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We’ve raised approximately $8,400, when including the $2,300 from the emergency fundraiser earlier in 2022. That puts us past $6,500 and a summary article on the world’s position and prospects, and $1,600 from the $11,000 final goal and threshold for an article on reasons for hope. I’ll end the fundraiser sometime next week, whether we’ve achieved the goal or not.

Generally speaking, money simply tells me, like everyone, that what I do is valued and I should do more of it. As always, if you are in a position where money is short for essentials like food, housing or medical care, please don’t donate or subscribe.

But if you have some extra and you value my writing…

 

Donate or Subscribe To My 2022 Fundraiser

Life’s been pretty tough for me lately. Not tough in the sense of any devastating financial hardship, or dire medical diagnosis, or profound loss, but tough in, like, that vague ennui where you’re slumped on your couch on a Tuesday evening in your perfectly nice apartment and think, I’m bored. Thankfully, after a whirlwind seventy-two hours of travel, I found a solution to all my problems: packing up my entire life and moving to a city I’ve projected all my false hopes on.

Back home, I’m burdened with such annoyances as doing taxes, loading the dishwasher, or eating leftovers. But in this city where I spent three carefree days, I didn’t have to do any of those things even once. No, life’s much different here, in this new city with a similar population size and voter demographic.

When interviewed on Great Game on Russia’s state-run Channel One (8 Dec. 2022), Russia’s Foreign Minister, Secretary Lavrov, was given ample opportunity to set out Russia’s views on its role in the Ukraine and on the differences his country has with its many adversaries. The interview is long and Lavrov is aided by presenters who Continue reading »

The destruction of the Brazilian congress by supporters of the former, and now self-exiled, President Jair Bolsonaro is yet another example of the power and real consequences of misinformation and deceit peddled on the internet. Viewing events from the afar, it’s easy to be bewildered by the fact that someone like Bolsonaro was elected in Continue reading »

An important debate is developing in Pearls and Irritations on the need to reduce consumption. In his article “Labor’s Environmental Denialism”, Stephen Williams acknowledged several positive steps being taken by the Labor government to help protect the environment, and then argued that Labor was failing to address the fundamental drivers of environmental disaster, which he Continue reading »

The Liberal Party Review has once again recommended a 50 per cent target for women but the apparent belief that this will win back electoral support from women is misplaced. The Liberal Party’s Review of the 2022 Federal Election, co-authored by former federal party director Brian Loughnane and Senator the Hon Jane Hume, makes a Continue reading »

The German government recently arrested 25 members of a conspiratorial right-wing group plotting to overthrow the government. One of those arrested was a member of a defunct German royal family that the group hoped to install as Germany’s new leader. In the United States, the Republican Party did well enough in the mid-term elections to Continue reading »

Venezuelanalysis’ Ricardo Vaz offers a hard-hitting take on the demise of Venezuela’s self-proclaimed “interim president.” And so it ended. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. After all, it was made of cardboard. It is very rare to have a political phenomenon beautifully encapsulated in a single moment or image. But in the case Continue reading »

On 5 January, the Taliban-led government of Afghanistan signed a contract with Chinese companies Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Co. (CAPEIC) to extract oil from the nation’s northern provinces. The oil is set to be extracted from the Amu Darya basin, marking the first time Kabul signs a public commodities extraction deal with a Continue reading »

Keep in mind that cutting spending is just owning the libs. They are all too stupid to have the most rudimentary understanding of what any of this means. The good news is that they can’t accomplish any of this stuff because they only have one house of congress and if they strong arm their swing state members into voting for this loony nonsense they’ll lose their seats in 2024. Of course, they will take the debt ceiling hostage at their earliest convenience to try to blackmail the Senate and the White House into going along with this ridiculous bullshit so that will be fun. But in the end they are cutting their own throats. And America is going to “go through some things.”

Religious freedom has been at the center of American history since the founding. (And by...

“The American people know that any documents are safe with me because I would never read even one word of them,” the former President said.

Musk has said Tesla’s problematic autopilot features are “really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.”

The post Exclusive: Surveillance Footage of Tesla Crash on SF’s Bay Bridge Hours After Elon Musk Announces “Self-Driving” Feature appeared first on The Intercept.

“It is clear enough that McCarthyism and its legacy were sufficient to make life hard for a particular strand of opposition to the analytic mainstream, characterized by its general adherence to empiricism and liberalism: those who were broadly Marxists.” So writes Christoph Schuringa a philosopher at Northeastern University London, in an article in Jacobin. He continues: But its power in cementing the analytic mainstream went beyond this. The whole tendency of the period was to block out alternatives to a paradigm that stretched across disciplines. This paradigm, which consisted of methodologies developed for the purposes of Cold War research and development such as rational choice theory, operations research, and game theory, functioned to reinforce a vision of society, and of inquiry, reliant on the classical liberal idea of the autonomous rational individual as the fundamental unit of society. The article includes accounts of some philosophers called before the House Un-American Activities Committee or persecuted by the FBI.

Or the changing climate Dr. Ian Malcolm : Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and um, screaming. What with 6-year-olds shooting teachers and Real Americans™ vying to turn the U.S. into Syria (or Somalia), House Republicans, antivaxxers, authoritarian mobs, and climate change will have to compete to be the final straw that takes us out. ChatGPT has received lots of gushing press recently touting the tantalizing possibilities for artificial intelligence (AI). Have these people never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, or The Lawnmower Man ? Perhaps we as a species are too naive to survive. Axios: Malicious hackers are already using the flashy new AI chatbot, ChatGPT, to create new low-level cyber tools, including malware and encryption scripts, according to a recent report. Why it matters: Security experts have been warning that OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool could help cybercriminals speed up their attacks, and it all happened fast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrichor 🌧️🥰

Click on the artwork to download the 3840x2047px version (good details for printing or a wallpaper). I started this one as a sketch yesterday to test a new set of Krita brushes I made, and decided this morning to push it with enough details to post it.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I want you to know I only read the headlines so I'm never distracted by understanding.

Today's News:

Haven't heard much about him lately.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has subpoenaed Donald Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, asking him to turn over records to a federal grand jury as part of an investigation into the former president’s fundraising following the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the subpoena.

A new study found that most biology textbooks devote fewer sentences to climate change than they did before 2010.

AI-powered "robot" lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court (Thanks to The Perts)

Fugitive cows in Quebec captured after months on the run (Thanks to The Perts)

Aussie island infested with mutant snakes (Thanks to Ralph)