Jennifer Schuessler, - Raw Story
Stephan: And here we see another passionately believed white supremacist fantasy.
Some marchers at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 displayed medieval symbols, like the rune shown on this flag, which was also used by the Nazis.
Credit: Edu Bayer for The New York Times
Each May, some 3,000 people descend on Kalamazoo, Mich., for the International Congress on Medieval Studies, which brings together academics and enthusiasts for four days of scholarly panels, performances and after-hours mead drinking.
But in recent years, the gathering affectionately known as “K’zoo” — and the field of medieval studies itself — has been shadowed by conflicts right out of the 21st century.
Since the 2016 presidential election, scholars have hotly debated the best way to counter the “weaponization” of the Middle Ages by a rising tide of far-right extremists, whether it’s white nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Va., displaying medieval symbols or the white terrorist who murdered 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, using weapons inscribed with references to the Crusades.
And hanging over it all is […]
No Comments
Stephan: Here is confirmation of what I have been telling my readers for several years. Donald Trump is a terrible negotiator. Worse he is playing into an historic miscalculation on the part of both parties, and the uber-rich who control them. China is building infrastructure not waging endless war. China is going to become the dominant economy, because short-term greed at the core of neoliberal capitalism in the U.S. has blinded America from the obvious.
Xi JInping and Donald Trump
Credit: Thomas Peter/Getty
On April 25-26, 2019 in Beijing, the People’s Republic of China hosted a forum celebrating its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI sponsors infrastructure investment in countries along the old Silk Road and has the potential to include over 60 countries, 4.5 billion people, and 40 percent of the global economy. This forum represented yet another facet of the U.S.-China global economic competition and how each is approaching the confrontation.
At stake in this U.S.-China contest is the dominant role of designing the future of the global economy. The deep irony is that the U.S. and China are both changing their approaches to more closely approximate the other’s recent past. This is the story of the power of multilateralism versus the glory of unilateralism, of the quiet accomplishments of coalitions versus the atavistic aggressions of autarky. Surprisingly, it is the story of how the U.S. and China are slowly assuming the previous public orientations of the other.
The […]
No Comments
Eoin Higgins, - EcoWatch/Common Dreams
Stephan: I think Puerto Rico, the American Virgins, Houston, Florida and Louisiana ought to be enough warning, don't you think? If climate disaster creates a catastrophe in your area, the government will not make it right, and everyone who lives in such an area should plan for that.
Elizabeth Warren, in contrast, understands and advocates the Theorem of Wellbeing. I think she is one of the smartest of the Democratic candidates. Inslee/Warren, or the other way round, would be a ticket that interested me.
Remains of a house in the eastern part of Puerto Rico. Lorie Shaull / CC
A group of Democratic Senators, led by Elizabeth Warren, are again pushing to have Puerto Rico’s debt forgiven in the wake of dual hurricanes that hit the island in 2017 — an announcement that came as activists from the U.S. territory were on Capitol Hill to find a solution to the island’s economic woes.
The United States Territorial Relief Act of 2019, as Warren’s bill is known, would offer comprehensive debt relief to the American territory. Warren was joined by fellow Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). All but Markey, Warren included, are running for the Democratic nomination for president.
“Our bill gives Puerto Rico and other struggling territories a route to comprehensive debt relief and a chance to recover with dignity,” Warren said in a statement. “It’s time for Congress to pass this bill.”
No Comments
Joey Garrison, - USA TODAY
Stephan: Here is some rare and excellent news about corporate drug addiction programs.
Insys Therapeutics founder John Kapoor leaves federal court in Boston on Jan. 30.
Credit: Steven Senne, AP
Racketeering charges carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
The landmark conviction in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts – in which the Justice Department first made indictments in 2016 – marks a victory on the legal front in the government’s efforts to fight the rising number of opioid overdoses. Kapoor’s 2017 arrest came on the same day that President Donald Trump declared the epidemic a public emergency.
The case centered on a fentanyl-based pain medication called Subsys, a powerful, highly addictive and potentially dangerous narcotic that is intended to treat patients with cancer suffering from intense pain.
Federal prosecutors argued that doctors between 2012 and 2015 provided patients large numbers of Subsys prescriptions – including to non-cancer patients – in exchange for kickbacks and bribes from the Insys executives. Some of the doctors, already convicted of crimes the states where they practiced, testified against the Insys executives during trial.
U.S Attorney Andrew Lelling, the top federal prosecutor in Massachusetts, hailed the historic significance of “a […]
No Comments
Bjørn Ekeberg , - Scientific American
Stephan: To say that the most fundamental scientific view of the universe is changing is an accurate statement. Consider:
Credit: Thanapol Sisrang Getty
What do we really know about our universe?
Born out of a cosmic explosion 13.8 billion years ago, the universe rapidly inflated and then cooled, it is still expanding at an increasing rate and mostly made up of unknown dark matter and dark energy … right?
This well-known story is usually taken as a self-evident scientific fact, despite the relative lack of empirical evidence—and despite a steady crop of discrepancies arising with observations of the distant universe.
In recent months, new measurements of the Hubble constant, the rate of universal expansion, suggested major differences between two independent methods of calculation. Discrepancies on the expansion rate have huge implications not simply for calculation but for the validity of cosmology’s current standard model at the extreme scales of the cosmos.
Another recent probe found galaxies inconsistent with the theory of dark matter, which posits this hypothetical substance to be everywhere. But according to the latest measurements, it is not, suggesting the theory needs to be reexamined.
It’s perhaps worth stopping to […]
4 Comments
