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When I was in the U.S. military, I learned a saying (often wrongly attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato) that only the dead have seen the end of war. Its persistence through history to this very moment should indeed be sobering. What would it take for us humans to stop killing each other with such vigor and in such numbers? Song lyrics tell me to be proud to be an American, yet war and profligate preparations for more of the same are omnipresent here. My government spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (and most of them are allies). In this century, our leaders have twice warned of an “axis of evil” intent on harming us,... Read more

Source: There Is Only One Spaceship Earth appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Biden launches ad blitz after Arizona abortion ruling Perhaps you’ve noticed. The Democratic president Donald “Now 88 Counts” Trump once called “Sleepy Joe” is hammering MAGA Republicans over their post-Roe revocation of women’s reproductive freedoms in state after state. Biden “plans to pummel Trump on abortion” (Politico): Joe Biden’s campaign plans to hammer Donald Trump for his role in erasing abortion rights largely by enlisting ordinary American women who have suffered from restrictions on the procedure, elevating their voices in place of the president’s own. This approach was immediately on display this week in a Biden campaign video featuring the story of a Texas woman released after Trump announced he would defer to state-level abortion laws, some of which impose draconian limits on women and physicians. Biden himself made no appearance in the ad, except to deliver a standard campaign finance disclosure line. As the reporters frame it, Biden is taking a back seat here because of his “complicated history” on abortion.

Callie Siskel’s Two Minds is neither minimalist nor maximalist, but the spareness and efficiency speak volumes—and sometimes speak in long lines, sometimes short—making an art of saying as little as possible, but crucially no less. What’s left out presses upon what remains, and what remains is both substantial and hard as stone. Here’s the beginning of “Invitation,” which begins with an invitation:

My initials curled inside the oval like three robins
crowding a tree hollow.

The cardstock was beveled, the envelopes lined in airy pink paper.

My father was dying

quietly like the sound of his pen lifting
then touching down again.

Mark Gatiss writes and tackles the lead role in Bookish, a new mystery series for Alibi set after WWII about a closeted consulting detective.

Social realism is about more than misery. Work centred on effects, rather than causes, runs the risk of suggesting that poverty is a tragic yet somewhat unavoidable reality. What makes artists like Ken Loach, Ronan Bennett, Lynn Ramsay and David Peace so valuable is their ability to tell stories of policy failure through the close […]

Millennials mill around a circle of chairs and a coffee station. They settle into seats and begin the weekly meeting of people whose friends have all moved to Los Angeles. This group is known as “We Have Yearning (for Those Who Moved to) Los Angeles” or WHYLA.

FACILITATOR KERRY: Good morning. Thank you all for coming—and for continuing to support one another as we pine for friends who have decamped for West Hollywood, Silver Lake, Culver City, or another area in LA for opportunities in the film industry, or simply because they like the sun. I say “area in LA” because I heard that some parts of LA are actually their own little cities, but they feel like neighborhoods, so I’m being vague because I don’t really understand.

VARIOUS GROUP MEMBERS: (overlapping) Me neither! Same!

FACILITATOR KERRY: Our guest speaker today is Jenny, who, as some of you know, has lost three friends to Los Angeles.

In an exclusive interview, Mukhtar Yassin explains how "a normal working-class bloke from the Ends" took on the millionaire-backed Reclaim Party leader

On 18 March, the Metropolitan Police’s cyber-crimes unit announced it had launched an investigation into the Labour Party’s selection process for the new seat of Croydon East. The contest had been suspended following allegations that members’ details had been tampered with — allegations since confirmed by party sources. Joel Bodmer, a candidate on the party’s […]

Ever since astronomers have looked to the skies, they’ve filled their knowledge gaps with wild theories of alien life

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

How, a century ago, radical freethinkers quietly and persistently subverted Scotland’s Christian establishment

- by Felicity Loughlin

Read at Aeon

The ‘thick skin bias’ obscures the reality of hardship. We should check our assumptions about those who are struggling

- by Nathan Cheek

Read at Psyche

Big Mac inflation appears to track CPI inflation, but its path can diverge from overall U.S. inflation because of price deviations relative to other items in the consumer basket.

Överskottsmålet är ett hål i huvudet. Riksbanken kommer inte att nå sitt inflationsmål. Euron är dysfunktionell och eurokrisen kommer tillbaka vid nästa recession. Se där tre bra utgångspunkter för den som vill förstå hur ekonomin kommer att utvecklas det närmaste året. Låter det både stolligt, alarmistiskt och populistiskt? Möjligt, men det finns en röd tråd […]

Tom Sargent is a bit out of touch with the real world up there in his office … Certain people have a capacity for ignoring facts which are patenty obvious, but are counter to their view of the world; so they just ignore them … Sargent is a sort of tinkerer, playing an intellectual game. […]

Natalie Burr, Julian Reynolds and Mike Joyce Monetary policymakers have a number of tools they can use to influence monetary conditions, in order to maintain price stability. While central banks typically favour short-term policy rates as their primary instrument, when policy rates remained constrained at near-zero levels following the global financial crisis (GFC), many central … Continue reading To the lower bound and back: measuring UK monetary conditions →

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is on track to win India’s upcoming election, giving him a third term in office and allowing him to cement his reactionary and racist agenda.

The post Modi’s Islamophobia on full display as India faces election first appeared on Solidarity Online.

When I was in London recently, I caught up with my good friend Carlos García Hernández, who is a Spanish radical and has a book publishing business – Lola Books – in Berlin, which publishes in English, German, Spanish and Italian. He gave me a copy of his own recently published book (2023) – Fiat…

This paper explores the merits of introducing a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) in Australia, focusing on the extent to which consumers would value having access to a digital form of money that is even safer and potentially more private than commercial bank deposits. To conduct our exploration we run a discrete choice experiment, which is a technique designed specifically for assessing public valuations of goods without markets. The results suggest that the average consumer attaches no value to the added safety of a CBDC. This is consistent with bank deposits in Australia already being perceived as a safe form of money, and physical cash issued by the Reserve Bank of Australia continuing to be available as an alternative option. Privacy settings of a CBDC, which can take various forms, look more consequential for the CBDC value proposition. We find no clear relationship between safety or privacy valuations and the degree of consumers' cash use.

Iran threatens to attack the U.S. if it assists Israel in defending against any Damascus retaliation.

The post Biden Administration Fears Iran Might Target U.S. Forces Over Israel Strike appeared first on The Intercept.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon