Volume 271 | No. 1

Has the Bill Finally Come Due?

To the editor; Unless you are an economist or an avid investor, you probably do not pay much attention to the bond market, yet its transactions directly affect your financial welfare because it is the place where the $32 trillion of long-term U.S. Treasury Bills are bought and sold. Many believe that Federal Reserve policy is the primary determinant of interest rates in the economy, but the fed sets short-term bank rates that have only an indirect effect on most interest rates. It is the market-determined yield (interest rate) on the ten-year Treasury Bill that is used to directly determine rates for most consumer debt …

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Randy Fine and the Ministry of Acceptable Journalism

by Richard Balzano Calla Walsh, Jackson Hinkle and Christopher Helali have been accused of disinformation and propaganda. They are nontraditional journalists, certainly. They do not spend their days interviewing retired generals for mainstream outlets about why this week’s bombing campaign is regrettable but necessary, and they don’t wait until truth commissions to be on the right side of history. Instead, they travel to countries the United States considers enemies, talk to people Americans are told to hate and fear, and report perspectives that rarely penetrate our Western media echo chamber. The trio were among the remarkably few Western media figures who attended the funeral procession …

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All the News That’s Fit to Print?

by W.D. Ehrhart For the past few months, I have largely avoided political events and especially contemporary goings-on involving the staggeringly comically greedy egotistical narcissistic bigoted hate-fueled criminal he-would-be-unbelievable-except-that-we’re seeing-it-daily-with-our-own-eyes excuse for a human being occupying what has become the Whitewash House. Instead, I’ve written essays that made fun of King Charles III’s impressive chest of medals and decorations, eulogized the writer Philip Caputo, mourned the passing of our 22-year-old cat, mocked the inability of politicians to keep their penises in their pants, remembered my high school graduating class of 1966, and written about my struggles with weight gain. But today I’ve decided that it’s …

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What Have We Learned?

Exactly one week ago the big media outfits went through the mandatory ritual of marking the 25th anniversary of… That Day. Being what they are, they could hardly have done otherwise. Their marching orders were to be solemn and respectful, to note how many people died in less than two hours—enough to constitute a modest New Hampshire town—and remember all the people who loved them, and whose lives have been forever changed. Not to have done any and all of this would have been unthinkable. The more daring of the news franchises, having temporarily appeased their audience’s apparently insatiable appetite for ritualized catharsis, may have …

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Volume 271, No. 1

Despite our insistence on practicing a fairly uninhibited sort of journalism here, at a time when the powerful frown on such behavior, we have survived yet another fortnight. Thousands of copies of our conveniently-sized paper—small enough to pocket and pass on to another reader—are now available, for free, here in Portsmouth and environs. If you click here, the whole thing, in digital form, will appear more or less miraculously on the glassy face of whatever gadget into which you’re now peering.