Misunderstanding China has a long and distinguished history. Much of that misunderstanding has been generated by western media going right back to the Qing dynasty. The Australian ‘Times’ correspondent of the era George Ernest Morrison was unable to speak Chinese and so depended on Sir Edmund Backhouse as a source of primary information. Sir Edmund Continue reading »
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Ten years ago Anthony King and Ivor Crewe published their book – The Blunders of Our Governments. They ranged over the Millennium Dome; the 20 billion pounds wasted on a failed scheme to upgrade London’s Underground; punishing tens of thousands of single mothers into poverty; massive IT disaster’s such as the Blair Governments NHS scheme; Continue reading »
Now is the time for the Nation State to reassert its control over multinational entities. Multinationals advance an agenda that is self-serving. These agendas may be separate from, and at times, above, a nation’s law. Financial gain is at its heart. Arthur Andersen, a former large international consultancy that collapsed in 2002, “struggled to balance Continue reading »
The effects of the climate crisis intrude with increasing regularity into our lives and yet we do not act. We are as paralysed as past civilisations were when facing catastrophic destruction. Princeton, N.J. — As I write this, the sun is a hazy reddish orange orb. The sky is an inky yellowish gray. The air Continue reading »
The other day I stumbled across a 2014 opinion piece in The Guardian titled “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war” by Seumas Milne, who the following year would go on to become the Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications under Jeremy Corbyn. I bring this up because the Continue reading »
by Norman Solomon, opinion contributor: TheHill.com
Donald Trump and Daniel Hale have each been indicted on charges of violating the Espionage Act, but the similarity ends there. While the former president prepares for arraignment in a Miami federal courtroom this afternoon, Hale — a U.S. Air Force veteran and drone whistleblower — continues to serve a 45-month prison sentence.
We’re not so different from an error-prone chatbot.
The post Why We Hallucinate Supernatural Explanations appeared first on Nautilus.
And right in the middle of all that was this: What???
If you follow college football, you probably heard that Glenn “Shemy” Schembechler was recently forced to resign from his post as assistant director of football recruiting at University of Michigan shortly after he was hired. This occurred after news emerged that he had liked numerous racist tweets. Glenn is the son of “legendary” Bo Schembechler, […]
Tom Nichols on how to deal with the threats: I made a joke on Twitter the other day that I thought deserved a better reception than it got. I was reading about Kari Lake bleating about how other Americans, if they wanted to “get” to Donald Trump, would have to “go through me” as well as “through 75 million Americans just like me … most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.” I said that Lake’s political career was like the origin story of Jonathan Matthias. I made that joke because I’m a nerd and I’m old. Matthias is the bad guy from the classic 1971 Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man,a postapocalyptic thriller in which almost everyone in the world is wiped out by a germ-warfare disaster. Heston has an antidote; the other survivors end up as light-sensitive ghouls that can go out only at night. Matthias (played by the legendary character actor Anthony Zerbe) was, before the plague, a blustery celebrity television newscaster, and he later uses his charisma to organize his fellow sorta-vampires into a cult built around hating Heston and all modern technology.
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In conjunction with the release of an undercover investigation on the factory farm, the group DxE mounted an “open rescue” of birds from a slaughterhouse.
The post Dangerous Pathogens and Cruelty Law Violations at Perdue Subsidiary, Animal Rights Report Alleges appeared first on The Intercept.
The algorithm used for the cash relief program is broken, a Human Rights Watch report found.
The post Algorithm Used in Jordanian World Bank Aid Program Stiffs the Poorest appeared first on The Intercept.
Mary Davenport (centre right), a former apprentice forced to drop out due to financial struggles, is speaking up about rock-bottom pay
David Tennant on viewing the Doctor Who 60th-anniversary special event as a "victory lap" and seeing Ncuti Gatwa in action as the new Doctor.
Get busy fighting or brace for democracy dying “A Red Alert for Voting Rights” is the Zoom call scheduled tomorrow by Carolina Forward. The topic is North Carolina politics. But the red alert is broader than that. Twitter followers of former Ohio state Democratic Party chair, David Pepper (“Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American“), know he’s been leaning hard into Ohio Republicans’ attempt to thwart a citizen initiative to secure abortion rights in the state constitution. The GOP-dominated legislature has scheduled an August special election to pass a constitutional amendment that would make it harder for citizens to pass their “Right to Reproductive Freedom” amendment in November.
Trump’s body man Walt Nauta is just the latest in a long line of lackeys.
The post Trump Is a Predator Who Feeds on Lackeys appeared first on The Intercept.
People misunderstand Wagner’s role in the Ukrainian war.
Wagner is a prison to meat-grinder operation. Convicts were recruited, given a bit of training and sent on the most dangerous attacks. This meant that regular Russian troops were not expended, and that less civilians had to be drafted or recruited.
When Prigozhin complains about mistreatment, he’s probably right. To the Russian military, Wagner are useful, but scum. Remember that Prigozhin himself is an ex-convict, and he was sent to prison for theft, which included in one case choking a woman nearly to death.
Using convicts may have saved Russian troops, but convicts in the military never ends well. The same thing was done, without the mercenary cutout, in Afghanistan by the Russians and it did great damage to the Russian military.
Over 300 activists from 32 countries gathered in Vienna, Austria to demand an end to the war in Ukraine and issue a powerful declaration of peace.
The post Vienna Summit: Anti-War Activists From 32 Countries Call For Diplomacy to End Ukraine War appeared first on MintPress News.
All wars do end, usually thanks to a negotiated peace agreement. Consider that a fundamental historical fact, even if it seems to have been forgotten in Brussels, Moscow, and above all, Washington, D.C. In recent months, among Russian President Vladimir Putin’s followers, there has been much talk of a “forever war” in Ukraine dragging on for years, if not decades. “For us,” Putin told a group of factory workers recently, “this is not a geopolitical task, but a task of the survival of Russian statehood, creating conditions for the future development of the country and our children.” Visiting Kyiv last February, President Joseph Biden assured Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, “You remind us that freedom is priceless; it’s worth fighting for,... Read more
Many people seem offended by the very idea that banks can create money “out of nothing”, or that governments can finance their spending by creating money, rather than borrowing. They seem wedded to the idea that money must be a physical thing, and therefore it can’t be created “out of nothing”. This probably arises from … Continue reading "Money from Nothing"