If you read any of the hundreds of advice columns that have found renewed life on the internet, you’ll recognize a certain genre of question. It comes from a woman, almost always married, who’s describing a partner’s shitty behavior. They often narrativize the behavior in a way that simultaneously asks the reader to understand that something is wrong (my partner/my family/my coworker is the asshole) while also framing the behavior in a larger framework of excuse (maybe I am the asshole?). Men do occasionally submit to these columns, but I find this genre almost always comes from women — because women have been taught, through various ideological machinations, that if there is something wrong in their lives it is almost certainly their fault, and if it is their fault, they must personally seek ways to fix it.
People do realize that being single is an option — but, depending on their background, they are often abjectly terrified of it. Why, in a culture that ostensibly celebrates strong, independent women, does this fear remain? It’s about money and keeping things together for the kids, of course — but it’s also about a lot more than that.
The letters in advice columns often overflow with an unsettling mix of propriety, descriptiveness, and desperation, all attempting to underline all the ways in which a marriage is, in fact, a good (Blue) one….save this one small thing. The problem is that one small thing too often belies a larger brokenness: one partner is wholly unwilling to communicate, or to raise children in a way that both of you agree is safe or nurturing, or to set boundaries against toxic relatives. Or, even sadder, it’s clear that the author’s spouse doesn’t actually respect them at all — not their labor, not their mind, not their interests, not their fears — and they’ve been reconciling themselves to a partnership that isn’t actually one.
And then there’s the resignation: dating sucks. What if, well, all men suck? What if there’s nothing better. What if you’re throwing away family and social and financial security just so, what, you can not feel like a devalued piece of shit every day? Not worth it! Power through it! Sunken cost! No matter how much feminist theory you’ve read, no matter how much you’ve celebrated others in your life who’ve chosen a single life, there is also a wrenching, paralyzing fear of being alone. The utter abiding and degrading shit that I have seen women endure in order to avoid that fate — it disarms me. It terrifies me, really. That, as a culture, we’ve effectively arranged the dynamics of un-marriage to resemble a horror movie: a fate to be avoided at all costs, no matter the injury we endure within the marriage. - Blue Marriage
If I can impart one truth to you. Never be friends with writers. Never date writers. Never go near writers. For the love of god, don’t marry writers. Don’t breathe on them. Don’t look them in the eyes. If you should suddenly stumble upon one in the wild, hold still until they leave. A writer cannot observe you unless you are doing something aberrant and quirky or have soulful eyes that reveal something mysterious. Should you have eyes like that, immediately close them when you get around a writer. - I am Dangerous!
Europe Held Hostage by America: This desire is caused not only by the US’s striving to sell as much as possible of its own liquefied natural gas to Europe, but mostly to prevent the appearance of cheap Russian gas in the Old World, which will lower prices on electric energy thus boosting the competitiveness of the European economy on the global market. By the way, when gas prices in Europe reached almost $1K per 1,000 cubic meters, there were no American gas carriers lining up in European ports. The US companies sold their LNG to Asia where the prices were even higher. At the same time, it is impossible to boost oil and gas production in the US in the nearest future due to extreme low investment in the sector over the past few years.
Europe Held Hostage by Russia - CNBC: Experts see the battle over Europe’s gas supply as something of a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia, with both vying to gain market share in the region with their supply of natural gas (Russia) and liquefied natural gas (the U.S.)
(ˈɛkspɜːˌtɪzəm) noun. the quality of being an expert. Specialism and expertism, the accompaniments of professionalism, are always related to the structures of institutional power.
Pandora Papers: is the world’s biggest leak the world’s biggest cover-up?: This time around, there are 14 Mossack Fonsecas; that is, 14 “offshore service providers” have been hacked. This is hacking on an industrial, possibly sovereign, scale. It is possible these “offshore service providers”, from Hong Kong to the Caribbean, divulged the information voluntarily, but unlikely.
Who benefits? The US and the Big Four. Just as the Panama Papers helped to demolish Panama as a tax haven, compelling clients of Mossack Fonseca to flee to other secrecy jurisdictions to hide their money, the upshot of the Pandora Papers is that, right at this moment, the super rich who secrete their money in the British Virgin Islands, the Seychelles or Cyprus will be thinking long and hard about restructuring to hide their riches via Delaware or another onshore tax haven in the US.
They will also think long and hard about getting the Big Four global tax firms – PwC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG – to manage their affairs. The A Team.
This is of course a speculative conclusion but also, as one regulatory finance source confided to Michael West Media this week, just a matter of putting two and two together. The Washington-based ICIJ never seems to be harassed by US authorities, the Big Four are rarely named, US billionaires are rarely named, blue chip tax avoiders are rarely named, the identity of the vast bulk of wealthy Australians in the data are never named.
MOSCOW, Oct 8 (Reuters) - The Kremlin on Friday congratulated Dmitry Muratov, an editor and journalist, on winning the Nobel peace prize despite the fact that his Novaya Gazeta newspaper has often criticised the Russian authorities. - Reuters