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Despite grim assessments by environmental scientists, the NSW Government continues to turn its back on the environmental devastation sweeping the state. read now...

Michael Tomasky at the New Republic on the GOP and Trump today: Still think the Republican base is done with Donald Trump? Take a look at what happened in Michigan over the weekend. The state GOP chose as its new chair one Kristina Karamo, an extremist election denier who refused to concede a defeat in last year’s secretary of state race—even though she lost by 14 points. Yes, Trump endorsed a different candidate in the 10-person field to run Michigan’s GOP. But that doesn’t really matter. What matters, along with Karamo’s Trumpy election denialism, is the fact that all 10 candidates hugged Trump. One of them told The Washington Post that Trump’s endorsement was resented because “he don’t live here,” but this person still said, “We love Donald Trump.” Remember: This is a state where the Democrats have literally taken over just about everything. All four statewide elected officials are Democrats, starting with Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Democrats control both chambers of the state legislature.

Does the Meta-Birkin seriously compromise consumers’ ability to separate the NFT from the real Hermès bag? 

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

“Every child gets a free piece of fruit before they leave!"

“This is for all the marbles” There’s an election coming up in what is arguably the most important swing state in the country. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. Abortion. Union rights. Gerrymandering. Fair elections. Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much in Wisconsin, the nation’s most important and arguably its most polarized swing state. But they agree that their state’s ongoing Supreme Court election is the most important in a generation. “The Supreme Court race is for all the marbles,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler told VICE News. Conservatives concur. They’re even using the same description. “This is for all the marbles,” Brandon Scholz, a veteran Wisconsin Republican strategist and lobbyist who has managed previous supreme court races, told VICE News. The April 4 election will determine whether liberals or conservatives have a majority on the state Supreme Court. That balance of power couldn’t be more important. The court will soon decide whether abortion is legal for the state’s 6 million people.

I don’t know about you but I found that to be shocking. And I was there. But I don’t remember this stark opposite land. What the hell?

A new lottery-style system for issuing permanent residency visas is a poorly-planned idea that will create its own share of problems. read now...

Niche news network Sky News Australia have blamed Australia’s rising cost of living as the reason for their shows rating so poorly. ”Interest rates and energy prices are going up, so the poor Aussie battler can barely afford to turn... Read More ›

Ezra Klein takes up the subject of Biden’s age and makes a good point, with which I have to agree. One reason for my hesitance to declare Biden too old to run in 2024 is that I thought his age was a problem in 2020, too. Everything people say about his age now was true then. He was halting on the stump. He fumbled words and phrases. But I’d argue the problem was worse then. The linguistic stumbles were paired with an aging outlook. Biden reminisced fondly about his relationships with segregationist senators and seemed to think the bipartisanship of yesteryear was recoverable in the present. He wielded his connection to Barack Obama as both spear and shield — it was the case for his candidacy and his all-purpose defense against attacks. But Biden wasn’t Obama and the Senate of the 1970s is long gone. Biden’s problem in 2020, in other words, wasn’t just his age. It was that he seemed stuck in the past. But Biden proved — and keeps proving — doubters like me wrong. He won the Democratic primary, even though voters had no shortage of fresher faces to choose from.

The Scottish First Minister's exit makes the possibility of a new referendum even less likely, writes Jonathan Lis

⅔ cup cottage cheese½ cup evaporated skimmed milk½ cup sliced mushrooms¾ cup chicken bouillon¾ cup tomato juice2 tablespoons chives½ teaspoon paprika⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper⅛ teaspoon nutmeg4 ounces cooked chicken, diced2 tablespoons chopped pimento Combine cottage cheese, milk, and mushrooms in blender container; process at low speed until mixture is smooth. Add bouillon, tomato juice, chives, […]

~ Today's Water Cooler ~

Capital has identified water as an important opportunity for profitable investment. Whether it is the privatisation of public water infrastructure, the expansion of the bottled water industry, the construction of dams for energy generation or the free expropriation of water for mineral extractivism or large-scale agriculture, private capital has poured into water in large quantities. And yet, water is also an area where resistance to capitalist exploitation has been most successful as reflected in a wave of re-municipalisations of water services across the world (Kishimoto,  Lobina and Petitjean 2015). How can we make sense of these struggles against water commodification? In our recent article Water Grabbing, Capitalist Accumulation and Resistance in the Global Labour Journal, we develop a conceptual-methodological approach to this question.

The post Conceptualising struggles over water grabbing appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Isn’t that special? In late 2021, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene briefly referenced “a National Divorce scenario” that seemed to allude to the dissolution of the United States. About a year later, the Georgia Republican seemed to predict a “national divorce” in response to the CDC adding Covid shots to its list of recommended vaccine schedules. This morning, as some elected officials released statements recognizing the Presidents’ Day holiday, the right-wing congresswoman published a message to Twitter that steered clear of traditional American patriotism. .. At face value, this isn’t especially surprising. Greene has earned a reputation as one of the most radical members of Congress in recent memory. She’s expressed support for violence against Democratic elected officials, and a year ago, the Georgia Republican appeared at a white-nationalist event. The fact that the congresswoman has endorsed a vision in which Americans “separate by red states and blue states” is entirely in line with everything we know about her.

In January the far-right website Townhall began publishing a four-part series on a so-called “Suburban...

China continues to lead the world in trust, according to the influential Edelman Trust Barometer. The 2023 latest survey repeats similar previous rankings and gives the lie to commentators who continually maintain that the Communist Party of China is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. One may and should question the assumptions Continue reading »

If Australia sleepwalks into a war with China, as many analysts fear is happening right now, then amid our strategic slumber we should at least ask one question: what would war with China mean for Australia? Put bluntly, the repercussions of Australia joining the US in any war with China over the status of Taiwan Continue reading »

On Tuesday, General Mark Milley, chair of the American joint chiefs of staff declared, in effect, that Russian had been militarily defeated in Ukraine. Russia, he said, was now a global pariah, and the world remained inspired by Ukrainian bravery and resilience. “In short, Russia has lost,” he told a press conference after a NATO Continue reading »

Opening up access to permanent residence for long stay refugees on temporary visas is right and inevitable. The decision will not set off a major new surge of maritime asylum seekers. The Coalition and their supporters have selective memories. Temporary protection visas were never a deterrent anyway. The government’s decision to allow access to permanent Continue reading »

The continuing debate in Pearls and Irritations about economic growth and sustainability has largely ignored a critical dimension: the role of human subjectivity. The debate has focused on the interactions between economic growth and environmental impacts. There has been some mention of living standards, wellbeing and quality of life, but little consideration of how what Continue reading »

Richard Cullen’s article, ‘Why Japan is not an acceptable military ally’, published in Pearls and Irritations (5 Jan. 2023) is an unfortunate piece of historical muck-raking. The core of his argument is that Japan’s record as a brutal imperialist power in the years 1895 to 1945 disqualifies it now, and presumably until further notice, from Continue reading »

But is the Arab country’s pioneering gender parity laws and the ‘State Feminism’ introduced in the 1950s by Habib Bourguiba under threat from President Kaîs Saïed’s new electoral law? The new Tunisian electoral law drops parity in a disastrous political and economic situation. While the old electoral law enshrined gender parity among candidates by obliging Continue reading »