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Back in 1987, when no one knew that the Cold War was just about to end, the Canadian Government signed up to build ten nuclear-powered submarines. That submarine program lasted for all of two years before being cancelled in 1989. No nuclear Canadian sub ever even began construction, let alone gettin Continue reading »

The looming question for me and my partner is “where might we live as we grow older and frailer?” For us, the ideal place is likely to be a retirement village. But at what cost? Continue reading »

Sure. Give him the nuclear codes again. What could go wrong? .

It is that time of year again. Ice the beer, call your friends, and set up your big board because fantasy season is beginning. Yes, philosophy fans, it is time to build your department.

To create your fantasy philosophy league, you will need ten colleagues. Before the start of the academic year, arrange a time and a place for your draft. Each player, called a “provost,” begins by coming up with a clever joke name for their department—The Clean Platonists, The Synthetic A Priori Buttkickers, The Heideggerian Brownshirts, The Illogical Positivists, Hegels and Lockes, The Quinean Undetached Rabbit Parts, Buridan’s Asses, etc. Once fully populated with philosophers, these ten departments will form a consortium.

Josh Marshall on the Arlington scandal is really good. He makes the important point that the whole thing was designed as a campaign stunt to make Harris look bad for supposedly failing to honor the dead. We all know how that worked out: Three days ago, the Trump campaign held a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery. The idea was to lay a wreath honoring the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed during the evacuation of Kabul in 2021 and film a political ad. They would distribute the video and attack Vice President Harris and President Biden for not “showing up” for their campaign event, which they sought to portray was an established memorial. As soon as the video circulated, military policy experts I know said right off the bat they were shocked that the campaign had been allowed to hold a campaign event on the grounds of the cemetery and circulate video of it. It isn’t just unseemly. It’s against the law. How were they allowed to do that? That turned out to be a good and prescient question.

From smoking, to taxes, to cronyism, Rishi Sunak's party is desperate for us to forget everything that happened until just last month

Has AG Sulzberger turned it into the Orange Lady? “WTF Is Happening To The NY Times?” Digby wrote just days ago. A chorus of critics believe the Gray Lady has lost its way, and they’ve brought receipts. The Times giving space this week to National Review‘s editor Rich Lowry, for example, to suggest that on character Donald Trump has a better case to make for his election led one FKA Twitter user to suggest, “The Onion writers are now running the @nytimes.” The New York Time Pitchbot account added, “I think we may be nearing the end of civilization.” Dan Froomkin caustically distilled a March speech publisher A.G. Sulzberger gave at Oxford University explaining Sulzberger’s editorial stance thusly: One: You will earn my displeasure if you warn people too forcefully about the possible end to democracy at the hands of a deranged insurrectionist. And two: You prove your value to me by trolling our liberal readers.

The more Trump and Vance run from weird, the more they own it No, the Republicans’ vice-presidential nominee is not weird. Not weird at all: JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate and US senator from Ohio, attacked teachers who do not have children in newly resurfaced remarks from 2021. In the resurfaced clip, Vance, who was speaking at a forum held by the Center for Christian Virtue, attacks “leaders on the left” and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, for not having children. “So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me,” Vance can be heard saying in the clip. “Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.” Weingarten is gay, married, and a stepmother to two daughters. Oh, and Vance?

The Full-Frontal Pom-Pom

Fun, playful, and an excellent reminder that it’s already time to schedule your annual mammogram. One size fits A to double D. Any pinching is fleeting.

The Gastric-Glow Three Pack

These brightly colored fuzzy socks draw inspiration from the contents of at least one entire cabinet in your kitchen.

The Instant Facelift Slouch Sock

No matter how many times you pull them up, the cruel mistress of Time will slip them right back down.

Fishnet Compression Stockings

Kamala Harris’s campaign asks: Who is a normal American now?

The post Kamala’s Moment appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

My neighbor Craig is a prepper. For years, he’s been telling me the world is coming to an end, and for years, I’ve been ignoring him. Then one day I saw him digging with a shovel in his backyard. The bank gave him a second mortgage, he told me, and he was going to build a bunker forty feet beneath the earth. I accidentally laughed at him, and the two of us haven’t spoken since.

But then ChatGPT was released, and there were all these articles about AI taking over the world. And then Trump was running for president again, and that Ohio Senator called for a civil war if Trump loses. And then I saw an Instagram post speculating that Coscto was encouraging consumers to stock up for the apocalypse, because they were selling Readywise Emergency Food Buckets, and it dawned on me that maybe Craig was right. Maybe I should be preparing.

My credit rating is, according to Equifax, fucking abysmal, so I knew a bunker bank loan was out of the equation. But I do have a Costco card, and I figured the least I could do to prepare for the End Times was drive over to Costco and buy my own Readywise Emergency Food Bucket.

Eyebrows raised as accounts show Reform UK rushed to repay £200,000 to Richard Tice, just a week after Nigel Farage took control of the party

An inside look at the little-known task force that uncovered the companies secretly funding Nixon’s operation.

‘I didn’t have a fall. A woman knocked me down outside Kwik-Save.’ Head in the bubble dryer, an elderly customer recounts her story with gossipy relish. After the fall, rather than simply visit the GP to have her stitches removed, the elderly woman visited the salon instead. ‘There’s nothing Hilary can’t turn her hand to.’ […]

These factors do not exist in isolation but interact and act as force multipliers for each other and are ripe to be manipulated through identity politics

There has been much attention online to a piece by Joseph Heath arguing that analytical Marxism disappeared because the analytical Marxists all turned into Rawlsian liberals. At a certain level of resolution (blurred, zoomed out) the argument has something going for it. But at that level, all it amounts to is the claim that this […]

Aydan Dogan and Ida Hjortsoe Exporting allows firms to access a larger market, but it also implies costs and risks. Some of these costs and risks are due to the time between production and sales generally being longer for exported goods than for goods sold in the domestic market. In our recent Staff Working Paper, … Continue reading Why short-term finance matters (a lot more) to exporting firms →

The Gallup poll shows that voter enthusiasm is higher than it’s been since 2008. (That was a very good year for Democrats, by the way.) Guess why? It’s the Democrats. Democrats’ current level of enthusiasm is one percentage point shy of the group’s high in Gallup’s trend since 2000. That was the 79% measured in February 2008, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were engaged in a spirited battle for the party’s presidential nomination. Enthusiasm subsided later that year, but by the end of the campaign, consistently more than seven in 10 said they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting. Democratic enthusiasm was also elevated during the 2004 and 2020 presidential campaigns. I’d rather be the Democrats than the Republicans….

A government cannot run continuous fiscal deficits! Yes it can. How? You need to understand what a deficit is and how it arises to answer that. But isn’t a fiscal surplus the norm that governments should aspire to? Why frame the question that way? Why not inquire into and understand that it is all about…

Sean Paul’s post on the 2nd Amendment got me thinking about the prospects for civil war in the USA, in particular this spicy quote:

So, Sean Paul, what does this have to do with the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms?

Everything to do with slavery, and nothing to do with holding our government accountable. Seriously, do you honestly think a couple thousand Texans with AR-15s could out fight an armored brigade? GTFOH.

It won’t be lard-ass militias that matter if there is a civil implosion in the US.

These things always come down to intra-elite splits and/or intra-military splits.

I was on the The Nicole Sandler Show show as RFK Jr.’s brain worm. I was going to add photos of the people and articles that I was referring too, because as bizarre at all these stories sound, I WAS NOT MAKING THEM UP! I decided to just list the articles below in case anyone wants to know more details. These are Real Headlines Written by Actual Humans about RFK Jr. in a new segment I’m calling RFK Jr.’s Brain Worm News. (The graphic is from an actual article on brain worms from ABC News, Australia that said, “headlines about brain worms can be alarming.” but adds, “..here are ways you can minimize your risks of being infected with one.” ) When I talked about how Dave, RFK Jr’s brain worm, would be advising Trump on loyalty and cabinet positions I was talking about John McEntee, Trump’s body man during the 2016 campaign is currently working on HR for the Trump campaign.