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UTS Comms Critical Webinar Series #2

The Atlas Network: Big Oil, Climate Disinformation and Constitutional Democracy

Date and time:

10-12 noon, Friday 8 December, Sydney time
6-8pm, Thursday 7 December, New York time

Register here

Welcome: James Goodman
Chair: Scott Ludlam

Speakers:
Dr Jeremy Walker (Silencing the Voice)
Prof Nancy MacLean (Democracy in chains)
Amy Westervelt (Drilled)
Prof J. Timmons Roberts

Responses:
Brendan Demelle - Desmog
Climate Investigations Center (tbc)

The post Webinar: The Atlas Network: Big Oil, Climate Disinformation and Constitutional Democracy appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Why do Marvel buy their comic book creators deep in the "special thanks" in the final credits when they relly don't have to?

An extraordinary email uncovered under freedom of information laws raises serious questions about whether Bellingcat, the “open source” collective widely cited by mainstream journalists and loved by the CIA, collaborates directly with Western intelligence agencies. Editor’s note: On December 22, The Grayzone received an email from Bellingcat founder and editor-in-chief Eliot Higgins threatening legal action if this story was not removed from the internet. Attempts to respond to Higgins produced an out of office automated reply, noting he was now […]

The post FOI raises further questions about Bellingcat coordination with Western intelligence  first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post FOI raises further questions about Bellingcat coordination with Western intelligence  appeared first on The Grayzone.

What the melting permafrost looks and sounds like to a scientist.

The post Portrait of a Fractured Arctic appeared first on Nautilus.

My mother taught me that you should not speak ill of the dead on the occasion of their passing. So I won’t.

Let’s microdose in my softest micro French terry sweatshirt gown. Let’s do Molly under my heritage-quality Molly Patchwork Quilt. Let’s celebrate the happiest season with the hug drug and a cheeky panty in boiled wool.

I live in the Garnet Hill catalog like Barbie lives in Barbie World. And like the Barbies, we have a matriarchy. All the men wear flannel joggers and have no penises. We do not need a social safety net because there are no poor, elderly, or human people here. The children buy their own childcare and Signature Supima long johns, which allows us ladies to stroll the tawny streets of medieval Portugal, or hunt whales above the Arctic Circle.

MDMA is all about connectedness to self and others. I want to mix and mingle at a private school winter concert. I want to make a hefty donation to the capital campaign and unwrap my crepe wrap dress for the head of school. I want to wear a $349 velvet button-down to the neighbors’ cocktail hour and sneak away to their timeless bathroom to pleasure myself with a porcelain Christmas tree figurine.

Henry Kissinger’s death draws to a close the epoch of intellectualism in foreign policy to which he was committed following his early study of and belief in a system of organised strategic balance and restraint of the kind that emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia in the 17th century. I first met Henry Kissinger in Continue reading »

It is more than 20 years since Labor Leader Simon Crean addressed Australian troops leaving to fight in the Bush-Blair-Howard war on Iraq. “I don’t believe that you should be going,” he said, absent a United Nations determination. “But that’s a political decision, that’s an argument that the prime minister [John Howard] and I will Continue reading »

Dozens of ‘small modular reactor’ designs are being promoted but precious few will reach the construction stage and the likelihood of SMRs being built in large numbers is negligible. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are defined as reactors with a capacity of 300 megawatts (MW) or less. The term ‘modular’ refers to serial factory production of Continue reading »

Tony Abbott added two new posts to his resume this month, debuting as Fox director and announced to be “joining the Danube Institute team as a guest lecturer.” Add these to the October news that Abbott is now an Advisory Board member of the far-right Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). Australians should be watching. Hungarian Continue reading »

John Edmund Ryan, OBE was a former soldier, career diplomat and acting director of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). He entered Australian folklore on 30 November 1983 when an ASIS team raided Melbourne’s Sheraton Hotel, during a training exercise. The subsequent political controversy engulfed the federal labor government and it claimed Ryan’s career, with Continue reading »

The new National Party led government for New Zealand will be New Zealand’s first cabinet coalition of three parties. Their joint agreement, hammered out during a month of difficult negotiations, will reverse a number of reforms introduced by the outgoing Labour Government and cut public service staff to approach 2017 levels. The outgoing Prime Minister Continue reading »

“Digital platforms continue to provide vested fossil fuel actors with a cheap and easy way to disinform the public about climate change,” said one campaigner. An analysis published Wednesday shows that major fossil fuel corporations have pumped millions of dollars into digital advertising this year in the lead-up to the COP28 talks, part of a Continue reading »

Sometimes Israel’s crimes are so horrific that at first you don’t even understand what you’re looking at. You just stare at it trying to make sense of what you’re seeing for a bit, like you would if you suddenly saw a space alien or a leprechaun or something. It happened to me yesterday when I Continue reading »

Visegrád 24 and its ultra-viral content have dominated social media platforms since Israel's war on Gaza began, but who is behind the pro-Israel account helping to shape the narrative on the year's most controversial topic? MintPress News investigates.

The post Visegrád 24: The Polish Government-Funded Fake News Factory Driving The Online Israel-Palestine News Cycle appeared first on MintPress News.

He denies it but yeah, he probably did. They reportedly went at it on January 6th, you’ll recall when MyKev supposedly said, “who do you think you’re talking to?” So they have that kind of relationship. And this report says that he said “fuck you” when Trump told him why he didn’t support him during the ouster: During a phone call with McCarthy weeks after his historic Oct. 3 removal as House speaker, Trump detailed the reasons he had declined to ask Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and other hard-right lawmakers to back off their campaign to oust the California Republican from his leadership position, according to people familiar with the exchange who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose a private conversation. During the call, Trump lambasted McCarthy for not expunging his two impeachments and not endorsing him in the 2024 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the conversation. “F— you,” McCarthy claimed to have then told Trump, when he rehashed the call later to other people in two separate conversations, according to the people.

More than 100,000 voters could be turned away at the next General Election according to one forecast

Don’t mess with Texas (women) This week the Texas Supreme Court heard a case brought by 20 women denied emergency care under the state’s radical abortion ban (Texas Tribune): In August, state District Judge Jessica Mangrum ruled that the near-total abortion ban cannot be enforced in cases involving complicated pregnancies, including lethal fetal diagnoses. The state immediately appealed that ruling, putting it on hold. Texas law allows abortions only when it is necessary to save the life of the pregnant patient. But this lawsuit, filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights in March, claims that doctors are unsure when the medical exception applies, resulting in delayed or denied care. “No one knows what [the exception] means and the state won’t tell us,” Molly Duane, senior attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, told the justices Tuesday. The state argues the judge went too far in her injunction by reading exceptions into the law beyond what the Legislature intended. Plaintiff Taylor Edwards and Duane spoke to PBS about the suit.

This year marks the anniversaries of two drastically different events that loomed all too large in my life. The first occurred a century ago in Hollywood: on October 16, 1923, Walt Disney signed into being the corporation that bears his name. The second took place in Santiago, Chile, on September 11, 1973, when socialist President Salvador Allende died in a military coup that overthrew his democratically elected government. Those two disparate occurrences got me thinking about how the anniversaries of a long-dead American who revolutionized popular culture globally and a slain Chilean leader whose inspiring political revolution failed might illuminate — and I hope you won’t find this too startling — the dilemma that apocalyptic climate change poses to humanity. This... Read more

Source: Duck! appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

What does Israel's current war against the Gaza Strip have to do with oil and gas? Since the year 2000, when Gaza's gas fields were discovered, the Israeli government has prevented the Palestinian people and their representatives from reaping the benefits of their own resources.

The post Israel’s Decades Old Plan to Exploit Gaza the Gas Fields of Gaza appeared first on MintPress News.