Alex Jones files for bankruptcy protection

I wrote earlier about how the net was tightening around this spreader of all manner of false and malicious information, including some that made life a living hell for the families of the Sandy Hook massacre, who were already suffering because of the murder of their children. He was under increasing legal pressure and has now started the process by which rich people, like the Sacklers, try to avoid paying for their behavior, by declaring bankruptcy.
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The Canary in the Mine: The Achievement Gap Between Black and White Students by Mano Singham

Here is another published article of mine that I am making freely available by posting here. It was published in the education journal Phi Delta Kappan in September 1998

The background to this article in that in 1992 I was selected to be part of an initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to improve science and mathematics education for middle school students in the state of Ohio. I was involved in it for a decade or so and during my work, I was not only struck by the difference in achievement between Black and white students (something that is well known) but more by how people viewed the problem and suggested solutions.
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Meanwhile, over in the UK …

… The Chancellor of the Exchequer (their equivalent of the Secretary of the Treasury in the US) Rishi Sunak has come under fire because it was revealed that his wife Akshata Murty, an Indian citizen and the daughter of an Indian billionaire, has used the non-domiciled status provision in the UK tax laws to avoid paying UK taxes on her large global income. While this is legal, it does not look good for Sunak, the person who has raised taxes on British citizens, to have his extremely wealthy wife take advantage of these provisions.
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Great moments in NFT investing

I have expressed my puzzlement with the idea of buying so-called NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) and have made several posts about the whole concept. And yet people are spending huge amounts of money on them. NFTs seem like collectibles except that while most collectibles are tangible objects with limited numbers of them, NFTs are digital constructs that can be easily reproduced by pretty much anyone. The value of an NFT seemed (to me at least) far more speculative than other forms of collectibles and thus liable to wild price fluctuations.

So it did not surprise me to read about someone who bought an NFT for $2.9 million in March 2021 but when he tried to resell it for $48 million yesterday, the highest offer he got was $6,800.
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The doorway effect

(Pickles)

This cartoon that appeared this past week illustrates a phenomenon that we have likely all experienced at some point and that is called the ‘doorway effect’. I wrote about it five years ago, where I pointed to research suggesting that it is due to our short term memories being at least partially cleared when we go from one environment to another, such as by walking through a door.

Finally, a case of voter fraud!

Donald Trump and Republicans have been going on about rampant voter fraud by Democrats that they claim led to them losing the 2020 presidential election. They have alleged that ballot boxes were stuffed, electronic votes switched, voter rolls that had ineligible or dead voters, and the like. But they have been unable to provide any evidence that it has happened on anywhere near the scale required to tilt the election outcomes. In fact, if anything, the repeated investigations that they have instigated have shown that there was very little fraud of any kind by ordinary people.
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Update on Sri Lankan crisis

The news is not good. The crisis is dragging on.

The latest news is that the government has suspended foreign debt repayments, in effect defaulting on its loans. This is disastrous for its credit rating and means that it will be charged higher interest rates if it tries to borrow money in the global markets. Its only hope is for loans from international agencies like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and countries like India and China. All of them are likely to make demands that, while maybe enabling the government to import fuel and food and in the short term ameliorate the suffering that has caused such widespread anger, will likely create other problems in the long term. These multinational agencies like the IMF, WB, and the ADB are run on neoliberal principles and they are likely to demand cuts in spending on the country’s public educational system (that has produced very high literacy rates of over 90%) and the national health system (which has resulted in good health outcomes and life expectancy of over 77 years, higher than many countries with larger per capita GDPs.)

The new governor of the Central Bank has almost doubled interest rates from 7.5% to 14.5% in an effort to curb the soaring inflation caused by the previous governor authorizing the printing of huge amounts of money to fund the government, and has vowed to act independently.
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