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My recent stocktake of the state of play on implementation of the Thodey Report recommendations was written just before PM&C released details of proposed changes to the Public Service Act with an exposure draft of the legislation and an exposure draft of explanatory materials. Extraordinarily, consultation on the changes ends on 31 May but these Continue reading »

The Public Service Act doesn’t just allow secretaries and their departments to push back on politicians’ abuses of power; it demands it. But targeting ministers or SES, or tightening the standards and laws under which they operate, will not be the most effective way to repair what is a broader issue.  It is hard to Continue reading »

På tio år har  — som SVT: granskning visar — Thorengruppen tjänat sammanlagt 944 miljoner kronor. Ägaren, Raja Thorén, har tagit 81 miljoner kronor i aktieutdelning. I Sverige år 2023 låter vi friskolekoncerner med undermålig verksamhet få plocka ut skyhöga vinster — vinster som den svenska staten gladeligen låter dessa koncerner ta av vår skattefinansierade […]

Atrocities don’t happen overnight. They ramp up over time. The Nazi death camps, were preceded by at least a decade of smaller, selective and escalating removals of human rights for Jewish and LGBTIQ+ peoples. Similar patterns allowed for the genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia – incremental and selective removals of minority rights built momentum and Continue reading »

Military attaches from the United States and Australia were among the dozens invited to tour the People’s Liberation Army’s garrison in Beijing last week, the first event of its kind since the pandemic. The event signals willingness in China for exchanges with Western forces, observers say. The tour came as the US said it would Continue reading »

RICO, as you may know, is a law passed in 1970, meant to be used against the Mafia. It allows the government to seize money before a guilty verdict if there is a “pattern” of racketeering (defined very widely).

Of course, once you seize someone’s money, they generally can’t hire a defense lawyer, so they tend to have to plead. I respect public defenders greatly, but if you’re in real trouble using one is a crapshoot at best and even the best ones can’t put in the time and work a private defense lawyer can.

Back in 2008 I suggested using RICO against the banksters: there was a pattern of fraud. I did this because I hated the banksters and I hate RICO, and the best way to get rid of bad law is to use it against important people. (Same reason I wanted the banksters thrown into nasty prisons.)

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DeSantis thinks that because he won big in Florida he has the secret sauce for America. I hate to tell him, but it’s a big country and Florida is a special case. This piece by Steve Schale, a Democratic operative in Florida, explains what happened there, from his perspective. It is probably somewhat self-serving and I doubt it’s the whole story but it’s a useful bit of information. There is simply no doubt that something terrible happened to Democrats in Florida. Who’s at fault is probably highly contested but I suspect there is probably something to this version of events even if the Florida Democratic Party is the most hapless in the country. He starts off by talking about his own history working on campaigns in Florida for many years. The state was a swing state that tended to go back and forth as they do. I’ll pick up the story in 2008 when Obama won: In 2008, thanks to the resources of the Obama/Biden campaign, we took those fundamentals, expanded them statewide, and built an organization.

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Hey marketing team for every major brand: Do you really think that I—a proud, rational, and tasteful LGBTQ+ person—am going to purchase your silly little product just because you released a pride edition? Because I will. You are correct.

The pride month pandering that occurs every June is both predictable and exhausting. Rest assured that your attempts to commercialize this celebration of queer history and culture have been noted. You know what’s also predictable? The fact that I’ll buy into it without even a second thought. My Hugo Boss wallet is going to be exhausted by July.

Oh, a Boston Red Sox hat with a rainbow “B” on it? How expected of you. Don’t mind if I do. I won’t even complain about the unnecessary price markup you added. Hell, I’ll buy two in case you lose any sales from bigots boycotting you because of this. Did I mention I haven’t watched baseball since I was nine?

Meet the new Senator from Oklahoma From Daily Kos: The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee meets in their Committee room. The members are listening to testimony on child care. Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the Committee Chairman, is presiding. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), a Committee member, is the antagonist. The other players include Cheryl Morman – President of the Virginia Alliance for Family Child Care Associations — who is there to testify, as well as others from the early education community. The dialogue  It is Mullin’s time to ask questions. You can find the video HERE. He starts by sniping at Sanders. In class, Mullin would have been penalized for using the ad hominem fallacy. Whatever Sanders may or may not be is irrelevant to the quality of the argument Mullin will make with his subsequent questions. Note: It will be an argument and not a search for the truth because this is politics, and the truth is its first victim. Mullin also trots out the straw man fallacy. He says that Sanders is a socialist because Bernie says he is a Democrat [sic] Socialist in his book.

Here are some answers about the new social media network Bluesky that you don’t need an invite to see.

The post Is Bluesky Billionaire-Proof? appeared first on The Intercept.

The new reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald comes as Australia is pressing the U.S. to end its attempt to prosecute Assange.

The post FBI Reopens Case Around Julian Assange, Despite Australian Pressure to End Prosecution appeared first on The Intercept.

by Gary Gardner

Global food production today is cornucopian: More food, of greater diversity, is available to more people in more places than at any time in human history. At the same time, this food abundance has a dark underbelly.  Some 828 million people—nearly ten percent of the human family—are chronically hungry, and two billion people lack critical micronutrients such as Vitamin A and iron. This juxtaposition of increasing abundance and chronic scarcity might suggest that ending hunger simply requires extending 20th century agricultural success to the entire human family.

The post Food: Abundant for How Long? appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Quinn Slobodian’s new book, Crack-Up Capitalism is an original and striking analysis of a weird apparent disjuncture. Libertarians and classical liberals famously claim to be opposed to state power. So why do some of them resort to it so readily? In his previous book, The Globalists, Quinn argued that globalization was poorly understood. It wasn’t […]

"If You Indict Putin, Make Sure Joe Biden Is With Him" – Alfred de Zayas on Ukraine and International Law

The post Ukraine, Human Rights, and International Law, with Alfred de Zayas appeared first on MintPress News.

The UK has taken no action against the Russian oligarch and Boris Johnson associate, despite Ukraine and Canada targeting him for his alleged ties to Putin’s regime, reports Adam Bienkov

Money, candidates, and “a lot of blocking and tackling” Contacts in Florida have said for some time that the Florida Democratic Party was all but dead. And dead broke. Any leadership was coming out of Hillsborough County (Tampa), still active and well-organized under Ione Townsend. The election in February to “the worst job in state politics” of former state agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried as state chair may signal revival. Fried promptly got herself arrested along with Lauren Book, Florida’s senate minority leader, in a protest against Florida’s six-week abortion ban. So, signs of life. And a little fight. Over at The Bulwark today, consultant Steve Shale recounts, in his view, the decade of mistakes that led to Ron DeSantis. (I have not had time to check with Florida insiders for their take, so read on with that caveat.) An outside donor group in 2009 decided it would “supplement to the work of the state party” and construct a “long-term progressive infrastructure” built on the Obama organizing model.

As Mia Hansen-Løve’s style and interests suggest, any narrative solution is one option among several. That is the force of the other meaning of the film’s title: not hoping against hope, or believing in luck, but living through the long morning of what we don’t know about ourselves.

Children in Tudor England did much the same things that children do now. They jumped, they fell, they cried. They played with dolls and flicked cherrystones at one another. John Dee, the Elizabethan astronomer and diarist, describes his son Arthur, aged about three, playing with a friend’s daughter, Mary Herbert, making ‘as it were a show of childish marriage, of calling each other husband and wife’. 

You cannot help being struck by the awesome stability of all the Bank of England’s arrangements: the paper for banknotes was manufactured at Portals’ mills in Hampshire from 1724 until the switch to polymer notes less than a decade ago. All the bills and dividends were painstakingly made out by hand in pretty much the same fashion until the advent of computers.

Because the USSR had no military presence in Africa, it relied on the work of intelligence services – the GRU and the KGB – and institutions such as the International Department to conduct a Cold War on the cheap. (The CIA-funded American Society of African Culture, by contrast, was known as ‘Uncle Moneybags’.)