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You Kids Don’t Understand Real Marriage

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/you-kids-dont-understand-real-marriage
Created
Mon, 30/09/2024 - 22:00

Listen, son, when I was your age, I thought I knew everything, and it looks like we have that in common. You think you know what this is all about? You think you understand what it means to be married to someone for over forty years?

I’ve been married since 1977, and let me tell you, it’s been a nonstop fuckfest ever since.

You think marriage is all picket fences and tomato gardens? Well, guess what, when you’re in a monogamous relationship, the erotic pressure doesn’t quit. It builds and builds for decades to the point you think it will break you. You glance in the mirror and don’t recognize yourself, the way lust has warped your features.

Look across the table, and you see the woman you love. She, too, has been disfigured by this carnal addiction you share. You make eye contact as her foot brushes your leg.

Looks like another dinner will be eaten cold.

Oh sure, you’re thinking, Doesn’t having kids slow you down? Yeah, right. Stuck at home with each other 24-7, plus you have to sneak around to make love? Your mother is into that kind of thing. I’ve had to hide from that woman. She is insatiable.

Public forum: Weapons, climate justice and investing ethically

https://www.ppesydney.net/public-forum-weapons-climate-justice-and-investing-et…
Created
Mon, 30/09/2024 - 16:47

Join a panel of experts for a conversation that tackles the moral and ethical obligations integral to research and investing priorities.

When: 5:00 pm – 6:15 pm, October 14, 2014
Where: Eastern Avenue Lecture Theatre 315, University of Sydney

Registrations: https://events.humanitix.com/weapons-climate-justice-and-investing-ethically

We are living in an era of overlapping crises: from climate catastrophe to devastating wars, alongside the age-old ravages of inequality at home and across the globe. As these struggles escalate, many ordinary people are questioning their own responsibility, and possibility of their complicity, in these disasters. What prospects are there for responding? What avenues for meaningful action?

With the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, these concerns have come into sharper focus. This panel of experts will examine some of these uncomfortable questions, and our moral and ethical obligations to address adverse human rights and climate justice impacts.

Panellists: 

Double Book Launch: Ethics or exploitation? Unpacking sustainable capitalism

https://www.ppesydney.net/double-book-launch-ethics-or-exploitation-unpacking-s…
Created
Mon, 30/09/2024 - 16:20

Double book launch for:

False Profits of Ethical Capital: Finance, Labour and the Politics of Risk by Claire Parfitt

Undermining Resistance: The Governance of Participation by Multinational Mining Corporations by Lian Sinclair

When: 630pm, Tuesday 29 October, 2024

Where: Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe

Registration: https://gleebooks.com.au/event/claire-parfitt-and-lian-sinclair-double-launch/

What economics can learn from epidemiology

https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2024/09/30/what-economics-can-learn-from-epidem…
Created
Mon, 30/09/2024 - 16:16
In mainstream economics nowadays there seems to be a broad consensus that one somehow can establish general truths about things by simply generalizing from lots of individual RCTs. But as is well-known among philosophers of science, this kind of inference, based on induction by simple enumeration, is highly flawed. And there are alternatives: The striking […]

Class origins matter – but who are the agents of change?

https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=62027
Created
Mon, 30/09/2024 - 12:14
The celebratory headlines in Australia today are about how the Federal government has just recorded two consecutive financial year fiscal surpluses, which the Treasurer lauded as an example of “responsible economic management” as the government removes from the economy a cumulative sum of $A172.3 billion since it was elected in May 2022. The headlines should…

The Economy Is Great

https://digbysblog.net/2024/09/29/the-economy-is-great/
Created
Mon, 30/09/2024 - 09:30
And yet most voters say they think that corrupt, orange, imbecile, con artist is the better choice to run it If that freak wins I don’t want to hear another word about economic determinism, “deliverism” or “fundamentals.” It will have been proven to be utter nonsense.

Scab Says What?

https://digbysblog.net/2024/09/29/scab-says-what/
Created
Mon, 30/09/2024 - 08:00
It’s true: In 1980, under pressure to begin construction on what would become his signature project, Donald J. Trump employed a crew of 200 undocumented Polish workers who worked in 12-hour shifts, without gloves, hard hats or masks, to demolish the Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue, where the 58-story, golden-hued Trump Tower now stands. The workers were paid as little as $4 an hour for their dangerous labor, less than half the union wage, if they got paid at all. Their treatment led to years of litigation over Mr. Trump’s labor practices, and in 1998, despite frequent claims that he never settles lawsuits, Mr. Trump quietly reached an agreement to end a class-action suit over the Bonwit Teller demolition in which he was a defendant. For almost 20 years, the terms of that settlement have remained a secret. But last week, the settlement documents were unsealed by Loretta A. Preska, a United States District Court judge for the Southern District, in response to a 2016 motion filed by Time Inc. and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

The Pentagon Goes to School

https://tomdispatch.com/the-pentagon-goes-to-school/
Created
Mon, 30/09/2024 - 07:31

The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight. Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research. And now, Pentagon-funded research... Read more

Cryin’ Kyle Was Looking For Trouble

https://digbysblog.net/2024/09/29/cryin-kyle-was-looking-for-trouble/
Created
Mon, 30/09/2024 - 06:30
I don’t know if this guy is on the level but if so, this is pretty damning: Kyle Rittenhouse’s former bodyguard and spokesperson feels the 17-year-old might never have been acquitted of killing two people and seriously injuring another if the jury knew then what he knows now. “When the world finds out everything that happened in this case and with Kyle, it’ll be shocking. It’s breathtaking,” Dave Hancock said in an interview for a documentary that sheds new light on what happened that fateful night in August 2020, on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Hancock said that he learned during the trial that Rittenhouse had allegedly used racial slurs in messages sent to his friends and appeared to be looking for an opportunity to use a weapon. “There was a history of things he was doing prior to Kenosha, specifically patrolling the street for months with guns and borrowing people’s security uniforms, doing whatever he could to try to get into some kind of a gunfight,” Hancock claimed. “I believed things he told me that I now understand to be one of his many lies. And that hurts.

Leonard Leo Strikes Again

https://digbysblog.net/2024/09/29/leonard-leo-strikes-again/
Created
Mon, 30/09/2024 - 05:00
The man who runs our judicial system has devised yet another depraved plot to destroy the planet: A rightwing organization is attacking efforts to educate judges about the climate crisis. The group appears to be connected to Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightwing takeover of the American judiciary who helped select Trump’s supreme court nominees, the Guardian has learned. The Washington DC-based non-profit Environmental Law Institute (Eli)’s Climate Judiciary Project holds seminars for lawyers and judges about the climate crisis. It aims to “provide neutral, objective information to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation”, according to Eli’s website. The American Energy Institute (AEI), a rightwing, pro-fossil fuel thinktank, has been attacking Eli and their climate trainings in recent months. In August, the organization published a report saying Eli was “corruptly influencing the courts and destroying the rule of law to promote questionable climate science”.