Data suggests that US dollar reserves in central banks are dwindling, as is the influence of the US on the world economy. This presents a unique opportunity for regional currencies and alternative payment systems to enter the vacuum. First published in The Cradle January 13 2023 The imposition of US trade restrictions and sanctions against a Continue reading »
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We barely had time to catch our breath from the wild spectacle of the Republicans finally electing a speaker when their next spectacle started with a bang. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen abruptly announced that the U.S. will hit the so-called debt ceiling on Jan 19, putting the issue immediately on the front burner. The government can move money around to keep paying its bills until some time next summer, but this is already shaping up to be an exhausting, months-long battle royale. It’s probably a good thing that they’re getting an early start since the MAGA House majority seems to need some serious remedial instruction on how the world works. That’s not to say that debt-ceiling standoffs are some core tactic of the MAGA movement. In fact, Republicans raised the debt ceiling three times during the Trump administration with no fuss at all. They never felt it necessary to try to persuade Trump to cut spending, and the Freedom Caucus didn’t utter a peep as he massively increased the deficit. These hostage situations are reserved for times when the GOP holds the House and a Democrat is in the White House. Shocking, I know.
A Masterful three-hour narrated audiobook set in the 1970s Third Doctor era, Terror of the Master, is being re-released in March 2023 as a standalone download from Big Finish Productions. In January 2021, the special limited edition anthology release from The Worlds of Doctor Who: Masterful celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first TV appearance […]
The post BIG FINISH: ‘Terror of the Master’ returns for a standalone download appeared first on Blogtor Who.
Some schools that removed police on campus following the 2020 uprisings are now asking for them to be reinstated.
The post Students Need Emotional and Community Support, Not Cops in Schools appeared first on scheerpost.com.
By Dorothee Benz / Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting A recent guest essay in the New York Times (12/28/22) concluded a searing takedown of “our technology overlords” with the sentence: We have a technologically driven shift of power to ideological individuals and organizations whose lack of appreciation for moral nuance and good governance puts us all at […]
The post NYT Worries Big Brother Is Not Watching You appeared first on scheerpost.com.
“I thought if I required Twitter employees to come to work in the office, that would do the trick,” Musk said. “Instead, they quit en masse.”
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The philosopher later refutes this while shouting FOUUUURRRR while thinking about butts.
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Lee Camp sat down with Mike Papantonio, one of the most successful lawyers in the US and an attorney who built a reputation for holding corporate America accountable.
The post Social Media Is Filled With Spooks! With Mike Papantonio appeared first on MintPress News.
I’m developing a set of Mastermind lectures on economics, and the marketing has included video “shorts” from my interview with Lex Fridman. This one, on why socialist economies didn’t innovate as fast as capitalist ones drew a lot of ire on Twitter. The text of that short is: Innovations: Socialist versus Capitalism [Under capitalism] You … Continue reading "Why did socialism fail at product innovation and economic growth?"
Why does the conservative American Dream look like Mogadishu? Jeff Sharlet is documenting the attrocities. I’ll repeat: Why does the conservative American Dream look like Mogadishu? And like Syria:
Oil prices have perked up and oil price moves can lead market rallies. Is this a false positive or an early sign?
On this week’s Lever Time Premium: we speak with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) about the current goings-on in Congress; and interview author John Hendrickson about the political and personal impacts of speech disfluency.
As well as ripping a hole in the economy with her disastrous mini budget, her passionate rants about cheese and pork markets and, of course, being outlasted as prime minister by a head of lettuce, one of Liz Truss’s lesser-known legacies is the damage she caused to the Environment Agency (EA) in her time as […]
On this week’s Lever Time: we speak with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) about the current goings-on in Congress; and interview author John Hendrickson about the political and personal impacts of speech disfluency.
Lowkey is joined by Professor David Miller, formerly of Bristol University and Zeeshan Ali, who runs the successful YouTube channel, Smile2Jannah, to discuss the power of the Israel Lobby, Jordan Peterson and the World Cup among other topics.
The post World Cup Racism, The Israel Lobby, and Jordan Peterson, with Smile 2 Jannah and David Miller appeared first on MintPress News.
Net neutrality to sunset if Retained EU Law Bill is passed Retained Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill will wipe out net neutrality from UK law on 31 December this year. Anyone who cares about the Internet – and indeed who cares about freedom of expression and access to information online – should be […]
This Afterlife is A. E. Stallings’s new Selected Poems, drawing on her four full-length books, and including a “lagniappe” or bonus of previously uncollected poems and translations. Stallings, a poet who was raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, has made Athens, Greece, her home for almost two decades. Her education in Classics, Latin, and Greek prepared her for a life preoccupied with the Grecian peninsula, but the move was not preordained—it’s rather as if her work over the years led her there, from her debut collection Archaic Smile, a book of rewritings of myths and riffs on sayings, her second book Hapax, her translations of Lucretius and Hesiod and George Seferis, on through her third book, Olives, and her fourth, the Pulitzer Prize finalist collection Like, which begins with an epigraph in Greek and a poem that responds to it. That the poem is a villanelle tells us on the one hand that she is a poet whose strongest work often emerges out of inherited forms, and that her sensibility was European before she herself knew it was—the poem recalls that journey in the slow boil of the villanelle, building, and recasting:
And he is the rest of us Donald J. Trump is a catalyst not a cause. Trumpism and its nihilistic “Deep State” wreckers have deeper roots than the shallow, game-show grifter whose name attached to our grievance-fueled anti-democracy movement. There is more than polarization afoot, argues Brian Klaas, writing from Britain. Unlike the U.S., few in England buy into conspiracy theories. Here, polarization “plus this conspiracist tendency risks turning run-of-the-mill democratic dysfunction into a democratic death spiral.” The paranoid style was with us since before Richard J. Hofstadter’s 1964 essay. Jared Yates Sexton argues that conspiratorial thinking found fertile ground in the New World and was present at the nation’s founding. Klaas compares the belief gap (The Atlantic): According to YouGov polling, a third of Americans believe that a small group of people secretly runs the world, while just 18 percent believe the same in the United Kingdom. Similarly, 9 percent of Americans think COVID-19 is a fake disease. In Britain, that figure is just 3 percent.
The cartoonist HT Webster predicting generative art in 1923
Russell Banks admitted that he wrote about the sort of people who voted for Trump; those were the people he came from. He wanted them to understand themselves better. But that didn’t mean he was an optimist. The real-life story of Sadie Marchant had a happy ending insofar as the Shakers were vindicated. Banks’s story is different.
Samuel Adams was an ascetic, indifferent to worldly baubles, decent comforts, respectable clothing. His republican vision for Massachusetts was forbiddingly austere, not an open marketplace free of intrusive British taxation, but what he termed, uninvitingly, a ‘Christian Sparta’. Religion was not then a private matter of belief unrelated to political attitudes.
Holding a coin that someone else held two thousand years ago creates a special feeling of connectedness. Anyone who has handed a bag of cheap Roman bronzes around a room of bored undergraduates will have seen first-hand the way it electrifies the atmosphere. Coins make history feel real. And there are an awful lot of them out there.