Reading

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 11:23
The Basis Of All Law

All laws are ultimately backed up by “if you don’t we will send violent men after you” and we should never, ever, pretend otherwise.

Mao’s “all power comes from the barrel of a gun”, or pre-gunpowder, guys with swords or clubs, is, however, only one-third true.

What matters isn’t the violent men, it is controlling the violent men. If all power came from violence, then it would be guilds of violent men who run society directly, but as powerful as police and armies are, in most places it isn’t military men or cops who who make the laws and are in the executive positions and when they are it is usually in a second or third tier country.

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 10:30
Ron Brownstein on the 2024 GOP primary Second verse same as the first? The same fundamental dynamic that decided the 2016 Republican presidential primaries is already resurfacing as the 2024 contest takes shape. As in 2016, early polls of next year’s contest show the Republican electorate is again sharply dividing about former President Donald Trump along lines of education. In both state and national surveys measuring support for the next Republican nomination, Trump is consistently running much better among GOP voters without a college education than among those with a four-year or graduate college degree. Analysts have often described such an educational divide among primary voters as the wine track (centered on college-educated voters) and the beer track (revolving around those without degrees). Over the years, it’s been a much more consistent feature in Democratic than Republican presidential primaries. But the wine track/beer track divide emerged as the defining characteristic of the 2016 GOP race, when Trump’s extraordinary success at attracting Republicans without a college degree allowed him to overcome sustained resistance from the voters with one.
Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 09:20
Cooking time: 30-35 mins.Preparation time: 30 mins.Main cooking utensil: saucepan For 4-8 people you need:⅔ cup shredded coconut1¼ cups boiling water1 onion1 medium apple¼ cup butter¼ cup all-purpose flour1 tablespoon curry powder3 tablespoons tomato pasteJuice of 1 lemon3 tablespoons molasses1 teaspoon salt2½ cups shrimp6-8 hard cooked eggs Accompaniments:Boiled rice, yogurt, cucumber, diced potato, green sweet […]
Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 09:00
What are they hiding? A Feb. 16 filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit in Delaware against Fox News has kicked up a media firestorm: Outlet after outlet described how internal email and text messages quoted in the document, a filing for summary judgment, showed that network honchos knew that former president Donald Trump’s election-theft claims were lies — and allowed them to air anyhow. Yet the filing is filled with frustrating dead ends, the result of the network’s aggressive effort to prevent disclosure of many of the internal communicationsthat came out of discovery in the case, Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News. The black passages in the document raise the questions: What is Fox News hiding? And will those passages ever be unredacted? As the Dominion filing makes clear, Fox News executives panicked in the weeks after the November 2020 presidential election. The network had called Arizona on election night for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, a move regarded as treason by the network’s MAGA crowd, which declared viewers would flee to the competition, especiallyconservative cable news outlet Newsmax.
Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:52

In her 94 years, Elaine Mokhtefi has lived several lives. Born Elaine Klein in New York, just months before the stock market crash of 1929, she was expelled from university for refusing to obey segregation on public transport. After becoming the student leader of an international movement for world federalism, she was expelled for being […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:52

Brendan Behan died at just 41 years of age after he collapsed in a Dublin public house in March 1964. To Joan Littlewood, the pioneering figure of working-class theatre in post-war Britain, it was nothing short of a tragic waste of talent: ‘I was so angry with Brendan for dying that I felt like kicking […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:52

On 29 April 1996, Newcastle United manager Kevin Keegan gave a legendary post-match interview to Sky Sports. Faced with the prospect of a tense Premier League title race, and responding to claims by Man United manager Alex Ferguson that Newcastle’s next opponents would go easy on them for certain unknown reasons, Keegan launched into a […]

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 08:51

Austerity is back. After a brief but disastrous experiment with debt-financed tax cuts, the Conservatives have returned to their comfort zone, telling us that decisive action is required to prevent government debt from spiralling out of control. Once again, there is no alternative: we must tighten our belts. While the rhetoric matches Osborne’s in 2010, […]