Reading

by Bruce Wilder

(Ian–this is an elevated comment from my post on Breakout Societal Power. It fills in much of the gap elided to in this phrase “Small groups in competition have the chance, though not the certainty, of fast progress, stuck as they are in a cauldron. It doesn’t always happen…” but does so better than I would have. It’s not just about why some societies in sharp competition don’t make it, however.)

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

The Wolves of Yellowstone Gray wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in 1995, resulting in a trophic cascade through the entire ecosystem. After the wolves were driven extinct in the region nearly 100 years ago, scientists began to fully understand their role in the food web as a keystone species. TRANSCRIPT: In 1995, something really exciting happened in the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone. 41 wild wolves are reintroduced here by scientists. After 100 years of being hunted, wolves could once again call this place home. The wolves thrived, but something else very surprising happened. Their return had a spectacular effect on the landscape, an effect that spread wider than anyone thought possible. So how did this all happen? In the past, wolves were seen as a risk to people and livestock, and they were exterminated from the Yellowstone area in the 1920s. The elk’s main predator was gone, and their population more than doubled. Elk are both grazers and browsers, so they eat grass, shrubs, and trees. They overgraze the entire park, upsetting the natural balance of the ecosystem.

Politico takes a look at the movement behind Vance’s ascent to power: Now that Vance is accompanying Trump on the top of the Republican ticket, this paradox has opened Republicans up to fresh criticisms. How populist can Vance really be while cozying up to billionaires in Silicon Valley? What does a Yale-educated attorney and ex-venture capitalist understand about the lives of Trump’s blue-collar voters? Is a guy who owns not one but two million-dollar houses a credible mouthpiece for the GOP’s fledgling economic populism? But the deeper I’ve dug into the conservative world Vance comes from — often referred to as the “New Right” — the more I’ve come to see Vance’s split identity as a feature rather than a bug for his ideological supporters. In fact, Vance embodies an archetype that has been theorized about at length in New Right-adjacent books and podcasts (many of which Vance has read and listened to).

Two theoretical physicists have a lively conversation about how abstract concepts can feel down-to-Earth.

The post Feeling Gravity’s Pull appeared first on Nautilus.

Based on our interviews, heterodox economics appears to be a positive project, inevitably defined somewhat in terms of the mainstream but not exhaustively so. It is also efficacious, with policy and real-world impact. It is a complex object, not amenable to definition by a single criterion. Its dimensions are partly intellectual, in terms of what […]

They are having to shut down elementary schools in Springfield today because of threats. Haitian immigrants are keeping their kids at home and fear going to the store. It’s only a matter of tie before something terrible happens. Trump said today at his press conference that he specifically plans to deport all the immigrants in Springfield. Of course, they are here legally but that doesn’t matter. Neither does it matter that he said he would deport them all to Venezuela. They are, of course, Haitian but to him all the “shitholoe countries” are the same. His demagoguery is getting worse and worse. And his partner in crime JD Vance doubled down today: Those immigrants were invited to fill the jobs that the locals couldn’t fill. The town was dying. losing population by the thousands. They are considered by the local businesses to be their best workers: What we are seeing is true fascist demagoguery. And it’s being promulgated as much by the new generation leader JD Vance as it is the elderly psychopath Donald Trump. This is the GOP.

From Joni Mitchell to nuclear apocalypse and everything in between.

The man at the beginning is close Trump confidante Johnny McEntee, a really sick piece of work, demanding that someone produce for him an example of women bleeding out in parking lots because doctors can’t offer necessary medical care for women who are having miscarriages or other medical emergencies. As you can see from that woman’s horrific story, it happens all the time. And there are plenty more like her. I was glad to see that after decades of Democrats hemming and hawing and grasping at euphemisms to defend reproductive freedom Kamala Harris finally did it right at the debate: Well, as I said, you’re going to hear a bunch of lies. And that’s not actually a surprising fact. Let’s understand how we got here. Donald Trump hand-selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade. And they did exactly as he intended. And now in over 20 states there are Trump abortion bans which make it criminal for a doctor or nurse to provide health care. In one state it provides prison for life. Trump abortion bans that make no exception even for rape and incest.

Australia is to spend mind-boggling money to weaken its own security. Minister RIchard Marles has released a National Defence Strategy which centres on what he calls “projection”. That is, Australian forces threatening China from China’s surrounding waters. The Albanese Government’s defence policy manufactures grievous risk for Australia. That risk must be understood by the government. Continue reading »

Israel was created as a rampart of “Western civilisation” in the barbarous east, but now the rampart is at risk of being overwhelmed. A wave of censorship in the “Western” world might be said to be turning “liberal democracies” into authoritarian states except they never were liberal. The red lines were always there in what Continue reading »

Mick Hall analyses an Australian Broadcasting Corporation story — 11 months into a genocide — on the Israeli military’s use of the Hannibal Directive to kill its own citizens. Special to Consortium News At the weekend Australia’s national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, featured a story reporting the Israeli Defence Forces had indeed carried out Continue reading »

An article published in the Medical Journal of Australia earlier this year points to increased private equity (PE) activity in Australian healthcare, conservatively estimating A$4.5 billion in acquisitions across general practice and selected specialties in 2022 alone. The paper refrains from extensive commentary on the drivers and implications of this trend. However, it points to Continue reading »

The capitulation by seemingly intelligent and decent-minded national leaders to the Holocaust Industry’s relentless campaign to validate any action by Israel in the current conflict in Palestine is seriously affecting the political landscape. It seems that the leaders of “the Western World” have learned nothing from nearly a century of calamitous events. Appeasement of genocide Continue reading »

The self-defence trope used to characterise Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza Continue reading »

Eighty-seven-year-old Pope Francis’ trip to Indonesia, Papua-New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Singapore shows he’s not slowing up. One thing you can say about Pope Francis is that he walks the walk, even if it’s in a wheelchair. The recent visit to Indonesia illustrates this. Eighty-seven percent of Indonesia’s population of 283 million is Muslim; 3.1% are Continue reading »

In Asia media this week: Myanmar recalls retired veterans. Plus: Race starts for Japan’s new PM; US Gaza stance an obstacle for AUKUS; Kolkata protests over gruesome rape-murder; China-Africa summit strengthens South-South ties; Pope’s Indonesia visit contradicts ‘clash of civilisations’. Myanmar’s military junta is becoming more desperate and more brutal as it battles to retake Continue reading »

As Andrew Taylor and Supriya Mathew point out in a recent article in P&I, the current indications regarding population growth are that it will shortly begin to decline in the majority of countries during this century and has already done so in the wealthier (first world) countries. This forcefully raises the question of whether this automatically presages Continue reading »

In an age of logic and evidence-based reasoning, modern research has revealed a thousand-year curse. It could be stopping the superstitious and spiritually-conscious Javanese from vigorously striving to return a thieved “emblem of Indonesian cultural heritage”. At first glance it’s a ridiculous assertion. But apart from a sudden surge of greed eroding goodwill, how else Continue reading »

Don’t underestimate this slender predator from the British grasslands.

The post The Stealthy Assassin Robberfly appeared first on Nautilus.

This one’s for the PBS watching older Indies and Republicans: As a traveler, I’m both a proud American and a citizen of the world — and I’ve got a few thoughts on this coming election. This election is deeper than partisanship. It’s far more than Republican versus Democrat. In the future, big challenges like pandemics, refugees, and climate change will be blind to borders. They’ll be everyone’s problem and only solved by working together as a family of nations. The world needs not American isolation, but American leadership. Not the chaos of Trump, but the stability of @KamalaHarris . Of course, how you vote is your choice. But if you believe, as I do, in the importance of nations working together constructively, the stakes are really high…and the best candidate is clear. Register to vote today at http://vote.gov — and encourage your travelin’ friends to do the same! I also like his argument very much. If you are a person who has spent any time outside the US you know this is true. This world is a lot smaller than people think and we are facing some huge challenges as a country and as a planet.