Europe

Authored by Noam Chomsky, originally posted at TomDispatch.com,

[This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted from Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books).]

When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.

This was a real lecture at MIT on May 9th. If we had known about it, we would have attended to document the moment we reached Peak Absurdity.

Submitted by IceCap Asset Management: April 2016 Letter to Investors

Revenge of the Risotto

If the US presidential election has devolved into a comical soundbite free-for-fall, then the UK has its hands full with Brexit, and how the two opposing camps are approaching the UK's vote to exit the Eurozone on June 23.

Automation is taking over all aspects of society.  In many cases, this is a good thing.  As we explain in Splitting Pennies - Understanding Forex - trading Forex manually (Without robots or automation) is basically impossible.  But also we've learned that when anything is done by the government, it ends up being mismanaged, overpriced, delayed, or worse.  In the most extreme example, inmates on death row that are killed by the government, are later found to be innocent with DNA or other hard evidence.