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Who doesn’t like good pizza? Delicious mozzarella that stretches as you pull the slice from your mouth. Sauce from the finest Roma tomatoes plucked from the storied shadows of Mount Vesuvius. Flavor-packed pepperoni cups, each like a salty little kiss from Santa Maria herself. There is simply no greater pleasure.

Anyway, don’t expect that stuff here.

Remember when you lived in the city? The hustle and bustle infiltrated every cell in your body. You even had a MetroCard. Then you moved here. You gave up. I will not reward that kind of mediocrity. You’re lucky I even stay open. If I weren’t locked into another four years of local Little League sponsorship, I would’ve left you strip-mall regulars in the dust years ago. The pizza I will make is the pizza that best matches my assessment of you and your choices. It is barely adequate.

[Editor’s Note: The Steady State Press has a new title. Gag-Ordered No More: The 800-Pound Gorilla in the U.S. Government (by Brian Czech) has gone to print. If the preface isn’t enough to whet your literary appetite, see the blurbs on the back cover (embedded below). And, be one of the first to order the book.]

Preface: They Wanted Me Out; Now I’m Out

They say the ironies never cease.

The post Preface to Gag-Ordered No More (by Brian Czech) appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

The true power to halt Israel’s latest push to fulfill Zionism’s genocidal founding mission may not lie in Washington DC but in London. Specifically, Buckingham Palace, reveals Kit Klarenburg.

The post The Mask Has Fallen: King Charles Supports Israel appeared first on MintPress News.

Dear ES/PE community members, find below an abundant list of great academic opportunities: 16 calls for papers for conferences and special issues, 12 postdoc positions, 4 visiting opportunities, 2 awards, 2 job opening, 2 doctoral positions, and a grant in economic sociology, political economy, and related fields, with deadlines from November 3 till December 4. Share this […]

I have come to the conclusion that the most essential element of the Silicon Valley ideology is its collective faith in technological acceleration. More than the mix of libertarianism and tech determinism that Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron described as the “Californian Ideology” in 1995, more than the breakdown of donations between Democratic and Republican […]

I remember hearing the news and thinking that this was going to end badly for everyone. I had no idea just how bad things would get.

This month’s catastrophic violence in Israel and Gaza — specifically, the contradictory statements from each side on the other’s war crimes — has taken me back to a revealing personal moment almost exactly 18 years ago, recalling a different war in a different part of the world. That day in the fall of 2005 I was in Yerevan, Armenia, where I was teaching a post-graduate journalism course at the state university. In class that morning, my six students, all of them young women (as was not unusual in that time and place), began discussing the terrible treatment of young recruits in the Armenian army, where the vicious hazing that had been notorious in the Soviet armed forces was still common... Read more

Source: War, Crimes, Truth, and Denial appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

UJA-Federation of New York, a tax-exempt nonprofit, has sent more than half a million dollars to groups supporting Israeli settlements.

The post Kathy Hochul’s Israel Trip Bankrolled by Group Funding Illegal Settlements appeared first on The Intercept.

The road to Jerusalem, it has so often been said, runs through Cairo. Writing from a regime prison cell in the months after Palestine’s ‘unity intifada’ of 2021, the Egyptian revolutionary Alaa Abd El-Fattah modified this historic injunction: ‘The road to Jerusalem looked like it ran through Cairo — but what is certain is that […]

Neither modern nor ‘postmodern’ quite describes Madelon Vriesendorp’s odd, outlier objects. No manifesto here, they quietly do their own thing, and are all the better for that. 

Nearly eighty years after she first starred in a film, Taylor is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men.

At a time when there was no female equivalent of the gentleman’s club, the Yellow Book offered a congenial literary space in which men and women could joke, flirt and briefly imagine themselves free to exchange their ideas on neutral ground.

In the crisis-ridden 1930s, Hughes was happy to combine the roles of activist, foreign correspondent and purveyor of agitprop verse. His most inventive and original poetry, however, had other sources, and in retrospect the most significant journey that he ever made was one of the shortest, from Times Square, where he spent his first night in New York on 4 September 1921, to 135th Street.

Ultimately, the companies responsible for producing and distributing infected blood products paid more than a billion dollars in compensation worldwide, but most victims never got a penny.

It’s too late in the day, and too late in the genre, for a gangster movie to be anything other than ironic in relation to morality. But then Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is not only a gangster movie, it is also an attempt to record historical, interracial harm. 

‘Little Boy’ exploded over Hiroshima at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, wiping most of the city off the face of the earth and killing eighty thousand people instantly. But the ‘shock’ to the leadership in Tokyo envisaged by the former US secretary of war Henry Stimson failed to materialise. 

Barbara Kingsolver’s reason for following the plot of Dickens’s David Copperfield so closely is simple. In the acknowledgments, she thanks Dickens for ‘his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us.’ Demon Copperhead sets out to revive a kind of creative indignation.

The brutality of Hamas’s attack shattered Israel’s definition of itself as a post-Holocaust sanctuary that guarantees protection for the Jewish people inside and outside its boundaries. Israel’s response isn’t simply vengeful; it’s existential.

Exceptionalism is the essence of Balmorality. There is no need to break the rules because they have been written in such a way that the private interests of the royal family are secured. Such arrangements are indefensible, unfitting and completely normal.