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The House is in chaos? No biggie… How Fox News’ favorite show shared the news that the House GOP had completely blown itself up: The conservative panelists of The Five, much like the bulk of the GOP, focused most of their ire on Gaetz while arguing that House Republicans had actually accomplished quite a bit under McCarthy in his nine-month tenure. Noting that former President Donald Trump complained on social media that “Republicans are always fighting among themselves” rather than “fighting the radical left Democrats who are destroying our country,” Jeanine Pirro declared that she was “furious” over McCarthy’s removal. “Now what we’ve got is total chaos when the Republicans are playing out their infighting on national television in a historic way instead of fighting Joe Biden’s policies,” she exclaimed.

I can’t imagine sights, smells, or sounds. What’s wrong with me?

The post My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things appeared first on Nautilus.

Benjamín Labatut’s latest novel excavates science history to hint at the madness of AI advancement at any cost.

The post The Creeping Techno-Horror of “The MANIAC” appeared first on Nautilus.

I enjoy reading the right wing apostates these days because in some ways they see certain aspect s of our politics more clearly than my own long-time allies. Maybe it’s because it’s newer to them to see this perspective or maybe it’s because some of my own allies are still mired in ancient, and currently irrelevant, internecine beefs. This piece by JV Last at the Bulwark isn’t exactly a new insight to many of us but it’s refreshingly sharp and very, very accurate: Imagine that it was the Democrats yesterday. Imagine that Pramila Jayapal and Cori Bush had forced Nancy Pelosi out of the speaker’s chair. What would the reaction have been? Dems in Disarray! Let me channel it for you: Sound about right? Did I miss anything? Yet when Matt Gaetz holds the Republican majority hostage in the House and forces the ejection of the speaker because he made a deal to avoid a government shutdown the reaction is more along the lines of . . . So raise your hand if you think Republicans will pay an electoral price for this debacle.

The rifts in the New Apostolic Reformation that emerged last year have erupted into a...

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There’s quite a bit of punditry today suggesting that the Democrats did the wrong thing by failing to bail out McCarthy yesterday. Here is some important context as to why they voted in unity not to do it from a House staffer named Aaron Fritschner: Pretty evident people don’t understand a key piece of House Dems’ thinking on McCarthy and governance of the House. The idea that we acted out of schadenfreude or pique with no thought to the legislative outlook is, of course, silly nonsense. Here’s what the takes are missing-  On Saturday morning we had no idea what was happening. Scalise told the GOP they were moving bills that signaled imminent shutdown. This is what we expected. Then McCarthy suddenly and unexpectedly did an about face and announced a vote on a CR. We didn’t know what to make of it. How to interpret this? McCarthy has resisted doing this all along, the wingnuts threatened to kick him out if he did it and he was running every play at their call. My immediate read was he wanted and expected us to vote against the suspension so we would be blamed for a shutdown  I said this then (see below).

Like Sarajevo in the 1990s, the Ukrainian city of Kherson is under siege with daily bombardments - but there are only two foreign correspondents there to cover the carnage

Your party turns its lonely eyes to you Some Republicans literally can’t think of anyone but Trump: Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) announced late Tuesday that he will file paperwork to nominate former President Trump to be the next Speaker of the House. “This week, when the U.S. House of Representatives reconvenes, my first order of business will be to nominate Donald J. Trump for Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives,” Nehls said in a statement. “President Trump, the greatest President of my lifetime, has a proven record of putting America First and will make the House great again.” It’s mass delusion. And statements like that should prove to all of us that the idea that elected Republicans are all cynics and cowards is not entirely true. Some of them are brainwashed true believers in the cult of Donald Trump. To them he is literally the only leader they can conceive of. Trump said he was fully concentrating on becoming president (to stay out of jail) but that hasn’t stopped the speculation.

America is falling into a trap. It thinks the future will be decided by military dominance, despite losing one war after another. China, on the other hand, recognises that the future will be decided by economics. Pearls and Irritations has posted an outstanding series of articles by Percy Allan on the so called ‘China Threat‘. Continue reading »

Over the 50 years since Patrick White’s Nobel Prize, the progressive cultural nationalists, who borrowed White’s honour, challenged a tired old elite, and then generated a new cohort of tired old elites. They had broken with Britain, but embraced America and its fantasy of the universal progressive empire that dare not say its name. The Continue reading »

An opinion piece (‘Degrowth approach is disastrous’, Canberra Times, 9 September, p.38) by authors from the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) attacked the concept of degrowth to a steady-state economy (SSE) and defended the notion of continuing economic growth on a finite planet. The Canberra Times did not publish the opinion piece I submitted in Continue reading »

Bad-tempered coverage of China continues to flourish across the entire US media. It ranges from fire-breathing to pearl-clutching. Most commentators look daggers at Beijing in a dozen different over-cooked ways – and especially at the Communist Party of China – while reminding readers and viewers of America’s continuing paramount superpower status. What is relatively new, Continue reading »

Business is always telling governments, and the rest of us, that Australia would perform much better if we and our rulers took their advice. There would be fewer and lower taxes while ‘flexible’ freewheeling industrial relations policies and much less regulation are all common claims about how Australia could be improved. While all these assertions Continue reading »

What a fabulous trove The Pezzullo Papers are. The hundreds of recently disclosed text messages sent by the Home Affairs Secretary Mr Michael Pezzullo to a person described as a “Liberal Party powerbroker” are morbidly fascinating. Poor Pezzullo – in a few days he attracted as much public commentary, most of it unflattering, as platoons Continue reading »

For nearly five decades, the Crimean Tatars tirelessly campaigned to return to their historical homeland in Crimea. Yet, for many political analysts writing about Crimea today from a critical perspective, the historical facts remain sadly unknown. As a representative of the indigenous people of the Crimean Peninsula, a Crimean Tatar whose sole homeland is the Continue reading »

When something becomes too complicated, psychologists say we go for ‘rules of thumb’. In Washington today, that rule is ‘the China threat’. America’s political elite are worried that domestic polarisation is undermining its ability to counter an “existential threat” like China, or as they prefer to call it nowadays, the Chinese Communist Party. They needn’t Continue reading »

His strategy to win the election is to delegitimize the legal system and martyr himself I’m sure Donald Trump was hopping mad to see Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz steal the spotlight yesterday with their historic antics in the House. After all, Dear Leader is on trial and he’s appearing in the courtroom even though he’s not required to so that he can preen before the cameras in the hallways and insult the judge, the prosecutor and everyone else. This is supposed to be his party and it was completely overshadowed by House Republicans who are supposed to understand that. As of midnight last night the only thing he had to say on the matter was, “Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves, why aren’t they fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our Country?” If the man he calls “My Kevin” expected him to intervene on his behalf he was sorely disappointed. In fact, he didn’t even bother to write a bland Truth Social post wishing McCarthy well in his future endeavors.

“House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted from his leadership position in a historic vote on Tuesday after a far-right revolt over his reliance on Democrats to pass funding to avert a government shutdown.” — CBS News

When I was elected Speaker of the House, the smarmy media class and the Democrats were delighted to point out just how convoluted and drawn out the process was. They laughed at how I bent and twisted myself to gain the favor of a base that didn’t trust me. They couldn’t help themselves from making snide comments when it took fifteen rounds of votes for me to finally attain the Speaker’s gavel. Well, guess who’s laughing now? I may have completely debased myself to become Speaker, but at least I didn’t accomplish anything.