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Palestinians Are Not Liars: Confronting the Violence of Media Delegitimization

https://www.mintpressnews.com/palestinian-journalists-not-liars-confronting-med…
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 11:40

55 journalists have been killed and hundreds more injured or detained by Israel since 2000. Yet for many Palestinian, the physical harm they face pales in comparison to the constant delegitimization of their work by in the media.

The post Palestinians Are Not Liars: Confronting the Violence of Media Delegitimization appeared first on MintPress News.

Waiting for him to shuffle off his mortal coil

https://digbysblog.net/2023/01/30/waiting-for-him-to-shuffle-off-his-mortal-coi…
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 11:30
I’ve said this many times: Republicans who know that Trump is a liability are basically just hoping that he goes to jail or dies because that’s the only thing that will shake loose the base (and there’s no guarantee that an indictment or jail term would do that either.) McKay Coppins in the Atlantic takes a look at that pathetically weak position: Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail this past weekend, declaring that he is “angry” and determined to win the  GOP presidential nomination again in 2024. Aside from his most blinkered loyalists, virtually everyone in the party agrees: It’s time to move on from Trump. But ask them how they plan to do that, and the discussion quickly veers into the realm of hopeful hypotheticals. Maybe he’ll get indicted and his legal problems will overwhelm him.

The Effect of Credit Constraints on Housing Prices: (Further) Evidence from a Survey Experiment

https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/rdp/2023/2023-01.html
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 11:30
The response of housing prices to financing conditions is determined by the effect on the marginal buyer, not the average household. I use heterogeneous willingness to pay (WTP) data from a stated preference experiment in Fuster and Zafar (2021) to estimate the effects of changes in mortgage rates and collateral constraints on housing prices by analysing the structure of housing demand curves. This work builds on their research, which focused on average changes in WTP. Relaxing down payment constraints has a large average effect on WTP, but the effect on price is less than half as large. Financially constrained households tend to respond more to relaxed constraints, but those households often have WTPs that are too low to affect market prices. Changing the mortgage rate has the same average effect on WTPs and on market prices, because there is no systematic relationship between a household's response to mortgage rates and their location on the demand curve. I use a heterogeneous user cost model of individual WTPs to understand how household heterogeneity determines the structure of overall housing demand.

Video: anti-fascist protesters demonstrate at Downing Street against Ukrainian nazis

https://skwawkbox.org/2023/01/31/video-anti-fasicst-protesters-demonstrate-at-d…
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 11:12
On Saturday, a small but passionate political protest took place opposite Downing Street, on a topic almost entirely ignored – not to mention actively whitewashed by the UK’s ‘mainstream’ media: the extent of nazi influence in Ukraine. The topic is papered over with equal diligence by what now passes for the ‘Labour party’, which punishes […]

Exploring the Economic and Social Benefits of Sustainable Rail Construction

https://www.peakoil.net/sustainability/exploring-the-economic-and-social-benefi…
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 11:11

Do you realize the power of transportation to transform our societies? It’s easier to imagine a world with cars, planes, and rail systems. Rail has long been one of the most reliable and efficient modes of transport around the globe—but its impact isn’t limited only to convenience. It can also be a powerful tool for…

The post Exploring the Economic and Social Benefits of Sustainable Rail Construction appeared first on Peak Oil.

No negotiation over the debt ceiling

https://digbysblog.net/2023/01/30/no-negotiation-over-the-debt-ceiling/
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 10:00
That what budget talks are for Josh Marshall makes an important point about the reasons the Democrats cannot negotiate around raising the debt ceiling. It’s not that they won’t ever negotiate. It’s that they can’t negotiate with people who think they can hold the world economy hostage in order to get their way: No one — not the White House or any Democrats on Capitol Hill — is saying they won’t negotiate the federal budget or how much the country should be spending on this or that priority or how much debt the country should take on. Kevin McCarthy is right when he says, albeit disingenuously: you can’t say you won’t negotiate. That’s what democratic governance is. That’s true. In the last Congress Democrats’ had a tenuous but complete control of Congress as well as the White House. Now Republicans hold the House by an equally tenuous but real margin. By definition, that means fiscal policy will move in the Republican direction during the next two years. That’s the democratic process. The extent of the shift is what negotiation is about. Each side has its own set of tools at its disposal.

How They Paid for the War — Sam Levy

http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2023/01/how-they-paid-for-war-sam-levy…
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 09:38
I am certainly not the first person to point to wartime mobilization as a model for our response to climate change. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines3 for it within politics, but academics such as JW Mason, Andrew Bossie, and Isabella Weber have also worked to extract lessons from World War II for today.4 In my research I zero in on the Treasury, a key nexus of macroeconomic policymaking, and compare and contrast their view specifically with that of MMT.

The method is historical: I dug through various sources, primary and secondary, to piece together the worldview held by Treasury officials. The result is a surprisingly long list of direct quotations that you could easily mistake for having come from an MMT economist.…
Of course, the MMT economists noticed this too.

Good article based on MMT principles but which is framed to appeal to the progressives looking at a Green New Deal rather than as a tract promoting MMT.

Strange Matters
How They Paid for the War

Russia and Iran launch payment system as an alternative to Swift — Middle East Eye

http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2023/01/russia-and-iran-launch-payment-…
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 09:08
Iran and Russia have linked their banking systems, a senior Iranian official said on Monday, a move that will allow the two heavily sanctioned countries with deepening economic ties to trade and conduct business outside the US financial system.

The two connected their interbank communication and transfer systems. Since the 2018 reimposition of sanctions, Iran has been disconnected from the western-based Swift financial messaging system, while many Russian banks were kicked off the platform following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

"Iranian banks no longer need to use SWIFT ... with Russian banks, which can be for the opening of Letters of Credit and transfers or warranties," deputy governor of Iran's Central Bank, Mohsen Karimi, told the semi-official Fars news agency.…

The "National Debt" is No One's Fault — Stephanie Kelton

http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-national-debt-is-no-ones-fa…
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 08:49
Let's stop the finger-pointing and have an honest conversation. Neither side is responsible for our debt crisis, because there isn't one....

 Substantial post.

The Lens
The "National Debt" is No One's Fault
Stephanie Kelton | Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University, formerly Democrats' chief economist on the staff of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, and an economic adviser to the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders

every small city has that one dictator chic house

https://mcmansionhell.com/post/707909502449614849
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 08:45

I don’t know why, but every city, no matter how big, has some insanely stacked dictator-looking McMansion somewhere outside the city limits. If you sort your Zillow results as Price: High - Low, this house will pop up first. It costs something like $5,000,000. It is 10,000 square feet. There are usually frescos and tawdry gildedness of some variety. The realtor’s text brags of marble and uses the word “Manor.”

Today, our house, squarely in this category, is found in the suburbs of Milwaukee, WI, not really a place known for unhinged 21st century robber barons. In fact, I find Wisconsin to be one of the least McMansion-dense states in the country. Even the guy who invented Culvers or the Milwaukee Bucks probably has a much less insane house than the one I’m about to show you:

The Stormy case is back on the agenda?

https://digbysblog.net/2023/01/30/the-stormy-case-is-back-on-the-agenda/
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 08:30
apparently … I confess that I find this a little bit hard to understand. Why have they decided that it’s worth pursuing now? But fine. He’s a crook, go after the crimes: The Manhattan district attorney’s office on Monday will begin presenting evidence to a grand jury about Donald J. Trump’s role in paying hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The grand jury was recently impaneled, and witness testimony will soon begin, a clear signal that the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, is nearing a decision about whether to charge Mr. Trump. On Monday, one of the witnesses was seen with his lawyer entering the building in Lower Manhattan where the grand jury is sitting. The witness, David Pecker, is the former publisher of The National Enquirer, the tabloid that helped broker the deal with the porn star, Stormy Daniels.

NUS Philosophy Apologizes for Rejection Email Mishap

https://dailynous.com/2023/01/30/nus-philosophy-apologizes-for-rejection-email-…
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 07:54
To its credit, the Department of Philosophy at National University of Singapore, in a timely manner, emailed some applicants to its recently advertised open rank position to inform them that they were no longer being considered for the job. Unfortunately, the email addresses of all of the recipients of the rejection letter were visible in the “cc” section of the message. The result was that over 200 people were exposed as having applied to the position. For some, this is no big deal, for others, it is. It’s a kind of privacy violation, but as one reader of Daily Nous put it in an email, the error also puts some “scholars in precarious positions at risk, since many do not want their employers to know that they are applying elsewhere,” for fear of upsetting them, or giving them reason to not renew their contracts. Once notified of the error, the search committee member responsible for it wrote to the affected candidates to apologize.

REVIEW: Doctor Who: Cass – An Unexpectedly Fun Time War Romp

https://www.blogtorwho.com/review-doctor-who-cass-an-unexpectedly-fun-time-war-…
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 07:00

The Doctor has an impossible reunion in three stories that showcase Paul McGann at his charismatic, freewheeling best Time is a funny thing, and nowhere is that more true than in the world of Big Finish. Their unique mandate to cover all of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child to The Power of the Doctor […]

The post REVIEW: Doctor Who: Cass – An Unexpectedly Fun Time War Romp appeared first on Blogtor Who.

In case you were wondering if they learned their lesson

https://digbysblog.net/2023/01/30/in-case-you-were-wondering-if-they-learned-th…
Created
Tue, 31/01/2023 - 07:00
They did not The tiny red trickle last November was a coincidence, apparently. They’re all-in on the forced pregnancy thing. The Republican National Committee passed a resolution Monday urging party members at both the state and federal levels to pass the most aggressive anti-abortion legislation possible in the run-up to 2024.  It specifically points to heartbeat bills, which usually translate as six-week gestational bans — before most women know that they’re pregnant — and “fetal pain” legislation, premised on the anti-abortion myth that embryos and fetuses can feel pain far before they’ve developed the structures that would allow them to.  The resolution also blames Republicans’ historically weak midterms performance on candidates failing to push their anti-abortion bona fides hard enough. You read that right. They didn’t press their out of the mainstream, anti-abortion beliefs hard enough which evidently led to people voting for Democrats instead? Actually, they clearly believe they failed on turnout which is incorrect.