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The post What Makes a True Skeptic? appeared first on Alfie Kohn.
Reading
Hi again. Sorry I’ve been so…absent…lately, but I’ve had a number of ideas I’d like to share with you in the next few weeks. The first involves psychedelics, whose benefits have long remained mysterious. We are finally getting a glimpse of how psychedelics work to improve mental health. And it’s fascinating. So consider this a […] (Read the rest.)
Roger Christopher Stevens’ LOCKDOWN: THE DOCTOR WHO FANS’ SURVIVAL GUIDE, is set to screen as part of this year’s Sydney Science Fiction Festival virtual event from November 4. The UK production from Reeltime Pictures as part of their CultTV series was created during the 2020 Covid19 out break. A call went out to fans of Doctor Who to film personal videos of how they were coping with domestic lockdown for months on end. Shot on mobile phones, laptops, tablets and video cameras, the finished work is an inspiring tale of the indomitable human spirit, wrapped in unique stories that are… Continue reading
On this day exactly 45 years ago, on 21 September 1976, the Sydney University Science Fiction Association (SUSFA) screened the Peter Cushing movie Doctor Who and the Daleks at the uni. At the event Antony Howe launched the first issue of Zerinza, being the first dedicated Doctor Who fanzine published in Australia. The event also saw the formation of the Australasian Doctor Who Fan Club (ADWFC), now known as the Doctor Who Club of Australia (DWCA). Which of course means – Happy 45th Birthday DWCA!! Continue reading
Publisher: Melange Books
Written By: Arrendle
RRP: £14.94 / $22.91 (Paperback) | £4.74 / $6.51 (Kindle)
Reviewed by: Nathan Jones
If, like us, you're a fan of CCGs - particularly Pokemon, then why not take a minute to check out the awesome products for sale over at our friends at Titan Cards www.titancards.co.uk.
They have an awesome selection of Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Cardfight!! Vanguard, Digimon CG, Flesh & Blood TCG and more! They even sell card sleeves, dice, coins and binders, so you can keep your collection safe and secure.
With Canadians headed to the polls next week, I’ve written a 650-word overview of the Green Party’s housing platform. Here’s the link: https://nickfalvo.ca/ten-things-to-know-about-the-green-partys-housing-platform/
(back of a quirky literary novel voice): Sometimes, things are not what they seem. An architecture critic disappears for three months to follow bike racing around Europe, rife with questions of becoming and desire. A real estate agent uploads a listing to an aggregator, knowing that it will be a difficult sell but thinking not much of it, for, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, all houses are difficult to sell in their own way. A house is built in 1980 in Staten Island and would have thrived as an anonymous bastion of tastelessness had the internet not been invented. But the internet had been invented. All of these things are brought together here, through truly unlikely circumstances.
Let’s not bother with the formalities this time.
None of you will buy this house.
Quantitative easing risks generating its own boom-and-bust cycles, and can thus be seen as an example of state-created financial instability. Governments must now abandon the fiction that central banks create money independently from government, and must themselves spend the money created at their behest.
Last year COVID-19 seemed simple. It was horrific, but the arguments about what to do were fairly straightforward.
On one side were people rightly horrified by its rapid spread who wanted us to stay at home and stay away from school and work and socialising in order to save lives.
On the other side were people concerned about the costs of those measures — to jobs, to education, to freedom, to mental health, and to other lives (because if we used too much of our health system fighting COVID-19, other lives might fall through the cracks).
And through it all came a kind of consensus.
After eight extensive posts about the Ontario electricity sector, I am expanding my geographic coverage to look at the electricity sectors in selected OECD countries. My focus will be on the historical and relative performance of each country’s sector with respect to decarbonization and prices. As in the case of Ontario, whole volumes could and have been written about each [...]
With Canadians heading to the polls in a federal election this month, I’ve written a 600-word overview of the Bloc Québécois’ housing platform. It’s available here: https://nickfalvo.ca/ten-things-to-know-about-the-bloc-quebecois-housing-platform/
The great question of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan was not whether the Afghans were fit for democracy. It was whether democratic values were strong enough in the US to be projected onto a traumatized society seven thousand miles away. Those values include the accountability of the people in power, the consistent and universal application […]
The post The Lie of Nation Building appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
Next week, the 2nd International European MMT conference will take place online. We start on Monday, Sep 13, with keynote speeches by Warren Mosler, Alla Semenova, Randall Wray and Zdravka Todorova. Tuesday we’ll have panels on unions and demand policy, inequality, Green New Deal and the political economy of fiscal policy. On Wednesday, we will […]
These issues are yet again the problem of our age. Their seeming trajectory towards resolution post WWII, with widespread prosperity and a rising middle class, has been undone. What undid them points to the underlying problem: Immediate causes include the spectacular increase in financialization and unearned rents, the lack of and lack of enforcement of progressive taxes, both in turn largely due to a shift in the public's understanding of these issues. What caused this shift in public understanding is the age old problem—power and the lack thereof.
This food timeline started as a way to explore the revolution in Australian food that has occurred during the baby-boomers’ lifetime, but has since expanded to include more about the previous decades (and century) as well. Also included are overseas events and trends that had an impact here. The entries are brief, but there are lots of links if you want more information.
After a misstep, it’s about to become illegal to import e-cigarettes without a prescription, which means that, for most Australians, it’ll become all but impossible to vape from October 1.
The misstep tells us a lot about how the Australian government works behind the scenes — most of it good.
Mid last year, Health Minister Greg Hunt announced plans to ban the import of nicotine-containing e-cigarettes and refills without a doctor’s prescription. Border force would be checking parcels.
To Hunt, the decision made sense. It was already illegal to buy and sell such products without a prescription in every Australian state and territory, and it was illegal to possess them without a prescription in every state but South Australia.
All Hunt was doing was closing a (very wide) loophole.
Pivot to blockchain
Last week I was pleased to attend a Crypto-commons Gathering with a crowd of people who believe that cryptocurrencies have a role to play in bending the arc of the future towards justice, peace and prosperity.
This was the most blockchain-centric event I've been to, and I was only invited because the economics students who organised it were fans of the late David Graeber and wanted to expose their crypto colleagues to the credit theory of money. This I was able to do, with some success I think.
Bill King takes another look at the 1986 album that Macca has all but disowned due to its lack of success. Paul McCartney was not really in a good place, creatively or careerwise, in late summer 1986, when his “Press … Continue reading
To the Editors: Fintan O’Toole in his review of Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War [NYR, July 22] makes some remarks that cannot go unchallenged, well quite a few, but the most offensive to me concern Robert Penn Warren, whom he lumps with Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and […]
The post A Younger Robert Penn Warren appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
The Journal of Professional Learning, sponsored by the NSW Teachers' Federation, has just published a condensed version of my paper on the nature of teachers' work in schools. It's available (open access) here: https://cpl.asn.au/journal/semester-2-2021/vital-elusive-and-fantastically-complex-teacher-s-worth . Please be my guest!
This sixteen-part series, The Souls of the People, will explore these issues and the ideas and economics behind them. The values, origins, economics and philosophy behind the call to "cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" (Norquist). The creation of think tanks specifically to provide a pseudo-intellectual foundation for inequality, and that along with media convince the middle class to vote against their own interests. The rise, reasons for, and effect of beliefs that markets without law allow for full employment and that wage laws cause unemployment. That competition alone can bring about good working conditions. The rejection of progressive taxes, and of the right to avail ourselves of the power and resources of the country through organizing public goods. And most importantly, how all of these are maintained by laws that impoverish the powerless and enrich the powerful, and thus are self-perpetuating.
With a federal election taking place in Canada in fewer than three weeks, I’ve written a 950-word overview of the Liberal Party’s housing platform. It’s available here: https://nickfalvo.ca/ten-things-to-know-about-the-liberal-partys-housing-platform/
If you’re an ebook sort of a person, you might like to know that Kindle version of my novel ‘Diary of a Somebody’ is available at the bargain basement price of 99p at the moment. And if you’re more of a papery sort of a person – I know I am – paperback (and hardback) […]
Australia’s economy was performing exceptionally well in the lead-up to the Delta variant lockdowns, propped up by a barrage of government spending in the three months to June and impressive household spending.
The June quarter national accounts published on Wednesday show inflation-adjusted production, income and spending (gross domestic product) climbed 0.7% between March and the end of June, ahead of the NSW lockdown that began on June 26.
Were it not for a surge in imports and a weather-related decline in the volume of exports (each of which cuts measured GDP) gross domestic product would have climbed 1.7% in the June quarter.
Over the year to June economic activity grew a record 9.6%, as it climbed back from a record 7% slide in the three months to June in 2020.
Australian quarterly gross domestic product