It’s the biggest story next door but barged offside by the Australian media for the Trump indictment and the ‘No’. There’s another factor: Soccer’s not our national game. But it is Indonesia’s, and the reaction to the loss of the Republic hosting the Under-20 World Cup because Israeli youth will play is showing the Great Continue reading »
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~ Today's Water Cooler ~
Nikki Haley tonight in Iowa spoke at length about the 2015 Charleston church shooting and her push to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state Capitol — a defining moment in her governorship that she has largely avoided talking about on the campaign trail. Haley said of her push to remove the Confederate flag: “Half of the state saw the flag as heritage and service, the other half saw it as slavery and hate. My job as governor wasn't to judge either side. My job was to bring out the best in them to get them to see a way forward.” Haley argued after the mass shooting of nine African Americans by a white supremacist that the “national media came in, they wanted to make it about racism, they wanted to make it about gun control, they wanted to make about the death penalty.” “The goal was, how do you hold the state together and not let that happen?…This was on the heels of Ferguson, you knew that everything was about to fall apart. And we basically, rather than falling into fear, we turned toward God and we made sure we came together as a state.” Originally tweeted by Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) on April 12, 2023.
Have you saved the date yet? The beautiful city of Pittsburgh, PA, will host the next DrupaCon North America from 5th through 8th June 2023. I know it feels like just yesterday that DrupalCon North America 2022 zipped by, and we’re already talking about DrupalCon 2023!
Famously known as the “Steel City” (the largest steel-producing city in the world) and “City of Bridges” (a staggering 446 bridges!), Pittsburgh is one of the top most liveable cities in the United States. When you’re here, you will be surrounded by warm and kind Pittsburghers (as they like to call themselves), world-class breweries and distilleries, green spaces, and some gorgeous views. Need more reasons to visit Pittsburgh?
Due to rising prices, regressive attitudes toward pay raises, and my 2002 Honda Civic’s engine exploding, I’ve had to come up with creative ways to pay the bills. That’s why I’m announcing my Patreon.
I know what you’re thinking. “Pay for education? That’s not what public school is about!” But I want to reassure you I’m not putting your child’s education behind a paywall. I’m merely offering more to those who want to help me afford rent, groceries, and a used scooter for getting around town. Think of it as Education+.
To further assuage your fears, here are my Patreon levels.
$10 a month: Thank you for being a supporter. I’ll give you a personalized shoutout during roll call every Monday.
$50 a month: Pressure is poison to education. So let’s give your student an extra five minutes on every spelling and math test. Plus, three “phone a friend” lifelines to use throughout the semester if they need a little extra help.
This paper revisits a traditional theme in the literature on the political economy of development, namely how to redistribute rents from traditional exporters of natural resources toward capitalists in technology-intensive sectors with a higher potential for innovation and the creation of higher-productivity jobs. Porcile and Lima argue that this conflict has been reshaped in the past three decades by two major transformations in the international economy.
The last few years have seen a new round of vigilante killings in America, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the civil rights movement. And under a new interpretation of the meaning of self-defense, many are getting away with it. Recall a few years back when an armed man named George Zimmerman down in Florida thought a young Black kid named Trayvon Martin looked suspicious so he jumped him and when the startled teenager fought back, Zimmerman shot and killed the boy. He said he felt threatened and was only defending himself. The jury acquitted him. More recently, a young white man named Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murder charges in Kenosha, Wisconsin when he waded into a protest armed with an AR-15 and killed two unarmed men, wounding a third. Rittenhouse may have been the one armed with a semi-automatic rifle but he said he felt threatened by the protesters so he opened fire. The jury found that to be a reasonable reaction. This interpretation of self-defense exists partly because the right has legalized carrying loaded firearms in public which makes any public confrontation potentially lethal.
The Ohio congressman warned that, if he refused to testify, he would have “no other choice” but to call for himself to be jailed.
Big Pharma has feels for mifepristone Corporations are not people, my friends. They have no feelings, only appetites and strong instincts for self-preservation. In that way, they are primitively animal-ish the way A.I. simulates thought. But damned if they aren’t territorial, too. David Dayen considers Big Pharma’s reaction to the potential banning of mifepristone: The pharmaceutical industry is very upset. Right-wing federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of abortion medication mifepristone could severely damage companies’ ability to develop and market prescription drugs. Companies could spend a fortune getting a drug approved, only to see the courts take issue with the process, and the money washed down the drain. To them, it’s the worst thing a court ruling can be: bad for business. That’s why Big Pharma is speaking out.
Housing secretary Michael Gove is facing pressure to abandon popular plans to reform England and Wales' feudal leasehold system, Josiah Mortimer reports
Effie Webb talks to past and prospective junior doctors who describe a crumbling healthcare system and the demise of what was once a prestigious career
A shaggy dog story on trying to get the IRS to accept cash....
The simple history of the pre-Civil War era in the US is that the slave states wanted the non slave states to return escaped slaves to them. The free states did not want to do that, and it eventually led to war.
There is something similar going on in the US today. Anti-abortion/Anti-Trans states are making it illegal for people to go to other states for abortions of trans related medical care. Part of the mechanic of that was punishing people who helped slaves.
Their plans come together The conservative base may be driven by what it “knows” in its gut, as Stephen Colbert’s alter ego once observed, but conservatism’s real movers are far more strategic. The left, not so much, despite pretensions to the contrary. Thomas B. Edsall asked several authors and academicians how strategists of the right pursue their ends and by what means. Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor of political science and sociology, tell him what we see today in the states is the result of careful, long-term planning and organizing by the right’s strategists, particularly the Federalist Society, to produce “minority authoritarianism” inside a nominally democratic government. Their base may dream of establishing a Christian nationalist theocracy, but for the right’s brain trust, turning the U.S. into a right-wing demockracy will do: That harkens back to the infamous 1983 Cato paper, Achieving a “Leninist” Strategy. The authors argued for a long-term, divide-and-conquer strategy for undermining support for Social Security using incremental changes to move the public toward private accounts.
In Jorie Graham’s hands, form is a kind of method acting, an inspiriting habitation. Breath, more than ever, is momentum in her new book, To 2040. As always in Graham’s oeuvre, the lyric explodes experience, stretches time—seems to—expanding the line’s possibilities, whether in short or long lines. To 2040 can seem both an address, an intimate but public apostrophe to a year that’s not so far away, and the title can also suggest a movement toward that year, a movement that might be fatal. The future the book is gesturing toward is the almost near future, and the poems point at a moment in the timeline of our global climate catastrophe that will be in many of our lifetimes. Apocalyptic possibilities of the near future, but in the poems, she’s also written brilliant strange renderings of VR, drones, the pinging world of phones and endless information—our very present strangeness. Meanwhile, as ever, the self who speaks and acts is slightly fugitive in Graham’s lines. The self moves in this book from splintery quatrains intermixed with one-line stanzas to a freer—but never entirely free—verse that bristles from the right-hand margin.
Zarina Zabrisky reports from Ochakiv on the Black Sea coast, one of Ukraine's most dangerous and underreported hotspots after almost a year of full-scale Russian aggression
As a millennial, I often feel my life is just a little behind schedule. I graduated high school into the Great Recession and spent my twenties finishing a graduate program that led to little but a series of low-paying teaching gigs. As I approach thirty-four, single, childless, with no prospects of ever owning a home, I still don’t feel like a full-fledged adult. It’s hard to imagine that at my age, my dad was just a couple of more chapters away from finishing that Tom Clancy novel that he’d been keeping on his bedside table for years.
Scientists and public health officials didn't do a great job of explaining Covid vaccine efficacy. Laziness? Arrognace? Obfusction?
The former Chief Prosecutor who brought the Rochdale 'grooming gang' to justice believes the Home Secretary's rhetoric will have real life consequences
Galbraith debunks conventional wisdom on sanctions against Russia.