Welcome to my Wednesday Blog, back and this week on a Thursday! Rosebud is Award Nominated! My gonzo SF novella Rosebud has been nominated for a Subjective Chaos Award. Every year, this group of SFF pundits choose their favourites, and I’m honoured to be in that company. You can see the nominees here. The Witches ... Read More
Reading
The Pulitzer-winning journalist discusses the fallout from his report exposing how the US blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipelines. Seymour Hersh joins Aaron Maté to discuss his report on how the Biden administration bombed the Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, which blew up not only a vital Russian-German infrastructure project but a key off-ramp to peace in Ukraine. Guest: Seymour Hersh. Pulitzer-winning journalist who writes at https://seymourhersh.substack.com/. Video: Audio:
The post Seymour Hersh: US bombed Nord Stream to prolong the Ukraine proxy war appeared first on The Grayzone.
And won victory after victory after victory Anand Giridharadas took inspiration from his research for “The Persuaders,” and particularly from his chapter on progressive messaging authority Anat Shenker-Osorio. The left focuses so much on what it stands against that what the left stands for gets lost. It’s a habit we need to kick, she tells students. “We have to be for a thing.” “As we fight against the neo-fascist right, let us not forget what we are for,” Giridharadas tweets in harmony. In conversation this week hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library, Giridharadas explored “the possibility and the difficulty of persuasion in a time of polarization, disinformation, conspiracy theories, political violence, and more.” But we should stop putting our political adversaries at the center of the progressive narrative, Giridharadas told the audience: We are trying something hard and awesome. And at the risk of kind of mixing progressivism with patriotism, it is an awesome pursuit in history.
by Orsolya Lelkes
Happiness matters. The quest for happiness is an elementary life force and an inherent part of steady state economies. Many fear that reducing material consumption will bring a decline in happiness. We do not like to lose what we already have. Recession and income loss tend to hurt.
On the other hand, voluntary adjustment of priorities in life may boost well-being, as a simpler life might deliver more of what many are missing: health,
The post Happiness Matters, Even in a Steady State Economy! Part 2: Flourishing Life appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
A deep dive into the costs and impact of the recent, large-scale European energy subsidies.
“Politicians are calling people demonstrating on the streets ‘terrorists’ for protesting for a new constitution,” Eliana Carlin, a Peruvian political scientist from Lima tells Behind the Headlines host, Lee Camp. Peru is currently in a state of crisis, after years of anti-austerity protests, the election of a humble teacher and union leader, Pedro Castillo, as […]
The post Crisis in Peru: Everything You Need To Know, with Eliana Carlin appeared first on MintPress News.
Sian Norris speaks to a family who will have been in the UK 33 years before they are granted indefinite leave to remain
While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China’s recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. Reviewing recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region raises a tried-and-true historical lesson that bears repeating at this dangerous moment in history: when nations prepare for war, they are far more likely to go to war. In The Guns of August, her magisterial account of another conflict nobody wanted, Barbara Tuchman attributed the start of World War I in 1914 to French and German plans already in place. “Appalled upon the brink,” she wrote, “the chiefs of state who would be... Read more
And meanness? The Fuck-your-feelings crowd is all about theirs. All the time. And America, fuck, yeah. But what besides flag-waving and chest-thumping and damp-eyed singing of Lee Greenwood’s anthem does America mean to them? Created equal? Hanging together or hanging separately? E pluribus unum? Equal justice for all? “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? Leave no team member behind? Not damned likely. It doesn’t seem MAGA holds any values more aspirational than every man for himself, cultural grievance, and not seeing white dominance slip. Their America is more about shibboleths and empty symbols, about tribes and owning the libs. In Jesus’ name. “The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs” (if you know the reference). Everyone else? Fuck ’em. I posited to two vets over lunch recently that this country holds up the military as America’s best. Service. Duty. Sacrifice. Everyone has a job. Everyone gets fed, housed and clothed, medical care. Leave no team member behind. A code of honor: you watch my back, I watch yours. But inside the fence line only.
This is US CPI… I don’t know if this is what the Art degree monetarist morons mean by their figure of speech “inflation!” but maybe… I don’t understand a lot about how these peoples non technical brains work… Anyway if you look at this price index it hasn’t peaked as of the January report…
This is in contrast to Bills report on Australia below… you can’t say the US CPI has peaked…
It seemed to have peaked looking at the December report at 297 but now since January 1 we’ve had a significant impulsive increase in fiscal flow and January reported a 2 point increase in this index to a new high…. so this appears to have the Art degree monetarist psycho morons panties all in a twist with all the drama…
Doctor Who's Jodie Whittaker stars in Capture, a satirical short from Financial Times tackling child online safety in a very "unique" way.
Yet another shameful episode from ‘long-time servant of the security state’ Starmer The UK’s lurch toward fascism continued last night with yet another shameful – and shamefully unsurprising – episode of cowardice and betrayal by Keir Starmer and the shell of the Labour party under his control. With the Tories’ repressive ‘National Security Bill’ in […]
The question of agency here is vexed and political (it’s also gendered). Does the authorship of Hilma af Klint’s spiritualist paintings lie with the medium or her spirit guides? And why do so many drawings by mediums look so similar? Is this the visual language of the living or the dead?
In the Byzantine world, Normans were ‘Franks’, and to the Scots they were English. Like the Vikings, the Normans didn’t maintain an empire but were assimilated where they invaded. What then remains of their myth of multiple conquests?
DESIGNER HILARY: So tell me about your house.
HOMEOWNER AVERY: It’s in a beautiful neighborhood, not far from a Starbucks. It has a charming llama habitat, and I love the wood built-ins in the dining room.
HOMEOWNER TRENT: There’s only one bathroom though. It’s accessible by shimmying through an abandoned mine shaft and riding a rusted minecart to an open pit.
AVERY: Even though I love this house, I’d really like a faucet in the kitchen. Right now, we have to lower a bucket into a well, and the water is full of toxic metals.
TRENT: I want to sell it. I have double vision from mercury poisoning, and there are demons in the basement.
REALTOR DAVID: You absolutely should sell it. This ugly house makes me retch.
AVERY: I want to stay. Our toddler is possessed and crawling up walls, but the dining room is Jamaican mahogany.
When I was 78, I wrote a book about being old. I don’t think I’d ever felt the need to swim more than twenty lengths at that time, let alone record my paltry daily achievements. Now I put letters and numbers in my diary (a sort of code) to remind me that I’ve walked at least five thousand Fitbit steps and swum a kilometre, which is forty lengths of the pool.
You didn’t have to work in the financial services industries to be a yuppie, but the most famous cultural depictions were from that sector. Even their clothes and accessories acquired a broader audience. The Filofax was an ancestor of the smart phone in its capacity to blur the boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘life’.
Students want – or think they want – more and faster feedback. So tutors write more and more, faster and faster, producing paragraph on paragraph that students, in moments of sheepish honesty, sometimes admit they don’t read. However infuriating, it’s understandable. This material is far from our best work. Much of it is vague, rushed or cribbed.
At the interface of the orchestra and the audience the conductor is the recipient of two quite different waves of transference. At his back, an amorphous crowd of strangers beam expectation at him. They have paid to experience something amazing. Variously informed about what exactly he is doing, they are happy to submit themselves to his mystique and charisma. To them, he is the high priest, guardian of the sacred texts, the leader.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 6 (Friday 03 March 2023)
If you have enough money, even being sanctioned by the British government is no impediment to using London’s courts to silence your critics. The Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 explicitly excludes money sent to the UK to pay for legal advice and litigation. Among the beneficiaries of this exemption was Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 6 (Friday 03 March 2023)
Ovens, fridges, vacuums, car keys, radios, speakers: all of them now contain microchips. An ordinary car contains dozens of them. A posh car contains a thousand. And those are just the standard consumer items of the mid-20th century. As for the things we think of as being this century’s new technology, they are some of the most complicated and beautiful artefacts humanity has ever made, mainly because of the chips they contain.
It grew in the hallway beside the pot plant,the ashtray, and the Yellow Pages left ajar.It started under floorboards, unspooledbetween the carpets and their waferings of underlay.It tracked the...