Reading

Created
Sat, 26/08/2023 - 02:00
Once in a while, as I peruse the morning headlines, I can’t help but ask myself: What would I have thought if I’d seen these stories 10 years ago? I’m always shaken by what it looks like from that perspective. It’s not as if shocking events hadn’t taken place in the decade before that. The 9/11 attacks came as a total shock and the financial crisis of 2008 was as close as I’d ever come to experiencing cataclysmic economic dislocation. But those, at least, were on par with historical world events like Pearl Harbor and the Great Depression, so there was a sense that they were not entirely unprecedented. On Thursday I read headlines that former President Donald Trump was turning himself in to be arrested for the fourth time, two of those arrests stemming from his attempt to overturn the election in 2020, another for stealing classified documents and yet another for illegally paying hush money to a porn star with whom he’d had an affair.
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Sat, 26/08/2023 - 00:30
Call me skeptical At a mixer last night, a friend mentioned the Democratic Data Exchange referenced recently at Axios: The database, run by an independent firm called Democratic Data Exchange (DDx), allows Democrats and allied groups — campaigns, state parties, super PACs and hundreds more — to bridge a longtime inability to share information. It’s a legal workaround. DDx allows 501(c) nonprofit groups to pool data with campaigns and the party that their nonprofit status otherwise prohibits. They cannot formally coordinate. Here groups just dump data into a pool that other allied groups can draw out of. The GOP has one too. Efficiency, huh? Back in the corporate world, when buzzwords like “efficiency” and “shareholder value” began circulating in the office it was time to update your resume. Listen, I do a lot of voting data analysis. Enough that I regularly hear Darth Vader in my head insisting, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.” Not that this DDx effort is not worthwhile, but it’s doubling down on microtargeting.
Created
Fri, 25/08/2023 - 18:10
Episode 14 of my – Podcast – Letter from The Cape – is now available. In this episode, we consider the so-called Intergenerational Report, which the Australian government released this week. These Reports are released every few years and are designed to scare us into believing that unless the government cuts spending and services now…
Created
Fri, 25/08/2023 - 17:05
The End Of The Post-War & Post-Soviet Eras

So…

The BRICS group of nations has decided to invite six countries – Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates

BRICS already included Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The era isn’t over yet, but when you consider that US/European sanctions against Russia failed to gain much support from India, China, and almost all of Africa and South America, it’s clear that US/West is down to its core again: the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. These are all either core West states or their key “uplifts” — the nations they let into the club and industrialized.