The Ardern era is well and truly over. The National-led coalition that took office in November has set about undoing many of her government’s initiatives. It is following a playbook not unlike “Project 25,” the second-term “battle plan” promoted by pro-Trump...
Readers, I keep needing to leave notes like this, which is embarrassing. I promised a long Water Cooler today, but I misunderestimated the time it would take to finish a post on the splendors and miseries of Biden’s debate performance...
1. A case study of how RAND Corporation succeeded. 2. Beware the phrase “cheap labor” (me for Bloomberg). 3. Can EdTech supersede Neil Stephenson’s notion of the primer? 4. On the Presidential immunity decision. 5. Cass Sunstein on Loper Bright....
“Reason has ultimately prevailed in favour of life, health, nature, biodiversity and food sovereignty.” After a four-year legal battle on multiple fronts with Mexico’s AMLO government, Monsanto has finally thrown in the towel. Last Tuesday, Mexico’s National Council of Humanities,...
Uncovered: 428-year-old secret dossier reveals Elizabeth I’s network of spies Guardian (Kevin W) The Secret, Magical Life Of Lithium Nomea (Micael T) Snowball Earth and the rise of multicellularity Santa Fe Institute (Chuck L) Frederick Crews, Withering Critic of Freud’s...
Yves here. Because so much has happened in the last week, between the Biden legitimacy crisis triggered by his poor debate performance, a series of major Supreme Court rulings, and the Ukraine and Israel conflicts (and related jousting), we are...
Big, sudden changes in election probabilities are unusual in American politics, though it seems we just had one. Here are some results, as reported in the FT: US closed higher in the first session of the second half of the...
Yves here. While NATO plans to further escalate Collective West conflicts that it is too overstretched to win, it’s not as if the hawks have not repeatedly tried to use these gatherings to scheme against the public at large. With...
There is a longstanding debate — for centuries in fact — as to whether you should consider only your national (or regional) interest, or whether you should think in cosmopolitan terms when evaluating policies with cross-national ramifications. Some commentators, for...
Last week we got GDP and wages and salaries for Q1, as well as employment and coincident indicators for May. With these data, we have the following picture. Figure 1: Wisconsin Nonfarm Payroll Employment (dark blue), Philadelphia Fed early benchmark...
