Alessandro Pertini makes a deep and meaningful point which is often lost on people who define success as winning at all cost or whatever it takes: “Sometimes in life we must fight not only without fear, but also without hope.”
Heard the one about the climate apocalypse? How to joke about the end of the world
Media coverage of Ketanji Brown Jackson Supreme Court confirmation hearings
Ukrainian peasant mechanic takes over in Moscow
Vaccinated more likely to die during omicron wave if they got J&J shot: CDC
Mormons Inc: Church accused of multinational tax rort
Federal Labor and the Greens have called for a Tax Office investigation into allegations the Mormon church has been involved in a significant tax rort in Australia.
An investigation by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald revealed that adherents of the Utah-headquartered Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (commonly called Mormons) were able to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in generous tax exemptions that are not lawfully ..
US Lawmakers Introduce ‘ECASH’ Bill in New Push to Create a Digital Dollar
CoinDesk: “The e-cash would be a digital analogue to the greenback and could preserve privacy and anonymous transactions, according to an adviser on the bill. A group of U.S. lawmakers says the U.S. Treasury Department may be the right government entity to create a digital dollar – not the Federal Reserve. A new bill introduced Monday would authorize just that. Reps. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), Jesús Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) introduced the “Electronic Currency And Secure Hardware Act” (ECASH Act) to direct the Treasury Secretary to develop and issue an electronic version of the U.S. dollar, with an eye to preserving privacy and anonymity in transactions.
The electronic dollar, as defined in the bill, would be a bearer instrument that people could hold on their phone or a card. The system would be token-based, not account-based, meaning if someone were to lose their phone or card, they would lose the funds. In other words, it would be like losing a wallet with dollar bills in it…”
Bitcoin could reach a price of $1.3 million while gold may top $31,000 per ounce, if the assets become the sole reserve asset across the globe, respectively, according to a new report.
As the U.S. and some other western countries sanctioned Russia by freezing its central bank’s reserves, which include the euro, US dollars DXY,
“We believe Central banks will act, as will private individual actors,” wrote Eric Fine, head of active emerging market debt and Natalia Gurushina, chief economist on emerging markets fixed income strategy at Van Eck.
Bitcoin could reach $1.3 million in this scenario, VanEck says
The Atlantic: “The Russian invasion of Ukraine and a series of COVID-related shutdowns in China do not, on the surface, appear to have much in common. Yet both are accelerating a shift that is taking the world in a dangerous direction, splitting it into two spheres, one centered on Washington, D.C., the other on Beijing. The world was not supposed to turn out that way.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union three decades ago, globalization seemed to be knitting all types of countries and societies into one prosperous order, bound together by trade, the internet, and, to a greater and greater degree, shared political and economic ideals. China’s capitalist revolution raised hopes that even that Communist giant would become too immersed in the democracy-led global system to turn against it. As the 21st century has worn on, however, only those with rose-tinted glasses can still foresee this future, as political confrontation, economic nationalism, and cultural nativism resurface. Deteriorating relations between the U.S. and China, combined with Beijing’s heightened strategic and economic ambitions, have already ushered in renewed great-power competition and an ideological struggle between liberal and illiberal global norms.
And now diplomatic fallout from the Ukraine crisis is ricocheting around the world in unanticipated ways, while the strain of the lengthening coronavirus ordeal has the potential to alter the international economic map. As the Russian invasion continues, and China sticks to its zero-COVID strategy, the likelihood of these tensions solidifying competing blocs is only increasing…”
Aldous Huxley Narrates a One-Hour Radio Dramatization of Brave New World
For the radio program CBS Radio Workshopthat premiered in January 1956, Aldous Huxley read a one-hour dramatization of his 1932 dystopian
science fiction novel Brave New World. You can listen to it here or at Internet Archive