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Created
Fri, 14/07/2023 - 00:30
Keeping women’s mistreatment in the headlines It may be a stunt, but one with a point (New York Times): Democrats in Congress are making a fresh push for the nearly century-old Equal Rights Amendment to be enshrined in the Constitution, rallying around a creative legal theory in a bid to revive an amendment that would explicitly guarantee sex equality as a way to protect reproductive rights in post-Roe America. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Representative Cori Bush of Missouri are set to introduce a joint resolution on Thursday stating that the measure has already been ratified and is enforceable as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution. The resolution states that the national archivist, who is responsible for the certification and publication of constitutional amendments, must immediately do so. […] “In light of Dobbs, we’re seeing vast discrimination across the country,” Ms. Gillibrand said in an interview. “Women are being treated as second-class citizens.
Created
Fri, 14/07/2023 - 00:10
by Greg Mikkelson

Something new and troubling is happening as economies grow across much of the globe. In contrast to prior decades, when human health improved as global GDP swelled, the link to health progress has been broken. No longer is economic growth delivering a health dividend, it seems.

Meanwhile, another metric, the health of the environment, has continued to deteriorate with economic growth. We now face a  “ghastly” global environmental crisis,

The post Guess What Has Decoupled from Economic Growth? appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Created
Fri, 14/07/2023 - 00:00
Both sides of Edward Coke’s reputation have endured. Not long ago the benchers of the Inner Temple refused to name a new building after him because of his brutal prosecution of Walter Raleigh. Yet Coke’s law reports, many of them his own cases, continue to be uniquely relevant to the modern law governing the use and extent of prerogative powers and much else beside. Francis Bacon is a more elusive character.
Created
Fri, 14/07/2023 - 00:00
Fashion, the It-girl Alexa Chung once said, is just what happens when you have been wearing one thing for ages, then get bored with it. Is this the reason Fleur Jaeggy has become so fashionable, because readers are tired of big books and humanist fiction, all that inwardness that isn’t really inward, all those vulgar, boring families with ‘all of the advertising’, as Jaeggy once put it, ‘on their side’?
Created
Fri, 14/07/2023 - 00:00
St Francis wrote poetry, tamed a wolf, received the stigmata on a mountainside, and if you love a kitsch Nativity figurine, you have St Francis to thank. He was a poor scribe and a worse artist, but great works have been made in his name, by Botticelli, El Greco, Caravaggio and Mickey Rourke (who took the title role in Liliana Cavani’s Francesco).
Created
Fri, 14/07/2023 - 00:00
All three of Jean Giono’s books are crowned, in their different ways, by killings, done by the hero or heroine and not against them or for them to tackle. An intriguing choice for a pacifist, and a choice that underlines an important strain in Giono’s work. He invites us to pause over phrases such as ‘larger than life’ and ‘getting away with murder’.
Created
Fri, 14/07/2023 - 00:00
As Western investors became controlling shareholders in the railways, mines and plantations of the global South, the supposedly peaceful worlds of trade and finance became harder to distinguish from imperialism. The rules of global capitalism require that international debts are repaid, and the great powers resorted to the methods of empire to ensure they were.
Created
Fri, 14/07/2023 - 00:00
Where Freudian orthodoxy called for analysts to work scrupulously against the effects of transference, Saul Newton and his colleagues taught their followers to do precisely the opposite, i.e. exploit the potent dynamics of the process to gain increasing control over their patients’ psyches. ‘You are their link to life,’ Joan Harvey told her trainees, ‘and, you know, that dependency can go on for ever.’
Created
Fri, 14/07/2023 - 00:00
Drag Race is a sisterhood, and a masterpiece of queer capitalism. RuPaul, a preppy businessman by day, is a figure of superlative glamour in drag – a Black woman comparable in beauty to Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks or Iman, strutting down the runway in a gown by Zaldy and a blonde or auburn wig, almost seven feet tall in heels, exuding confidence.
Created
Fri, 14/07/2023 - 00:00
The austerity of the mid-1950s constantly stymied possible British preparations on the home front, though plenty of money was found for bombs and submarines: deterrence by means of a policy of mutually assured destruction. The government couldn’t even find the resources to fund the national provision of steel ID tags, to allow for the identification of incinerated bodies in the event of an attack. 
Created
Fri, 14/07/2023 - 00:00
J. Edgar Hoover liked to say he didn’t hire policemen but investigators. Agents were university graduates, only to be seen in dark suits and ties (hats were required when outside). Until 1934, they weren’t allowed to carry guns. ‘I want the public to look upon the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice as a group of gentlemen,’ he said in a magazine interview.
Created
Fri, 14/07/2023 - 00:00
Giovanni Amendola had been attacked by fascists on a number of occasions, receiving a savage beating in Rome in December 1923; armed blackshirts hung around outside his flat. But he continued to publish and speak out against Mussolini. He probably thought they wouldn’t go so far as to murder him, that a second Matteotti case was a step too far, even for the fascists.
Created
Thu, 13/07/2023 - 23:52
I argue that economic methodologists failed the economics profession by not actively pointing out to the economics profession or to the general public that, if an economist’s primary goal was to provide policy advice to society, then the standard methodology being used by applied macroeconomists had serious problems. I see methodologists’ failure as a systemic […]
Created
Thu, 13/07/2023 - 23:26

In case you hadn’t noticed — and how could you not? — there have been more than 500 (yes, 500-plus!) wildfires burning across the vast reaches of Canada, an unheard-of number, and more than half of them completely out of (human) control in a record-shattering fire season. That’s been true for seemingly endless weeks now with no end in sight. (And, by the way, elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, Siberia is having its own possibly record fire season.) If you didn’t notice any of this, though, I have a possible explanation. Perhaps the vast clouds of smoke from those fires that recently gave the skies of Chicago and Detroit, New York and Washington, D.C., the worst air quality on the... Read more

Source: A Third Way? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.