Reading
It’s probably been done before, though I don’t know of the book if it has, but one could write a terrific book on Marx and his breakups. The model here would be Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives. Instead of a book about five Victorian marriages, however, and the mix of intellectual, personal, and political sparks they emitted, this would be a book about Marx’s intellectual and political divorces. And how each was a critical turning point in his thought and life. The criterion for inclusion would be that Marx had a personal relationship with these individuals. No chapters on Hegel or Smith or Aristotle. Otherwise it would be too sprawling and insufficiently personal, more of a standard intellectual history rather than […]
There’s a lot of worship of intelligence in our society. Some of it is justified but much isn’t.
I’m reasonably intelligent: I’m at the level where I’m startled if someone is much smarter than I am; it doesn’t happen often.
But it does happen. There are people who make me feel stupid.
Intelligence is essentially two things: ability to perform mental operations, and speed of operation. A smart enough person can perform operations a less smart person can’t; can more swiftly learn how to do operations available to both, and processes faster.
Intelligence at its highest levels leads to polymaths: people who have mastered multiple subjects. All that speed matters.
Generally speaking, though, a smarter person will just get to the same conclusion a stupider person who knew the same things would get to faster. Think the kid at the front of class putting his hand up first.
To download a free PDF of this entire list, click here.
- - -
Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. This election year, with the very real possibility of Trump returning to office, we know it’s important to be reminded of these horrors and to head to the polls in November to avoid experiencing new cruelties, collusions, corruption, and crimes.
Scrambling before showtime Politico has two pre-DNC convention stories worth examining. The first by past convention planners provides a back-stage look at the frenetic preparations for a convention that is at once a four-day infomercial for the Democratic nominee for president, and a last-minute scramble to re-write the script for a convention planned around a different candidate. How to make it must-see TV when everyone knows the outcome? It’s “like herding (childless cat ladies’) cats“: That’s why at this convention, you will see at least one “must-cover” speaker each night: President Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton on Monday, President Barack Obama on Tuesday, President Bill Clinton and Governor Tim Walz on Wednesday, and Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday. Even with big names, a Democrat supporting a Democrat isn’t newsworthy, but much like a 1970s sitcom, extra-special guests are — especially Republicans supporting Democrats. This is why conventions have tried to highlight unlikely supporters or allies.
All of us must play a part in lowering our nation’s political temperature. So I applaud Project 2025 mastermind Kevin Roberts for postponing publication to rewrite and tone down the violent rhetoric in his forthcoming memoir, Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America (with a foreword by J. D. Vance), I’ve decided to follow his lead by making similar edits to my forthcoming book, ROCKET’S RED GLARE: Embracing the Cleansing Fire of Patriotism That Will Burn Our Modern-Day Sodom to the Ground So That a New America Can Rise from the Ashes.
Because my memoir was sent to reviewers in its original form, then excerpted online (often out of context) to widespread and vociferous backlash, my publisher has asked that I publicly endorse these new revisions to show that I am “on board” and to “indemnify them” in case of what they described as “a 150 percent chance of litigation.”
I approve of all these changes, is something I’m contractually obligated to say here.
In July a report on the UK's largest immigration detention centre found it was "filthy" and "dilapidated" and had drug problems
Cutting ties with the controversial columnist and the magazine's Associate Editor would be bad for business – and it is hard not to conclude that it must agree with him, writes Brian Cathcart
Ironically, the riots during a leadership election give the party a unique opportunity to turn a page and turn their back on Farage-type populism. The signs are they will not take that opportunity
| archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about |
| ← previous | August 19th, 2024 | next |
August 19th, 2024: This comic was inspired by the sea!! Can any of us truly know her? I have been regularly following the scientific literature on the labour market impacts of COVID-19 and as the evidence is becoming richer we are getting a clearer idea of those impacts. The short conclusion is that public health policy makers, under pressure from ill-informed individual and corporate interests, have failed dramatically to protect the public…
Policymakers are often interested in the degree to which changes in prices are driven by shocks to supply or demand. One way to estimate the contributions of these shocks is with a structural vector autoregression identified using sign restrictions on the slopes of demand and supply curves. The appeal of this approach is that it relies on uncontroversial assumptions. However, sign restrictions only identify decompositions up to a set. I characterise the conditions under which these sets are informative, examining both historical decompositions (contributions to outcomes) and forecast error variance decompositions (contributions to variances). I use this framework to estimate the contributions of supply and demand shocks to inflation in the United States. While the sign restrictions yield sharp conclusions about the drivers of inflation in some expenditure categories, they tend to yield uninformative decompositions of aggregate inflation. A 'bottom-up' decomposition of aggregate inflation is less informative than a decomposition that uses the aggregate data directly.
“I have to do it my way.” —Donald Trump Republicans are whining because their leader, the man who has always been a demented imbecile, is acting like a demented imbecile: “He’s rattled and needs to get on message,” one GOP House member told NOTUS. “Life’s too hard for too many; the border was left open; and everyone is paying too much for too little.” Another GOP House member called Trump’s attacks on Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp “extremely foolish” and, like many who spoke to NOTUS for this story, urged the former president to stay disciplined and focus on the issues. “If he displayed self-discipline and impulse control, he’d win,” this member said. “The issues favor us. He’s been unable to focus on the issues and is behind. This is his race to lose, and he’s shooting himself in the foot. There’s some Trump fatigue too, and if he’d focus on issues and get off the personality attacks, he’d connect more with voters.” And another GOP congressman was even more clear-eyed. “Let’s be real: He lost in ’20,” this congressman told NOTUS.
Almost three-quarters of a century ago, my mother placed a message in a bottle and tossed it out beyond the waves. It bobbed along through tides, storms, and squalls until just recently, almost four decades after her death, it washed ashore at my feet. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. Still, what happened, even stripped of the metaphors, does astonish me. So here, on the day after my 71st birthday, is a little story about a bottle, a message, time, war (American-style), my mom, and me. Recently, based on a Google search, a woman emailed me at the website I run, TomDispatch, about a 1942 sketch by Irma Selz that she had purchased at an estate sale in Seattle. Did it,... Read more Source: Requiem for the Home Front appeared first on TomDispatch.com. Trump even claims the Democrats rigged their own election The organizing principle of the MAGA GOP is that everything in the world is “rigged” against Donald Trump. And that includes the Democratic Party’s own nominating process: During a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, Trump repeatedly blamed Harris and Democrats for Biden dropping out of the race more than a month ago — undermining Harris’ legitimacy as a candidate and highlighting his one-time opponent. He claimed, without evidence, that the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago next week is “rigged” because Biden isn’t on the ticket. He said Biden is a worse debater than Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke. And Trump accused the media of being biased in favor of the president. “What happened to Biden? I was running against Biden and now I’m running against someone else,” Trump said.
The top is the headline from the new Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos poll which shows that Harris has taken the lead nationally by 4 points. As the NY Times Pitchbot satire account points out the characterization of her holding a “slight” lead is more than a little bit pinched. The newspapers are mad that she isn’t pounding at their doors begging to be interviewed 24/7 (the John McCain good old boys bus tours still remain their fondest dream.) So the coverage is hedged, to say the least. The national polls are interesting, of course, if we want to know how the country at large is perceiving the race. But as we know, the real question is where we stand in the antiquated electoral college. Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter today took a deep dive into the polls. He discussed “the Blue Wall” strategy which until Harris took over was considered the only path Biden had to win. , Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and the single district in Nebraska would get him to 270 and at the time he dropped out no other swing states appeared to be in play.
According to Matt Pottinger, ‘a China expert and deputy national security adviser in the Trump White House…anyone who has entertained the idea of stable ties with Beijing is really smoking dope.’ If that’s what it takes, it might be time to light up. Continue reading »
In trying to Palestine’s prospects of independence and peace with Israel, one is reminded of Tolstoy’s observation that ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. This is to say that, successful claims to independence share common features, but the circumstances of Palestine’s aspiration for independence are distinctively its Continue reading »
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 18 2024 by Tony Wikrent Strategic Political Economy The world will lose $4.7 trillion of revenue in the next decade to tax havens. How did we get here? [The Business Standard, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2024] | ||
