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How did you sleep last night?

Not great, honestly.

How come?

Look, I wasn’t going to tell you, Holly, because I know you get freaked out by this stuff, but I saw a ghost in our bedroom.

Oh my god. I told you we shouldn’t have moved into this old house, Greg.

I know. She just appeared out of nowhere and was, like, trying to teach me Spanish for a while. And the crazy thing is that I took Spanish in high school, but I couldn’t remember shit last night.

Wait, what?

I said I took Spanish in high school, but I don’t remember shit. She must think I’m an idiot.

What are you talking about?

I told my parents back then that my brain can’t think about languages like that, and I was right. And now this ghost is up my ass about it.

Greg. Can you please focus? Was this, like, an evil spirit kind of ghost?

I would say more strict than evil, but I could see her getting super pissed if I keep blowing it like I did last night. She asked me to tell her my name in Spanish and I said, “Si amo e Greg.”

So?

That’s not how you say it, Holly, those are all the wrong words except for “Greg.”

Byline Times' Co-Founder Peter Jukes recalls his journey of the past decade: from exposing the corruption of our newspapers to launching his own in shops across the country this week

China from Deng (82) on, had two main plays.

The first play was a standard mercantalist export driven developing state. Low costs were used to create low cost goods primarily for overseas consumption. Foreign currency was plowed back into capital machinery acquisition. Foreign partners were given good deals and the decision makers become rich, but to play one had to give up intellectual property.

This is the standard industrialization sequences, followed by almost everyone, including Britain, Germany, the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Or they pretend not to anyway It may seem obvious that everyone in the country knows that Donald Trump tried to overturn the election results in 2020 because we all watched him do it live as it was happening. His campaign filed more than 60 lawsuits in various states, as was his right, none of which were found to be meritorious. His minions and accomplices in the Republicans party both in Washington and around the country actively tried to help him do that by pressuring election officials, persuading local officials to sign on as “alternate electors” etc. And I think you’d have to have been in a coma not to know that he aggressively tried to bully Vice President Mike Pence into refusing to count the electoral votes on January 6th. Trump’s famous January 2nd phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger was all over the news the very next day in which he very pointedly said:  “What I want to do is this.

Government documents pointing to construction at a classified U.S. base offer rare hints about a little noted U.S. military presence near Gaza.

The post U.S. Quietly Expands Secret Military Base in Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

The attack on the BBC by the Israeli President Isaac Herzog is now being weaponised by political enemies who have long wanted to destroy the public service broadcaster

Chemicals of decomposition are also starting points of life.

The post The Stench of Death Has a Sunny Side appeared first on Nautilus.

As the West Asian powderkeg inches closer to disaster over Israel's ongoing slaughter in Gaza, Craig Murray dissects the various factors at play that could push the region over the precipice.

The post Craig Murray: As Genocide Unfolds, Chances of a Regional War Become Almost Unavoidable appeared first on MintPress News.

Doctor Who Showrunner Russell T. Davies' life & career will be in the spotlight in an upcoming "imagine..." special for BBC One and iPlayer.

Upcoming “Corporate Bullsh*t” David Dayen reviews an upcoming book by Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh, Donald Cohen and Zachary Roth. “Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America” examines the boilerplate arguments corporate shills have used to object “to virtually every government and social program, from the abolition of slavery to the increase in the minimum wage.” Dayen writes: These timeworn tactics have been successful, the authors write, because “they offer a civic-minded, reasonable-sounding justification for positions that in fact are motivated entirely by self-interest.” It’s an attempt to set the terms of debate and to make those terms unchanging and unmovable. The endless repetition of these talking points is a source of their strength. But identifying their history and application to virtually everything can be a source of their weakness. The six categories of corporate bullshit begins with pure denial.

Russia’s relationship with Hamas is well-known and well-documented

You can’t win if you don’t show up to play David Rothkopf described new House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana as representing “a movement that is actively seeking to institutionalize the religious beliefs of evangelical Christians into law.” Rothkopf was just getting warmed up (Daily Beast): The term Christofascism may seem inflammatory. It is not. It is intended to provide the most accurate possible definition of what Johnson and those in his movement wish to achieve. Like other fascists they seek to impose by whatever means necessary their views on the whole of society even if that means undoing established laws and eliminating accepted freedoms. Christofascists do so in the name of advancing their Christian ideology, asserting that all in society must be guided by their views and values whether they adhere to them or not. Johnson has ties, Rothkopf claims, to the Christianist New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and Seven Mountains Dominionism. Read more at Daily Beast. David Corn has another chilling account of Johnson’s beliefs at Mother Jones. Men in Afghanistan who don’t think the same things as Mike Johnson think the same way.

To help celebrate our twenty-fifth year of being on the information superhighway, we have reached out to some of our favorite former columnists for check-ins and updates. Today we reconnect with globe-trotting, pint-drinking Kevin Dolgin, who wrote a travel column about out-of-the-way places for this site from 2000 to 2011.

I was recently contacted by the editors of McSweeney’s, who informed me that they had not forgotten I exist. In fact, they invited me to write another installment of my column Kevin Dolgin Tells You About Places You Should Go in Europe as part of their twenty-fifth anniversary festivities.

Former BBC reporter and producer Patrick Howse explores the damage done to the broadcaster in its attempts to appease enemies that want it destroyed

Doctor Who has turned the sonic screwdriver into a fetish object for fans & toy collectors alike - a fascinating rabbit hole to dive down.

Hello there. Happy Halloween. I see you’ve noticed I’m wearing a sweater. Yes, I realize it’s ninety degrees, but I do not care. It is late October—the height of sweater season. And even though climate change has rendered this traditionally crisp time of year sickeningly humid, I will wear this sweater.

Yes, I am extremely uncomfortable. No, I will not be taking the sweater off.

Late October is the time to wake up, throw a sweater on in the morning, sit on the front porch, and enjoy the fall air with a nice, steaming cup of coffee. So that’s what I will do, even if the fall air is not so much crisp as it is gooey. I will sit in the heat, drink my piping-hot beverage, and pretend it is warming me to my core and not pushing my body dangerously close to a heat stroke.

I refuse to carve pumpkins in a tank top. I will not pick apples in shorts. I will do fall activities in knit sweaters and wool socks, and I will live with the resulting body fungi. This is my pledge.

The Trent and Mersey Canal in Rugeley affords a pleasant walk in an area of outstanding beauty. Maria drives past it every day on her way to the Amazon warehouse just a stone’s throw away. She’s never stopped by for a leisurely stroll in the years she’s been working here. Why would she, after a […]

War crimes have no justification, whoever commits them. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 18th October 2023 For almost 4,000 years, some governments have insisted that if wars must be fought, there should be rules. The first known code, by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, laid down the principle on which all subsequent laws of […]