The Commonwealth Treasury’s Insights into the first six months of JobKeeper was dumped on Monday, of course, being “Freedom Day” in the major media market of New South Wales. That’s public relations sorcery, right there. Fully three years into its bondage to Josh Frydenberg, the once-great department is now as alive to the forces of PR as it is to those of economics.
Team Frydenberg was correct to assume the nation’s economics journalists would either be in Sydney getting a haircut or in Canberra driven to distraction by the Instagram posts of their friends in Sydney getting a haircut
JobKeeper wasted $40 billion, not $27 billion, but who’s counting?
A Request: Please Don’t Let Amazon Eat The Film Industry
This year's Seoul International Writers' Festival, with a theme of 'Awakening', opened on Friday and runs through the 24th; there's a solid list of participants. Apparently, it is a hybrid online/in-person event this year.
See also previews in The Korea Herald (Seoul International Writers' Festival to shed light on literature's role in post-pandemic era, by Kim Hae-yeo) and The Korea Times(Seoul Int'l Writers' Festival to kick off next week, by Park Han-sol.)
He paints a picture of a region marked by stark “social fractures” between a handful of booming cities and vast rural zones abandoned to decline and depopulation. This frustration among East Germans, compounded by a distrust of elites inherited from the GDR, has ultimately created the conditions in which right-wing populism can flourish.
Steffen Mau spoke with Jacobin’s Loren Balhorn about what kind of society East Germany really was, what reunification meant for its citizens, and why calls for “intra-German talk therapy” won’t be enough to heal the country’s wounds
He paints a picture of a region marked by stark “social fractures” between a handful of booming cities and vast rural zones abandoned to decline and depopulation. This frustration among East Germans, compounded by a distrust of elites inherited from the GDR, has ultimately created the conditions in which right-wing populism can flourish.
Over Three Decades Since Reunification, Germany Is Still Fractured Jacobin
CIA creates working group on China as threats keep rising AP
— Sui-Lee Wee 黄瑞黎 (@suilee) October 9, 2021
Authoritative parenting is best style for raising confident kids: Child psychologist CNBC (furzy)
EPA OFFICIALS EXPOSED WHISTLEBLOWERS THREE MINUTES AFTER RECEIVING CONFIDENTIAL COMPLAINT Intercept. Note this is now Biden’s EPA.
Time Lapse Map of Covid-19’s Spread Across the US, 2/2020 to 9/2021
Kottke: “Using data from Johns Hopkins, thistime lapse video shows the spread of Covid-19 across the US from Feb 2020 to Sept 2021. This looks so much like small fires exploding into raging infernos and then dying down before flaring up all over again. Indeed, forest fire metaphors seem to be particularly useful in describing pandemics like this.
- Think of COVID-19 as a fire burning in a forest. All of us are trees. The R0 is the wind speed. The higher it is, the faster the fire tears through the forest. But just like a forest fire, COVID-19 needs fuel to keep going. We’re the fuel.
- In other forest fire metaphorical scenarios, people are ‘kindling’, ‘sparks being thrown off’ (when infecting others) and ‘fuel’ (when becoming infected). In these cases, fire metaphors convey the dangers posed by people being in close proximity to one another, but without directly attributing blame: people are described as inanimate entities (trees, kindling, fuel) that are consumed by the fire they contribute to spread…”