Tom Roche

Just a quick one.

Often it seems I need a copy of a list of files / directories in plain text without any gubbins such as a path, permissions, date and all those shenanigans, basically basenaming; for example:

So how can I achieve this in emacs? I would really prefer to use dired somehow rather than shell / ls (which was my first thought)

Below is my typical dired listing:

drwxr-xr-x  4 4.0K Jan 15 19:35 Backup
drwxr-xr-x  3 4.0K Jan 14 19:33 Camera
drwxr-xr-x 22 4.0K Jan 15 19:01 content
-rw-r--r--  1   65 Dec 31 16:34 .directory

Rectangle marking first came to mind but the paste seems to have a weird format and strangely inserts the text.

So I came up with the following process:

In dired, select ’(’ dired-hide-details-mode which toggles off all the details and gives:

Backup
Camera
content
.directory

This looks very promising and surely a simple M-w (kill-ring-save) will work?. It doesn’t work. It still copies the full details :(

However if org-copy-visible is used it does the same as in org mode in that it only copies the visible parts of the region. I had no idea that functions from one mode can be used in another!

Guest: Christian Raffensperger on the place of Kyivan Rus' in the wider European medieval world.

The post Kyivan Rus’ appeared first on SRB Podcast.

All the best recent segments from our amazing partners on Breaking Points including recent FTC actions, nursing/Uber strike footage, the obesity crisis, and an important Kroger lawsuit.

Timestamps: 

FTC (Matt Stoller): (0:00 - 13:09)

Nursing Strike (Status Coup): (13:10 - 22:17)

Uber Strike (Status Coup): (22:18 - 29:39)

Obesity (James Li): (29:40 - 40:39)

Kroger Lawsuit (Max Alvarez): (40:40 - 1:10:43)

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The content of Matt Hancock’s Covid diaries, the reason why Sir Keir Starmer may soon be out of a job, and a behind-the-scenes look at the King's preparations for his Christmas message.

Performed by Jon Culshaw, Lewis McLeod, Jan Ravens, Duncan Wisbey, Naomi McDonald and Anil Desai.

Written by Written by Tom Jamieson and Nev Fountain, Laurence Howarth, Sarah Campbell, Tom Coles and Ed Amsden, James Bugg, Cody Dahler, Toussaint Douglass, Robert Darke, Sophie Dickson, Katie Sayer, Peter Tellouche and Edward Tew.

Produced and created by Bill Dare. Production Co-ordinator: Caroline Barlow

The latest iteration of Washington’s regime-change efforts against the democratically elected Venezuelan government came to an end. On December 30, an opposition-controlled parliament whose term ran out two years ago voted to end the US-backed “interim government” headed by Juan Guaidó.

A few outlets recognized that the latest developments represented “a blow” (New York Times, 12/30/22) or “a failure” (Financial Times, 1/8/23) for the United States, but for the most part the media’s goal seemed to be to solidify the biased premises underlying the regime-change operation. Corporate media remain as unwilling as ever to question US foreign policy, regardless of its deadly consequences.

The Guaidó-led operation had earned the wholehearted support of the media establishment from the get-go (FAIR.org, 1/19/19, 1/31/19). However, its end did not lead to a reckoning or reevaluation of past coverage. The loyal stenography from Western pundits is as reliable as ever (FAIR.org, 6/13/22, 5/2/22, 4/15/20, 1/22/20, 9/24/19).

The Big Lie

Guaidó “declared Venezuela’s authoritarian president an illegitimate ruler,” making himself “the most serious threat to President Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian government,” this New York Times story (12/30/22) reported in its first two paragraphs.

The coverage of Guaidó’s demise saw media pundits dust off some of their Venezuela bias greatest hits. The New York Times (12/22/22) used the “authoritarian” label in reference to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro three times in the teaser and the opening two paragraphs of an article. Other favorites like “strongman” (Wall Street Journal, 1/5/23) and “autocratic” (LA Times, 1/5/23) were not far behind.

Likewise frequent were gushing tributes to the “hope” that Guaidó signified (AP, 1/5/23; New York Times, 12/30/22), as if the unelected US-backed pretender naturally represented the aspirations of the Venezuelan people. Some sources made the even bolder claim that “the failure to drive out Maduro frustrated Venezuelans” (AP, 12/30/22; Al Jazeera, 12/31/22). This is the common maneuver of presuming that all Venezuelans support the opposition, while also ignoring the overwhelming popular rejection of foreign meddling.

The opening act of any Guaidó story is always the Goebbelsian claim that Maduro’s 2018 electoral win was illegitimate (FAIR.org, 5/23/18), despite the lack of evidence of irregularities and the presence of international observation missions who vouched for the vote’s integrity (Venezuelanalysis, 5/31/18).

The unsubstantiated claims about the contest go from “disputed” (BBC, 12/31/22; Reuters, 12/22/22), to “widely deemed” or “believed” or “seen as” or “considered” or “condemned as” “fraudulent” (see Bloomberg, 12/30/22; Miami Herald, 12/23/22; AFP, 1/4/23; LA Times, 1/5/23; Washington Post, 12/30/22), all the way to “a sham” (Wall Street Journal, 1/5/23; New York Times, 12/22/22; Reuters, 1/4/22).

Once this false premise was established, another one followed: the alleged “constitutional” grounds behind the self-proclaimed “interim government.” Whether by allowing Guaidó and acolytes to repeat the claim (Wall Street Journal, 12/30/22; Washington Post, 12/30/22), or by casually stating it (AP, 1/9/23, 1/9/23; Reuters, 12/29/22; New York Times, 12/22/22), Western outlets were eager to paint the US-backed presumption with a varnish of legitimacy.

Nowhere to be found was the text or a link to the invoked constitutional article. Because anyone who read Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution would immediately realize that: a) none of the conditions to declare the presidency “vacant” were met, as Maduro had not died, resigned, been removed by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, become permanently physically or mentally disabled, abandoned his position or been removed by a popular vote; and b) even if one were, it would lead to nothing remotely resembling this parallel government that lasted nearly four years. (Instead, the constitution calls for new direct elections to be held within 30 days.)

Having taken their gaze off of Venezuela as regime-change efforts faltered, corporate journalists needed some dishonest gymnastics to report Guaidó’s demise. In particular, they had to explain why a National Assembly whose term expired two years ago was still around. Their experience in discarding elections boycotted by the opposition and won by Chavismo came in handy (FAIR.org, 12/3/21, 1/27/21, 5/23/18).

For example, AFP said the former parliament “was replaced by a legislature loyal to Maduro” (12/31/22), ignoring the fact that it was “replaced” through the regularly scheduled elections. But the Associated Press (12/22/22, 1/9/23, 1/9/23) went a step further by calling the newly elected parliament “Maduro’s rubber-stamping legislature/National Assembly,” as if there is something sinister about a party with a legislative majority supporting a president from the same party. It is not the government’s fault that the opposition, with US encouragement, decided to boycott elections and pin its hopes on an outright coup.

Inconvenient truths

The LA Times (1/5/23) described the US recognizing a lawmaker with no constitutional claim to power as the actual government of Venezuela as an “audacious gamble.”

With all the effort to double down on well-crafted narratives, it was hard to expect any contrition from Western media that cheerfully endorsed Guaidó’s baseless claims to power. Instead, his failure was attributed to Maduro, currently serving his second constitutional six-year term, having a “grip on power” (Wall Street Journal, 1/5/23) that was “maintained” (Reuters, 1/4/23), “tightened” (AFP, 12/30/22) or “proven durable” (Washington Post, 12/30/22).

For all the talk of Guaidó’s commitment to “restore democracy” (AP, 1/9/23; LA Times, 1/5/23; New York Times, 12/30/22), there was little detail as to how he actually tried to accomplish it.

The opposition frontman’s most serious initiative to overthrow Maduro was a military putsch on April 19, 2019. Yet only a few outlets explicitly mentioned this episode (Wall Street Journal, 12/30/22; New York Times, 12/30/22). Most included only vague references to a failure “to win over” (AP, 12/30/22) or “recruit” (Bloomberg, 12/30/22) the military. The Associated Press (1/5/23) went so far as to falsely describe the Venezuelan armed forces as the country’s “traditional arbiter of political disputes.” It seems that the preferred means to “restore democracy” in the South American nation was a good old-fashioned military coup.

Not mentioned at all by the establishment outlets was the hardline opposition’s calls for a foreign invasion (Venezuelanalysis, 5/13/19) and, more damningly, Guaidó actually hiring a mercenary company to topple Maduro and put himself in power (Venezuelanalysis, 5/17/20). The best hope was always that US economic sanctions would generate enough suffering to force the government out.

While the “interim government” made no inroads to take power, it was handed control of a number of foreign-held assets worth billions by Washington and allies, among them US-based refiner Citgo.

Corporate outlets reported that these assets need to be “protect[ed]” (AP, 12/30/22) or “shield[ed]” (AP, 1/9/23) from creditors, and that the opposition’s control might be jeopardized by Guaidó’s ouster. Spain’s El País (12/30/22) baselessly claimed these resources would be “embezzled” by the Maduro government.

Out of sight is the string of corruption allegations pertaining to opposition (mis)management of foreign assets (Venezuelanalysis, 10/14/21), which came from the anti-government camp itself. The most publicized case was Colombia-based agrochemical producer Monómeros. Humberto Calderón Bertí, who served as opposition “ambassador” in Colombia, accused the different factions of treating the company like a “piñata.”

Likewise unmentioned is a series of actions by Guaidó’s camp that have endangered Citgo, from not showing up in court to striking under-the-table deals with creditors to suspicions of conflicts of interest (Venezuelanalysis, 9/25/21, 10/4/21, 10/23/21).

‘Regardless of what form’

The Washington Post (12/30/22) writes about “the opposition-controlled National Assembly” as if there haven’t been legislative elections in Venezuela since 2015.

The heightened regime-change attempts by Washington in recent years were cheered at every step by the Western media establishment. By falsely trumpeting Guaidó’s credentials and whitewashing his anti-democratic actions, corporate journalists were free to endorse any and all efforts to place him in power, especially deadly economic sanctions.

Human rights experts estimate these measures have killed over 100,000 people over the past five years. But some pieces managed to not mention them at all (AP, 12/30/22; Bloomberg, 12/30/22; El País, 12/30/22). The New York Times (12/22/22, 12/30/22) euphemistically wrote that sanctions were “designed to assist” Guaidó, but as it happened ended up “forc[ing] Venezuelans to focus on daily survival, not political mobilization.”

Washington imposed, among many other measures, heavy sanctions on the oil sector of a country that depended on oil sales for over 90% of its export revenue. And the resulting widespread suffering is somehow an unforeseen consequence for the Times! Moreover, not only are the unilateral measures a form of collective punishment against civilians, they actually preceded Guaidó.

Other media only brought up sanctions to echo US officials saying they can be used “to pressure Caracas” (Wall Street Journal, 1/5/23), since the US “hold[s] all the cards” (Washington Post, 12/30/22). State Department spokesperson Ned Price was quoted as saying sanctions will “remain in place,” and could even be expanded should the Venezuelan opposition say so (AFP, 1/4/23).

As usual, the New York Times (12/22/22, 12/30/22) outdid all others in covering for US economic blackmail. The Biden administration recently released around $3 billion in frozen Venezuelan funds, to be used in social programs via UN agencies, after the Venezuelan government restarted talks with the hardline opposition. The Times (12/22/22) outrageously described it as Maduro “agree[ing] to” allow these funds to be used for aid. Caracas has repeatedly demanded that its assets be released, and even suggested this kind of arrangement. During the pandemic, the government asked that the frozen gold in the UK be sold to buy food and medicine through the UN. The Venezuelan opposition and its foreign backers refused.

The latest coverage was just another demonstration that Western media will unflinchingly back Washington’s Venezuela policies no matter what. Even when anonymous officials callously say that the US will continue to recognize the opposition’s “interim government,” “regardless of what form it takes” (AFP, 12/31/22; Al Jazeera, 12/31/22; Washington Post, 12/30/22), loyal stenographers will not hesitate in presenting it as democracy promotion.

It is worth recapping: The media establishment followed Washington’s lead in declaring the 2018 elections fraudulent with no evidence, echoing Guaidó’s “constitutional” claim, backing all sorts of coup attempts, as well as supporting and whitewashing murderous sanctions and the theft of Venezuelan assets. The US’s surrogates can come up with whatever scheme they can think of, and the imperial regime-change arsenal is at their service. And that includes media coverage as dishonest as necessary.

The corporate media pretend to defend the truth and hold those in power accountable. Their claim is just as legitimate as Guaidó’s self-proclaimed “interim presidency.”

The post Guaidó Is Gone, but Media Dishonesty Is Here to Stay appeared first on FAIR.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Orson Welles' film, released in 1941, which is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, films yet made. Welles plays the lead role of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper magnate, and Welles directed, produced and co-wrote this story of loneliness at the heart of a megalomaniac. The plot was partly inspired by the life of William Randolph Hearst, who then used the power of his own newspapers to try to suppress the film’s release. It was to take some years before Citizen Kane reached a fuller audience and, from that point, become so celebrated.

The image above is of Kane addressing a public meeting while running for Governor.

With

Stella Bruzzi Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London

Ian Christie Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London

And

John David Rhodes Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

A man, a hammer, a nail, a door, history. Martin Luther sets off the protestant reformation and lays the groundwork for a century of violence in Europe.

This first episode of Hell on Earth: The Thirty Years War and the Violent Birth Capitalism is available for free. Subsequent episodes will be released exclusively for Chapo Trap House subscribers on Patreon at patreon.com/chapotraphouse.

Interactive atlas, bibliography and credits for the series can be found at: hellonearth.chapotraphouse.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re joined by Ben and Hesse of Seeking Derangements to look at the bungled coup in Brazil, Matt Schlapp’s sexual harassment accusations and prince Harry’s explosive new book about getting frostbite on his dick. Finally, we read a New York Post story about parents whose kids hate them so much they have to hire deprogrammers. 

LINKS+PLUGS:

Seeking Derangements patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seekingderangements

Hell on Earth launch party, Littlefield, NYC 1/20/23: https://littlefieldnyc.com/event/?wfea_eb_id=479703214227

And Introducing DJ night, Elsewhere, NYC 1/18/23: https://www.elsewherebrooklyn.com/events/night-rippers-presented-by-audio-video-disco-18th-jan-the-loft-new-york-tickets

Talking Simpsons @ SF Sketchfest feat. Matt, 1/25/23: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/talking-simpsons-10p-seating-tickets-500829052177

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Since the 2016 presidential election, the notion that the Russian government somehow “weaponized” social media to push voters to Donald Trump has been widely taken as a gospel in liberal circles. A groundbreaking recent New York University study, however, says there’s no evidence Russian tweets had any meaningful effect at all.

“We demonstrate, first, that exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures,” the scholars wrote in the journal Nature Communications. “Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

The research, conducted by NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, is a rare counter to what’s become the prevailing media narrative of the post-2016 era: that social platforms like Twitter were and will continue to be wielded by malicious foreign actors to interfere with American political outcomes.

Most importantly, according to the study, based on a longitudinal survey of roughly 1,500 Americans and an analysis of their Twitter timelines, “the relationship between the number of posts from Russian foreign influence accounts that users are exposed to and voting for Donald Trump is near zero (and not statistically significant).”

That Russian intelligence attempted to influence the 2016 election, broadly speaking, is by now well documented; the idea that the propagandizing amounted to anything other than headlines and congressional hearings, however, is little more than an article of faith. While their impact remains debated among scholars, the specter of “Russian bots” wreaking havoc across the web has become a byword of liberal anxiety and a go-to explanation for Democrats flummoxed by Trump’s unlikely victory.

The NYU study found that Russia’s Twitter campaign had no effect in part because barely anyone saw it. Moreover, to the extent anyone ever saw the Russian tweets, it was people who weren’t going to be easily influenced anyway: “[T]hose who identified as ‘Strong Republicans’ were exposed to roughly nine times as many posts from Russian foreign influence accounts than were those who identified as Democrats or Independents.”

After 2016, as platforms like Twitter rushed to scrub networks of Russian accounts based on the premise they were inherently harmful, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., characterized Russian tweets as a full-blown national security crisis. Following a September 2017 congressional hearing on Russian social media meddling, Warner described Twitter’s testimony as “deeply disappointing,” and decried an “enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions, and again begs many more questions than they offered.”

This stance became a popular stance among Russia hawks and Trump foes. A year later, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., tweeted, “Russian troll accounts were still active on Twitter as recently as this year, interfering in our politics. We will continue to expose this malign online activity so Americans can see first-hand the tools Russia uses to divide us.”

Panic over Russian tweets and the belief they might swing elections spread throughout Congress, academia, business, and the U.S. intelligence community. A cottage industry spouted up to combat what Facebook termed “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior” — an industry that lives on today.

Crucially, the report focused only on tweets, so the possible effect of Facebook groups, Instagram posts, or, say, the spread of materials hacked from the Democratic National Committee was left unassessed. The report nonetheless serves as a gentle evidence-based corrective to societal fears of low-effort social media propagandizing as some diabolical tool of adversarial regimes.

Russian tweets, the authors note, were a small speck when compared to homegrown posters. “Despite the seemingly large number of posts from Internet Research Agency accounts in respondents’ timelines,” the report says, “they are overshadowed—by an order of magnitude—by posts from national news media and politicians.”

The post Those Russian Twitter Bots Didn’t Do $#!% in 2016, Says New Study appeared first on The Intercept.

I have a longstanding fascination with document layout. It’s something I first learned from Rich Stevens. His books were always visually beautiful with a layout that showed an obsessive attention to detail. Fortunately, he wrote about his process extensively on his Website and was generous with his help when I was laying out my first book.

Like Stevens, I wrote and typeset my books with Groff. These days, I do all my writing with Org mode so I’m always interested in ways the make Org mode exports look better. I recently I came across two posts that address this very problem.

The first is by Norman Walsh. His interest is customizing PDF output from Org files. He didn’t like the way the default output made his documents look like academic papers. He includes output from both the default method and his customized method so that you can see the differences.

The second is by Colin McLear, a teacher who wants to use the same Org file to produce

1. A set of notes for his students
2. A set of slides for his lectures
3. A handout version of the slides with additional content

Walsh’s post contains all his configuration except his setup files. Those are available in his GitHub repository.

Neither of these setups are likely to be exactly what you want but they’re ripe with ideas and show you how to make your own customizations. The ability to do this means that there’s no reason to do your writing in anything but Org. If you have special output requirements, it’s pretty easy to realize them with some simple configuration.

UPDATE [2023-01-14 Sat 18:55]: Added link to McLear’s post.

I got an account on Mastodon. I am at https://emacs.ch/@EMacAdie. It is on a server for Emacs enthusiasts. I will probably post about more than just Emacs.

I created the account in the browser, but afterwards I posted using the Mastodon client hosted on Codeberg; here is a link to the post. After you install and add a couple of vars to your Emacs config, you type “M-x mastodon“, and it puts a URL to the authorization page in the OS buffer. You go there, then you get the token, or the secret, or whatever OAuth calls it, and you then do back to Emacs and C-y, and you are in. It will put a file called “mastodon.plstore” with all the login info in your Emacs config directory. If you put your config into a git repo, add “mastodon.plstore” to your .gitignore file (or whatever your equivalent is if you do not use git).

One thing the author of the client does not mention is that you cannot authorize the client if you run with “–no-window-system“. The URL I kept getting when I ran Emacs in terminal mode was just the regular page for my profile. I could get to a page listed what apps were authorized, but I could not actually authorize anything. I re-started Emacs without “–no-window-system” and it worked fine. I looked at some of Mastering Emacs, and apparently there are some things that do not work when you are in terminal mode. There are some times I thought I was doing something wrong and could not get something to work. Perhaps the real issue was that I was in terminal mode.

The client repo does mention that if you want to post with a second account, you need to edit your config and restart.

I mentioned the Mastodon client in my post about the December 2022 Austin Emacs meetup.

What does one do on Mastodon? Tweet? Mastocate? Is there another word for it? [Note 1]

The code for the client is hosted on Codeberg. I might move my Github repos to Codeberg. I want to have as little Microsoft in my life as I can. If I do, I might give some money to Codeberg to help keep them going. I might also donate to help keep Emacs.ch running. I have given money to Wikipedia. I will make a list of projects/organizations to make small donations to, and track them in Org.

I will try to post a link to this post from the Emacs client, but I reserve the right to fall back to the web if needed.

Note 1, added after publishing: Per the comments, apparently you “toot” on Mastodon.

Image from the Emperor’s Bible, an 11-century manuscript housed in the Uppsala University Library; image from the Alvin portal, assumed allowed under public domain.

Apparently all it took were some fireworks to send Germany into a racist frenzy. Happy 2023 everyone!

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Support Corner Späti

I'd like to refer to snippets of code, but lines are too fragile to use as references for code and posts that I want to easily update. I'd like to specify a from-regexp and a to-regexp instead in order to collect the lines between those regexps (including the ones with the regexps themselves). org-export-expand-include-keyword looked a bit hairy to extend since it uses regular expressions to match parameter values. For this quick experiment, I decided to make a custom link type instead. This allows me to refer to parts of code with a link like this:

[[my-include:~/proj/static-blog/assets/css/style.css::from-regexp=Start of copy code&to-regexp=End of copy code&wrap=src js]]

which will turn into this snippet from my stylesheet:

/* Start of copy code */
pre.src { margin: 0 }
.org-src-container {
    position: relative;
    margin: 0 0;
    padding: 1.75rem 0 1.75rem 1rem;
}
summary { position: relative; }
summary .org-src-container { padding: 0 }
summary .org-src-container pre.src { margin: 0 }
.org-src-container button.copy-code, summary button.copy-code {
    position: absolute;
    top: 0px;
    right: 0px;
}
/* End of copy code */

Here's the Emacs Lisp code to do that. my-include-complete function reuses my-include-open to narrow to the file, and my-include-complete uses consult--line so that we can specify the prompt.

(org-link-set-parameters
 "my-include"
 :follow #'my-include-open
 :export #'my-include-export
 :complete #'my-include-complete)

(defun my-include-open (path &optional _)
  "Narrow to the region specified in PATH."
  (let (params start end)
    (if (string-match "^\\(.*+?\\)::\\(.*+\\)" path)
        (setq params (save-match-data (org-protocol-convert-query-to-plist (match-string 2 path)))
              path (match-string 1 path)))
    (find-file path)
    (setq start
          (or
           (and
            (plist-get params :from-regexp)
            (progn
              (goto-char (point-min))
              (when (re-search-forward (url-unhex-string (plist-get params :from-regexp)))
                (line-beginning-position))))
           (progn
             (goto-char (point-min))
             (point))))
    (setq end
          (or
           (and
            (plist-get params :to-regexp)
            (progn
              (when (re-search-forward (url-unhex-string (plist-get params :to-regexp)))
                (line-end-position))))
           (progn
             (goto-char (point-max))
             (point))))
    (when (or (not (= start (point-min)))
              (not (= end (point-max))))
      (narrow-to-region start end))))
    
(defun my-include-export (path _ format _)
  "Export PATH to FORMAT using the specified wrap parameter."
  (let (params body start end)
    (when (string-match "^\\(.*+?\\)::\\(.*+\\)" path)
      (setq params (save-match-data (org-protocol-convert-query-to-plist (match-string 2 path)))))
    (save-window-excursion
      (my-include-open path)
      (setq body (buffer-substring (point-min) (point-max))))
    (with-temp-buffer
      (when (plist-get params :wrap)
        (let* ((wrap (plist-get params :wrap))
               block args)
          (when (string-match "\\<\\(\\S-+\\)\\( +.*\\)?" wrap)
            (setq block (match-string 1 wrap))
            (setq args (match-string 2 wrap)) 
            (setq body (format "#+BEGIN_%s%s\n%s\n#+END_%s\n"
                               block (or args "")
                               body
                               block)))))
      (insert body)
      (org-export-as format nil nil t))))

(defun my-include-complete ()
  "Include a section of a file from one line to another, specified with regexps."
  (interactive)
  (require 'consult)
  (let ((file (read-file-name "File: ")))
    (save-window-excursion
      (find-file file)
      (concat "my-include:"
              file
              "::from-regexp="
              (let ((curr-line (line-number-at-pos
                                (point)
                                consult-line-numbers-widen))
                    (prompt "From line: "))
                (goto-char (point-min))
                (consult--line
                 (or (consult--with-increased-gc
                      (consult--line-candidates
                       nil
                       curr-line))
                     (user-error "No lines"))
                 :curr-line curr-line
                 :prompt prompt)        
                (url-hexify-string
                 (regexp-quote (buffer-substring (line-beginning-position) (line-end-position)))))
              "&to-regexp="
              (let ((curr-line (line-number-at-pos
                                (point)
                                consult-line-numbers-widen))
                    (prompt "To line: "))
                (goto-char (point-min))
                (consult--line
                 (or (consult--with-increased-gc
                      (consult--line-candidates
                       nil
                       curr-line))
                     (user-error "No lines"))
                 :curr-line curr-line
                 :prompt prompt)        
                (url-hexify-string
                 (regexp-quote (buffer-substring (line-beginning-position) (line-end-position)))))
              "&wrap=src " (replace-regexp-in-string "-mode$" "" (symbol-name major-mode))))))

The New York Times had a major article reporting on how many people in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan are being forced to work well into their seventies because they lack sufficient income to retire. The piece presents this as a problem of aging societies, which will soon hit the United States and other rich countries with declining birth rates and limited immigration.

While the plight of the older workers discussed in the article is a real problem, the cause is not the aging of the population. The reason these people don’t have adequate income to retire is a political decision about the distribution of income.

If the issue was simply that too few people were working in these aging societies, we should expect to see slower per capita growth than in countries where aging is less of a problem. That is not the case. The figure below shows real per capita income in these three countries from 2014, along with projections to 2027, as well as France, which has maintained a relatively high birth rate.

Source: International Monetary Fund.

As can be seen, both Korea and Hong Kong have been seeing more rapid per capita GDP growth than France and are projected to continue to do so, with Japan’s growth rate virtually identical over this period. Korea is projected to maintain a 2.4 percent growth rate, while Hong Kong is projected to have a 1.4 percent annual growth rate. By comparison, France is projected to have a 0.94 percent growth rate, only slightly higher than Japan’s 0.9 percent rate.

The conventional story of a country facing problems due to aging would be that it stops seeing per capita income growth, and could even see declines, as the ratio of workers to total population falls. Two of the three countries highlighted are sustaining considerably more rapid per capita growth than a country that is less affected by an aging population. In the third case, the growth is essentially identical.

This means that the reason older people are unable to retire in these countries is not the aging of the population, but the political decision to not provide adequate support for the elderly population. In short, the problem is political, not demographics.

The post Contrary to What the NYT Tells You, the Problem in An Aging Society is Distribution appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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Whenever something crazy is going down in Congress, Thomas Frank is here to talk about it. We chatted while the Capitol was stormed on 1/6, and now the historian, writer, and populism expert returns to Bad Faith as the House Republicans struggle to meet the 218-vote threshold to elect a Speaker. Inside: discussions about the parallels between this historical moment and the ones Frank has written about, the wisdom of Force The Vote, and whether Briahna is right to be jealous of the rogue Republicans in this moment.

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Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

We’re back to regular coverage today with a look at the enjoyably dysfunctional quest of the GOP trying to elect a speaker of the house. Then, we discuss Bolsonaro in Orlando and OF COURSE, for the reading series we’ve got Rod Dreher’s revelation that his father was a damnable Freemason (oh, and also in the KKK). 

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The drops in both new jobs and wage growth contained in a Department of Labor report released on Friday elicited cheers from financial world insiders.

“This is a really terrific jobs report in lots of subtle ways,” tweeted Neil Irwin, Axios’s chief economic correspondent. He said, “Job growth is soft-landingish” — polite econ-speak for saying growth is decreasing steadily.

quite the backdrop for "more people need to lose their jobs" https://t.co/AndhaayB4g

— jordan (@JordanUhl) January 6, 2023

“This looks like the right direction of travel re: jobs,” New York Times economic reporter Jeanna Smialek said on Twitter, above a chart depicting a steady decline in jobs. “But it’s probably not *as much* of a slowdown as the Fed wants, yet,” Smialek hedged, adding that “[Federal Reserve] Chair Powell is looking for notable cooling in wages” — the dip in wage growth depicted in the jobs report apparently not steep enough.

Others reacted to the news with even less restrained enthusiasm. “Wage growth … slowed a lot,” tweeted Harvard economics professor Jason Furman, declaring that it represented the “best reason for hope on moderating inflation.”

Even President Joe Biden welcomed the news, saying that “this moderation in job growth is appropriate,” after acknowledging that “average monthly job gains have come down from over 600,000 a month at the end of last year to closer to 200,000 a month.”

Last year, amid the economic recovery following the dips of the pandemic, the central bankers of the U.S. Federal Reserve launched a campaign of some of the steepest interest rate hikes in years in an attempt to tamp down inflation. By making money more expensive to borrow, rate hikes can reduce inflation by slowing down the economy and driving up unemployment.

“While higher interest rates, slower growth, and softer labor market conditions will bring down inflation, they will also bring some pain to households and businesses,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in August. “These are the unfortunate costs of reducing inflation.”

Not all experts agree. Some argue that the medicine of rate hikes and their attendant costs to workers, including higher unemployment and lower wages, can be worse than the inflationary disease. Other dissenting experts say the primary, underlying causes of inflation — a pandemic, supply-chain crisis, corporate concentration, climate crisis straining agriculture — aren’t addressed by tighter monetary policy and that the pandemic-related inflation was always going to be transitory.

At stake in the debate is millions of Americans’ jobs. To tame inflation, former treasury secretary and economist Larry Summers has called for a year of 10 percent unemployment, far above what we have now and which would see millions of people put out of work. The Fed, for now, appears to be heeding that advice, albeit on a smaller scale — a scale that could grow depending on which side of the debate prevails.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has warned that the Fed’s rate hikes “risks triggering a devastating recession.” Warren’s assessment was echoed by the Fed’s own research, which this summer warned that, in a past example, aggressive interest rate hikes in rapid succession resulted in the depression of 1920. The United Nations has also called on the Fed to stop its rate hikes, warning that it risks a “global recession.” The International Monetary Fund issued a similar warning, as did a World Bank paper.

Rate hikes can be an effective tool against inflation depending on its causes, but it is far from the only one. The inflation currently besetting the U.S. is being driven by forces beyond the control of the Fed, like supply chain problems and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Warren argued. (Economist Thomas Ferguson identifies the same causes as well as another one: extreme weather events resulting from climate change.)

Instead of rate hikes, Warren suggested several other ways to bring down inflation, including fighting corporate price gouging with aggressive antitrust policies, bringing more parents into the workforce by subsidizing child care, strengthening supply chains by ending tax breaks for corporations that offshore jobs, and bringing down drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate them.

“As with any illness, the right medicine starts with the right diagnosis,” Warren has said. “Unfortunately, the Fed has seized on aggressive rate hikes — a big dose of the only medicine at its disposal — even though they are largely ineffective against many of the underlying causes of this inflationary spike.”

Warren has asked Powell, the Fed chair, how many job losses the central bank is willing to accept in its war on inflation. The Fed has no clear answer.

In a press release announcing further rate hikes last month, the Fed specified the inflation rate it was aiming for — 2 percent — but, in terms of employment, only vaguely claimed to seek the “maximum.”

In contrast to the 2 percent figure, the president of the New York Fed recently said unemployment could reach 5 percent this year — representing millions of people losing their jobs. Despite the Fed’s famous mandate to pursue both the highest employment and lowest inflation possible, the priority seems obvious.

Inflation has been steadily falling since July, buoying hopes that the “pain to households” that Powell warned about might subside. For now, though, it appears the Fed’s aggressive war on inflation is just beginning, despite growing warnings that it could trigger a recession.

An alarming but little-noticed report released by the St. Louis Fed on December 28 found that slightly over half of U.S. states are experiencing “recession-like conditions” that serve as a key indicator for a coming national recession.

“Huge downward revision to November wage growth,” Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said of the new jobs report. An earlier report had suggested wages were rising again, but the finding was corrected in the latest report once better data became available. Dean called on the Federal Reserve to “hold the rate hikes please.”

The post Financial World Celebrates Slowing Wage and Employment Growth in New Jobs Report appeared first on The Intercept.

Krystal and Saagar discuss the multiple days of continuing chaos surrounding the vote for House Speaker, AOC floating a potential compromise between Dems and R's, Trump receiving blowback from the religious right over his Abortion midterm comments, Mass tech layoffs at Amazon and Meta, Jim Cramer changing his mind and warning people about Crypto, the Age of Con Artists like Andrew Tate and George Santos, and Big Soda smearing their opponents as racist.

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Ryan and Emily discuss the historic loss of Kevin McCarthy's bid for speaker, the new chapter of the Twitter Files revealing pressure Twitter experienced from the intelligence community, SBF in court, how DNA technology was used to catch the Idaho killer, Unusual Whales revealing information on dem/republican stock corruption, tech company layoffs rising, and an exclusive interview with Matt Taibbi on the new chapters of the Twitter Files.

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Why is the US willing to risk a nuclear apocalypse to weaken Russia and China? Our leaders say it’s about protecting the international rules based order from an authoritarian axis of evil. But this is just a guise. It’s actually about maintaining US unipolar hegemony over the world, which requires preventing or at the very least delaying the integration of Europe and Asia, an integration that is logical, both economically and geographically. 

To discuss this and more Rania Khalek was joined by Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and author of many books including “Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations."

Articles discussed in this episode: 

The United States wants to prevent a historical fact–Eurasian integration: The Twenty-Seventh Newsletter https://mronline.org/2022/07/08/the-united-states-wants-to-prevent-a-historical-fact-eurasian-integration/

Mali’s Break with France Is a Symptom of Cracks in the Transatlantic Alliance: The Forty-Eighth Newsletter (2022) from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/malis-break-with-france-is-a-symptom-of-cracks-in-the-transatlantic-alliance/ 

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Enlarge / Retiring Sen. Richard C. Shelby, R-Ala. (credit: Scott J. Ferrell | Getty Images)

Every other year, luminaries of the air and space community gather in France for the famed Paris Air Show, the largest aerospace exhibition in the world. The show offers visitors the chance to see new technology and the opportunity to mix and mingle.

For the leaders of the largest and most powerful aerospace companies in the world, there is also an opportunity to kiss the ring. This would come on the one evening of the Paris Air Show, during which the Alabama legislative delegation rented out the top floor of the Eiffel Tower for a reception to host aerospace dignitaries.

The star attraction atop the historic tower was a US senator, Richard Shelby. The chief executives of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Dynetics, and other industry firms would come to meet with Shelby, to see and be seen, and to show the state of Alabama the love. As chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee in the US Senate, Shelby's voice was that of God when it came to funding US defense and civil space contracts.

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It’s finally time to return to Pandora: we review Avatar: The Way of Water. James Cameron expands and improves on his otherworldly saga of colonization and resistance in about every conceivable way, including revolutionary whale violence, CRAB MECHS, and competing visions of eternal life, one blessed & one damned. Saddle up your Skimwing and join us once again in this consciousness-raising blockbuster fantasy world of blue guys.

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Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):

December 8, 2022 Natalia Petrzela, author of Fit Nation, on the history of physical culture in the US • Paolo Gerbaudo on the weakness of the Italian bourgeoisie