recently — ignore the debt ceiling it is invalid legally.
A simple way Biden could stop this drama and ignore the debt limit
Zachary B. Wolf, CNN interviews Robert Hockett, a law professor at Cornell University who specializes in public finance and consults for the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Hockett: The budget is its own debt ceiling.…Kake News
We don't need gimmick vs. gimmick when we have budget law
WOLF: What about the other ideas to get past the debt ceiling? Trillion dollar coins and such?
HOCKETT: The wonderful thing from my point of view here is we don't need any of those gimmicks. We just have a little garden-variety budget law on our side, and so we don't really have to resort to anything kind of unusual or surprising or gimmicky..…
A simple way Biden could stop this drama and ignore the debt limit
Zachary B. Wolf, CNN interviews Robert Hockett, a law professor at Cornell University who specializes in public finance and consults for the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Trump claims tears were streaming down DeSantis’ face Lol: I believe it. This is the desperate ad DeSantis ran and it garnered him just enough votes to win in 2018:
It’s not a stretch to say that examining the changing skyline of Manchester is something of a perverse obsession. The 2020 docuseries Manctopia cemented what many communities have felt for a long time now: Manchester is a deeply unequal city, and it increasingly feels alienating to those who once celebrated it as a beacon of […]
A representative from America’s Frontier Fund said that a “kinetic event” in the Pacific would be very good for its bottom line.
The post White House-Linked Venture Capital Fund Boasts China War Would Be Great for Business appeared first on The Intercept.
Anti-arms trade campaigners say UK-made weapons are contributing to thousands of civilian deaths in the devastating Middle Eastern war
Private equity returns are finally going pear-shaped, but for the most part, investors are re-upping their bets.
Almost six years after we unearthed that the British authorities at the Crown Prosecution Service destroyed key emails on the WikiLeaks founder, we can now report that the Swedish Prosecution Authority also destroyed a large part of the documentation. As Assange's life hangs in the balance, will Britain and Sweden finally open an investigation into the destruction of documents?
The post Revealed: Sweden Destroyed a Substantial Part of Its Documents on Julian Assange appeared first on scheerpost.com.
An unannounced inspection of a women's prison raises new concerns about safety across the female estate. Sian Norris reports
The Drupal Association is pleased to announce that it has been selected to host Denaya Dennis, a Fellow from South Sudan in the 2023 Alumni Professional Development Experience (PDE) component of the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders from January 23 to March 3, 2023, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
“Astonishing labor market growth” Headlines at the New York Times and Washington Post trumpet 25 straight months of job growth. Unexpected jobs numbers Friday show the unemplyment rate falling to 3.4 percent, a rate not seen since 1969. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the economy added 517,000 jobs last month. The labor force participation rate remained stable at 62.4 percent but below pre-pandemic levels. But wage growth is slowing with inflation. Despite claims that employers cannot find workers because “nobody wants to work these days,” restaurants cannot find workers because many have found better jobs with “increased flexibility, stability and often better pay” (Washington Post): Nearly three years since the coronavirus pandemic upended the labor market, restaurants, bars, hotels and casinos remain short-staffed, with nearly 2 million unfilled openings. The leisure and hospitality industry, which before the pandemic accounted for much of the country’s job growth, is still short roughly 500,000 employees from 2020 levels, even as many other sectors have recovered.
Nicaragua ranks first among countries whose citizens feel at peace. Despite this, US media demonizes its Sandinista government, has sponsored violent coup attempts and has hit the country with crippling sanctions.
The post We’re Trying To Crush The Happiest Country On Earth – Lee Camp on Nicaragua appeared first on MintPress News.
On this episode of The Watchdog, Alan Macleod exposes Elon Musk's ties to intelligence agencies and special interest groups, highlighting SpaceX's ties to the CIA and the use of Starlink in advancing US foreign policy.
The post Elon Musk’s Cozy Ties With The Military Industrial Complex, With Alan MacLeod appeared first on MintPress News.
Celebrate Black History Month: Explore conversations with prominent economists and discover community development insights.