Reading

I remember the first time I heard of Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History”, and I remember thinking “no one can be stupid enough to believe that.”

But I knew I was wrong, because it kept popping up. The article became a book, even, and fools further down the intellectual stupidity chain made careers out of sub-theses, like Thomas Friedman’s “the world is flat”.

The thesis of the “End of History” was that the ideological wars were over: democratic market capitalism had won, everyone knew it, and history was in effect over because the great ideological war of the 20th century between capitalism/democracy, communism and fascism/democracy had ended. Everyone admitted that democratic capitalism had won and was the best system and now inevitably it would sweep the world and usher in an era of prosperity and relatively good government.

Sunak's Government is throwing out plans to get dirty money out of the UK

Sitting on the banks of the River Trent, the market town of Rugeley in Staffordshire has a rich industrial history. In 1777, it benefited from the construction of the Trent and Mersey Canal, which enabled the smooth transportation of fragile potteries and created a thriving industry. Cooling water from the mighty Trent later made it […]

Mitch McConnell freezes up again Sen. Mitch McConnell, whatever parts are failing him, is yet another entry into the decline of the Washington, D.C. gerontocracy (Washington Post): Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) appeared to freeze for more than 20 seconds Wednesday while taking questions from journalists in an incident that mirrored another occasion when he abruptly stopped speaking in late July. McConnell took questions from reporters in Covington, Ky., after talking with a local group. A reporter asked him about running for reelection in 2026, then repeated the query twice when McConnell said he couldn’t hear, according to video of the incident. McConnell, 81, chuckled and said, “Oh, that’s, uhh —” and stopped speaking. After about seven seconds, an aide approached and asked the senator if he had heard the question. She was covering, clearly, to make it appear his problem was hearing. McConnell stared straight ahead, and the aide asked reporters to give them a minute. Another aide then walked over and spoke to McConnell, who signaled that he was fine.

by Kendrick Hardaway and John Mulrow

In Chicago, the great dome atop the Museum of Science and Industry rotunda is emblazoned with these words:

Science discerns the laws of nature

Industry applies them to the needs of man

The inscription’s lofty rhetoric hides a powerful assumption that is broadly internalized in industrial societies today: that the “needs of man” are unlimited,

The post Degrowth for Engineering and Engineering for Degrowth appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Doctor Who: Doom's Day #1 and #2 may be wittier & more fun than previous chapters in the multimedia event, but it's still mostly fanservice.

Greetings! If you’re reading this semi-legible note, it means that you’ve royally ticked off King Stenkill the Merciless, and you now find yourself falling at a maximum speed of two hundred miles per hour. As the self-elected mayor and official greeter of this bottomless pit, let me be the first to say welcome to your new home.

Rest assured that the legend is true: the pit is, in fact, bottomless. You need not worry about a quickly approaching dungeon floor on which you’ll pop and splatter like a cantaloupe. Nor will you ever arrive in China, the liquid magma core of the earth, or even hell. Let’s put it this way: if there is a bottom to this thing, we still haven’t found it.

I bet you’re probably a bit peckish. Panic-inducing adrenaline flooding your nervous system will do that. So, feel free to try and grab some of the pigweeds growing out of the walls. Don’t let the name fool you—they taste terrible. Still, pigweed can grow without sunlight, so… win?

But avoid touching the bricks if you want to keep all your fingers.

Genealogy is fun, but it has never been an entirely innocent pastime. The establishment (or fabrication) of pedigrees has been essential to the policing of social and racial hierarchies. The Nazis, however, made it a murderous obsession. A banal family record could be a license for advancement or a death warrant. According to the historian […]

The post The Trouble with Ancestry appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Like many ’90s kids, I lusted after the panoply of colorful, sugary cereals that were marketed to us in a never-ending parade of cartoon mascots, box-top sweepstakes, and jingles so catchy that, to this day, I remember them more vividly than anything I learned in graduate school. But my mom wasn’t keen on me starting my days with enough sugar to induce a diabetic coma. In our house, both the desperate rabbit and the kids would have been called “silly” for thinking a bowl of Trix constituted a meal.

As an adult, I’ve tried to embrace the wholesome charms of oatmeal, chia seeds, and bran-based cereal, whose primary selling point is its power to induce regular bowel movements. Alas, my true love remains a piping-cold bowl of violently sweet breakfast-in-a-box.

Enter Trader Joe’s Tiny Fruity Cuties. Call it a moment of weakness. Call it an attempt at a middle ground between the hedonist pleasures of General Mills and the bland virtues of Bob’s Red Mill. Just don’t call it a comeback.

The UK's miscarriages of justice watchdog failed to protect Malkinson, who remained in jail for 17 years for a crime he didn't commit

In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: AMPTP/WGA, Rick and Morty, AHS, Venture Bros., Star Trek: Lower Decks, One Piece, Doctor Who, and more!

The Lever explores why the potential autoworkers strike could be transformational.

The Beveridge curve looks at the relationship between the job vacancy rate and the unemployment rate. But how is the curve affected by employed workers competing for unfilled jobs?

My grandmother had the theory that, as we get older, our mind subconsciously cleanses our memories of a myriad misfortunes, leaving a sanitised version of the past for us to feel nostalgic about. The optimism of remembrance, she called it. Little did she know that her reasonable hypothesis would, one day, become the climate change […]

The post What’s behind this summer’s unnaturally huge Greek forest fires – UNHERD appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

The truth is that Rishi Sunak's Government is complicit in forcing desperate people to risk their lives in order to seek refuge in this country

Julian Oakland Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are supposed to be simple and straightforward, and for the most part they are, but one group punches well above its weight when it comes to market impact. In this post, I show that leveraged and inverse (L&I) ETFs generate rebalancing flows that: (1) are always in the same direction … Continue reading Leveraged and inverse ETFs – the exotic side of exchange-traded funds →

Young professionals are turning to AI for headshots.

We're not owned! We're not owned!

When translation becomes a part of the art of fiction.

I have been avoiding keeping up-to-date with the Irish national accounts over the last several years for reasons that I documented in this blog post – Ireland – not as rosy as the official story might suggest (January 2, 2018). Ireland has been held out as the poster nation for the Eurozone boosters because of…

Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles staked their credibility on defeating dissent over AUKUS. It was not much of a gamble.

The post Labor conference endorses Albanese’s conservative agenda and military build-up first appeared on Solidarity Online.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon