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Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
What are the consequences for politics if the supposed grown-ups are outside the room? For Osborne, Balls, Stewart and Campbell, it means power without responsibility, armchair politics with advertising revenue, status acquired in public service leveraged for private gain. With their lofty commentary and self-promotion, they seem more likely to intensify than to counter cynicism about and distrust in our institutions. 
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
The vogue in the 1930s and 1940s for unknown, native and ‘primitive’ art means that Morris Hirshfield is remembered (when he is remembered) as an unworldly Jewish tailor who one day decided to pick up a paintbrush. In Richard Meyer’s account, however, Hirshfield was a canny operator who knew how to play on distinctions between high and low culture.
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
Richard Ford’s Frank might be more low-key than other sequential protagonists in modern American fiction – Nathan Zuckerman, Harry Angstrom, Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton – and at the end of Be Mine he’s still claiming to be in limbo as a character: ‘I do not believe I have an essential self.’ But he understands what he sees, and his cartographic analysis (and, despite himself, his self-analysis) is incisive.
Created
Thu, 29/06/2023 - 23:30

“There must be some kind of way out of here…” As night fell over the South River Forest, the music festival was in full swing. Young and old swayed to the sounds of Suede Cassidy. Families gathered around the grill. Little ones frolicked in an inflatable bouncy house bedecked with a banner that read: “Stop Cop City.” While the band played on, a strike force of Georgia state troopers assembled in the shadows. They were there to clear the way for the creation of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, better known as “Cop City,” a $90-million training ground for the future of urban warfare. It would destroy more than half of that urban forest. For years, the project had... Read more

Source: American Inquisition appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Created
Thu, 29/06/2023 - 22:03
Quick Takes 4: Covid Mental Illness, IMF Admits Greed Sometimes Bad, & More

The sheer desperation of the US to halt China’s rise is on display with the news that America blacklisted fourty-four flight schools for teaching Chinese pilots.

Ain’t gonna work, sunshine, and it makes you look like petty fools. Also this whole extraterritorial law thing is now beyond tiresome and pissing everyone off. Ain’t anyone but your lackeys who doesn’t want this to end and to see America in the graveyard of empires.

***

In the sort of lovely Covid news we’ve become used to, it seems that about one-third of everyone who gets Covid gets short or long term mental issues:

Created
Thu, 29/06/2023 - 22:00

In the beginning, I created the apartment and the lease. Then I said, “Let there be tenant”; and there was tenant. And I saw the tenant and that she had sufficient pay stubs and no criminal record, which was good. For I am the landlord your God, and wish not to reveal my wrath upon our first meeting.

Then I said, “Let there be skylight”; and there was skylight. For it gave the apartment a majestic view of the sun and the stars, which I created too, because, lest you forget, I am the landlord your God, sovereign over all things real estate.

Then I said, “Let there be furnishing.” For the tenant was created in my image and my image alone. Let there be a kitchen backsplash, goblet drapery, TV (with built-in Roku), and a mustard-colored sectional. And it was so. For toiling in the name of home improvement is very good.

And thus, I said to the tenant: “Behold your new palace. I have led you into the land of milk and honey. Eat grapes off my landlord vine. Be fruitful and multiply on your bed fit for a queen!”

Created
Thu, 29/06/2023 - 19:11
[Jevons] is a man of some ability, but he seems to me to have a mania for encumbering questions with useless complications, and with a notation implying the existence of greater precision in the data than the questions admit of.  John Stuart Mill Fixation on constructing models — “implying the existence of greater precision in […]
Created
Thu, 29/06/2023 - 18:00
Kristin Forbes, Christian Friedrich and Dennis Reinhardt Recent episodes of financial stress, including the ‘dash for cash’ at the onset of the Covid-19 (Covid) pandemic, pressure in the UK’s liability-driven investment funds in 2022, and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, were stark reminders of the vulnerability of financial institutions to shocks that … Continue reading Funding structures and resilience to shocks after a decade of regulatory reform