Linkage

The electric transport revolution is a great chance to rethink how we move through our cities – and whether we even need a car at all.

Cars, after all, often have only one occupant. You’re expending a lot of energy to transport yourself.

By contrast, electric mopeds and bikes use a lot less energy to transport one or two people. They’re also a lot cheaper to buy and run than electric cars.

If you commute on an e-bike 20km a day, five days a week, your charging cost would be about $20 – annually.

 Sen. Bernie Sanders was the lone member of the Senate Democratic caucus to oppose advancing a $110.5 billion supplemental foreign aid measure on Wednesday, expressing opposition to the bill's unconditional military assistance for the Israeli government.

"I voted NO on the foreign aid supplemental bill today for one reason," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. "I do not believe that we should give the right-wing extremist Netanyahu government an additional $10.1 billion with no strings attached to continue their inhumane war against the Palestinian people."

"Israel has the absolute right to defend itself against the Hamas terrorists who attacked them on October 7," Sanders added. "They do not have the legal or moral right to kill thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children." 

“You have to go the way your blood beats,” James Baldwin said in an interview. “If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.” Belatedly, I’m coming to grips with this. My attempts to cope with gender dissonance have consumed much of my life, taking hours away from each day, isolating me from loved ones, alienating me from my body, leading to bouts of depression, ideations of suicide, and alcohol abuse. It doesn’t go away. In middle age, I’m forced to recognize that nothing short of being who I am will resolve my profound inner conflict. The word “transition” is terrifying but, however catastrophic the process of coming out may be, I’ll not be much good to those I love if I’m burned out, incapacitated, or dead.

Knowledge is power. If I had simply known more, I would have been spared some suffering. The idea that I’ve been converted by the “gender cult” is preposterous. My starting point was my own experience, going back years before I could even articulate it. I simply was what I now call “transgender.” My brain and flesh and bones told me so. And peace could never be mine until I had uncovered its nature and found a way to live with it.

The many bills trying to prevent youth from learning about trans identity trouble me deeply. They seek to condemn another generation to the deathly dysphoria that has burdened me in the belief that people like me are misbegotten or perverted, and that state-imposed ignorance can prevent children from turning out like us.

She said: “Previous attempts have failed because they did not address the root cause of the problem: expansive human rights laws flowing from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), replicated in Labour’s Human Rights Act, are being interpreted elastically by courts domestic and foreign to literally prevent our Rwanda plan from getting off the ground.

“And this problem relates to so much more than just illegal arrivals. From my time as home secretary, I can say that the same human rights framework is producing insanities that the public would scarcely believe.

“Foreign terrorists we can’t deport – because of their human rights. Terrorists that we have to let back in – because of their human rights. Foreign rapists and paedophiles who should have been removed but are released back into the community only to reoffend – because of their human rights.”

Veteran TV executive Samir Shah, the co-author of Boris Johnson’s controversial race report, has been named the new chairman of the BBC.

The role was vacated by Richard Sharp in a cloud of controversy earlier this year, when the ex-Goldman Sachs banker quit after failing to declare his link to an £800,000 loan made to Mr Johnson.

[…] 

The new chairman is best-known for his role co-authoring a much-criticised 2021 race report that dismissed the idea that Britain was institutionally racist.

Mr Shah strongly defended the findings of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report – and claimed the response of the “race lobby” had failed to understand it.

He argued that “class, poverty, family circumstance and geography” played as big a role as race in life outcomes.

Mr Shah also said there was “no doubt” that racial disparity still existed – but insisted that racism was “not sweeping” and was “diminishing” in the UK today.

Commissioned in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, the report found that institutional racism doesn’t exist. Some commissioners later claimed officials at No 10 helped rewrite the conclusion of the report.

Ours is a fast-moving industry. We measure our work in tickets, sprints, and projects. But that can make it hard to see the bigger picture sometimes. In this talk we’ll attempt to pull back and measure our progress in terms of decades. We might even attempt to gaze into the future…

This book is a quick reference for developers creating Drupal sites. While working on such sites during my career, I have gathered a large collection of notes and code which I use for my reference. I hope it will be useful for you, too.

This is  a  discussion  of how  best  to  reconcile  the demands  of War  and  the  claims  of private  consumption.

We already have the financial wherewithal needed to afford whatever is technologically possible. We do not need to go hat-in-hand to rich folks to get them to pay for it. We do not have to beggar our grandkids to pay for it. We do not have to borrow from China to pay for it. We do not have to get the Fed to “print money” to pay for it. All we need to do is to remove the self-imposed constraints, the myths, and the misplaced morality; then budget for it, approve the budget, and spend. No new spending process is required. Follow the normal procedures that the Fed and Treasury have developed. That is how you pay for it.

As the great J. Fagg Foster (1981) said, “Whatever is technologically possible is financially feasible.” There is really no other reason to have a financial system. If you know how to build houses but your financial system cannot find a way to make them affordable, then you must replace that system with one that will.

It is possible that we will need to constrain domestic consumption in order to release resources for the GND effort in a noninflationary manner. The problem is not that we cannot financially afford the GND—government can always bid resources away from private use by paying higher prices—but spending on the GND will generate private income that can support higher bids in competition with the government for scarce resources. This is the real reason that tax hikes might be desirable: to reduce private income and thereby remove competition for resources.

The House of Representatives seemed to achieve its summit of cynical grandstanding today, with debate over a resolution proclaiming that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. That measure is not only a kind of photographic negative of the 1975 UN resolution condemning Zionism as racism (revoked in 2019); it also is founded on the antisemitic equation of Zionist sentiment with Jewish identity, even though many Orthodox Jews, and secular dissenters, remain opposed to Zionism. New York Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler raised that crucial objection, among others, in an impassioned dissent to the resolution, but as Nadler spoke on Monday night, the measure was on track to be endorsed in a lopsided majority vote—not least because its language leaves ample room for anyone voting “no” to be branded an antisemite. Sure enough, the resolution passed by a resounding 311-14 margin, with 92 representatives voting “present.”