Reading

Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 04:30
Keep in mind that cutting spending is just owning the libs. They are all too stupid to have the most rudimentary understanding of what any of this means. The good news is that they can’t accomplish any of this stuff because they only have one house of congress and if they strong arm their swing state members into voting for this loony nonsense they’ll lose their seats in 2024. Of course, they will take the debt ceiling hostage at their earliest convenience to try to blackmail the Senate and the White House into going along with this ridiculous bullshit so that will be fun. But in the end they are cutting their own throats. And America is going to “go through some things.”
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 03:00
“It is clear enough that McCarthyism and its legacy were sufficient to make life hard for a particular strand of opposition to the analytic mainstream, characterized by its general adherence to empiricism and liberalism: those who were broadly Marxists.” So writes Christoph Schuringa a philosopher at Northeastern University London, in an article in Jacobin. He continues: But its power in cementing the analytic mainstream went beyond this. The whole tendency of the period was to block out alternatives to a paradigm that stretched across disciplines. This paradigm, which consisted of methodologies developed for the purposes of Cold War research and development such as rational choice theory, operations research, and game theory, functioned to reinforce a vision of society, and of inquiry, reliant on the classical liberal idea of the autonomous rational individual as the fundamental unit of society. The article includes accounts of some philosophers called before the House Un-American Activities Committee or persecuted by the FBI.
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 02:30
Or the changing climate Dr. Ian Malcolm : Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and um, screaming. What with 6-year-olds shooting teachers and Real Americans™ vying to turn the U.S. into Syria (or Somalia), House Republicans, antivaxxers, authoritarian mobs, and climate change will have to compete to be the final straw that takes us out. ChatGPT has received lots of gushing press recently touting the tantalizing possibilities for artificial intelligence (AI). Have these people never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, or The Lawnmower Man ? Perhaps we as a species are too naive to survive. Axios: Malicious hackers are already using the flashy new AI chatbot, ChatGPT, to create new low-level cyber tools, including malware and encryption scripts, according to a recent report. Why it matters: Security experts have been warning that OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool could help cybercriminals speed up their attacks, and it all happened fast.
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 02:15
Haven't heard much about him lately.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has subpoenaed Donald Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, asking him to turn over records to a federal grand jury as part of an investigation into the former president’s fundraising following the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the subpoena.
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 01:35

(The monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) is scheduled for release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday, January 12th at 8:30 AM Eastern Time.) The overall inflation rate in November was just 0.1 percent, held down by a 2.0 percent drop in gas prices. However, inflation in the core index was also moderate, coming […]

The post Inflation Preview: What to Look for in the December CPI appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 01:28

A few recent headlines reveal the painfully inhumane, dangerously volatile state of U.S. relations with its own home region, the continent of North America. A record-breaking 2.76 million border crossings from Mexico filled homeless shelters to the bursting point in cities nationwide in 2022. This year, the possible cessation of Covid restrictions could allow tens of thousands more migrants, now huddling in the cold of northern Mexico, to surge across the border, as some are already able to do. Most of those refugees are Central Americans, fleeing cities ravaged by gang warfare and farms devastated by climate change. The inept U.S. response to such a disturbing world ranges from the Biden administration’s nervously biding its time without a plan in... Read more

Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 01:17

CEPR has long been a leader in examining economic and political developments in Latin America. Highlights of our work in 2022 included the following:  Co-Director Mark Weisbrot joined Joseph E. Stiglitz to author this op-ed for Foreign Policy on the February 2022 agreement between Argentina and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The piece highlighted that […]

The post CEPR Spotlight: Latin America appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 01:07
Skwawkbox will be in London later this month to livestream ‘#FreeTheTruth: Secret Power, Media Freedom and Democracy‘, an event in support of wrongly-jailed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, featuring leading international journalists. The livestream will run on Skwawkbox and Socialist Telly and will be embedded in the organisers’ pages and feeds. Streaming links will be published […]
Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 01:00

Yona Harvey is a poet of the speculative, a poet of other worlds—other words—that turns out to be our worlds and words. Her first full-length collection of poems was Hemming the Water, which won the Kate Tufts in 2013, and her second was You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love which appeared when the pandemic was six months old. It’s not just that Mars is far from disturbed Earth, but also that it’s alien, that feeling human sometimes means feeling alien. She works slowly and deeply—there’s a third collection close to finished, but still a ways off—and sometimes she takes time away from poetry to write words for Marvel comics with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Hemming the Water is a riff on sound and song, a book that gets in the head of—or into conversation with—figures like Mary Lou Williams, Toni Morrison, Ruth Stone, Pablo Neruda. “A door & the darkness,” a “song in the head of a heathen.” One poem is called “The Riot Inside Me,” one is titled “Chatterblue,” another “Gingivitis, Notes on Fear.” As a book of discovery, discovering the self and its histories and burdens, it registers, in brash delicate gorgeous styles, “The shock / Of your voice.”

Created
Wed, 11/01/2023 - 01:00
Inverting the “tragedy plus time” formula Late night comics weighed in on the Republicans’ 15-round House Speaker fight (New York Times): “Things really started to spin out on the floor of the House. It got so out of control, I thought I was watching the Oscars.” — JIMMY KIMMEL “Ahead of the last round of voting for House speaker, Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers appeared to charge at fellow Republican Representative Matt Gaetz. And, out of habit, Gaetz yelled ‘I’ve never even met your daughter!’” — SETH MEYERS “That’s a face mask violation — 15 yards. It was really the most exciting hour of cable news in quite some time.” — JIMMY KIMMEL “Oh, my God. I don’t know if men should hold political office. They’re just too emotional!” — STEPHEN COLBERT “After 15 rounds of voting, McCarthy pulled off the impossible — he got people to watch C-SPAN for an entire week.” — JIMMY FALLON “I can’t even imagine what McCarthy was going through.