Most people before the 20th century didn’t travel far. Even in the days of Rome, the most common reasons to travel between cities was to move home, march as a soldier or cross the empire as a merchant or travelling actor. Most people, Roman or not, would spend their entire lives in their home provinces, with travelling beyond that often being considered some grand endeavour.
Latest Posts
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Silicon Valley and xenophobic national security propaganda
17 minutes readYASHA LEVINE—Since the dot-com bubble, Silicon Valley had been at the forefront of pushing for a new (American-led) global world order — a borderless society with global platforms, global supply chains, and global capitalism. But that’s over. The mood’s changing. Ever since Trump won in 2016, the industry has gotten more nihilistic and militaristic and much more patriotic. It’s part of this new liberal belief that America is an embattled society being attacked through the Internet by hostile foreign forces.
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Protesters in Chile Have Been ‘Murdered, Tortured, and Disappeared’. (Video dispatch)
6 minutes readChile’s President Piñera says foreign intervention and a conspiracy are behind the recent protests. But protesters say what’s happening is an explosion of long-contained rage against poverty, inequality, and oppression.
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How the Deep State ‘Justifies’ Itself in America
16 minutes readERIC ZUESSE—In America, the Deep State ‘justifies’ itself in the ‘news’-media that it owns, and does so by falsely ‘defining’ what the “Deep State” is (which is actually the nation’s 607 billionaires, whose hired agents number in the millions). They mis-‘define’ it, as being, instead, the taxpayer-salaried career Government employees, known professionally as “the Civil Service.” (Although some Civil Servants — especially at the upper levels — are agents for America’s billionaires and retire to cushy board seats, most of them actually are not and do not. And the “revolving door” between “the public sector” and “the private sector” is where the Deep State operations become concentrated.
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The Next Freakout: Foreign Spies in Surveillance Valley!
12 minutes readYASHA LEVINE—This week, the FBI unveiled charges against two former Twitter employees — one of whom is a Saudi citizen — accusing them of spying for Saudi Arabia. According to the feds, the two of them were being run by another Saudi national on behalf of Crown “Bone Saw” Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Reading the complaint, these “spies” come off as very inept. They did everything out in the open, had their activity logged, and even got caught by Twitter management.
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Jeffrey Sachs lambastes America’s War on Chinese Technology
18 minutes readJEFFREY SACHS—If the Trump administration “succeeds” in dividing the world into separate technology camps, the risks of future conflicts will multiply. The US championed open trade after World War II not only to boost global efficiency and expand markets for American technology, but also to reverse the collapse of international trade in the 1930s. That collapse stemmed in part from protectionist tariffs imposed by the US under the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act, which amplified the Great Depression, in turn contributing to the rise of Hitler and, ultimately, the outbreak of World War II.