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Spekulationsbubblor får konsekvenser för hela samhället. Men hur skapas de? Priserna på finansmarknaden sätts efter en annan logik än varor i vår vardag, säger professor Lars Pålsson Syll. Man köper tillgångar, inte för att använda dem, utan för att sälja dem vidare. Tulpanmanin i Holland på 1600-talet är den först kända spekulationsbubblan. Då drabbades bara […]

The IMF and the World Bank are in Washington this week for their 6 monthly meetings and the IMF are already bullying policy makers around the world with their rhetoric that continues the scaremongering about inflation. The IMF boss has told central bankers to resist pressure to drop interest rates, even though it is clear…

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

The Washington Post reports on some of the MAGA faithful who are losing their nest eggs on Trump’s Truth Social stock: Jerry Dean McLain first bet on former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social two years ago, buying into the Trump company’s planned merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, at $90 a share. Over time, as the price changed, he kept buying, amassing hundreds of shares for $25,000 — pretty much his “whole nest egg,” he said. That nest egg has lost about half its value in the past two weeks as Trump Media & Technology Group’s share price dropped from $66 after its public debut last month to $32 on Friday. But McLain, 71, who owns a tree-removal service outside Oklahoma City, said he’s not worried. If anything, he wants to buy more. “I know good and well it’s in Trump’s hands, and he’s got plans,” he said. “I have no doubt it’s going to explode sometime.” Even the $3.5 billion loss in value since its debut last month hasn’t deterred them. Neither has the fact that it lost $58 million last year and only had 4 millionin revenues.

Words can’t express the horrors of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To actually feel the nightmare, you would have to be there under the bombs, fleeing with Palestinians desperately seeking a safe place that doesn’t exist; seeing building after building destroyed; treading through blood in one of the few, only partially standing hospitals; and witnessing children and other patients sprawled on hospital floors, limbs amputated without anesthesia (Israel having blocked all medical supplies). It has taken the Jewish state’s savagery to break decades of silence about its history of crimes against humanity. U.S. military historian Robert Pape has called the onslaught against Gaza “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.” Former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew... Read more

Source: Dead on Arrival appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

My friend Evan Henshaw-Plath wrote recently about some concerns with ActivityPub. I want to go over his concerns one by one and give some assessment of how accurate and important I think they are. Rabble’s words in italics; my responses in just normal text. I think there are a plenty of good points in Rabble’s … Continue reading Responses to Rabble on ActivityPub →

Yes, it’s finally here and it confirms what all the other polls have been showing for the last month. Acknowledging that the NY Times Sienna poll is considered the gold standard among the cognoscenti, Dan Pfeiffer does a nice analysis of what it says about this moment in time: The Democratic coalition is heading home. As the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher wrote in his analysis of the poll: Biden had a 43-point lead with Black voters in February, now that advantage is 53 points. Among Hispanic voters, Biden trailed by six in February. He now leads by nine. The President also increased his lead with voters over the age of 65 by three points. Based on this data, we can assume that the movement is largely among older voters. These are also the voters expected to shift after an event like the State of the Union and an aggressive, well-funded television advertising campaign. Engaging older voters is simply easier in this fractured media environment. They consume more traditional news sources and still watch linear television and are therefore easier to reach with television ads.

This man is the perfect emblem of the modern GOP I have no words.

Liberal democracies remain shamefully complicit with Israel, despite its ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. Students of world politics have long understood that when it comes to the strategic interests of leading states, international law is marginalised unless it is useful in waging a propaganda war against adversaries. Indeed, the United Nations was designed in Continue reading »

The sponsored pass system for lobbyists to access Parliament House opens the door to undue influence and potentially corrupt behaviour. Facilitating such opportunities is both unwise and inappropriate. Lobbying can be an important means of informing Ministers and other parliamentarians about issues and the perspectives of particular groups in the community. It involves political communication Continue reading »

The UN Human Rights Report of August 31, 2022 says what’s happening in Xinjiang constitutes “crimes against humanity”. In plain English, this is saying it is not genocide under the UN Genocide Convention. It confirms an earlier Amnesty International report in 2021 to the same effect. Both are clear implicit rejections of unsubstantiated genocide claims. Continue reading »

I think if I hear again, in some attempt at a supposed even-handedness an interviewer ask a representative of the Palestinian people in this terrible time, ‘do you also oppose the actions of Hamas on 7th October?’ I will puke. That is not a pleasant prospect. There it was again the other day on ‘our Continue reading »

The ACT Labor-led Government might lead the nation in many worthy ways and it might, too, you might think, especially six months out from an election, be vigilant to avoid what many might see as an embarrassing own goal. But no… This is a column I never thought I’d write. In my last stint in Continue reading »

Recent figures show that around 30% of Australian school children do not have adequate reading skills. This 30% of Australian school children need vocational knowledge and skills to find a productive place in Australian life, but some will have their reading tested by TAFE then told, without a hint of irony, “You need to go Continue reading »

The recent P&I article by Chris Douglas featuring Glencore and the Great Artesian Basin raised many genuine concerns, especially regarding the sophism of corporate social responsibility. These included Glencore’s predatory culture and rapacious deeds and the egregious conduct of many other extractive mining brigands across Australia and elsewhere around the globe. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Continue reading »

In 2023, an American economics firm, Brattle, provided its reparation calculations to a symposium on Transatlantic Slavery Reparations chaired by international judge Patrick Robinson. Brattle calculated that the USA and slave-trading European countries owed the Caribbean and Americas US$130 trillion for wrongs done over a 400-year period. The reparation numbers are shocking but the symposium’s Continue reading »