Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 7 (Friday 17 March 2023)
Reading
Ships are abandoned when their owners take on too much debt, or when they deliberately let the ship’s condition and licences slip, or when they fail to pay the crew’s wages. If they leave the ship, crew members lose the right to claim their wages, and in some jurisdictions they may be threatened with arrest for negligence.
Corruption is ‘endemic in policing across the world’, the 2021 report into Daniel Morgan’s murder states. It takes root, efforts are made to tackle it, then attention moves elsewhere and it takes root again.
More self-serving outrage from the GOP Without getting overly wonky here, I’ve studied the Electronic Registration Information Centers (ERIC) efforts at voter roll maintenance for several years. Multiple red states in recent weeks have exited the ERIC network. The consortium of over two dozen states (it was over 30) share voter registration data in a coordinated effort to eliminate multi-state registrants, to identify registrants who have moved within and between states, to identify those who have died, and to identify people who vote in more than one state in an election. There seem to be quite a few of the last group in Florida, one of several red states that exited ERIC last week. Readers who remember Kansas’ Kris Kobach’s defunct Interstate Crosscheck system and its history of bad data matching, take note. Originally a project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, ERIC is what Interstate Crosscheck purported to be and was not. Kobach’s real project was not election integrity but promoting the notion that voter fraud was widespread and photo IDs necessary to combating the phantom menace. Republicans loved it.
As the suffering increases so do the numbers who go private in desperation. I am sure that in doing so myself I contributed to what seems the unstoppable drift to a two-tier system. But there is a further distinction. Private medicine isn’t cheap if you don’t have health insurance.
By the end of the year Basing House was more like the Tower of London than an effete stately home, ‘strongly walled about with earth raised against the wall of such a thickness that it is able to dead the greatest cannon bullet’. The grand residence was on a war footing.
Something which has slipped past most people’s radar is that China recently acted as the intermediary for peace talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The two countries have been at each other’s throats for decades, funding and running operations and proxies against each other. Elijah Manjier has a decent summary (part is behind a subscriber wall) from a pro-Iranian point of view.
It’s also interesting that in this conference no English was used!
Now it’s obvious why the US couldn’t be involved: it hates Iran and doesn’t intend to change that any time soon. But that China was reached out to indicates that it has good relationships with Iran and Saudi Arabia and that it’s considered powerful and prestigious enough to be involved a region far from its core.
A guide for ORG supporters and activists who want to take action to protect their digital rights from the Online Safety Bill Campaign Pack on the Online Safety Bill for ORG campaignersAuthor – James Baker – james.baker@openrightsgroup.orgMarch 2023 – V1CC BY-SA 3.0
Studies have found that alphabet books are helpful and fun tools to promote literacy and teach life lessons to children. But studies also show that kids’ lives are ridiculously easy. They don’t have to pay rent or run errands or wonder whether it’s time to start thinking about freezing their eggs. Adults, on the other hand, are faced with all kinds of unwritten rules every day—and we need to have them spelled out. Literally. Here are twenty-six experiences that define being twenty-six and beyond.
A is for Adulthood, its trials and tribulations…
B is for the Babysitter—whose rates outpace inflation.
C is for Cups covering your nightstand and desk…
D is for the rush you’ll get Depositing mobile checks.
E is for Escaping your home friend’s MLM biz…
F is for FICO score, whatever that is.
G is for Grocery shopping—AGAIN—for moldy berries…
H is for HBO to cure the Sunday scaries.
Startups are on pins and needles.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: SNL, AEW, The Blacklist, Monk, The Boys, Star Trek: SNW, Gunn/Superman/Batman, Daredevil, Doctor Who & more!
Advocacy groups and human rights organisations have written to the Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, and the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, Stephen Watson, to ask them to investigate discriminatory police practices in the wake of the conviction of ten young Black men, known as the Manchester 10. Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy BurnhamGreater Manchester Combined […]
In this week’s Lever Time episode, we explore the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and its impact on the financial system.
Michael Hudson gives a wide-ranging talk on SVB and other recent bank collapses, focusing on the considerable role of misguided Fed policies
Iain Barbour first noticed something was wrong when he started choking on a burger. ‘I realised I couldn’t swallow. And I had these chest pains that I thought was a heart attack,’ he recalls. When he went to the doctor in July 2020, he was told it was acid reflux. After weeks with no progress […]
- by Aeon Video
- by Mario Saraceni
The Currency of Politics - audiobook
The neoliberal approach to money is that it is apolitical, facilitating exchange without interfering in it. But with the bailouts of 2008 and then COVID, more people understand that money does not work by itself, but must be managed through the political process.
"Fool me once, shame on thee. Fool me twice, shame on me." The Global Soutn has wised up in the wake of the war in Iraq.
Stefano Goodman explains how impairment can lead to sudden physical reliance on strangers – and how this shapes our personalities
I’m sure experts can say many deep things about war crimes. Alas, I’m no expert. And yet, that caveat in place, I think I’ve noticed two things about war crimes. It’s up to you to judge how interesting they are.
The first thing I can say about war crimes is that for years we hear next to nothing about them, even during wartime. It’s almost like wars became civilised affairs.
Then, suddenly, news reports are full of alleged war crimes.
That’s what happened since February 2022, when the Russian Federation invaded the Ukraine: the term “war crime” became almost as frequent on our TV screens as the daily appearances of the Ukrainian President.
The second thing I’ve noticed is that current news coverage of war crimes is inevitably framed within a cosmic good versus evil conflict – sorry – Western liberal democracies versus autocratic regimes narrative. In this story war crimes are the preserve of the Other: autocratic regimes (aka, the bad guys). Western liberal democracies (We), the immaculately good guys, abhor such things. Living under the rule of law, We promote an “international rules-based order”.
How the SVB bailout confirms the dedication of the elites to self interest only.