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Floridians prefer Trump: The warning signs were there even before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stepped onto the stageat a luxury hotel near Miami. Ticket sales for the local Republican Party’s biggest annual fundraiser were down by two-thirds. One group of reliable supporters skipped the event entirely. The ballroom at the JW Marriott Turnberry Resort & Spa was far too big for the 380 people who showed up. Staff hustled to arrange paneled “air walls” around the room to make the space look smaller. When DeSantis arrived at the gathering in early July, he gave what two people who attended described as a familiar and lackluster speech. “It kind of came off like a bar mitzvah speech,” said a party member who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from Miami-Dade GOP leaders. “The only time people really applauded was when he was introduced, and when he was done.
Maureen Dowd wrote a typically snotty column excoriating Joe and Jill Biden for failing to acknowledge their granddaughter, Hunter’s child by a woman with whom he’d had a brief affair four years earlier. It gave the right wingers fodder to proclaim that despite Joe’s reputation as a family man, the Biden Crime Family is cruel to little children and other living things. It seemed obvious that there was more to the story than what we knew which was already complicated. The first family put out this statement: President Joe Biden has offered his first statement on 4-year-old grandchild Navy Joan Roberts, the daughter of Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts, an Arkansas woman who filed a paternity suit against the president’s son in May 2019. “Our son Hunter and Navy’s mother, Lunden, are working together to foster a relationship that is in the best interests of their daughter, preserving her privacy as much as possible going forward,” President Biden said in a statement provided exclusively to PEOPLE.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project. The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what’s already become known as “Barbieheimer” by seeing Greta Gerwig’s hit film Barbie and Nolan’s three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day. Nolan’s film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC’s 1983 airing of The Day After about... Read more
You cannot make this stuff up: Former president Donald Trump called on congressional Republicans to withhold military support for Ukraine until the Biden administration cooperates with their investigations into the president and his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings. The demand, delivered at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, echoed Trump’s conduct at issue during his first impeachment, when Trump withheld aid from Ukraine while pressuring the country’s president to announce an investigation of Biden. “Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles … to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings,” Trump said at the rally. He added that any Republican lawmakers who didn’t join the effort should face primary challenges, a tactic he used last year to unseat Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
While posing as a defender of free speech, Florida’s Ron DeSantis has played point man on the Israel lobby’s crusade to criminalize American citizens for their exercising their constitutionally-protected right to boycott Israel. Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has spent his career as an elected official pushing an array of laws attacking the free speech of American citizens who exercise their constitutionally-protected right to boycott Israel. One anti-boycott bill DeSantis championed sought to send violators to prison […]
The post How Ron Desantis puts Israel first and assaults the speech rights of American citizens first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post How Ron Desantis puts Israel first and assaults the speech rights of American citizens appeared first on The Grayzone.
Until now, I’ve avoided getting myself worked up about ChatGPT. Prompted by this article by a Columbia undergraduate this past spring, I thought that if a student knows enough about paper-writing to make ChatGPT work for them, in the way this student describes in his piece, without detection by a minimally alert instructor, that student has probably already mastered the skills of essay-writing far more than the author of this piece seems to realize. I at least could rest easy with the knowledge that if a student used ChatGPT to write a paper for me, and it was good, I wasn’t not teaching that student what they needed to learn how to do. But this recent article, by a Harvard […]
Arkansas is going after booksellers too: Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled Saturday. U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, was set to take effect Aug. 1. A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged. The judge also rejected a motion by the defendants, which include prosecuting attorneys for the state, seeking to dismiss the case. The ACLU of Arkansas, which represents some of the plaintiffs, applauded the court’s ruling, saying that the absence of a preliminary injunction would have jeopardized First Amendment rights.
The mainstream media has once more tried to generate alarm about the presence of two relatively innocuous Chinese electronic spy ships in international waters during the latest biennial Talisman Sabre military exercise spread across the Australian mainland and offshore oceans. It involves 30,000 troops from 13 countries. Although the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had Continue reading »
America is Australia’s “great and powerful friend” so it matters a great deal how reliable our firmest strategic partner is. Is the US heading for a degree of political dysfunction that could blow back into its steadfastness as a leading player and an Australian ally in a multipolar Indo-Pacific? In this series, Roger Beale explores Continue reading »
“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” said one researcher. The system of Atlantic Ocean currents that drive warm water from the tropics toward Europe is at risk of collapsing in the coming decades, an analysis of 150 years of temperature data published Tuesday concluded. “The Atlantic Continue reading »
“For over seven years [working for the US government] I have been preoccupied with our involvement in Vietnam. In that time I have seen it first as a problem; then as a stalemate; then as a crime” – Daniel Ellsberg, 1971. Daniel Ellsberg, who died on 16 June 2023, aged 92, was a courageous United Continue reading »
Western economies have immovable “stagflation” that classical (include monetarist) policies won’t budge, the increasingly “bearish” market seems incapable of getting growth, investment is in retreat, unemployment is rising and people in rich countries are starving. The Great Depression was just like that, and so is the present western capitalist economy. As the pundit says, those Continue reading »
In recent Pearls and Irritations essays there has been a difference of opinion between myself and Ross Fox, the Director of Catholic Education, Canberra and Goulburn. I believe this difference of opinion rests with the definition of students with severe behaviours and my assertion that private schools do not enrol them. I have a determination Continue reading »
The US and China are at the forefront of new AI-imbued military technology development, and are the world’s undoubted leading military powers. But, while the US struggles to recruit highly educated personnel to its military; in China, out of over one hundred thousand recruits in 2022, 80% are tertiary educated, with more than half holding Continue reading »
The Chinese Communist Party has a history of turning to senior figures to steady the ship in emergencies and Wang’s return may be in line with this precedent. Beijing will need someone to prepare the ground for some major diplomatic setpieces including a possible trip to the US by President Xi Jinping. The abrupt ousting Continue reading »
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 30, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
A rare opportunity to be heard
Antitrust Guidelines and Overthrowing a Corrupt Priesthood
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 7-23-2023]
Classy guy indeed… And he’s having a normal one today.
As if Pensacola News Journal: In a recently published research letter regarding emerging infectious diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that Florida is witnessing an increase in leprosy cases lacking traditional risk factors and recommending that travel to Florida be considered when conducting leprosy contact tracing in any state. […] The number of reported leprosy cases across the country has doubled over the past decade, according to the CDC. Citing data from the National Hansen’s Disease Program, the CDC says there were 159 new cases reported in the U.S. in 2020. Nearly 70% of these new cases were reported in Florida, California, Louisiana, Hawaii, New York and Texas. Florida stands out in the report for two reasons: Central Florida alone accounted for nearly 20% of the total number of cases reported nationally and several new-case patients in central Florida demonstrated no clear evidence of zoonotic exposure or traditionally known risk factors. Not to panic. DeSantis is more of a threat. But not treatable with antibiotics.
Why cultists are so loud and proud Lies and conspiracy theories are related, finds Marcel Danesi, a professor of semiotics and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto. In a pattern that “goes back to antiquity,” populist leaders such as former President Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin “use language to develop a cult-like following.” Danesi offers a scientific explanation at Politico. Such leaders deploy “dehumanizing metaphors to instill and propagate hatred of others.” Here is an example of the result, live and in color, from the Trump rally Saturday in Erie Pennsylvania: Whoops. Danesi explains: The first step to manipulating the minds of the public, or really the precondition, is that listeners need to be in the right emotional state. In order to hack into the minds of the public, people need to feel fear or uncertainty.That could be caused by economic instability or pre-existing cultural prejudices, but the emotional basis is fear.
Catherine Tate's raucous, bridge-burning, anti-royal sitcom Queen of Oz brings the kind of fire that "The Thick of It" brought to politics.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Wil Wheaton/Star Trek, CM Punk/Elon Musk, Rick and Morty, Invincible, Doctor Who, Good Omens 2, and more!