Reading

As long as I’ve been blogging, I’ve made notes of articles I wanted to write about at some point, and then, mostly, I haven’t written about them, generally because they don’t support a full article.

When I was the managing editor at the Agonist I’d put up a quick takes post fairly often, and use those links. The difference from Tony’s excellent roundups, is that every link gets some commentary.

I’m going to start doing “Quick Takes” here, and if people like them I’ll continue.

 

Current US policies toward China are outrageous: Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky Interviewed by Global Times June 6, 2023. Global Times. Editor’s Note: At 94 years old, Noam Chomsky (Chomsky) is as vocal as ever. As a renowned American linguist and public intellectual, he constantly appears on the media talking about US foreign policy with his strong […]

You can’t make this stuff up. A good piece from Mark Sumner at DKos on some of the weirdness coming out of the Ukraine war these days: On Tuesday, Wagner Group CEO Yevgeny Prigozhin sat down for an interview with pro-Russian military blogger Konstantin Dolgov. Over the course of the discussion, the mercenary leader continued his barbed criticism of Russia’s military leadership, disparaged the sad state of the Russian army, and even seemed to suggest that a general revolt against the government of Vladimir Putin was right around the corner. In the wake of that widely viewed interview, Dolgov was fired from his position at a Russian propaganda network, but Prigozhin … goes on. In what may be one of the most inexplicable chapters of Russia’s labyrinthine political system, Prigozhin still hasn’t had a stairwell accident, an unfortunate illness, or a visit to an open window despite months of increasingly blatant disdain for everyone and everything involved with Putin’s personal war on Ukraine.

Recently, the Biden administration released the U.S. National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism, an unprecedented report...

He didn’t have much luck doing that with Trump, however, and was soon out of the race. Yesterday he announced that he was going to give it another shot although it’s highly unlikely he will get past the starting gate. But it would be nice if he could get his message out to at least a few people who have never heard any of it before. Some highlights of his announcement: I don’t know if he has any credibility with Republicans but he might have some with GOP leaning Independents. And maybe his words will somehow make it into the fever swamp, you never know. Trump, by the way, responded in kind:

In fact, it should be ready in two weeks Ah memories: “My first day in office, I am going to ask Congress to put a bill on my desk getting rid of this disastrous law and replacing it with reforms that expand choice, freedom, affordability,” said Trump on Oct. 25, 2016 a day after he St. Augustine speech, in Sanford, Florida. “You’re going to have such great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost. And it’s going to be so easy.” Fast forward to 2020: Trump began teasing his own replacement plan during his first presidential bid, five years ago. Back then, he pledged to swap out the Affordable Care Act for “something terrific,” details TBD. Over subsequent months and years, Trump boasted about the benefits of his plan. It would be cheaper yet somehow also more generous than Obamacare. It would be “so easy,” even though “nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” It would “take care of everybody,” even as it took literal care away from many.

Every word of Anthony Albanese’s address to the Shangri-La dialogue on 2 June was chosen with care. It was a balancing act, with the Prime Minister poised between peace and war, defence and diplomacy, the US and China, in a high-wire performance his Coalition predecessors wouldn’t have attempted. Has Australia’s approach to Asia changed? Does Continue reading »

Prime Minister Albanese spoke moderately and positively at the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore last weekend, although his address didn’t really live up to its prior publicity. However the main impression from the exchanges at the Dialogue was of the differences between the US and China. Amazingly, the American Secretary of Defence didn’t seem to realise Continue reading »

Propaganda is a potent weapon used by politicians and rival nations to wage a war of words, especially those abetted by a biased media. It is used by politicians to deceive, convince and indoctrinate. Terrorist organisations use it to radicalise. Propaganda works like a Covid-19 infection. We catch it and spread it around like carriers. Continue reading »

When a government proposes a policy to improve our diet, it can trigger a gag reflex. Some people feel that deciding what to eat is purely a personal choice, and the ‘nanny state’ should stay out of the way. No-one wants to be lectured, shamed, or forced to eat their greens. Perhaps it goes all Continue reading »

Don’t believe anyone – not even a governor of the Reserve Bank – trying to tell you the Fair Work Commission’s decision to increase minimum award wages by 5.75 per cent is anything other than good news for the lowest-paid quarter of wage earners. Because they are so low-paid, and mainly part-time, these people account Continue reading »

News that the FBI continues its investigation into the case around Assange appears to have taken both supporters and the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus by surprise. On 1 June 2023, Foreign Affairs and National Security correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, Matthew Knott, quoted from a letter received by Andrew O’Hagen, novelist and Assange’s ghostwriter, on Continue reading »

The myth of  the “Tiananmen Square massacre” is arguably the most successful disinformation campaign of modern times, according to western and eastern sources—so much so that proud psychological warfare specialists recently used it to ADVERTISE their news manipulation skills. We’ll get to that below. As everyone knows by now, there have always been two dramatically Continue reading »

In case you were wondering about all the “leaks” we’ve been getting from the Mar-a-Lago case — and Trump’s lawyers screaming bloody murder that Jack Smith himself is doing the leaking , here’s an explainer from TPM: The short answer is that the sources of the flurry of stories we’ve seen are witnesses in the case or, more precisely, their lawyers. Trump World figures, in responding and reacting to some of the disclosures, have divulged some new information, too, but that’s been less revealing of the underlying facts than of potential defenses they might use and the public narrative they want to create. None of the big reveals about the MAL evidence from the last few weeks bear much sign of having come from Smith, the FBI, or DOJ more broadly. Kurt Eichenwald, the veteran investigative reporter, had a good thread on the dynamics: As a flood of details of the Trump MaraLago case come out, Trump, commentators etc say Smith’s team is leaking. As someone who has covered these kinds of cases many times, that is almost certainly not true.

How playing with robot animal companions boosts patients’ health.

The post The Pet That Doesn’t Poop appeared first on Nautilus.

Our cutting-edge lemonade stand harnesses the insight of artificial intelligence to help us understand our customers’ needs like never before. We’re confident this next-gen technology was a valuable investment for our twenty-five-cent children’s drink business.

Before we opened our lemonade stand, we asked ourselves, what do our customers want? We immediately said lemonade, because that’s all we can offer as a pair of nine-year-olds, but then we had to think of some other stuff because our parents told us to use a full hour to answer that question.

So we talked mindlessly and wasted time looking up words we heard adults at home use, like “scalability,” “machine learning,” and “Malcolm Gladwell.” In the end, we determined that our business (the one constructed out of milk crates and posterboard) needed the unproven and expensive power of AI. Our parents said we were behaving exactly like real-life entrepreneurs.

The Government's refusal to provide key documents to the inquiry is a blow to the pursuit of truth in the COVID Inquiry – but bereaved families and inquiry chiefs are determined to get answers

You’ve got to be joking. Philip Bump unravels the looney tunes James Comer and Chuck Grassley jihad against Chris Wray for failing to “turn over” a document they’ve already seen. It’s a complicated story and it’s very, very stupid so take a deep breath: Over the course of 2019, President Donald Trump and his allies were focused on the electoral threat posed by former vice president Joe Biden, the candidate leading in polling for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani thought he had a useful angle to that end: an allegation from a former Ukrainian official that Biden had leveraged American funding to benefit a company for which Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, worked. That official, Viktor Shokin, met with Giuliani, then Trump’s attorney, to allege that the vice president had pressured Ukraine to fire him to block a probe into the energy company Burisma. The claim didn’t withstand scrutiny. Shokin’s ouster was a multinational effort predicated on the prosecutor’s failure to address corruption.

The crisis and corruption in the British press is one of the biggest, ongoing scandals of our time. Byline Times tips its hat to Prince Harry

Careful where you point that thing It’s all fun and games until someone loses their beach house or their life’s savings (Axios): Insurability in an age of climate change is a 50-state problem. It’s just growing more actute in California, Florida, Texas, Colorado, Louisiana and New York “as insurers are being forced to re-assess their risk tolerance as climate change leads to more common and severe extreme weather events, says Steve Bowen, chief science officer at Gallagher Re.” Rates in Florida “are expected to rise about 43% to nearly $6,000 in 2023,” according to the Insurance Information Institute. No problem. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican state legislators will just madate that “woke” insurers offer coverage anyway. Because Florida is where capitalism goes to die.

All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving? For me, that last question is radical indeed. From my early years, I believed deeply in the idea of America. I knew this country wasn’t perfect, of course, not even close. Long before the 1619 Project, I was aware of the “original sin” of slavery and how central it was to our history. I also knew about the genocide of Native Americans. (As a teenager, my favorite movie — and so it remains — was Little Big Man, which pulled no punches when it came to the white man and his insatiably... Read more

Source: Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Dr. Ella Cockbain, associate professor at University College London, exposes the dangerous rhetoric behind British Home Secretary Suella Braverman's false claims about Britain's so-called "grooming gangs."

The post The Truth About Britain’s “Grooming Gangs,” with Ella Cockbain appeared first on MintPress News.