Reading

Created
Wed, 10/01/2024 - 04:10

There are two public housing schemes in South London designed by the architect Kate Macintosh, both of which are still much admired to this day. One, Dawson’s Heights, is gigantic and unmissable — an immense brick castle on a hill, inspired by Macintosh’s native Edinburgh. She designed it in 1965, at the age of twenty-eight, for […]

Created
Wed, 10/01/2024 - 04:00
Can you believe it? “I just think it’s just something where, if you want to accomplish something, you know, a lot of people, I hear, complain about what other people do or why it’s hard, or why it’s impossible,” Kushner said in the video. “And again, I say this as somebody who has been so blessed with so many things in life, but when I’ve had challenges or things I’ve wanted to achieve, I just focus and say, ‘What can I do?’” he added. “I’ll read everything I can get my hands on. If I fail at one thing, if the door closes, I’ll try the window. If the window closes, I’ll try the chimney. If the chimney closes, I’ll try to dig a tunnel. It’s just, if you want to accomplish something, you just have to go at it.” In sharing the post online, Ivanka gushed over her husband, observing that she had received “a remarkable number of gracious compliments” regarding Kushner’s comments. “I personally love this clip as it reveals the determined optimist who firmly believes that there’s always a solution if you’re willing to try enough paths.
Created
Wed, 10/01/2024 - 02:30
Sort of Lawyers are right this minute arguing that Donald “91 felony indictments” Trump should be immune from criminal prosecution for acts he took during his White House tenure. “Circuit judge Florence Pan is putting Trump lawyer John Sauer in a tough spot,” writes The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell. Sauer is still arguing that Trump is not an “officer” of the U.S. You can listen along to the arguments here. On the SEAL Team Six scenario above, Brian Beutler takes on the argument that Trump should be held to a special standard. We all know how special he is, don’t we? Beutler’s “We Can’t Afford Weak-Kneed Liberalism In The Trump Era” refers specifically to objections to disqualifying Trump from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment. Just to get you started: Boiled down, the argument is this: Donald Trump should be held to a special standard, not written into the Constitution, because applying the law to him faithfully is unfair to Republicans, and may allow them to engage in tit-for-tat retribution.  Both of these objections are easily refuted.
Created
Wed, 10/01/2024 - 01:38

Kit Klarenberg investigates the sinister connections that may explain why Israel considered the accused pedophile and close Epstein associate Alan Dershowitz to lead their ICJ defense without concern over a public backlash.

The post Conflict of Sin-terest: Why Israel Dumped Accused Pedophile Alan Dershowitz appeared first on MintPress News.

Created
Wed, 10/01/2024 - 01:29

This week marks the 22nd anniversary of the opening of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the infamous prison on the island of Cuba designed to hold detainees from this country’s Global War on Terror. It’s an anniversary that’s likely to go unnoticed, since these days you rarely hear about the war on terror — and for good reason. After all, that response to al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, as defined over the course of three presidential administrations, has officially ended in a cascade of silence. Yes, international terrorism and the threat of such groups persist, but the narrative of American policy as a response to 9/11 seems to have faded away. Two and a half years ago, the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal... Read more

Created
Wed, 10/01/2024 - 01:00
An invisible consensus evaporates The Bears, one of Adrian Belew’s bands, play a joyous set of guitar-driven songs that stick with you. Reading Jedediah Britton-Purdy’s offering in The Atlantic immediately evoked one of their most memorable: “Trust.” The Duke Law School professor considers the breakdown in mutual trust fueling what feels like a breakdown in the democratic spirit that birthed this country, powered its resolve to form a more perfect union, and held it together, more or less, since its founding: In 2019, 73 percent of those under 30 agreed that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” and almost as many said, “Most people would take advantage of you if they got the chance.” Trust in government has taken an even greater hit. In 1964, 77 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time. In 2022, that number was 22 percent, and it has been languishing in that neighborhood since 2010. In 1973, amid riots, domestic terrorism, the Watergate scandal, and clashes over the Vietnam War, majorities trusted Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.
Created
Wed, 10/01/2024 - 01:00

Chicago humorist Mark Peters is obsessed with reading, writing, hearing, telling—and now, writing about—jokes. In each essay, he looks at a perfect joke by a master of the form.

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Jack Kirby created thousands of comic book characters, from the X-Men to the Fantastic Four to the Dingbats of Danger Street. But which one was the funniest?

(If you’re not familiar with Jack Kirby, imagine everything you think Stan Lee created, plus a lot more creating, plus killing Nazis. And smoking cigars. That’s Jack Kirby.)

Since Kirby composed every character and page extra-large and mega-bombastic, plenty of them have an element of humor.

Created
Wed, 10/01/2024 - 00:01

Dear Mr. White,

It is with an uneasy mixture of consternation and lust that we received, via Instagram, your latest thirst trap. We see that you have finally assumed the mantle of Calvin Klein Underwear Boy, and while we love this for you, we are compelled to say that you’ve done enough. You may have, in fact, done too much.

We appreciate the work that’s gone into creating your perfect six- (eight? Five-thousand?!?)-pack abs. Your shoulders look hewn from the same Carrara marble that Carmy’s ancestors used to build temples. That pelvic line is a perfect road map to [REDACTED]. But, sir, this level of hotness has scrambled our GPS, and we are frankly terrified to explore your highways and side streets, even within the cozy confines of our private fantasy life.

Created
Tue, 09/01/2024 - 20:58
Construction Of Reality: Humanity’s First Invention

Four chapters remain. We are a little over $1,200 from our final reward of the fundraiser ,an article on the Middle Ages Academic crisis (overproduction and collapse.) Chapters to come include:

8. Interaction ritual (how daily life creates identification and personality)

9.The Ritual Masters (How rituals create different types and classes of people)

10. The Ideologues (How identity is tied into story, ideology and meaning)

11. Reign of the Ideologues (How ideology is used to create civilizations and the payoffs for ideologues)

Chapter 7: The Ritual

Humanity’s first invention was either simple stone tools or rituals.

My money is on rituals.

Created
Tue, 09/01/2024 - 20:24
 The most expedient population and data generation model to adopt is one in which the population is regarded as a realization of an infinite super population. This setup is the standard perspective in mathematical statistics, in which random variables are assumed to exist with fixed moments for an uncountable and unspecified universe of events … […]
Created
Tue, 09/01/2024 - 11:30
It’s no longer about Jesus and the Bible There’s quite a bit of good writing about Christian Nationalism these days largely because we’re spending a tiresome amount of time in Iowa which is the heartbeat of white conservative evangelicalism. This one (gift link) from the NY Times is quite good. And this one from Benjamin Wallace Wells in the New Yorker is really excellent. They both report that today’s evangelical GOP evangelicals are different than they used to be. Wells interviews a number of Iowa pastors and politicians and they’re all interesting. But this one really struck me: One evening, I drove from Des Moines to Council Bluffs, on Iowa’s far-western edge and just a few miles from Omaha, to meet Joseph Hall, another pastor who had delivered the opening prayer at a recent Trump rally. Hall is forty-six years old, a military veteran who grew up in South Carolina and still has a strong Southern accent. His church looked like it was prospering. It got several hundred parishioners on Sundays, he said, and many of his sermons were online.
Created
Tue, 09/01/2024 - 11:30
Yes, that happened this month in Italy. And yes, they are wearing black shirts. Italian opposition leaders have called on Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government to ban neofascist groups after a chilling video emerged of hundreds of men making fascist salutes during an event in Rome. The crowd was gathered outside the former headquarters of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neofascist party founded after the second world war which eventually morphed into Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party. The annual gathering, on Via Acca Larentia in the east of the city on Sunday, commemorates the 46th anniversary of the killing of three militants from the now defunct party’s youth wing. In the video, which was widely shared online, the men are standing in rows making the stiff-armed salute and shouting “present” three times. A militant then shouts “For all fallen comrades!” – a typical rallying cry of neofascists. This sort of thing is ostensibly illegal in Italy. But it’s apparently hard to prove.