I think DeSantis and the gang see this as a feature not a bug. But it isn’t. There comes a point at which turning your state into an antediluvian hellscape starts costing real money: With the start of the 2023-24 academic year only six weeks away, senior officials at New College of Florida (NCF) made a startling announcement in mid-July: 36 of the small honors college’s approximately 100 full-time teaching positions were vacant. The provost, Bradley Thiessen, described the number of faculty openings as “ridiculously high”, and the disclosure was the latest evidence of a brain drain afflicting colleges and universities throughout the Sunshine state. Governor Ron DeSantis opened 2023 with the appointment of six political allies to the college’s 13-member board of trustees who vowed to drastically alter the supposedly “woke”-friendly learning environment on its Sarasota campus. At its first meeting in late January, the revamped panel voted to fire the college president, Patricia Okker, without cause and appoint a former Republican state legislator and education commissioner in her place.
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While Australians pride themselves, for the most part, in having stricter gun laws than most and not being warlike in disposition, their governing officials have increasingly thought otherwise. War drums are beating. The chatter about acquiring and building armaments is getting more frenzied. As a client state of the US imperium, firmly enmeshed in the Continue reading »
But it needs your financial support to survive and grow. With the mainstream media handcuffed to the firewall, our governments self-censored by ‘freedom’ of information, and the national interest ignoring the public interest, Australians need an online opinion site that’s free, accessible, informative, uninhibited, and quick to read. John Menadue and his young team give us this Continue reading »
At the end of a Retreat together on “Spiritual Leadership in Difficult Times”, a German social scientist asked me to help her to organise a Retreat for decision-makers at the next UNCOP – the annual UN Conference of Parties focused on preventing catastrophic climate change in ways that are just. Just, yes, especially towards those Continue reading »
Australia urgently needs a national plan to effectively address child and youth homelessness. In 1989, after a two year National Inquiry, the Human Rights Commission advised the Federal Government that Australia had nearly 25,000 homeless children and young people – some of whom were dying from neglect — while many others were living in squalid Continue reading »
Spare a thought for the National Anti-Corruption Committee which has so many juicy cases before it that there is a substantial chance that it might have to pass on investigating some of the serious sources of potential corruption around the nation. Not because it doubts the seriousness of allegations that have come to its notice, Continue reading »
The Australian Universities Accord Interim Report (the Report) was made publicly available on 20 July 2023. Since Labor regained office in May of last year and the Accord process was announced, hopes have not been high that either the process or the Minister would make any commitments to reforming what is widely perceived as Australia’s Continue reading »
China and the U.S. are not mates. These two massive nations bristle over Taiwan, snarling like dingoes protecting their territory, with China threatening “catastrophic consequences” in case of a dust up. Then there is the question of human rights, with the US accusing China of genocide in its treatment of the Uyghur people in the Continue reading »
Two different news stories about US-Australian relations have broken at around the same time, and together they sum up the story of US-Australian relations as a whole. In one we learn that Australia has agreed to manufacture missiles for the United States, and in the other we learn that Washington has told Australia to go Continue reading »
Only novels can plumb the depth of human consciousness.
The post Why Novels Are a Richer Experience Than Movies appeared first on Nautilus.
Roy Edroso breaks it down — and everything he says is right on: Back when I did a regular “rightbloggers” column for the Village Voice, I covered a few of the loonier rightwing conspiracy theories those folks promulgated. I didn’t make a habit of running them down, though. I thought the bloggers’ and web propagandists’ ridiculous interpretations of major events were loony enough themselves, and also more germane to way conservatives were polluting our political discourse and indeed our politics, than the occasion crackpot cock-and-bull story about, for example, Barack Obama’s secret gay life. Back then, despite what Tommy Lee Jones said in Men In Black, what one might read in the supermarket tabloids or their web equivalents was not considered the best investigative reporting on the planet.
Set for September, Big Finish's four-part audio drama Doctor Who - Doom's Day: Dying Hours finds the assassin encountering the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann), Charley (India Fisher), Jackie Tyler (Camille Coduri), the Silence, and more.
I get what I want, and this summer, I want Emily Dickinson. She is the hottest girl in Amherst. Did you see that white dress she insists on wearing every day? It reaches all the way to the floor, baby.
Mark it down, before I leave Massachusetts, I’m going to bang that lady poet. She’ll be so out of her mind, she’ll be like, “I’m nobody, who are you?” And I’ll be like, “I’m the dude who just fucked your brains out.” And she’ll make me leave because she has chores. People don’t realize she can’t get out of chores just for being a poet.
I’ve hooked up with many sexy ladies in the past, and let me tell you, man oh man, every single one of them had seen volcanoes. I’m looking for a girl, who’s like, “We could talk about whatever you like, but I want to talk about death.” Aw, yeah, only us in this carriage, baby—and immortality.
An abandoned—or abandoning—god might also reappear.
Despite climate-denying spin, almost 50% of voters rank reaching net zero carbon emissions highly important for the country – new polling for Byline Supplement by Omnisis reveals
A softly-softly approach to the newspaper’s reckless journalism has failed – now the ‘regulator’ has been challenged to make a landmark choice, writes Brian Cathcart
God knows why… Donald Trump stepped on to the stage in Des Moines Iowa on Friday night to the ubiquitous GOP rally song called “Only in America” just as the lines, “one could end up going to prison, one just might be president” were blaring over the loudspeakers. Everyone in that room has probably heard the song a thousand times, Trump included, but never have the words been more relevant. If they were mad at Gov. Reynolds they shouldn’t have been. The song was played for every candidate who spoke. It’s just that those particular lyrics only apply to one of them. The crowd cheered lustily for the former president and current front runner for the Republican nomination anyway ,as they always do. It’s doubtful any of them even heard those lyrics, and if they did they no doubt saw it as more evidence of the massive conspiracy against Donald Trump. We know this because earlier in the evening one lone Republican candidate tried to tell them the truth: Reporters inside the room said the booing was much louder and more energetic than what appears on the video.
During the time period from 1925 to 1933 — when he still considered himself a ‘central-theoretician’ and a ‘pure economic theorist’ — Gunnar Myrdal wanted to apply to economic doctrines an ‘immanent method’ of criticism. His main interest was to criticize the received economic theory that had preserved structures of normative speculation built upon the […]
Storing dead people at -196°C
Explaining the decision to reporters, he said, “Elon Musk is an O.K. name, but WTF fits me better.”
If they vote Democrat, stop them! The outrage meter here in The Cesspool of Sin is pegging this morning. Brad Friedman‘s X-post-factoid Sunday was pretty eye-catching. Ohio Republicans really, really don’t want the majority of state voters to cast ballots in the Aug. 8 special election. Their ultimate goal is to prevent a popular constitutional amendment securing abortion rights from passing in November. Ohio Capitol Journal: Early voting is ongoing for the upcoming Aug. 8 special election on Issue 1 that asks voters to make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution by raising the threshold to 60%. To get to the ballot box, voters need to keep in mind changes made to voter ID laws last year, in a late-night legislative move approved by Gov. Mike DeWine at the beginning of 2023. Those changes, made through House Bill 458, mean different identification allowed at the polls, and limits to the absentee ballot dates. While a driver’s license with a different address is still allowed (as long as it’s not expired), voters must be registered with the Ohio Secretary of State at the correct address before voting.