When The Powerless Gain Power

Signs according to Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney that the world is in a rupture (what philosopher Alain Badiou calls an Event).

A. Why is Australian transport so slow? There were failures in a lack of systems thinking; information asymmetries; and a failure to use causal loop diagrams.

B. How do Australian neo-Nazis communicate and signal to each-other? Plus: the enduring conspiracy theories that Adolf Hitler had children (cue the 1978 film The Boys From Brazil).

C. Dystopian war-gaming a possible third Trump administration.

D. The United States is embracing gambling.

E. An interview with historian Rutger Bregman about populism, finance, and the state of the world.

F. You too can eat like a Roman emperor. Plus: why Islam is the engine of world history; and why chess is fiction’s favourite metaphor.

G. Today’s MIT OCW free course is an Introduction to Linguistics created by Professor Norvin Richards.

H. Elon Musk speaks at the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos, Switzerland.

I. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang also speaks at the WEF.

J. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has given a much commented and well received speech that rapidly became a WEF event. Prime Minister Carney refers to Vaclav Havel’s influential essay The Power of the Powerlessness (1979). But some people are not happy with it. So consider philosopher Alain Badiou on what an event is (a talk and an overview article).