Reading

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

The GOP establishment is pathetic: A Pulitzer Prize-winning political photographer resigned Tuesday from the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, blasting the group for cowardice in rejecting Trump critic Liz Cheney as the recipient of its top yearly award. David Hume Kennerly claimed in a letter to fellow trustees that Cheney’s nomination for the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service was nixed largely out of fear that Trump would retaliate against the organization if he’s reelected. Cheney, herself a trustee, was rejected three separate times, Kennerly wrote, as other potential honorees declined the award. Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels will receive the 2024 medal in June, according to an email that Gleaves Whitney, the foundation’s executive director, sent to trustees Wednesday, after POLITICO broke news of Kennerly’s resignation. Whitney said in a statement sent ahead of the Daniels announcement that the foundation’s executive committee, guided by legal counsel, believed it was not “prudent” to give the medal to Cheney given her flirtations with a presidential run.

Would he? (Of course he would.) Trump’s allies are trying to reassure the Supreme Court that if you give Trump total immunity he would never order an enemy to be killed as was posited in the appeals court hearing. And anyway, even if he did, nobody would carry it out. So it’s all good. It is not: As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in Donald Trump’s presidential immunity case, the former president’s allies are working to tamp down any concerns the justices might have about one of the more absurd and disconcerting arguments offered by any Trump lawyer ever: that a president would have to be impeached and convicted before he could be prosecuted if he were to, hypothetically, order the assassination of a political rival. The America First Policy Institute, a think tank led by former top Trump advisers and allies, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court last month arguing that the justices should not consider this hypothetical in their decision, because the military would never follow such a command.

Property developers in Brisbane have bandied together to purchase the property owned by the Heeler family as featured in the Sylvania waters style reality tv series, Bluey. With plans afoot to knock down the property and turn it into a... Read More ›

What a missing element can teach us about the universe.

The post Lithium, the Elemental Rebel appeared first on Nautilus.

The Hill reports: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Tuesday interview that he does not need “primitive” ideas from former President Trump on ways to resolve the war with Russia. In an interview with Axel Springer media outlets, including Politico, Zelensky said he was open to hearing Trump’s proposals for the war, but, he said, “If the deal is that we just give up our territories, and that’s the idea behind it, then it’s a very primitive idea.” “I need very strong arguments. I don’t need a fantastic idea. I need a real idea because people’s lives are at stake,” Zelensky added. The interview comes after The Washington Post reported this weekend that Trump has privately said his plan to end the war in Ukraine would include pressuring the war-torn country to give up territory, including Crimea and the Donbas border region, to Russia. That’s actually a nice way of putting it. The more precise word is “stupid.” I don’t know if Trump thinks he can just tell Ukraine what to do but I wouldn’t be surprised.