New Thing I Learned This Week - In The Philippines there is an institution of higher education called Harvardian University, and that is not a joke, just (from US point of view) an oddity.
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I’m not sure of the long term meaning of this, but it is interesting that this has happened; a drop in office rental rates is not odd, given Covid’s impact on business’s return to the office, but residential rental rates …?
The decline in China’s housing market exacerbates the crisis in the property market, where sales have slowed to a trickle due to the combination of a slowing economy and an ongoing mortgage boycott by borrowers.
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I listen to a lot of podcasts about current events and politics, but also occasionally about philosophy. Today I listened to one that struck me as being of value, as well as, contained a lot that was novel to me. I had not thought of a lot of what the speakers talked about in this podcast, so I recommend it and hope that it is of some value to you as it was to me. “Finding Hope in a World on the Brink” https://podcasts.google.com/subscriptions?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiLsv2ctoP7AhWArGoFHbY_Cc4Q6tUFegQIABAB
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Politico West Wing Playbook tells us:
LOUISA CATHERINE ADAMS took care of silkworms while in the White House.
She “found solace in caring for [them],” according to the White House Historical Association . “On June 23, 1828, President JOHN QUINCY ADAMS wrote in his daily diary that ‘Mrs. Adams is winding silk from several hundred silkworms that she has been rearing.’ Using these silkworms, which grew on mulberry trees on the White House Grounds, she harvested silk and used it in her own sewing projects.”
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BP more than doubled its third-quarter profit from a year earlier to $8.15 billion, lifted by strong natural gas trading, as it expanded its share buybacks by $2.5 billion amid rising calls to increase taxes on the energy sector. [Reuters]
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For people who like to pair culinary delight with pain:
PARIS, Oct 28 (Reuters) - It is hard to come up with something new at Paris' annual chocolate fair, but French chocolatier Damien Vidal found a way to put a mouth-tingling twist on his confectionary: incorporating the world's hottest chili.
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India's first fully solar village lights up the lives of poor residents
Reuters story of a town of 6,500 people who had no electricity but which, with 1,300 solar panels on roofs, is completely electrified.
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Legendary labor reporter Timothy Noah added this oddball piece to his CV, and it is more historically-based than one might think:
A Short History of the Phrase, "Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker"
By way of contemplating that the right has been twice as likely as the left to commit acts of political violence even when you factor in the famously tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s.
Tim’s closing paragraph: What led me to this research? The memory of late 1960s/early 1970s radicalism and its occasional penchant for violence, expressed most memorably in the phrase, “Up against the wall, motherfucker.” I had this epoch in mind as I reported my latest New Republic piece, which is about the radical right’s hateful penchant for violence. I presumed this to be a recent phenomenon, but it turns out that even going back all the way to 1948 the right has been nearly twice as likely as the left to commit acts of political violence. I invite you to read my piece (“‘We Don’t Have A Political Violence Problem. Republicans Do”). https://substack.com/redirect/5682eb30-4d26-400d-9248-ec340eed4aa4?r=evas
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Well, *that’s* a relief!
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While it is possible to imagine much worse places for people to be stuck, still …
Shanghai Disney shuts over COVID, visitors unable to leave
Oct 31 (Reuters) - Shanghai's Disney Resort abruptly suspended operations on Monday to comply with COVID-19 prevention measures, with all visitors at the time of the announcement directed to stay in the park until they return a negative test for the virus.
The resort said at 11:39 a.m. local time (03:39 GMT) it would immediately shut the main theme park and surrounding areas including its shopping street until further notice to comply with virus curbs.
The Shanghai government said on its official WeChat account the park was barring people from entering or exiting and that all visitors inside the site would need to await the results of their tests before they could leave.[Photo from SCMP.com]
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Finally, Spencer Ackerman reports on the Biden administration’s decision to revive the Obama administration’s drone death panel:
The PPM Process itself is one in which a "nomination"—that is, marking someone for death—filters up from the national-security bureaucracy to select committees of senior national-security appointees and then to either the defense secretary or the CIA director and the president.
On one level, resurrecting the matrix is meant to operate as a constraint upon lethal counterterrorism actions. Sarah Yager, Washington director of Human Rights Watch and a former senior adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shorthands it, "You Must Explain Yourself."
On another level, one familiar to readers of REIGN OF TERROR, the move institutionalizes extrajudicial executions, creating a process that is less an obstacle to such actions and more a bureaucratic path to navigate. [Forever Wars]