Reading

by Dave Rollo

”Economic growth” is commonplace in the daily news. We assume it’s a good thing, that a 2–4 percent increase in GDP is beneficial to all. Likewise, we hear that our communities are growing, and we see a 2–4 percent increase in population as reasonable and benign. Meanwhile, visionary community leaders are busy planning for a steady feed of single-digit annual growth. So we’re in good hands, right?

But what the news reports miss is that any steady rate of growth is an exponential function that contains within it a knowable doubling time.

The post Envisioning a Steady-State Comprehensive Plan appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Page A1: Page A16 This is what we’re dealing with. It shouldn’t have to be this hard. Check this out from Politico: That’s right. He’s four points up in that poll. But that headline is how they chose to frame the story. How about this? What does being beleaguered have to do with student loan forgiveness? How about “determined” or “committed”? Here you can see that they originally had a neutral headline and actually revised it to make it demeaning toward Biden: Every headline is about how poor, old Biden is just floundering, over and over and over again. It’s astonishing.

Of all the instances of disrepute to shame Westminster in recent years, yesterday’s fracas was undoubtedly the system at its lowest. Speaker Lindsay Hoyle’s decision to deny MPs the opportunity to vote on a Gaza ceasefire was not just an affront to the millions of people demanding action from politicians, but it revealed Britain’s deeply […]

The £1.2 billion tunnel is arguably the biggest infrastructure project Khan has approved – but he rarely brings it up

Hekmat Aboukhater reveals the concealed agenda of the newly extended Caesar Act, exposing the Israel Lobby's influence and examining the broader impact of sanctions on Syria and the world.

The post Deconstructing H.R. 3202: The Israel Lobby’s Persistent Role in Sanctioning Syria appeared first on MintPress News.

Emo Trump revisited “Nah.” This clip evoked a memory from Donald “91 Counts” Trump’s tenure. Post by @fightforprogress View on Threads USA Today (2/13) op-ed: Donald Trump on Friday acknowledged his cowardice when it comes to America’s epidemic of gun violence and the resulting slaughter of this country’s children. Being Trump, he tried to make that sound like a virtue. Speaking at a National Rifle Association gun show in Pennsylvania’s capital city Friday, Trump bragged about his record of inaction. “During my four years nothing happened,” Trump said. “And there was great pressure on me, having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield.” That’s Trump telling the truth for a change.  “We did nothing,” Trump brags. It’s a Republican thing. You wouldn’t understand. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

A murder mystery that is also an impressive sociological imaginary.

Long ago, I came to believe that being a Jew, even a secular one like me, entailed certain responsibilities. A people who had suffered so much yet survived were obligated, if not honored, to serve as witnesses and supporters of other oppressed people and to live in the public interest, to model ethical lives. Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, and Sandy Koufax all made me proud, while I felt ashamed of Roy Cohn, Alan Dershowitz, and Henry Kissinger. I never reached such lofty, self-righteous, or even chauvinistic heights or depths, but such figures, positive and negative, offered a comforting structure for my casual, shallow life as a Jew. I rarely observed high holy days. My children were neither bar nor bat... Read more

Source: I’m Heartbroken by the War in Israel appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Plus, the truth about your credit cards, the scourge of our distraction economy, Honest Abe’s dying wish, banning your right to cold beer, and much more.

It’s Free States and Slave States again “If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention,” writes Charles Blow, reacting to the Alabama Supreme Court’s Tuesday ruling that frozen embryos are children. Destruction of those embryos, even by accident, the court ruled, falls under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.  From the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe to plans by Trump-aligned think tanks to restructure the United States to suit Christian nationalists to Alabama’s Tuesday ruling, Tali-bans will pop up all over in a second Trump term. A national abortion ban is clearly on the agenda. “Control of women’s bodies is the endgame,” Blow continues. But is it? Reducing women to birthing vessels and daycare attendants is only one part of the plan. Theists who have long argued that the founders intended to create a Christian nation publish textbooks, build theme parks, ban books, and rail against public education on that basis in a bid to force the rest of us to live according to their worldview. And not just women.

Acid house wasn’t a genre of dance music so much as a new way of experiencing it: audiences dressed down, parties ran all night and – so dancers reported – social divisions disintegrated, helped along by the empathetic rush of the new drug.

The crack in the promise of the Academy Awards is that American pictures don’t cut it any more. ‘Hollywood’ (if you are prepared to believe that kingdom still exists) doesn’t know how to deliver a pointed universality that can upset us.

 ‘Make Hungary Great Again’ is an effective summation of Orbánism; many Hungarians would like back the tracts of territory lost with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire at the end of the First World War.

Simmonds’s books and newspaper strips have been a compass for generations of British women, as sure a gauge of who and where they are as Marks and Spencer knickers.

China’s sheer size, and the revival of decentralised decision-making since the early post-Mao decades, means that a great deal of economic statecraft occurs at lower levels: provinces, cities, districts, counties, townships and so on.

A recycling centre is a good place to go for a glimpse into the 21st-century industrial sublime. Standing above the maze of conveyor belts, you can watch as the relics from a thousand domestic scenes – broken toys, bank statements, vodka bottles, handwritten notes – float serenely into the jaws of the machines.

The notion of existential lack, of a hole that yearns to be filled, of the human need to be made whole through connection with another, is a fundamental and recurrent preoccupation in Coetzee’s fiction. 

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 5 (Friday 23 February 2024)

There are seventy million more privately held guns in the US – around four hundred million of them – than there are people. AR-15s comprise about 5 per cent of the total, but it is currently the best-selling rifle in the country.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 5 (Friday 23 February 2024)