From the ashes of a world war that killed 80 million people and reduced great cities to smoking rubble, America rose like a Titan of Greek legend, unharmed and armed with extraordinary military and economic power, to govern the globe. During four years of combat against the Axis leaders in Berlin and Tokyo that raged across the planet, America’s wartime commanders — George Marshall in Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower in Europe, and Chester Nimitz in the Pacific — knew that their main strategic objective was to gain control over the vast Eurasian landmass. Whether you’re talking about desert warfare in North Africa, the D-Day landing at Normandy, bloody battles on the Burma-India border, or the island-hopping campaign across the Pacific,... Read more
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“One of the great renewable resources” “You can’t keep a good homicidal maniac down” is an essential trope from slasher films. In the zombie genre, the lingering question of, “How long can they last?” persists alongside the infectious, shambling dead. Given the Outrage Industrial Complex extant since the 1980s, the same uncertainties apply to MAGA. How long can people addicted to daily outrage keep going before burning out? “What used to rule the day on the American right was ‘owning the libs.’ But now they are owning one another,” writes Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. How long can political meth addicts maintain before finally, beset by paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, they crash and/or devour each other? With Dominion’s massive defamation settlement against Fox News, with Tucker Carlson’s ouster from the network, and with looming legal accountability for Donald Trump, perhaps MAGA’s collapse is, if not as imminent as that Fani Willis indictment, on the horizon.
I’ve just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s great, fun novel, Red Team Blues, and I’ve been thinking about how well it exemplifies one of the strengths of good science fiction. Back when we ran our seminar on Francis Spufford’s novel, Red Plenty, there was a back-and-forth between Francis and Felix Gilman. As Francis described it post-hoc, […]
“If you come across spam on Facebook, report it to us. By doing so, you’ll be playing an important role in helping us protect other people from scams.”
— Facebook
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We’re here today asking you to help us remove spam accounts on our platform. Please report any Facebook profiles you think might be bots trying to get you to visit pornography sites, so we can make room for all the real people trying to get you to believe 5G towers are transmitting Chinese pornography into your head.
It’s important we work together on this. In recent years, fake accounts have gotten significantly better at appearing human, while human Facebook users have gotten significantly better at appearing like malfunctioning alt-right drones programmed to say the most insane shit they can think of.
This situation is serious. We need your help eliminating fraudsters that are ruining the Facebook experience.
What if a food that works fine in its original goopy form were deconstructed into its elemental components, dehydrated, and rebranded as a spice? That’s the question that Trader Joe’s can’t stop asking, and the latest incomprehensible answer is Ketchup-Flavored Sprinkle Seasoning Blend.
My own question is, why? Especially given that ketchup already exists. Is it supposed to be astronaut food, like Tang?
No. You can’t sprinkle powder willy-nilly in zero G. (Tang was contained in a vacuum-sealed pouch, after all.) That’s why you never see old footage of astronauts doing lines of coke off the lunar module.
Perhaps the target consumers aren’t spacemen but terrestrial folks who can’t be trusted to squirt ketchup safely. Like maybe a hapless employee at TJ’s product labs was squeezing a half-empty Heinz bottle over her hot dog at the company cookout, causing it to emit a slurpy farting noise in front of her crush. And lo, she went into her lab the next day and created Trader Joe’s Ketchup-Flavored Sprinkle Seasoning Blend (TJKFSSB) in the crucible of her mortification.
It’s late at night on Turin’s Via dell’Arcivescovado. A man with a Southern accent shows up at L’Ordine Nuovo’s office, insisting on speaking with the lead editor. For L’Ordine Nuovo is not only the workers’ daily, but also the paper of Antonio Gramsci. Yet the political climate here in Turin at the start of the 1920s is tense […]
On this week’s Lever Time: the potential links between “forever chemicals,” pro athlete deaths, and products found in your home.
- by Aeon Video
- by Javier Moscoso
His spokesman told Byline Times that the Labour Leader has a "long-standing view against PR"
Simon Speakman Cordall reports on the origins of the conflict and the stake neighbouring countries have in it
Today marks the 51st anniversary of the death of Ghana’s first Prime Minister and President, Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah’s Pan-African dream envisioned a united Africa free from neocolonial exploitation and capable of representing itself as an equal on the world stage. While these dreams sadly never came to full realisation, they continue to provide inspiration to […]
With Congress Party opposition leader Rahul Gandhi facing prison, CJ Werleman explores how the UK is ignoring serious warning signs in the world's largest democracy
A number of barristers are speaking out against the 'cab rank' rule, under which advocates have to accept any case that lands on their desks, faced with their concerns about the climate emergency
Earlier this week (April 25, 2023), I saw a Twitter exchange that demonstrated to me two things: (a) some mainstream media commentators are now understanding some of the principles of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and relating that knowledge to practical matters that concern them (lens being applied to values); and (b) high profile financial market…
A major, and notorious, problem with this approach, at least in the domain of science, concerns how to ascribe objective prior probabilities to hypotheses. What seems to be necessary is that we list all the possible hypotheses in some domain and distribute probabilities among them, perhaps ascribing the same probability to each employing the principal […]
Three comics about the hanky code.
Sega of America is unionizing.
This truly shows that DeSantis is not ready for prime time. He sounds confused at best and shifty at worst. I’m not sure what he believes but whatever it is he’s communicating it very poorly: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that it’s in the world’s interest for a cease-fire to be negotiated in Ukraine. DeSantis made the comments during a wide-ranging interview with Nikkei Asia on Tuesday while the Florida governor is in Japan on an international trade mission. In the interview, DeSantis warned that an extended war is possible in Ukraine. “You don’t want to end up in like a [Battle of] Verdun situation, where you just have mass casualties, mass expense and end up with a stalemate,” DeSantis said. “It’s in everybody’s interest to try to get to a place where we can have a cease-fire.” DeSantis also called out Europe, and Germany in particular, for allegedly not doing enough to help Ukraine. “The Europeans really need to do more [on Ukraine]. I mean, this is their continent. The U.S. has provided security for them.