Our human species is drifting rapidly towards extinction, and there is not yet in place, a process to prevent it. Three very recent books, two by Australian authors, point to the desperate situation in which humanity now finds itself. The three books are “How to Fix a Broken Planet by Canberra science writer, Julian Cribb, Continue reading »
Reading
Australia’s leading financial media platform, the Australian Financial Review, raised the red flag about the future of Timor-Leste this month, with International Editor Professor James Curran’s article, Timor-Leste on brink of failure. Curran sensibly said that Chinese influence in Timor-Leste may be a concern in Canberra, but the big problem is that the small nation Continue reading »
Led on by crusading Reserve Bank governors, the nation’s economists are determined to protect us from the scourge of inflation, no matter the cost in jobs lost. But there’s a black hole in their thinking about the causes of inflation, only some of which must be stamped on. Others can be ignored. Meanwhile, here’s another Continue reading »
Education Minister Jason Clare’s important review of education seems to have lost the plot. Secondary schoolers have been told for years that their aim should be university entrance. That approach has distorted the focus of secondary schooling toward achieving a high score in HSC while the technical side has been downgraded in both funding and Continue reading »
The alleged branding of the Star of David on the face of a Palestinian man by Israeli police has left many around the world aghast at the barbaric cruelty and violence of such an act. It has been reported in numerous media outlets yet is, so far, glaringly left out of others. This kind of Continue reading »
Amid continuous news that the Ukrainian counteroffensive which began in June is not going as hoped, The New York Times has published an article titled “Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Near 500,000, U.S. Officials Say.” Reporting that Ukrainian efforts to retake Russia-occupied territory have been “bogged down in dense Russian minefields under constant Continue reading »
A quick note because I have to get out the door and go to work… gah.
I recently removed the restrictions on my robots.txt file.
This site has been denying access to most bots for the past year:
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Allow: /
User-agent: ia_archiver …A quick note because I have to get out the door and go to work… gah.
I recently removed the restrictions on my robots.txt file.
This site has been denying access to most bots for the past year:
# Welcome to Tregeagle
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User-agent: archive.org_bot
Allow: /
User-agent: ia_archiver …The great Alexandra Petri on the debate last night. If you said, “Would you like to watch Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, Mike Pence, Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie talk to each other for two hours? FYI, the place where they’ll do so is hotter than Beelzebub’s armpit!,” I would have said, “No, thank you.” But if you said, “The alternative is watching Donald Trump talk to Tucker Carlson on the website formerly known as Twitter,” I would say, “I can’t wait to hear what Ron, Vivek, Nikki, Tim, Doug, Mike, Asa and Chris have to say!” Wednesday night’s debate on Fox News raised all kinds of questions. Like: “Why is this happening?” and “Where is Donald Trump?” and “Is it technically a primary debate or more of a secondary debate given the levels where these people are polling?” Here is approximately how it went. Bret Baier: Hello. We have brought a bell just because we enjoy the sound of a bell.
As voters in Maine decide whether to buy the state’s electric utilities, Democratic consultants rake in corporate cash while residents face shut-offs.
Wagner didn’t just support Russia’s military, it became an integral part of the fighting force.
The post Prigozhin’s Legacy Is the Global Rise of Private Armies for Hire appeared first on The Intercept.
Controlling people’s bodies requires trashing representative government and violating every individual right.
The post Abortion Bans or Democracy — You Can’t Have Both appeared first on The Intercept.
2024 REPUBLICAN
PRIMARY DEBATE
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN
They are trying to kill their own children.
This one’s been off my radar The insurrectionist-in-chief plans to proudly turn himself in today for booking in Atlanta. Donald Trump, the ever-blustery showman and former president, has scheduled the media circus in primetime for maximum television ratings. Receiving less coverage is the multi-state plot to access voting software included in Fulton County District Attorney Fanu Willis’ indictment. Ben Clements and Susan Greenhalgh take up the story for Slate. “There have been multiple accounts of Trump supporters unlawfully accessing voting systems to copy proprietary vote-recording and vote-counting software in Michigan, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. These reports spurred criminal investigations in their respective states, but until Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis filed charges last week, none of these probes had tied the crimes back to Trump’s coordinated, multipronged plot to stay in power,” the pair explain. Willis includes the software heist in her racketeering indictment.
‘What do you do?’ a midwife asked as she helped me to the bathroom. We were in the postnatal ward for people who have had a bad time of it. ‘I’m a historian of ... all this,’ I answered, and gestured vaguely at the wreckage of the ward. Two and a half years on, I can say, expertly, continently: between the 16th and the 18th century, midwifery was transformed.
The good cop, bad cop routine of the digital age.
Ulysses is haunted by the story of its own composition. As Joyce famously put it, ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.’ The annotators point out, however, that it is ‘very likely that Joyce never said this’.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 17 (Friday 25 August 2023)
Only the Greek junta in 1969 and Russia last year have left the European Convention on Human Rights – Russia went shortly before it was to be expelled for invading Ukraine. No democratic country has sought to do so.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 17 (Friday 25 August 2023)
J.L. Austin was fascinated by many details of language for their own sake, and in 1947 brought together a group of philosophy dons, mostly younger than himself, to pursue these investigations collectively. They met on Saturday mornings during term, and while this group brought to life Austin’s ideal of philosophy as a co-operative enterprise, he controlled the agenda and proceedings, as he had with the Martians during the war.
Voltaire regarded the short tale as a duel with the reader, and a form of complicity. He went out of his way to disparage the ‘littleness’ of the form, and to ridicule all fiction, as fables without a philosophy. But he also wanted to write stories, and to make storytelling respectable.
The main objection to Georges Seurat’s Nude with Blonde Hair – what makes it ‘one of the most puzzling works in the collection’ – is its ‘poor quality’. But the argument that it isn’t by Seurat – even when young and in a formative stage of his career, because Seurat never painted anything so bad – is circular. Félix Fénéon knew him. My bet is that it’s genuine.
Early Works shows Alice Notley feeling her way past the dominant aesthetics of her period – she was a key figure in the downtown New York poetry scene before moving to Paris in 1992 – and discovering a distinct, feminist voice. The poems insist that a woman of honour should be prepared to die for ‘the right to frivolity’. Notley is ‘a girl Samson in a pink/prom dress’, ready to pull down the temples of the avant-garde.