You cannot make this stuff up: Former president Donald Trump called on congressional Republicans to withhold military support for Ukraine until the Biden administration cooperates with their investigations into the president and his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings. The demand, delivered at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, echoed Trump’s conduct at issue during his first impeachment, when Trump withheld aid from Ukraine while pressuring the country’s president to announce an investigation of Biden. “Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles … to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings,” Trump said at the rally. He added that any Republican lawmakers who didn’t join the effort should face primary challenges, a tactic he used last year to unseat Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
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While posing as a defender of free speech, Florida’s Ron DeSantis has played point man on the Israel lobby’s crusade to criminalize American citizens for their exercising their constitutionally-protected right to boycott Israel. Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has spent his career as an elected official pushing an array of laws attacking the free speech of American citizens who exercise their constitutionally-protected right to boycott Israel. One anti-boycott bill DeSantis championed sought to send violators to prison […]
The post How Ron Desantis puts Israel first and assaults the speech rights of American citizens first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post How Ron Desantis puts Israel first and assaults the speech rights of American citizens appeared first on The Grayzone.
Until now, I’ve avoided getting myself worked up about ChatGPT. Prompted by this article by a Columbia undergraduate this past spring, I thought that if a student knows enough about paper-writing to make ChatGPT work for them, in the way this student describes in his piece, without detection by a minimally alert instructor, that student has probably already mastered the skills of essay-writing far more than the author of this piece seems to realize. I at least could rest easy with the knowledge that if a student used ChatGPT to write a paper for me, and it was good, I wasn’t not teaching that student what they needed to learn how to do. But this recent article, by a Harvard […]
Arkansas is going after booksellers too: Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled Saturday. U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, was set to take effect Aug. 1. A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged. The judge also rejected a motion by the defendants, which include prosecuting attorneys for the state, seeking to dismiss the case. The ACLU of Arkansas, which represents some of the plaintiffs, applauded the court’s ruling, saying that the absence of a preliminary injunction would have jeopardized First Amendment rights.
The mainstream media has once more tried to generate alarm about the presence of two relatively innocuous Chinese electronic spy ships in international waters during the latest biennial Talisman Sabre military exercise spread across the Australian mainland and offshore oceans. It involves 30,000 troops from 13 countries. Although the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had Continue reading »
America is Australia’s “great and powerful friend” so it matters a great deal how reliable our firmest strategic partner is. Is the US heading for a degree of political dysfunction that could blow back into its steadfastness as a leading player and an Australian ally in a multipolar Indo-Pacific? In this series, Roger Beale explores Continue reading »
“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” said one researcher. The system of Atlantic Ocean currents that drive warm water from the tropics toward Europe is at risk of collapsing in the coming decades, an analysis of 150 years of temperature data published Tuesday concluded. “The Atlantic Continue reading »
“For over seven years [working for the US government] I have been preoccupied with our involvement in Vietnam. In that time I have seen it first as a problem; then as a stalemate; then as a crime” – Daniel Ellsberg, 1971. Daniel Ellsberg, who died on 16 June 2023, aged 92, was a courageous United Continue reading »
Western economies have immovable “stagflation” that classical (include monetarist) policies won’t budge, the increasingly “bearish” market seems incapable of getting growth, investment is in retreat, unemployment is rising and people in rich countries are starving. The Great Depression was just like that, and so is the present western capitalist economy. As the pundit says, those Continue reading »
In recent Pearls and Irritations essays there has been a difference of opinion between myself and Ross Fox, the Director of Catholic Education, Canberra and Goulburn. I believe this difference of opinion rests with the definition of students with severe behaviours and my assertion that private schools do not enrol them. I have a determination Continue reading »
The US and China are at the forefront of new AI-imbued military technology development, and are the world’s undoubted leading military powers. But, while the US struggles to recruit highly educated personnel to its military; in China, out of over one hundred thousand recruits in 2022, 80% are tertiary educated, with more than half holding Continue reading »
The Chinese Communist Party has a history of turning to senior figures to steady the ship in emergencies and Wang’s return may be in line with this precedent. Beijing will need someone to prepare the ground for some major diplomatic setpieces including a possible trip to the US by President Xi Jinping. The abrupt ousting Continue reading »
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 30, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
A rare opportunity to be heard
Antitrust Guidelines and Overthrowing a Corrupt Priesthood
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 7-23-2023]
Classy guy indeed… And he’s having a normal one today.
As if Pensacola News Journal: In a recently published research letter regarding emerging infectious diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that Florida is witnessing an increase in leprosy cases lacking traditional risk factors and recommending that travel to Florida be considered when conducting leprosy contact tracing in any state. […] The number of reported leprosy cases across the country has doubled over the past decade, according to the CDC. Citing data from the National Hansen’s Disease Program, the CDC says there were 159 new cases reported in the U.S. in 2020. Nearly 70% of these new cases were reported in Florida, California, Louisiana, Hawaii, New York and Texas. Florida stands out in the report for two reasons: Central Florida alone accounted for nearly 20% of the total number of cases reported nationally and several new-case patients in central Florida demonstrated no clear evidence of zoonotic exposure or traditionally known risk factors. Not to panic. DeSantis is more of a threat. But not treatable with antibiotics.
Why cultists are so loud and proud Lies and conspiracy theories are related, finds Marcel Danesi, a professor of semiotics and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto. In a pattern that “goes back to antiquity,” populist leaders such as former President Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin “use language to develop a cult-like following.” Danesi offers a scientific explanation at Politico. Such leaders deploy “dehumanizing metaphors to instill and propagate hatred of others.” Here is an example of the result, live and in color, from the Trump rally Saturday in Erie Pennsylvania: Whoops. Danesi explains: The first step to manipulating the minds of the public, or really the precondition, is that listeners need to be in the right emotional state. In order to hack into the minds of the public, people need to feel fear or uncertainty.That could be caused by economic instability or pre-existing cultural prejudices, but the emotional basis is fear.
Catherine Tate's raucous, bridge-burning, anti-royal sitcom Queen of Oz brings the kind of fire that "The Thick of It" brought to politics.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Wil Wheaton/Star Trek, CM Punk/Elon Musk, Rick and Morty, Invincible, Doctor Who, Good Omens 2, and more!
The New York case, often downplayed as the weakest of four potential indictments against the ex-president, could be his biggest legal threat.
The post Stormy Daniels May Have the Last Word on Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
The New York case, often downplayed as the weakest of four potential indictments against the ex-president, could be his biggest legal threat.
The post Stormy Daniels May Have the Last Word on Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
A personal account of a Wall Street-fueled health insurance disaster.
The problem of evaluating models built for forecasting is that one cannot get around invariance. There must be a stable bridge that connects the past and pres. ent with the future … To evaluate invariance its domain should be considered. In other words, one has to investigate what the list of all relevant non-negligible potential […]
What was I doing 10 years ago? I thought I’d look through my photoarchive from 2013:
In my previous post on utilitarianism, I started with two crucial observations. First, utilitarianism is a political philosophy, dealing with the question of how the resources in a community should be distributed. It’s not a system of individual ethics Second, (this shouldn’t be necessary to state, but it is), there is no such thing as […]