A little over 75 years ago, a Japan-designed Asia-Pacific community collapsed, leaving not only Japan itself but much of the region in chaos, millions dead, cities in ruins. The lesson the world – and the Japanese people – took from the catastrophe was incorporated in the constitution of Japan agreed one year later: under Article Continue reading »
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It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the referendum on the Voice will be won not as a virtually unanimous offering to First Nations Australians but narrowly in an ugly, bitter and divisive brawl between older and younger Australians. Even a win will have the capacity to leave divisions in the nation, and Continue reading »
On the faint memory of the smell of an oily rag, John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations public policy journal daily publishes a range of opinion and insights that shames the lack of diversity in our much bigger and better resourced media. Most importantly, P&I provides viewpoints now rare in MSM – alternatives to the groupthink Continue reading »
The Timor-Leste March 2022 Presidential elections gave a resounding win in the second round to Nobel Laureate Jose Ramos Horta, and this provided leverage for Xanana Gusmão in his efforts to wrest back the executive power he apologetically relinquished in February 2015. But Gusmão and his National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT) must still win Continue reading »
Student outcomes in literacy and numeracy continue to go backwards. Why? Missing from the list of causes for poor learning outcomes, as it is from every such list, is the ineffectiveness of the Learning Assistance Program. Student outcomes in literacy and numeracy continue to go backwards, according to the Productivity Commission in a report released Continue reading »
Recently, I had a catch-up conversation on climate change and November’s UN climate change conference (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh with one of Hong Kong’s most conscientious students of the subject. As we began to wind up, I asked what we should be taking away from the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal – confusingly called COP15 – Continue reading »
NATO support for the war in Ukraine, designed to degrade the Russian military and drive Vladimir Putin from power, is not going according to plan. The new sophisticated military hardware won’t help. Empires in terminal decline leap from one military fiasco to the next. The war in Ukraine, another bungled attempt to reassert U.S. global Continue reading »
A big spender on right-wing causes, investor Andrew Intrater gave seed money to a group formed to oust a reform-minded district attorney.
The post George Santos Benefactor Bankrolled Group Opposing LA’s Progressive Prosecutor appeared first on The Intercept.
He’s back and angrier than ever. I’m talking about Donald Trump, of course. In what is being billed as his first official event since he announced his run for the 2024 GOP nomination, Trump said so himself: “They said he’s not doing rallies, he is not campaigning. Maybe he’s lost his step. I’m more angry now and I’m more committed now than ever.” He was referring to the fact that most of the media have been commenting on his lackluster performance ever since that boring announcement speech more than two months ago. The growing consensus is that he’s lost his mojo. So when he scheduled two small events this past weekend, first in New Hampshire at the annual GOP meeting and then at South Carolina’s Capitol building, both before crowds of about 400 people each, it reinforced that assumption. Gone were the days when he would land in his shiny Trump jet or Air Force one to rapturous crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. Now he’s just another Republican presidential hopeful hanging around diners and glad-handing the local officials.
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I just worry kids will never know the pleasure of convincing your exhausted mother that you'll shut up in exchange for the king size candy bar and 6 pounds of Ninja Turtles episodes.
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NATO support for the war in Ukraine, designed to degrade the Russian military and drive Vladimir Putin from power, is not going according to plan. The new sophisticated military hardware won't help.
The post Chris Hedges: Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong appeared first on MintPress News.
Why Australia bottles up its air
Alex Williams recently wrote “What Is ‘Core PCE Services Ex-Housing’ Anyway?,” which dissects the measure that the Fed is using to get a handle on “underlying” inflation. The most interesting bit (for me) is that about 1/4 of this measure is an imputed price index, based on wages. This means that this component will track wages (giving a convenient analytical relationship) by definition.
The logic of following this measure is that the Fed convinced itself that the core (ex-food and and energy) personal consumption expenditure is the best measure of “underlying” inflation, but it turns out that the housing part of that has construction issues (too smoothed to pick up current events), and so they wanted to strip that out of the measure.
The helpless and their power-ups Why do people believe what they do? Why are conspiracy theories so attractive? Slate’s John Ehrenreich examines the persistence of the Wuhan lab leak theory behind the emergence of COVID-19. Yes, “Running Man” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)* is one of the first to suggest it. But in the end, why did the story take off on the right when most scientists find the disease’s animal origin more plausible? For one, Ehrenreich suggests, the lab leak theory plays into the right-wing distrust of “experts” and elites. Plus: People also generally prefer simple, straightforward stories that give them a sense of control over complex ones filled with ambiguity and complexity that foster a sense of helplessness. The lab-leak story is simple. Short version: Someone in a lab in China doing research on deadly viruses screwed up. The actions to take are clear: Blame China. Demand reparations. Tighten up regulation of laboratories doing research on disease-causing microbes. Bar gain-of-function research that alters viruses to make them more deadly.
“This is what makes Ron DeSantis so dangerous, quite frankly,” he said.
Conservatives are ready to die for gas stoves. Yes, you read that correctly: They aren’t...
The timing of a Blinken interview and a RAND paper release points to elite splits over Ukraine. Sadly the warmongers are still in charge.
Your next infection could be the one that permanently disables you. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 26th January 2023 You could see Covid-19 as an empathy test. Who was prepared to suffer disruption and inconvenience for the sake of others, and who was not? The answer was often surprising. I can think, for […]
The question is what will? McKay Coppins presents a gallery of Republican donors and operatives eager to see Donald Trump gone before he can do more harm to the Republican Party. What’s left of it anyway. They just lack the guts to take on Trump and his (proven violent) cult members frontally. Their strategy is to hope Trump, 76, just dies. As his mother did at at 88 and his father at 93. Plying him with hamburgers and fried chicken may be a sounder plan. Former Michigan Republican congressman Peter Meijer “termed this strategy actuarial arbitrage.” Other Republicans hope indictments will take Trump out of the picture. Not a good plan either (The Atlantic): Michael Cohen, who served for years as Trump’s personal attorney and now hosts a podcast atoning for that sin titled Mea Culpa, grudgingly told me that his former boss would easily weaponize any criminal charges brought against him. The deep-state Democrats are at it again—the campaign emails write themselves. “Donald will use the indictment to continue his fundraising grift,” Cohen told me. They are hoping for a deus ex machina to appear.
The poetry of Alex Dimitrov stays in the present. It’s the essence of contemporary. A living voice, an urbane voice, overstimulated and sweet and stylish and aware. To say it’s talkative is only to highlight the point, and point to its tradition, which is very old, older than the New York poets who embodied it, James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara and others: it’s as old as the intimate cutting voice of Catullus or the troubadours of Galicia. New York is not so much the subject of Dimitrov’s work—particularly true in his latest collection, Love and Other Poems—so much as its raison d’être. Even a poem like “New York,” a catalog of places in New York the speaker has cried in, is a love poem to “the best city to cry in.” Dimitrov’s voice is casual, open aesthete, open-hearted in a way that doesn’t forgo acid worldliness. No one could call his lines naïve, and yet they record—almost can’t help themselves—moments of awe, happiness, painful clarity, or, the beauty of true feeling, up or down. In that sense, Dimitrov is a first-class artist of the art of feeling, of giving a mood a shape in language.
Wars, conflicts, and other crises have left more than 30 million children displaced from their homes in the world today. More than 10 million children are refugees or asylum-seeking. “Whatsoever You Do to the Least of My Brothers You Do unto Me”
As the former PM continues to deny he sought financial advice from the BBC's now Chairman, guidance from his civil servant at the time has contradicted this, reports Josiah Mortimer
On 13 January 2023, the London-based organisation Index on Censorship named Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador its Tyrant of the Year for 2022. ‘While competition was tough, one leader surged ahead, by a mile in fact,’ insists the accompanying text, which goes on to recite a series of justifications for the designation, including violence […]
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Your eyes dance, and you gesture wildly as you tell me and two others about a recent rock climbing trip. Unfortunately, this seems to have all the makings of a multi-minute anecdote. But one thing keeps me from walking away: the opportunity to top your story with one of my own.
The moment you uttered the phrase “rock climbing,” it was over. I got the gist of things right then and there. So while you go on and on about a multi-day ordeal on a mountain range and some sort of bear encounter, I mentally retrieved a story from years ago that will eclipse everything you’re sharing right now. The bear thing may prove hard to outdo, sure, but I’ll get it done, even if it takes some light embellishing.
Though it’s been about ninety seconds since I tuned you out, I smile encouragingly and slightly shake and nod my head at what I assume are the appropriate times. It’s the polite thing to do, and I’m a polite guy. Despite these efforts, closer scrutiny of my face would reveal that my smile is all mouth, and my eyes betray a desire to fast-forward you.