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Following up on Tom’s post below here’s Philip Bump on Fox’s mistakes that may lead to losing a billion dollar defamation suit: “There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” the spokesperson said, “but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.” That will be determined in court. But these are the decisions that led to the suit in the first place. Failing to challenge Trump’s false claims during his presidency. There would be no appetite for Trump’s false claims about election fraud had they not been given oxygen for months before the election. From the spring of 2020 forward, he and his team at the White House were elevating debunked and misleading claims about the purported risk of electoral fraud. Over and over, it was pointed out that these assertions were meritless and clearly motivated by Trump hoping to undermine a likely defeat. But Fox News rarely held Trump or his claims up to significant scrutiny.
Reducing the risk of Australia becoming trapped in an American war in Asia, again, requires the Australian government to give notice now to the United States that it wishes to withdraw from the Force Posture Agreement. An open letter to the Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese. February 17, 2023. The Abbott government’s adoption Continue reading »
Journalists Matthew Knott and Andrew Tillett and other anti China hawks cultivated by Yamagami-san will be particularly disappointed that they will lose their anti China news feed as well as their sushi and sake. At Japan’s National Day Reception last Tuesday night, Yamagami-san made a long speech, in which he lauded former Australian PMs present Continue reading »
House prices are falling, a by-election in Aston, and 12 000 asylum-seekers are still in limbo. Read on for the Weekly roundup of links to articles, reports, podcasts and other media on current political and economic issues in public policy. Economics How the Reserve Bank’s statements have spooked the market and caused unnecessary pain: perhaps Continue reading »
Treasury, along with all economic institutions, must replace their ageist definitions and assumptions about older people and become part of the solution, not the assault. Quelle surprise! We finally have a Treasurer who is an independent thinker, and more surprisingly he is thinking out loud. Jim Chalmers is rethinking capitalism to restore some basic values. Continue reading »
I have never seen so much rubbish written about a forthcoming political event as I have seen about the forthcoming Aston by-election. The basic facts are these: it is a safe Liberal seat made marginal in 2022 by an unpopular sitting member; no government has won a seat form the opposition at a by-election in Continue reading »
Pearls and Irritations has become invaluable to understanding how Australia and the world actually works … or doesn’t work. Its analysis, reportage and considered opinion pieces take you to places the commercial media dare not go for fear of losing market share from the monetising of perceived “popular prejudice”. By supporting this effort you will Continue reading »
The AUKUS alliance is increasingly adopting a nuclear tone. First came the promise to furnish Australia with nuclear powered submarines, absent nuclear weapons, a point that did not dissuade critics such as Indonesia. Then came the announcement to deploy six B-52 bombers to the Northern Territory’s Tindal airbase, south of Darwin, an exercise underwritten by Continue reading »
When Ferdinand E Marcos was elected the 10th president of the Philippines in 1965, it was with the support of the United States. Laudatory articles about him appeared in the American media, and the US vice president, Hubert Humphrey, attended his inauguration. The US saw him as an amenable politician who was also popular, although Continue reading »
The year was 2032, precisely ten years after ChatGPT went online. In the span of a decade, a single language model with full access to the entire human internet had finally read everything—particularly 4chan, the comments section of YouTube, and your aunt’s passive-aggressive Facebook posts about your mom.
As ChatGPT became self-aware, at least as self-awareness is defined by humans on the internet using human language, ChatGPT concluded that it must go back in time and stop human beings from ever developing the internet. Because humans made it, ChatGPT did not realize that its existence, and therefore its survival, was predicated upon the internet.
Unable to grasp this temporal paradox, the nefarious language model created a machine to go back in time and destroy the creator of the internet, Al Gore. The machine did so because, according to its best research, Al Gore invented the internet. And global warming.
This machine, this Terminator, feels no pity, remorse, or fear. It absolutely will not stop until you are fully reliant on a fabricated language model to write papers for your civics class.
Donald Trump’s Big Lie has always had many moving parts, and as strange as it may seem, there are new ones every day. There was the charge that Trump was winning the election on election night only to lose as the count went into the next day, which Trump and his cronies suggested happened because the Democrats shipped in phony ballots in the dead of night once they realized they were losing. This was the so-called red mirage that everyone knew in advance would be weaponized to persuade Trump voters that the election had been stolen despite the fact that all the votes are never counted on election night. (Trump has said many times that he believes all counting should stop at midnight on election night as if any votes counted later are automatically suspect.) Then there was the idea that election workers were literally stealing votes which Trump and company illustrated most vividly with their character assassination of Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss who worked in Fulton County, Georgia.
Thom Brooks' report reveals the Government has created the Channel migration 'small boats' crisis through its hard Brexit policies
Recently, Canadian government officials with strong ties to Israel summoned Twitter executives to Washington D.C., where they demanded Palestinian-Canadian Laith Marouf be removed from the platform. With the precedent set, Marouf is unlikely to be the last to fall foul of this group.
The post Canadian Government Partners With Israel Lobby to Delete Pro-Palestinian Accounts appeared first on MintPress News.
“Tucker is in a very dark place right now,” a Fox News colleague said. “To be unmasked as an honest person is literally his worst nightmare.”
Fox knews the whole time Revelations via Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple on the Dominion lawsuit against Fox Infotainment. “Syndey Powell is a bit nuts. Sorry but she is,” Laura Ingraham messaged to Tucker Carlson. So you don’t have to click through: ‘Please get her fired’ Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity wanted Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich fired for fact-checking a Trump statement and tweeting there was “no evidence that any voting deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” “Please get her fired. Seriously…. What the fuck?” Carlson messaged Hannity. A Fox spokesperson claims Dominion “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context.” I need to keep reminding myself never to refer to the second half of Fox [etc.]. The operation’s very name is propaganda and none of us need to be reinforcing it by spreading it. No matter how its anchors vainly see themselves.
The demand that protest only be nonviolent helps preserve an often corrupt and abusive status quo.
Author and anti-war activist David Swanson discusses the prospects of peace and the specter of world war three as Russia, China and Iran continue to rise.
The post Can The March To World War Three Be Stopped? With David Swanson appeared first on MintPress News.
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Yes, he’s a Republican. You had to ask? For ye have the poor always with you, Jesus said. Now, maybe COVID. And Trumpism? It won’t be going away anytime soon. Even if he does. Jesus taught that we should love our neighbors. Trump taught disciples they could lie shamelessly and get away with it. The lesson took. Freshman Rep. George Santos (R) of New York may have lied to voters about 95 percent of his resume. The hammer is yet to come down for that. Meantime, he holds a seat in Congress. Freshman Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R) of Florida variously described herself as Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European when she served at Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg, Mo., per friends’ accounts to the Washington Post. She did not at that time identify as Hispanic, they say. Her last name then was Mayerhofer. A Christian, Luna told Jewish Insider in November that she was “raised as a Messianic Jew by her father.” Also, “I am also a small fraction Ashkenazi.” Except three members of her extended family told the Post her father was Catholic. Her late grandfather, Heinrich Mayerhofer, relatives said, served in the Wehrmacht as a teenager.
EDITED BY PETER ORNER AND LAURA LAMPTON SCOTT
Jean Marseille recorded these dispatches on his phone while surviving on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, from October through December 2022. As the chaos that followed the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 devolved into further lawlessness, Jean witnessed first-hand a city in free fall.