Pinky’s Moon
Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo says the nation should be striving for peace but "not at the cost of our precious liberty
Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo warns 'drums of war' are beating in a message to staff
The Observatory of Anonymity Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic. If you want real intersectionality, here it is.
Boris Johnson: ‘Let the bodies pile high in their thousands’. PM’s incendiary remark during fight over lockdowns is latest claim in No10 drama – amid spectacular row with Cummings Daily Mail but COVID-19: Minister denies Boris Johnson made ‘let the bodies pile high’ comment – and calls it ‘a comedy chapter in gossip stories‘ Sky News. Pass the popcorn.
Bypassing the Road Block Craig Murray
Czech leader: 2014 blast at ammunition dump may have been an accident The Hill. Plot twist!
IHRA: The Politics of a Definition Free Speech on Israel
Why does everything seem so left-wing?
Why does everything seem so left-wing
‘We are drowning in insecurity’: young people and life after the pandemic FT
Log guns
Take a log, paint it black, and make sure your enemy can see it. The “quaker guns” were a key piece of strategic deception in the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
Eric A. Kades (William & Mary; Google Scholar), A New Feudalism: Selfish Genes, Great Wealth and the Rise of the Dynastic Family Trust:
Today’s record levels of economic inequality are infecting our future as the top 0.01% bequest vast wealth to their descendants. With the death of the Rule Against Perpetuities (RAP), this inequality has the potential to harden social class lines not just for a generation or two but forever.
Steven Dean (Brooklyn Law School) & Attiya Waris (University of Nairobi), Ten Truths About Tax Havens: Inclusion and the ‘Liberia’ Problem, 70 Emory L.J. ___ (2021):
There has been a decades-long effort to repair an increasingly fragile international tax system. One reason it has foundered has been what we identify as the ‘Liberia problem.’ In 2000, the powerful Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development identified Liberia—but not Switzerland—as a tax haven and targeted it for sanctions. It did not go well. During the two decades since, everything has changed; yet seemingly from this lens of inclusion, nothing has changed at all. Awkwardly similar “blacklists” still target ‘Black’ and ‘Brown’ jurisdictions despite the fact that experts mean something quite different when they speak of the “scourge of tax havens” and secrecy jurisdictions. We think differently in important respects but believe that those real disagreements demonstrate the need for a less-insular global tax policymaking apparatus. And we share a conviction that a more inclusive and more level playing field in the international tax arena would benefit all states.
To show why, we offer a series of possible “truths” designed to prompt a long-overdue conversation about perceptions of bias and privilege in international taxation.
Where Might We Find Ecologically Intact Communities? Front. For. Glob. Change, 15 April 2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2021.626635
“Conservation efforts should target the few remaining areas of the world that represent outstanding examples of ecological integrity and aim to restore ecological integrity to a much broader area of the world with intact habitat and minimal species loss while this is still possible. There have been many assessments of “intactness” in recent years but most of these use measures of anthropogenic impact at a site, rather than faunal intactness or ecological integrity. This paper makes the first assessment of faunal intactness for the global terrestrial land surface and assesses how many ecoregions have sites that could qualify as Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs – sites contributing significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity) based on their outstanding ecological integrity (under KBA Criterion C). Three datasets are combined on species loss at sites to create a new spatially explicit map of numbers of species extirpated. Based on this map it is estimated that no more than 2.9% of the land surface can be considered to be faunally intact. Additionally, using habitat/density distribution data for 15 large mammals we also make an initial assessment of areas where mammal densities are reduced, showing a further decrease in surface area to 2.8% of the land surface that could be considered functionally intact. Only 11% of the functionally intact areas that were identified are included within existing protected areas, and only 4% within existing KBAs triggered by other criteria. Our findings show that the number of ecoregions that could qualify as Criterion C KBAs could potentially increase land area up to 20% if their faunal composition was restored with the reintroduction of 1–5 species. Hence, if all necessary requirements are met in order to reintroduce species and regain faunal integrity, this will increase ecological integrity across much of the area where human impacts are low (human footprint ≤4). Focusing restoration efforts in these areas could significantly increase the area of the planet with full ecological integrity…”
Accused money launderers left a path of bankrupt factories, unpaid taxes, shuttered buildings and hundreds of steelworkers out of jobs Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
America’s Architecture and Construction Industry Is Broken Treehugger
Do Brain Implants Change Your Identity? The New Yorker
Low-Skill Workers Aren’t a Problem to Be FixedThe Atlantic
Gig workers fear carjacking, other violence amid spike in violence crimes NBC
Why Do Economists Ignore the Greatest of All Market Failures? Brad DeLong, Grasping Reality
Mandevillian intelligence Synthese. From 2017, still germane: “Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive vices (i.e., shortcomings, limitations, constraints and biases) are seen to play a positive functional role in yielding collective forms of cognitive success.”
Apple’s $29 AirTag is a coin-sized tracker that helps you find lost things — here’s how it works CNBC. Poetry break. A villanelle, not a sonnet–
The Heretical Origins of the Sonnet JSTOR. “Highly dialectical.”
How To Live In Wonder Caitlin Johnstone