The son of Indian immigrants,convicted drug dealer, Bannon acolyte and George Santos staffer. You have to read this whole thing because it is literally unbelievable. These excerpts alone are enough to make you grab for the tequila bottle. I pick it up in the middle: During his college years, Burra built what he described to TPM as a drug dealing “empire.” It came crashing down in mid-2014 when he was busted with over two pounds of marijuana and a small amount of hallucinogens. Burra said he got into the business in pursuit of “respect.” “I wanted people to realize that I was the best in the room,” he explained. Not long after Burra’s drug bust, Trump launched his first presidential campaign. Burra found himself increasingly pulled to the world of Republican politics. Trump’s contradictory brand of hypercapitalist anti-establishment populism spoke to Burra. “I’ve had my own red pilling experiences slowly over time, but it all clicked with Trump,” Burra said, using an online right phrase for awakening. Criminals do tend to be attracted to him.
Reading
Yesterday, I dug into the deepest nest of folders on my MacBook Pro to find a paper I wrote on a 512K Mac in 1987, for a magazine that no longer exists and isn’t (AFAICT) digitally archived. The file must have made transitions from “hard floppies” to removable 44Mb drives (remember them?) to hard drive […]
A week after elections that produced the most far-right government in Israel’s history, the protests...
~ Today's Water Cooler ~
Will DeSantis hold a press conference surrounded by his election police force? Nope, sorry: All four residents of The Villages charged with voting twice in the 2020 election have now admitted to the crime, court records show. John Rider, 62, recently entered into a pre-trial intervention program that will allow him to avoid potential prison time if he successfully completes court-ordered requirements and refrains from violating the law. Rider acknowledged his guilt as part of the agreement with prosecutors. “The Parties agree that the first step in rehabilitation is to the admission of his wrongdoing,” the contract states. Rider indicated in court papers that he plans to “buy out” his requirement of completing 50 hours of community service at a cost of $10 per hour. Three other residents of The Villages accused of voting twice signed similar pretrial intervention contracts last year. All four were facing a maximum of five years in prison if a jury convicted them of a third-degree felony.
This is a huge deal not because of avoiding sanctions but because of its impact on world trade, the global economy, the Global South and East, and the shifting world order in the direction of multipolarism. It is also a signal that India is taking its place on the world stage as a principal player. This is a huge deal for the world system and it represents a concrete reconfiguration of this system taking place at present.
The Global North and West will likely work at disrupting this transformation since it threatens Western dominance. Any disruption will be temporary, since the direction of development is toward that East now that the West is already developed. Subjugation of the East to the West is no longer possible in the longer run. Globalization will happen, just not linearly and not always in line with the Western agenda, especially as the level of development equalizes.
Naked Capitalism
Russia’s “Sanction-Proof” Trade Corridor to India Frustrates the NeoconsConor Gallagher
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I honestly don't understand why birders are all so happy. It's like constantly rubbing your face in human limitations, and then you don't even get to shoot the source of your suffering.
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Smile? Of course I know how to smile. Smiling is a basic facial expression that normal human beings make dozens of times a day without even thinking about it. And I’m definitely a normal human being who smiles on a regular basis.
Oh, you mean smile right now? For the camera? Uh, sure, no problem! Just give me a minute to get into the right pose. What kind of smile are we going for here? Like, did someone tell a joke that’s kind of dumb, but I’m trying to be polite? Or am I a minimum-wage worker who’s really excited to welcome the next person in line to this Subway sandwich bar? Or is this a gesture of peace, where I’m a fifth-century Saxon warrior approaching a rival Frankish tribe, and I want to show that I’m not hiding weapons between my teeth? A little direction on this whole smiling thing would help. I don’t want to overdo it and look like a serial killer. Or underdo it and look like a serial killer.
Why are you looking at me like that? Is it because I’m thinking about serial killers? Oh god, can you tell from my face that I’m thinking about serial killers? I’ll stop thinking about serial killers.
The United States is not preparing to go to war against China. The United States is preparing Australia to go to war against China. Thank you for inviting me to address the Salon. I am greatly honoured and somewhat daunted, given the long list of eminent scholars, analysts and writers who have preceded me. I Continue reading »
On January 27, Israeli forces kill 10 Palestinians in Jenin, including two youths and an elderly woman. The following day a lone Palestinian gunman shoots dead seven Israelis as they leave a synagogue in a settlement in East Jerusalem. In response to the murdered Israelis, the US ambassador to Israel refers to the synagogue attack Continue reading »
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus says the Government will shortly announce a ‘humane resolution’ to the situation of 31,000 legacy boat arrivals who have been living in Australia for over a decade. Like night follows day, Peter Dutton will immediately react with hysteria about re-starting the boats, as he does whenever there is discussion of this. The Continue reading »
Australia’s position as America-lite, a little sibling stumbling along the line between voracious neoliberalism and violent abnegation of its own history, comes into distinct relief every so often. One such recent occasion is the overturning of Roe v Wade, and what would’ve otherwise been the 50th anniversary of the right for folk in the United States Continue reading »
Something worse than anything seen even amidst the dark years of the Cold War has awoken, Matthew Ehret writes. It feels like today’s world is spinning quickly out of control. Fear of nuclear confrontation between Russia and NATO has increased to a fever pitch and something worse than anything seen even amidst the dark years Continue reading »
A group of top US agents, mostly Democrats, pumped hundreds of fake news stories into the mainstream media, it was revealed at the weekend. From 2017, they falsely told major news outlets to print that support for the people they didn’t like (which included Donald Trump and Tulsi Gabbard) came from Russian propaganda operatives working Continue reading »
The great media critic Margaret Sullivan is now writing a column for the Guardian and this one is very welcome. (Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I’ve been saying the same thing for quite a while.) On Sunday morning, NBC’s Chuck Todd hosted the Ohio Republican congressman Jim Jordan on Meet the Press, where the querulous conservative ranted about President Biden’s sloppy handing of classified documents. Todd showed more tenacity than usual in challenging this combative guest (he “incinerated” Jordan, applauded the Daily Kos) but Jordan nevertheless managed to drive home his ill-conceived accusations through sheer volume, repetition and speed. Jordan’s real victory was being given the chance to do so, at such length, on national TV. Meanwhile, over on Fox News, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz was trying his sneering best to connect Hunter Biden to the document dustup, and the rightwing network was helping by showing various file photos of the president’s troubled and troubling son, always with a crazed look in his eye.
When Jean Renoir was conceiving his legendary 1939 tragicomedy The Rules of the Game, he stuck to one guiding principle: it would have no heroes or villains. The film, which went on to inspire everything from Robert Altman’s Gosford Park to Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, treats each of its hedonistic bourgeois characters […]
Doctor Who comic book legend Dave Gibbons autobiography arrives next month Dave Gibbons forthcoming autobiography, Conflabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography is almost here. One of Britain’s most celebrated comic book artists, Gibbons also has a strong associated with Doctor Who. He was the artist on the very first comic strip in Doctor Who Weekly (now Doctor […]
The post Conflabulation: New Dave Gibbons Autobiography appeared first on Blogtor Who.
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Your mileage may vary Yglesias is not someone I pay much attention to, but this Monday tweet caught my attention. So you don’t have to click over: “Interesting comparing to the DJI,” one respondent tweeted with the chart at top.
The problems that economists encounter when trying to predict the future really underline how important it is for social sciences to incorporate Keynes’s far-reaching and incisive analysis of induction and evidential weight in his seminal A Treatise on Probability (1921)....Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Economic forecasting — why it matters and why it is so often wrong
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University
As Oskar Morgenstern noted in his 1928 classic Wirtschaftsprognose: Eine Untersuchung ihrer Voraussetzungen und Möglichkeiten, economic predictions and forecasts amount to little more than intelligent guessing. Making forecasts and predictions obviously isn’t a trivial or costless activity, so why then go on with it? The problems that economists encounter when trying to predict the future really […]
A report from a Russian working abroad about the effect of the war on his industry.
Sâmia Bomfim enviou pedido à ministra Rosa Weber após reportagem do Intercept e do Portal Catarinas sobre criança de 12 anos grávida pela segunda vez por sofrer violência sexual.
The post Menina do PI: Deputada pede que CNJ proíba nomeação de defensor de feto em casos de crianças grávidas após estupro appeared first on The Intercept.
My name is Bill Astore and I’m a card-carrying member of the military-industrial complex (MIC). Sure, I hung up my military uniform for the last time in 2005. Since 2007, I’ve been writing articles for TomDispatch focused largely on critiquing that same MIC and America’s permanent war economy. I’ve written against this country’s wasteful and unwise wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its costly and disastrous weapons systems, and its undemocratic embrace of warriors and militarism. Nevertheless, I remain a lieutenant colonel, if a retired one. I still have my military ID card, if only to get on bases, and I still tend to say “we” when I talk about my fellow soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen (and our “guardians,” too, now that... Read more
Next Florida will mandate yellow WOKE badges Woke is a four-letter word, a conservative all-purpose epithet as meaningless as the f-word. “You woking wokers get that woking thing out of my woking sight!” Meaningless or not, it serves Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s purposes: to divide and inflame. Republican politicians, conservative pundits, and Fox News anchors attach their slur to anyone to the left of submitting to them on their knees. Writing in Roll Call, Mary C. Curtis believes the term’s vagueness in Florida’s “Stop Woke Act” is deliberate. DeSantis means to erase Black history without expressly erasing Black history. A federal judge ruling on the act in November stated that Florida’s actions strike “at the heart of ‘open-mindedness and critical inquiry.’” By so doing, “the State of Florida has taken over the ‘marketplace of ideas’ to suppress disfavored viewpoints.” If you have to ask, “disfavored by whom?” you might be part of the problem.