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To criticise/oppose the current mathematical modelling emphasis is to adopt an antiscience stance. It is not. Mathematics is not essential (or inessential) to science; science involves using tools that are appropriate to the given task. A science of economics is perfectly feasible, and the current emphasis on mathematical modelling in economics serves, given the nature […]

Here we go again Fergwadsakes: House Republican leaders are now betting they can come up with 218 GOP votes for the FY2024 defense authorization bill after essentially ending any hope of a bipartisan deal with Democrats. Speaker Kevin McCarthy is giving the House Freedom Caucus and other conservative hardliners what they’ve demanded all week — dozens of “culture war” amendment votes on the $886 billion NDAA package. Conservatives threatened to derail the defense-authorization bill unless they got these votes. The House will take up these amendments today in what promises to be a long and bitterly partisan slugfest. McCarthy wants to vote on final passage for the NDAA bill by Friday. You can see the list of NDAA amendments here. These GOP amendments run the gamut of conservative talking points. They cover everything from the Pentagon’s abortion policy, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives, Covid-19 vaccines, critical race theory and transgender-related medical services. Ukraine, China and Taiwan are also key amendment topics.

A Wall Street titan with Florida pension business withdraws from the governor’s fundraiser after questions from The Lever.

Keeping women’s mistreatment in the headlines It may be a stunt, but one with a point (New York Times): Democrats in Congress are making a fresh push for the nearly century-old Equal Rights Amendment to be enshrined in the Constitution, rallying around a creative legal theory in a bid to revive an amendment that would explicitly guarantee sex equality as a way to protect reproductive rights in post-Roe America. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Representative Cori Bush of Missouri are set to introduce a joint resolution on Thursday stating that the measure has already been ratified and is enforceable as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution. The resolution states that the national archivist, who is responsible for the certification and publication of constitutional amendments, must immediately do so. […] “In light of Dobbs, we’re seeing vast discrimination across the country,” Ms. Gillibrand said in an interview. “Women are being treated as second-class citizens.

by Greg Mikkelson

Something new and troubling is happening as economies grow across much of the globe. In contrast to prior decades, when human health improved as global GDP swelled, the link to health progress has been broken. No longer is economic growth delivering a health dividend, it seems.

Meanwhile, another metric, the health of the environment, has continued to deteriorate with economic growth. We now face a  “ghastly” global environmental crisis,

The post Guess What Has Decoupled from Economic Growth? appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Smell has always been a crucial diagnostic sense, the one that brings us closest to the fundamental properties of matter, and the evolution of perfume follows an unbroken narrative thread that extends from alchemy to modern industrial chemistry.

St Francis wrote poetry, tamed a wolf, received the stigmata on a mountainside, and if you love a kitsch Nativity figurine, you have St Francis to thank. He was a poor scribe and a worse artist, but great works have been made in his name, by Botticelli, El Greco, Caravaggio and Mickey Rourke (who took the title role in Liliana Cavani’s Francesco).

All three of Jean Giono’s books are crowned, in their different ways, by killings, done by the hero or heroine and not against them or for them to tackle. An intriguing choice for a pacifist, and a choice that underlines an important strain in Giono’s work. He invites us to pause over phrases such as ‘larger than life’ and ‘getting away with murder’.

‘Mengi’ event, Brooklyn, 12 May 2023 she does a performance that involves screamingmore formally you might say vocal improv I would say screamingwhat I think of it I’m not...

In small village and coastal resorts in Wales and Cornwall, for a few weeks each summer and increasingly at weekends throughout the year, the richest and the poorest end up in close proximity. The disparities become glaring and the demands for change louder. Second homes are a daily reminder of the wealth gap. 

As Western investors became controlling shareholders in the railways, mines and plantations of the global South, the supposedly peaceful worlds of trade and finance became harder to distinguish from imperialism. The rules of global capitalism require that international debts are repaid, and the great powers resorted to the methods of empire to ensure they were.

Where Freudian orthodoxy called for analysts to work scrupulously against the effects of transference, Saul Newton and his colleagues taught their followers to do precisely the opposite, i.e. exploit the potent dynamics of the process to gain increasing control over their patients’ psyches. ‘You are their link to life,’ Joan Harvey told her trainees, ‘and, you know, that dependency can go on for ever.’

Drag Race is a sisterhood, and a masterpiece of queer capitalism. RuPaul, a preppy businessman by day, is a figure of superlative glamour in drag – a Black woman comparable in beauty to Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks or Iman, strutting down the runway in a gown by Zaldy and a blonde or auburn wig, almost seven feet tall in heels, exuding confidence.

Only the minor gods have ventured outthis morning: delicateand silken, with a gift for mimicry,they do not stoop to punish, or forgive,though, sometimes, they are capableof blessing.I wake at...

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 15 (Friday 14 July 2023)

The austerity of the mid-1950s constantly stymied possible British preparations on the home front, though plenty of money was found for bombs and submarines: deterrence by means of a policy of mutually assured destruction. The government couldn’t even find the resources to fund the national provision of steel ID tags, to allow for the identification of incinerated bodies in the event of an attack. 

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 15 (Friday 14 July 2023)

J. Edgar Hoover liked to say he didn’t hire policemen but investigators. Agents were university graduates, only to be seen in dark suits and ties (hats were required when outside). Until 1934, they weren’t allowed to carry guns. ‘I want the public to look upon the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice as a group of gentlemen,’ he said in a magazine interview.

Keir Starmer will be the next British prime minister. The nation is miserable and conditions are favourable, but this hardly diminishes Starmer’s achievement: he has isolated the left within his party, splashed the flag about, genuflected towards British business and drunk champagne at Murdoch’s birthday do.

Giovanni Amendola had been attacked by fascists on a number of occasions, receiving a savage beating in Rome in December 1923; armed blackshirts hung around outside his flat. But he continued to publish and speak out against Mussolini. He probably thought they wouldn’t go so far as to murder him, that a second Matteotti case was a step too far, even for the fascists.

Both sides of Edward Coke’s reputation have endured. Not long ago the benchers of the Inner Temple refused to name a new building after him because of his brutal prosecution of Walter Raleigh. Yet Coke’s law reports, many of them his own cases, continue to be uniquely relevant to the modern law governing the use and extent of prerogative powers and much else beside. Francis Bacon is a more elusive character.

Ernest Cole’s politics were opaque, he didn’t give much away, but his photographs suggest that he saw racism as a more decisive force in South Africa than the structural injustices of capitalism, even though the ANC – which read racism back onto class struggle – used his work to publicise their cause.

Lynne Tillman’s Mothercare shows us the end. Reading it, you feel Tillman’s clammy grip on your wrist reminding you not to waste time. She offers a writer’s prescription: examine the world closely, and as only you can.