Mike Norman Economics

This was a very difficult video to watch, which I thought it was going to be deeply spiritual, but it wasn't really like that at all, although it was very profound.I was going to write a summary of the video, like I often do for those who don't time to watch, but I realised I would spoil it. I'll just say it's incredibly sad and shows how difficult life can be, especially at the end.It was very sad when Herbert Fingarette spoke about his late wife, and it was very sad when he was in the...

In the US freedom is defined as 'freedom from the government', 'freedom from the bureaucracy', 'freedom from the regs'.In Scandinavia freedom is defined as letting the government provide all the services - cradle to grave - while they get on with living a happy, carefree life.Athough the Scandinavians are not as rich as Americans, they have enough money to never need to worry about it, and most don't care about being rich, anyway, because it couldn't make them any happier.What does it take...

Reminiscence of the Future (sober appraisal)A Social Contract....Of Sorts.Andrei MartyanovAnti-EmpirePutin *Gives Up* Power and All MSM Sees Is “Power Grab”Ben Aris, BNE IntelliNews Russian and Eurasian Politics (Longish and detailed)REPORT: Putin's Perestroika?Gordon M. Hahn, analyst and Advisory Board member at Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, member of the Executive Advisory Board at the American Institute of Geostrategy, a contributing expert for Russia Direct, a senior researcher...

Reproduced in full.  The first thing to understand is that it is not a trade deal.  It is Trump backing off his tariffs when he discovered that the tarrifs fall on US goods and American consumers, not on China.  Trump is covering his retraction by calling it a trade deal.  China’s part of the deal is to agree to purchase the US goods that it already intended to purchase. The purpose of tariffs is to protect domestic producers from foreign competition by raising the price of imported...

Another really good article looking at the ludicrous amount of money the US spends on the military. Go into the Pentagon and it's so busy it's like a war is always going on.The combined US intelligence budget of some $80 billion is larger than Russia’s total military budget of $63 billion.  Today’s Republican Party is a collection of rural interests from flyover country, handmaidens of the military industrial complex and, most important, militant evangelical Christians who see the world...

Proof at the nexus of pure mathematics and algorithms puts ‘quantum weirdness’ on a whole new level. I'm not sure if they will ever fully work out what the universe is, and perhaps it will always be a mystery to some degree. It probably has infinite complexity, like a fractal, and you can go on learning about it forever, and all the while it's getting spookier.  In a 1976 paper3, using the language of operators, Connes asked whether quantum systems with infinitely many...

The prospect of war with Iran is terrifying. Experts predict as many as a million people could die if the current tensions lead to a full-blown war. Millions more would become refugees across the Middle East, while working families across the U.S. would bear the brunt of our casualties. But there is one set of people who stand to benefit from the escalation of the conflict: CEOs of major U.S. military contractors. Counterpunch  War Profiteering is Real, by SARAH ANDERSON

There are quite a few videos about China on YouTube at the moment.A couple of guys went to China about ten years ago and married Chinese women,  lived there for a while, started business, and made nice videos about China. But when Trump started the trade wars they said that China changed and became less friendly, and that the people there became less friendly towards them too, with even old friends becoming cold and cautious.These people have now left China and make videos saying how bad...

From Poverty to Power Decolonization, Decoloniality and the Future of African Studies Maria Faciolince Project Syndicate (the stock market is not the economy)The Truth About the Trump Economy Joseph E. Stiglitz | Nobel laureate in economics, University Professor at Columbia University, and Chief Economist at the Roosevelt InstituteMoon of AlabamaHow Trump Rebelled Against The GeneralsThe Vineyard of the SakerCould this (finally!) be the end for the Atlantic Integrationists?The SakerThe...

There are often attempts in the west to depict China as capitalist rather than socialist. After decades of China going from strength to strength on macroeconomic criteria – and in view of its undeniable achievement in reducing poverty at a rate unmatched in recorded human history – some on the right wish to deny that this could have been accomplished through socialism and so instead claim China to be capitalist. At the same time, there are those on the left who wish to distance notions of...