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Mon, 03/02/2025 - 19:00
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February 3rd, 2025next

February 3rd, 2025: You can confess anything at all as long as

Created
Mon, 03/02/2025 - 13:25
The other day I received an email from what might be one the few colleagues still checking into Twitter (most seem to have moved to Bluesky, as have I). The email was just a link with the subject title Did you see? I hadn’t. Gosh, I wrote in response (which I gather they found a little understated). My […]
Created
Mon, 03/02/2025 - 11:30
Is this what MAGA voted for? Elon Musk’s takeover of federal government infrastructure is ongoing, and at the center of things is a coterie of engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college. Most have connections to Musk and at least two have connections to Musk’s longtime associate Peter Thiel, a cofounder and chairman of the analytics firm and government contractor Palantir who has long expressed opposition to democracy. WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer. Wired has now reported the names and backgrounds of all these young fellows.
Created
Mon, 03/02/2025 - 11:16
The late journalist Alexander Cockburn had a good line on the legacy media. Referring to the little ‘Correction’ boxes that would appear most mornings in The New York Times, he suggested that the principal reason the paper made such a show of its fallibility was to bolster its reputation for veracity. In owning to these […]
Created
Mon, 03/02/2025 - 10:59
The notion of the Anthropocene was first proposed twenty-four years ago by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen. It denotes a geological epoch defined by human activity, and remains an unofficial designation, with the International Commission on Stratigraphy—whose processes appear to be geologically slow—yet to approve it for technical use. Nevertheless, in that quarter of a […]
Created
Mon, 03/02/2025 - 08:51

Six years ago, at the time of the first Trump administration’s Muslim ban and its initial round of vicious anti-immigrant policies, I visited a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos to see how Europe was handling its own immigrants and refugees. Within a day, I met two Syrians, Eyad Awwadawnan and Hasan Majnan, who had fled Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship only to end up in a filthy, overcrowded camp in a country that didn’t want them with a future they could not foresee. That was June 2018 and I’ve kept in touch with them both ever since. So, when Assad’s regime fell on December 8, 2024, ending two generations of perhaps the most murderous dictatorship in the modern... Read more

Source: “The Lion Has Fallen!” appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Created
Mon, 03/02/2025 - 04:59
Israeli media has extensively discussed the implications of the recent prisoner exchange, emphasising the significant gains achieved by the Palestinian Resistance Movement, Hamas. Among the key figures expected to be released in the second phase of the deal are Marwan Barghouti, a senior Fatah leader (pictured above), and Ahmed Saadat, Secretary-General of the Popular Front Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 03/02/2025 - 04:57
Mark Dreyfus wrote an article in, The Guardian (29 January 2025) entitled, ‘ For my great-grandparents, for all Jews, for all humanity, I say never again ‘. Here is my response. I write to make people, who are not Jewish, aware that the Jewish community is not only not monolithic, but that many dissent from Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 03/02/2025 - 04:56
What do Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Howard have in common with the Piltdown Man? They all managed to sell a hoax that lasted for decades, before it was exposed as completely false. But wait, their hoax is still central to transglobal neoliberal capitalism’s stranglehold on us all, whereas Charles Dawson’s 1912 forged ‘missing Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 03/02/2025 - 04:55
Cambridge Union I don’t believe the US has any right or any ability to put in place a democracy in any other country. Nor do I believe, by the way, that American democracy functions as a real democracy anymore on the life and death issues… This is not democracy. This is a game. And it’s Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 03/02/2025 - 04:54
What does the acquisition of iconic Melbourne independent Text Publishing by US-based multinational Penguin Random House tell us about the health or otherwise of the Australian book publishing industry? In itself, and without the details of the agreed financial terms having been made public, not a great deal. Text has been for most of its Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 03/02/2025 - 04:52
“We must never forget, this must never happen again.”  Since the WW2 Holocaust, it is said genocide should ‘Never Happen Again’. But it is happening, again. Every genocide is different, yet the deliberate act of ethnic cleansing is devastating, every time. After the Red Army liberated Auschwitz Concentration Camp in January 1945, several thousand children’s Continue reading »