Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

An ode to a struggling empire

With prices rising at the fastest rate for 40 years … UK’s record number of billionaires

The writer should have included the American complicity in the use of torture by the US allies from Pakistan to Egypt to Morocco whether before, after or during the so-called war on terror and the rendition programme. US leaders from Bush to Biden are in denial

 

An interesting and good read , especially for someone who does not read about evolution regularly and wants an update on the field. I have not read about the topic since 2010 (mainly through the writings of Jerry A. Coyne and Stephen Jay Gould). This is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline. “The issue at stake,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, “is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology.” And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up. The modern synthesis theory’s ideas “are still deeply embedded in the field, yet no formal reckoning with its failures or schisms has occurred. To its critics, the modern synthesis occupies a po

According to a leading liberal, new Keynesian economist, “The next crisis will not be like its predecessors. In the 1970s, we had stagflation but no massive debt crises, because debt levels were low. After 2008, we had a debt crisis followed by low inflation or deflation, because the credit crunch had generated a negative demand shock. Today, we face supply shocks in a context of much higher debt levels, implying that we are heading for a combination of 1970s-style stagflation and 2008-style debt crises – that is, a stagflationary debt crisis.”

Creating a new military alliance with Israel