Search Results: literature
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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INTERNATIONAL
- David James
- 09 March 2019
7 Comments
It has been postulated that there are three types of war: kinetic, informational and economic. America has been losing its kinetic conflicts in the Middle East and recently has escalated its informational war. The favoured weapon with economic warfare is sanctions, and Trump has started to use them to an extreme degree.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
Racing along the Shenyang-Hainan Island Freeway alone. Going across the Hangzhou Bay alone. Playing amidst the Zhoushan Archipelago alone. Staying in a mountain village alone. Occupying a presidential suite alone. Using eight dinner sets alone. Drinking three hundred glasses alone.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Philip Harvey
- 08 February 2019
8 Comments
It's all very well to remove excess furniture, but furniture is not books. How many chairs does one need? Chairs are not books. To reduce a library as a household expedience is to objectify the books. Their contents are emptied of value, their history relegated to out-of-date. They have no more meaning than books in an Ikea display room.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 30 January 2019
14 Comments
If you wish to peer into the heart of darkness, the nexus between big oil and big money is a good place to start. Those who control the energy market and the financial markets control the world. The latest victim of this brutal intersection is Venezuela, a country that has made the mistake of having the biggest oil reserves in the world.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Neve Mahoney
- 24 January 2019
5 Comments
I realised my own definition of what was challenging was based on a lifetime of hate-reading books I thought I should like, while the romance books that I was reading were often dealing with heavy topics like colonisation, racism, trauma and mental illness from perspectives different to my own.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 15 January 2019
2 Comments
One of the most basic distinctions in finance, with which any stockbroker or fund manager is familiar, is that between equity and debt. As the global economy teeters on the edge of a debt and banking crisis, with global debt more than 300 per cent of global GDP, the merits of equity is something that needs to be better understood.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 12 December 2018
14 Comments
A commentator recently described most politicians as being professional liars, and it can be argued that they tend to deceive themselves as well. Many can be compared with Heart of Darkness's Kurtz, who hid 'in the magnificent folds of his eloquence the barren darkness of his heart'.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 04 December 2018
7 Comments
The problem goes much deeper than a few crooked operatives and it will not be fixed by changing the corporate 'culture'. The fundamental evil is the arithmetic of compound interest. Interest on debt rises exponentially, while economic activity is linear. That means that sooner or later those in a weaker position are unable to pay.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 08 November 2018
1 Comment
So here is a question. Which are you? A customer, a shareholder, a worker, a citizen, or, well, a whole human being? If you answered 'customer' then congratulations, you are in line with contemporary economic orthodoxy, and boy, have we got a society for you. If you answered 'a human being' then that really is a problem, I'm afraid.
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EDUCATION
- Binoy Kampmark
- 01 November 2018
2 Comments
Birmingham's intervention, and Tehan's consolidation of that ill-exercised discretion, suggests Australian Research Council funding will be politicised by executive veto. Expertise will be subordinated to the whimsy of the education minister of the day; researchers will be pondering how to shape their applications accordingly.
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RELIGION
- Michael McGirr
- 31 October 2018
21 Comments
My year ten class studies Islam, one of the most formative influences in the world that my students will inhabit and hopefully improve. I have a profound respect for Islam. Westerners often fail to acknowledge the debt they owe to Islam, a tradition that had a huge role in bringing Europe through the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Gillian Bouras
- 19 October 2018
11 Comments
In London of the 1990s, I observed people sleeping under bridges, on doorsteps, in cardboard boxes. How they survived the winters, I never knew, and I suppose many didn't. Since the beginning of Greece's financial crisis in 2008 and the influx of refugees from the Middle East, similar scenes can now be seen in Athens.
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