Cumron

This is the Moroccan-Chinese restaurant where Maimonides lived in Fez

Paris commune barricade location, now a KFC

@songbirdpublish More for me

Twenty-three years ago the US said it was going to Americanize Iraq. Instead we got something closer to the Saddam-ification of the US.

Claudia Sheinbaum is the only Jewish head of state in the Americas and the president of a country with a population 13x that of Israel. Frum loathes her because she is pro Palestinian and a social democrat.

As a great admirer of the Japanese rail system, I'm bothered by ignorant and motivated attempt to use it as the poster child for "privatised" (as opposed to "government run") rail. Japan is indeed the great outlier: privatisation was designed and remains embedded within an institutional framework of regulatory oversight, land-use coordination, political expectations and pressure. In the UK, competing rail franchisees extract operating profit, whereas Japanese firms are vertically integrated regional monopolies who benefit from deep value capture from the land and commercial real estate around stations in dense walkable urban environments with high demand. This strongly incentives them to max passenger #'s at those stations, which in turn incentives infrastructure maintenance and stringent punctuality. This also means they don't need to squeeze customers through fares. But fares are also strictly regulated by the state (MLIT): operators apply for revisions, and MLIT approves or rejects them based on their assessment of operator's costs, a permitted rate of return, efficiency benchmarks etc. In practice, this "private" rail system is marked by a lot of informal government pressure ("administrative guidance") on costs and on shutting down unprofitable rural lines unilaterally. As a result, fares almost never rise and the decline of rural service has been a slow, negotiated process of managed despite Japan's demographic malaise. All of this relies on a set of institutional complementarities most countries simply don't have: the decades long hand-in-hand with urban policy and land use planning (---> decades of accumulated commercial property assets), a clean balance sheet inherited at privatisation (debts were ultimately taken over by the public), the enormous urban density and walkability across the entire urban corridor from Tokyo to Fukuoka, a very particular corporate culture (quasi tyrannical emphasis on precision, reliability, service, continuous improvement from crew behaviour to station cleanliness) which is rewarded by the business model (sic), and a system in which firms bow to informal government pressure.

El Papa cuando le preguntan su postura sobre la migración: “Yo cambiaría la pregunta: qué hace el norte global para ayudar al sur global en su situación que les obliga a migrar”

Even more than in the past, it is clear today that the proliferation of armed conflicts is often driven by the exploitation of oil and mineral deposits, with no regard for international law or the self-determination of peoples.

Beyond shameful! Next time the German government lectures ANYONE about human rights, remember that in Germany, you get arrested if you peacefully hold up pictures of starving Palestinian children. This video is from Berlin.

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses. Dear friends, you, however, are real persons! Creation itself has a body, a breath, a life to be listened to and safeguarded.

No mention of who or how the war was started, let alone its illegality. Post-Davos = pre-Davos.

This story is so good. The Fords, both Rob and Doug, built their whole political brand on tabloidy bullshit calling out people on city council for expensing office supplies and my man quite literally used public funds to buy himself a $30 million private jet.

We were rightly outraged when the Taliban prevented girls from going to school. Where is Canada’s voice - and action - when Israel prevents Palestinian children from going to school?

Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth. #ApostolicJourney #Cameroon vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

Come on. We have a "Secretary of War" stating that God is on the side of the righteous Americans, and wants to violently destroy its enemies. We have a president cosplaying Jesus Christ, threatening to destroy civilizations, and making sacrilegious remarks about other religions. Get your priorities right. If anything this pope is Barthian, refusing the domestication of the Christian faith for the purposes of waging holy wars.

Okay, so I guess Pinochet's Chile wasn't authoritarian because there was a plebiscite and then an election? Moreover, there's a whole literature on competitive authoritarianism and hybrid regimes. Getting rid of elections entirely is very hard.

Liberals claim our arms embargoes are ironclad, but former Ministers Lloyd Axworthy & Allan Rock are calling out a massive "U.S. loophole." As long as military goods can be shipped via the U.S. without permits, our laws are being bypassed. No more excuses—close the loophole. 🇨🇦

He was shot in the head by an Israeli drone. Anand makes no mention of this but politely asks Israel to “cease its attacks.” If you’re Canadian and Israel kills you, this is the absolute most you can expect from this government.

"Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine" vs "the war in the Middle East," we are achieving levels of liberal contradiction heretofore unknown to man