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But it’s on life support From Professor Melissa Murray: Some initial thoughts on Allen v. Milligan. Media is trumpeting this as a “victory” for the Voting Rights Act. And it is. And I don’t want to be a turd in the punchbowl… but this is pretty weak sauce from this Court. First, this doesn’t “strengthen” the VRA. It preserves the status quo. And the status quo is that this Court has done an A+ job of hobbling the VRA over the last 10 years. In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, it eviscerated the preclearance formula. The preclearance regime required states with a history of voting discrimination to first “preclear” any changes to their voting rules and regs with the DOJ or a three-judge federal court panel The Court invalidated the preclearance formula on the ground that progress had been made and minorities were voting and blah blah blah. This progress narrative prompted RBG to note in dissent that throwing out the preclearance formula was like throwing out your umbrella in a rainstorm because you weren’t getting wet.
Thanks so much for sending me your script. There’s tons of great stuff in here, but I think it’d be a lot stronger if you kept in mind the utter meaninglessness of human existence.
I loved all the action sequences. Jimmy and his crew of bank robbers are a lot of fun, but some of their decisions confused me. For instance, when they take the security guard hostage, why does anyone care? At some point in time, the security guard will eventually die. Whether it happens in the moment or years from now, the morbid outcome is immutable. The reaper’s scythe cannot be outrun!
But I loved the moment when he slipped on the banana peel—hilarious!
I did have trouble following when Jimmy’s mom tells him that everyone has a purpose in life. As we all know, the human species came into being due to a random set of atmospheric conditions. Any attempt to decipher meaning from this is pure egotistical delusion. Furthermore, how can his mom even be giving him advice when all knowledge is an illusion meant to give us a false sense of mastery over the world? Just something to consider.
I loved when she slipped on the banana peel, though. I was cracking up.
“All the color drained from his face,” a campaign aide said. “Mike was even whiter than usual.”
This is what he’s come to I can’t tell you how much I love this: Had it come from anyone else, the transition would have been amusing. “The media lie,” the host says, looking into the camera for a video posted on Twitter. “They do. But mostly, they just ignore the stories that matter.” Stories like what, you ask? Well, fast-forward a few seconds and you get your answer. “Yesterday, for example,” he explains, “a former Air Force officer who worked for years in military intelligence came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. government has physical evidence of crashed, non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft.” Ah, okay. Everyone over the age of 13 can see where this is going. But the speaker here wasn’t one of the unidentifiable talking phenomena that litter social media. It wasn’t even Alex Jones, who made a career out of elevating skepticism in authority so high that people might even believe that his nutritional supplements were worth the cost.
I’m off to do a talk to mark World Ocean Day, so this is posted in haste. The ocean needs advocates. It’s our biggest ecosystem, probably our biggest carbon sink, a major source of oxygen. It regulates temperatures, and drives weather patterns. Hundreds of millions of people are nutritionally dependent on fish. But the ocean […]
Trump-DOJ news took some keeping up with on Wednesday Luckily, Marcy Wheeler keeps up better than anybody.
by Daniel Wortel-London
Inequality threatens people and planet alike. Billions struggle to make ends meet while a tiny minority grows fabulously wealthy. At the same time, the conspicuous consumption of the wealthy and the waste they generate takes an enormous environmental toll. The intertwining of social and environmental damage suggests that standard fixes for inequality are inadequate.
Herman Daly thought that waste from the wealthy could not be ended through redistributive taxation alone.
The post Limits to Wealth = Limits to Growth appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
The official publication day came and went. I felt weirdly out of it, waiting for something I had anticipated for half my life and worked toward unremittingly.
The government is preparing to quietly amend the definition of disruptive protest in ‘chilling’ change already rejected by peers
Mark Temnycky explores the consequences on global food supplies of what appears to be yet another example of the Kremlin's ecological terrorism
On May 11th, I was with a group of people at the bottom of the Paso del Norte bridge in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Suddenly, I realized that I didn’t have the small change needed to cross the bridge and return to El Paso, Texas, where I was attending the 16th annual Border Security Expo. Worse yet, this was just three hours before Title 42, the pandemic-era rapid-expulsion border policy instituted by the Trump administration, was set to expire. The media was already in overdrive on the subject, producing apocalyptic scenarios like one in the New York Post reporting that “hordes” of “illegals” were on their way toward the border. While I searched for those coins, a woman approached me, dug... Read more
Source: The Real Border Surge appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
"The United States should realize that the lives of Palestinian Muslims are equally precious," said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying. "The international community should work together to find a comprehensive and just solution to the Palestinian question."
The post China and Palestine: No To ‘Piecemeal Crisis Management’ appeared first on MintPress News.
Pedro Sánchez hopes to win over wavering centrist votes in a snap election. But what of the potential king makers on the far right and far left?
Election-rigging simplified Breaking news of Donald Trump’s forever-imminent indictment on federal and state charges came so thick and fast on Wednesday that I missed this detailed New Yorker essay from Andrew Marantz until MSNBC’s Chris Hayes interviewed him on set last night. “How a Fringe Legal Theory Became a Threat to Democracy” charts the journey of the independent-state-legislature theory (I.S.L.T.) from crank theory supporting the Bush v. Gore decision that settled the 2000 presidential election to one mainstream enough to reach the U.S. Supreme Court again. Marantz reviews this one, Moore v. Harper, from North Carolina: In 2021, with Tim Moore as the speaker of the North Carolina House, the majority-Republican legislature drew gerrymandered congressional maps—that is, even more egregiously gerrymandered than usual. Several voters (one of them named Becky Harper) and a handful of nonprofits (including Common Cause, where [democracy activists Sailor]Jones works) sued to block the implementation of those maps, and the state Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The U.S.
Pekka Kallioniemi says Russia should be excluded from the 2024 Olympics even as neutrals, for their presence will be manipulated yet again in Russian propaganda
They say where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But what happens when there’s too much fire? As I looked out my window at the haze engulfing my beloved city, I couldn’t help but wonder: If one little spark could burn more than nine million acres of land in Canada, then why couldn’t my new flame even bother to call me back? In an era when smoke could travel across continents, why wasn’t my new boyfriend willing to take a cab from SoHo to the Upper East Side?
After clearing my throat, I knew it was time to clear the air. Here I was, single and swallowing more smog than Samantha on a Saturday night. I started thinking about communication and how maybe this was Earth’s way of telling us something. Maybe we all needed to see our relationship with the planet the way we might a romantic partner. We were, after all, bound to its surface.
There is something nostalgic about Warheads Soda. Not in a bike-riding, sprinkler-running, sleepover-camp kind of way, but more in a repulsive sort of “Remember how I used to think it was acceptable to eat Cool Ranch Doritos crushed over an untoasted bagel for lunch every day?” kind of way.
Forget summer vacation and not paying bills; my favorite childhood memory is the complete indifference I had to dietary carcinogens.
It’s macabre, really, this liquified monstrosity of a malic acid-coated candy. One imagines this being the type of formula kept from an unsuspecting public behind lock and key, not—as is actually happening—being hawked for allowance money at pubertal meccas like Hot Topic.
Despite (or maybe because of) this, Warheads Soda calls me, an adult, to the void. It beckons me to jump off a cliff I shouldn’t be on in the first place, a cliff typically reserved for pre-teens with eyebrow rings.
So now, a can of Warheads Soda lies in wait inside my refrigerator door. Its familiar “Kidz Bop Presents: Faces of Death” logo goggling out at me, daring me to risk it all and consume thirty-five grams of sour sugar in one chug.
Catherine Tate discusses her new BBC comedy series, Queen of Oz, set to premiere on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Friday, June 16th.
On this week’s Lever Time, Sirota and David Dayen of The American Prospect unravel the “meager thinking” behind the debt ceiling deal.
As the Privileges Committee concludes whether Boris Johnson was in contempt of Parliament over Partygate, the former PM's opponents are preparing to oust him from office
The GOP hydra grows.
- by Aeon Video
- by Mark Buchanan
- by Vicky Grut