The Guardian: Meet the Healy-Raes: the rural Irish populists who have never lost an election

But the Healy-Raes, who hold three county council seats and two seats in parliament, tend to have the last laugh. They are savvy populists who have not lost an election since entering politics four decades ago – a remarkable record given the fact they run as independents.

They appear poised for fresh victories in the general election on 8 February – and could end up in government. The more Dublin snickers, it seems, the better for the Healy-Raes, who alchemise metropolitan disdain into votes at home. [...]

The family has elevated patronage and personal connection – venerable traditions in Irish politics – to high art. “The first commandment in Healy-Rae land is: thou shalt not turn off thy mobile phone,” Donal Hickey, a local journalist, wrote in a biography of the family.

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Bloomberg: Biggest Danish Pension Fund Targets Climate With Green Product

Denmark’s largest pension fund is offering a new product that gives customers the option of placing retirement savings in climate-focused investments. [...]

PFA Climate Plus will, as a starting point, “emit 60% less CO2 than the MSCI World Index and be completely CO2-neutral in 2025 at the latest,” the pension fund said in a statement. The aim is to have a CO2-negative portfolio by 2030.

PFA said it expects returns to fluctuate in the product’s initial years, because there are fewer assets from which to choose. In the long term, Climate Plus “will have the same level of risk and return expectations as” other market returns-based products.

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openDemocracy: George Monbiot on the unholy trinity of ideologies trashing our planet

Monbiot argues that capitalism now is neoliberal capitalism. And, unusually, that capitalism and consumerism are ideologies as much as neoliberalism is. “Part of the insidious power of these ideologies is that they are the water in which we swim - the plastic soup in which we swim. They are everywhere. They affect our decision making every day, they affect the way we see ourselves. They are difficult to see not because they are so small but because they are so big. The most powerful ideologies never announce themselves as ideologies. That is where their power lies. Our first step is to recognise them as ideologies.” [...]

“We cannot go back to [Keynes],” Monbiot responds. “It is growth based. The whole point of Keynesian economics is to maintain the rate of growth - not too fast, not too slow - and we know that even a steady rate of growth is progress towards disaster. But also, in its first iteration in the years after the Second World War it was very effectively destroyed, principally by finance capital working out ways to destroy capital controls, foreign exchange controls. The idea that we can relaunch a Keynesian capitalism and not have it destroyed by people who have already destroyed it once, who have not forgotten those lessons, and who are in a much more powerful position to destroy it today….that’s just dreaming. That is magical thinking. You cannot go back in politics, you have constantly to devise new models.” [...]

“I don’t think you can be [ideologically free]. We’re so governed by our social environment, and our social environment will always be saturated by ideology. To be ideology free would be to become an island, you would have to be completely isolated from all other human beings - and even then you would probably create your own ideology. You often hear people stand up and say, ‘I have no ideology’. And that is just self-deception.”

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SciShow: What We Know About the New Coronavirus

The WHO has declared the new coronavirus a global public health emergency—but that doesn't mean you should panic.

openDemocracy: Iran’s protests: misrepresentation and the silence of western allies

The main misrepresented fact is that the current protests are not just about the public outrage over the downing of the Ukrainian plane, nor are they distinguishable from the protests of November 2019 or December 2017. [...]

On the contrary, the image of Iranians mourning for the death of IRGC top commander, Soleimani, was on the front page of almost every one of them. It is not a hard guess to figure out that under a totalitarian regime such a funeral is nothing but a display of power and therefore, participation is mandatory at least for civil servants, students, and soldiers. Yet it would be surprising to know that even children in primary schools and pre-schoolers had to participate in this “national mourning”. [...]

As in Europe, the left is largely losing the support of the working class and slightly gaining the support of the upper middle class, in the Middle East it has let the people down and sided with the regional dictatorship in the name of anti-imperialism or peace. The white western left tells the people of the MENA to choose the “lesser evil” in order to prevent war, yet it calls upon the people in the West to support them as the most progressive forces. [...]

This clear message of the Iranian students has been echoed in the demands of the Iraqi and Lebanese revolutionaries yet has not been heard by the western elite. The progressive forces in the MENA have proved many times that they are committed to the most essential principle of the left, i.e. internationalism. Despite the neo-orientalist view of many in the western left that, this time, exotifies suppressive regimes in the Global South as anti-imperialists, the progressive forces in the MENA still draw a clear line between themselves and the reactionary forces. But there is a limit to their influence on the society especially when they are betrayed, silenced and left alone by the western intelligentsia who could've been their natural allies.

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