Reading

With billions of dollars on the banquet table, Australia should choose its dinner guests wisely. The defence lobbying firm Pyne & Partners – chaired by the former Australian Defence Minister Christopher Pyne – co-hosted an AUKUS reception and dinner in Washington at the swanky Cosmos Club on Embassy Row, with Northrop Grumman Corporation, on 3 April Continue reading »

Just released vehicle export figures for the first five months of 2023 indicated that China would be the world’s largest vehicle exporter in 2023. The country exported 325,000 passenger vehicles and 63,000 commercial vehicles for a total of 389,000 vehicles in May, a 58.7 per cent year-on-year surge. For the first five months, nearly 1.76 Continue reading »

Inside the celebrated novelist’s first and only nonfiction essay.

The post Cormac McCarthy Took Us Beneath the Surface appeared first on Nautilus.

I wrote about this a while back but since they seem determined to throw the election to Trump it’s worth reiterating. Here’s Rick Wilson on twitter: Good morning. If any of you are still bamboozled by Nancy Jacobsen and Mark Penn’s @NoLabelsOrg‘s actual intentions let me hook you up. They claim to be moderate, centrist problem solvers who are running a 3rd part effort to “give Americans more choices.”  Nancy is one of DC’s most powerful, influential, and connected players. A Swamp Empress. Richer than God. She and Mark Penn are angry, though. Very, very angry. At whom, you ask? Well, Democrats. They were exiled from Clinton world. Obamas, same.  They’ve been on a jihad ever since. Mark has dozens of Fox hits defending and praising Trump. Their major donors are the EXACT same billionaires funding Ron DeSantis. (Yeah, Nancy hides her donors, but girl, your org leaks because your staff hates you.)  They formed No Labels as a long con, a way to break the Democrats, get rich doing it (and again, they are VERY rich), and punish their imagined enemies.

Conservative Christian social media influencers have an important message to deliver after a new documentary...

BAFTA Winner Lenny Rush is joining Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies, Ncuti Gatwa & Millie Gibson in the next series of adventures.

Wheezer

Glucose Styx

The Who Left This Light On?

A1C/DC

The Police Aren’t All Bad

Cialis in Chains

Supergramp

Tom Petty and the Heartpacers

A-Ha I Just Remembered Why I Walked into the Living Room

The Arrhythmics

Talking Heads with Subtitles

Depressed Mode

Dinosaur Sr

Blood Work, Sweat & Tears

Dad Halen

Dire Straits Due to Our 401(k)s

REM Stationwagon

Sugar Ray Vaughn

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and No Longer Young

Boyz II Balding Men

Blue Pillster Cult

The Guess Who Just Saved 10% with Their AARP Discount

Huey Lewis and the Fox News

Radioheadache

Squint 182

Queasy Dan

Five years after the violent coup attempt in Nicaragua, the country is celebrating its recovery – peace has returned, the economy is growing, the Sandinista government re-elected in 2021 is investing strongly in public services. But it’s important to remember what happened in 2018 and the enormous, deliberate damage that was done to the country. Nicaragua’s opposition, pushing for support in Washington, expects its horrendous acts to be forgotten. This article describes in detail one of the many incidents of […]

The post Nicaragua rebuilds – five years after US-funded terror was defeated first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post Nicaragua rebuilds – five years after US-funded terror was defeated appeared first on The Grayzone.

It’s the only way to truly prove your devotion The National Review agrees with Coulter. Some people have been skeptical about the presence of motivational speaker/venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race. My colleague Charlie Cooke cruelly accused him of “not really running for president.” An even less reputable writer irresponsibly declared that he had “voluntarily enserfed himself” to Donald Trump, which is the sort of tasteless language that I’m glad National Review no longer tolerates. And with good reason, because Vivek Ramaswamy has proven himself worthy of his candidacy with a truly selfless act: He has called upon all of Donald Trump’s other opponents to sign a promise to pardon Trump of all his crimes regardless of guilt or innocence if they win office. Some opponents of the former president might have taken a combative position in regard to his indictment on 37 counts of stealing and withholding national secrets and more; others might sit on the fence.

by Gregory M. Mikkelson

Like a doctor measuring a patient’s vital signs, environmental scientists use various indicators to assess the health of the global ecosystem. These planetary vital signs are reckoned in a variety of units, such as tons of greenhouse gas emitted or hectares of land deforested. Meanwhile, conventional economists try to measure everything in terms of dollars (or other currencies). For example, they assign monetary values to the “ecosystem services”

The post Tons, Hectares, or Dollars? Measuring the Pressure Exerted by the Economy on the Biosphere appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Putin's partial mobilisation has failed to compensate for his military failures, and will deplete Russia's domestic workforce for generations ahead

Governance doesn’t bleed It should be no surprise by now that the press covers the circus before it turning to boring non-nonsense. The former president’s performances fascinate (and draw eyeballs and clicks) in the way The Joker is an iconic Batman villain. His antics bleed and lead. The challenge in how the news covers Donald Trump “news” is to cover what is news and not what is more Trumpish nonsense, suggests Brian Stelter, formerly of CNN. “Formerly,” because as a media critic he routinely “said the quiet part out loud” about the fecklessness of major news coverage. It got him cancelled. News sources don’t like having their dirty laundry exposed in public. The problem for Democrats is that taking governing seriously is not headline news. If their daily activities are not as eye-catching as frontal nudity or AR-15 parades or street violence, it is easy to assume they are doing nothing. Just yesterday, an acquaintance on Twitter complained that as Republicans cheer Trump’s violations of law and civic norms, Democrats mostly stand by and do nothing. Two impeachments? Nothing.

Most of us would find it horrible to be told that we aren’t worth engaging with, that our views are socially unacceptable or merely a function of demography. But that it is painful to be on the receiving end of such remarks doesn’t mean that one’s own rights to ‘free speech’ are thereby imperilled; it might simply be a reminder that speech can wound.

My brother John and I knew that the telephones in both our parents’ houses were tapped. My dad had been a surveillance target since the formation of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), and probably before. It was obvious, sometimes, talking to a schoolfriend on the phone, that we were actually having a three-way call with the police. You heard a continual clicking.

Some final-year students may not graduate this summer; others will ‘graduate’ without their assessments being marked, or even read – including capstone assessments such as dissertations. If marks don’t matter, what is an examination system for? What does a degree mean?

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 13 (Friday 16 June 2023)

Unlike most realists, Marx does not see art as precious because it reflects reality. On the contrary, it is most relevant to humanity when it is an end in itself. Art is a critique of instrumental reason. In its free, harmonious expression of human powers, it is a prototype of what it is to live well.

Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 13 (Friday 16 June 2023)

The DifferenceIn those days, fearlessnesshadn’t come to mean bravery yet, just an absenceof fear. What they called holiness could meanthe drama of reindeer stampedingcounter-clockwise in the...

Coward absorbed many of the ideals of the lower-middle-class Edwardian England in which he grew up and never repudiated them. Patriotic, enthusiastic about the Empire, mistrustful of intellectualism and deferential to the monarchy – if he made fun of these attitudes from time to time, he held them all the same.