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As 2022 comes to a close, panelists discuss the immediate prospects for the global economy, the dangers of a lost decade for developing countries and what needs to be done to put the SDGs back on track.

Moderator: Richard Kozul-Wright, Director of the Globalization and Development Strategies Division

UNCTAD Panelists:

Anomaly 6 turns every citizen on Earth into a potential “person of interest” to intelligence agencies, and thus a target for recruitment, surveillance, harassment, and much, much worse.

The post Shadowy US Spy Firm Promises To Surveil Crypto Users For the Highest Bidder appeared first on MintPress News.

The Anti-Defamation League has acquired Jewish investor network JLens. This has little to do with investment and everything to do with shielding Israel from criticism from ethical investment firms. 

The post ADL Using Impact Investing to Target BDS appeared first on MintPress News.

Over the course of recent months, US lawmakers had a chance to come down strongly on the side of organized labor by backing railroad workers in their pursuit of paid sick leave. Instead, both Congress and the Biden administration opted to impose an agreement that the rank-and-file of four railroad unions, including the largest railroad […]

The post The Little Engine That Couldn’t Have Paid Sick Leave: How US Lawmakers Let Workers’ Rights and Health Go Off the Rails appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

How Showering Money on Both Parties Paralyzed Regulators

Late last week, Samuel Bankman-Fried, in the eyes of many our century’s answer to 18th-century fraudster John Law, Charles Ponzi, and the con artists who puffed tulips back in the Dutch Golden Age, allowed that he would be willing to testify before the House Committee on Financial Services. Curiously, for someone usually so eager to jump on stages where he could trumpet his determination to make the world a better place, Mr. Bankman-Fried was far more tentative about the possibility of appearing before the Senate Banking Committee.

On this special episode of The Watchdog, Lowkey discusses and later analyzes the role played by external actors in dictating the domestic political environment in the United Kingdom.

The post The British American Project and Fighting Back Against the Israel Lobby with Matt Kennard, Asa Winstanley and Huda Amori appeared first on MintPress News.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

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Really! People would be out in public in front of their own friends just mainlining Internet like it was normal!

Today's News:

Hey, cheer up because it truly is a beauty! I’m talking about this country’s latest “stealth bomber,” the B-21 Raider, just revealed by Northrop Grumman, the company that makes it, in all its glory. With its striking bat-winged shape and its ability to deliver a very big bang (as in nuclear weapons), it’s our very own “bomber of the future.” As Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin put it at its explosive debut, it will “fortify America’s ability to deter aggression, today and into the future.” Now, that truly makes me proud to be an American. And while you’re at it, on this MAD (as in mutually assured destruction) world of ours, let that scene, that peculiar form of madness, involving... Read more

Source: Peace Is Not Our Profession appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

How has philosophy’s role in cognate disciplines been changing? We could ask this question about philosophy and political theory, or cognitive science, or business ethics, or theoretical physics, and so on. In the following guest post, the focus is on philosophy and bioethics. Authors Vilius Dranseika, Piotr Bystranowski, and Tomasz Żuradzki (Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics, Jagiellonian University) examine the claim that philosophy’s role in bioethics is diminishing. They take a data-driven approach to the problem, looking at trends in how frequently philosophical work is cited, and how often especially philosophical topics are discussed, in bioethics literature. In addition to putting forward their view of the matter, they are seeking feedback from readers about this method and their particular application of it. Are Philosophy’s Glory Days in Bioethics Over? by Vilius Dranseika, Piotr Bystranowski, and Tomasz Żuradzki There is a familiar claim that, when compared to the early days of bioethics, the role of philosophy in bioethics has diminished. Let’s call it the Disconnection Thesis.

In some fields—physics, geophysics, climate science, sensitivity analysis, and uncertainty quantification in particular—there is a popular impression that probabilities can be estimated in a ‘neutral’ or ‘automatic’ way by doing Monte Carlo simulations: just let the computer reveal the distribution … Setting aside other issues in numerical modeling, Monte Carlo simulation is a way to […]

Angelo Calianno reports from northeastern Syria, where the former freedom fighters against Islamist terrorism have been abandoned and forgotten

I did an interview few weeks ago with Chris Oestereich, which he’s putting up in three parts. I listened to part three today and, while I rarely say this, I thought it was quite good and if you’re interested in any of these topics, probably worth your while.

 

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Listen to the podcast here.

Along with ridding the home society of unwanted people and criminals, transporting men and sometimes women to distant places made available rich supplies of coercible labour. In virtually all overseas and overland imperial territories, ‘convicts’ of various sorts became vital frontier workers and sometimes active agents of expansion and consolidation. If they died in the process, or became hobbled by disease, who really cared? It was part of their punishment.

Ingmar Bergman’s​ Fanny and Alexander is currently back in cinemas, forty years after its first release in Sweden. Both early and late on in the film, there is talk of a ‘little...

Official Chinese publications emphasise the multiethnic and multicultural character of Xinjiang, but no one who spends time there can be in any doubt that Islam dominates Uyghur society. At the root of the present conflict in Xinjiang is the perceived threat that Islam-inspired Uyghur nationalism poses to the integrity of the Chinese state.

Neither Alexander nor his generals could have imagined how spectacularly their publicity efforts would succeed. Over the decades and centuries that followed, his legend grew and ramified across the ancient world, taking on new features and larger dimensions.

More interesting than the sentimental evocation of reading as an activity that sets lonely children apart is the conception of authors as would-be ushers of the apocalypse. That books themselves are pregnant with the urge to burn down the world would seem to be part of their appeal. Like many remarks in Cormac McCarthy’s books, delivered in apparent jest or mock solemnity, the character’s words are part of a larger thematic schema that equates language with the destructive power of fire and the bomb.

Toni Morrison is not envious of her characters. They are not punished for the qualities she has given them. Pride does not always come before a fall. Beauty is not bestowed so it might be marred or destroyed. The people in her pages are allowed to love one another and forbear from cruelty. The punishments meted out might be catastrophic, but they have clear origins in the unbearable realities of racism.

Jon Fosse​ doesn’t use sentences, or prefers not to end them. When you open Septology, with its smallish print and narrow margins, it can feel like a death sentence – all the more so since the book, much possessed with death, runs to more than eight hundred pages. There are no paragraphs or full stops here. Fosse has called the writing ‘slow prose’ and it lingers on moments – hours even – when nothing much happens.

The most common complaint about Dickens in his lifetime was that he exaggerated, that his characters were implausible specimens of humanity. Prince, too, was seen as going far beyond the norm, especially in his sexuality (he developed a guitar that could be wanked off over a crowd, spattering them with water; he wore backless trousers at the VMAs).

22 October. One casualty of Covid (and I don’t think it’s age) has been chronology. These days I’m often confused by what day it is, not to mention the date. Keeping the diary has been a different sort of casualty as politics became difficult to ignore and Boris Johnson tedious to chronicle. By the time I’d got round to Liz Truss she’d gone.

If I think about the concept of sea level hard enough, I experience disorientation, almost motion sickness, as awareness grows that I’m not living on solid ground but on a sinking chunk of planetary crust, on the surface of a not-really-spherical spinning globe, at the mercy of the nearest star, two icecaps and a capricious moon that sloshes the oceans to and fro like a child rocking in an over-filled bath.

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 1 (Friday 16 December 2022)