“Do we really need a man in a dress reading fairytales to children?”
The post Calls to Ban Drag Shows Targeted at Children appeared first on The Shovel.
Reading
I think the DeSantis ad is better but they played it at the NRA convention and Trump was received with rapturous applause. The pudding ad is one of those ads that will stick even though it’s icky. I call it a draw.
Truth will out and sharp-eyed activist finds Question Time comments as Labour front-bencher derides CPS investigating its own scandal Keir Starmer continues to try to trade off his time as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) running the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to enhance his public image. But his time there was disastrous and at odds […]
Another Message Board Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’ve moved my irregular email news from Mailchimp to Substack. You can read it here. You can also follow me on Mastodon here I’m also trying out Substack as a blogging […]
After nine years of Coalition failure, the Albanese Government has an opportunity to lead the world on alternative affordable housing. read now...Why is the Pentagon budget so high? On March 13th, the Biden administration unveiled its $842 billion military budget request for 2024, the largest ask (in today’s dollars) since the peaks of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And mind you, that’s before the hawks in Congress get their hands on it. Last year, they added $35 billion to the administration’s request and, this year, their add-on is likely to prove at least that big. Given that American forces aren’t even officially at war right now (if you don’t count those engaged in counter-terror operations in Africa and elsewhere), what explains so much military spending? The answer offered by senior Pentagon officials and echoed in mainstream Washington media coverage is that... Read more
Right wing legal extremists have a cunning plan to “fix” the border Gregg Abbot hasn’t signed off on it yet but he’s ready: One of the more insidious elements of Texas’ attempt to annex immigration enforcement away from the federal government comes down to its justification. Proponents, like the author of the hard-line HB20, state Rep. Matt Schaefer (R), say that Texas faces an “invasion” from Mexico, specifying that drug cartels trafficking fentanyl constitute a threat to the state of Texas. It’s not only a way to inflate the sense of crisis and potentially set the stage for a sea change in national immigration policy; it could, far-right lawmakers theorize, allow the state to seize border enforcement powers from the federal government. During an invasion, the Constitution says, states have a right to defend themselves. Declaring an invasion under Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S.
There are many cogent arguments against AUKUS, and Pearls and Irritations has featured most of them. For me the most galling is the re-emergence of the images of the Anglosphere, and the photos of Australian Prime Ministers beaming between the US President and the UK Prime Minister, as if nothing had changed since Sir Robert Continue reading »
In a recent piece by Guardian Australia’s higher education reporter, an academic, who preferred to remain anonymous fearing institutional retribution, likened the modern Australian university to a supermarket. Students were the customers filing through the self-checkout counters; the staff, increasingly rendered irrelevant, were readily disposable. University life is becoming increasingly precarious. Casual academics continue being paid Continue reading »
You may have read this week that Australia’s super tax breaks are excessively generous (“well beyond any plausible purpose”) and that their costs unsustainable. The claim came from a Grattan Institute report, Super savings. But is it realistic? The figures quoted – A$45 billion a year or 2% of GDP “and set to exceed the cost of the Continue reading »
The federal government needs to cut spending and raise taxes to rein in Australia’s structural budget deficit, according to a new Grattan Institute report. The pre-budget report, Back in black? A menu of measures to repair the budget, shows that Australia is on track for 25 years of deficits – teenagers who started high school Continue reading »
Fascism is in the news again, with the nazi salute being banned. Fascism is much more insidious than a few extremist adherents. With careful rebadging it has begun to pervade some of our institutions. Fascism is a hideous ideology, think of German Nazism unleashed on Europe by Hitler and Axis allies (Mussolini, Petain) with its Continue reading »
It seems that Hong Kong is at risk of losing its twin city status! Travel around almost any part of the UK and Europe and you will pass innumerable signs saying that such and such a city/town/village is twinned with a similar city/town/village in another country. Hong Kong’s twinning is somewhat different as since the Continue reading »
From his stronghold at Princeton University, Sheldon Wolin watched his political system collapse. In the latter days of his life, Wolin erupted into utter despair. His final testimony was heartbreaking: America had become ‘the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.’ No opinion critical of the set-up is in any Continue reading »
It’s on the menu The Overton Window has shifted a lot on abortion what with the extremists deciding lately on a total ban with no exceptions and proposing to limit interstate travel etc. It wasn’t long ago that these ideas weren’t even discussed among “pro-lifers.” Now it’s a mainstream Republican position. Is that going to be enough for them? Not bloody likely. If you thought they cared about cute little babies, think again. This is really what it’s all about: A new pro-forced pregnancy proposal in the South Carolina General Assembly that would make people who obtain abortion care eligible for the death penalty was portrayed as coming from the fringes of the Republican Party by one GOP lawmaker—but with 21 state Republicans backing the legislation, critics said the idea is representative of the party’s anti-choice agenda. Proposed by state Rep.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 16, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
Climate and environmental crises
How an Early Oil Industry Study Became Key in Climate Lawsuits
[Yale Environment 360, via The Big Picture 4-9-2023]
For decades, 1960s research for the American Petroleum Institute warning of the risks of burning fossil fuels had been forgotten. But two papers discovered in libraries are now playing a key role in lawsuits aimed at holding oil companies accountable for climate change.
They never miss a trick Sarah Posner wrote this piece about Jordan’s latest attack on the FBI for something truly stupid: Conservative media outlets, fueled by distortions from Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, are promoting a false story that the FBI has an anti-Catholic bias and is targeting traditionalist Catholics for criminal investigation. At the center of this new smear campaign is a single internal intelligence memo, dated Jan. 23 and written by the bureau’s Richmond, Virginia, field office, assessing far-right extremist threats stemming from “Radical-Traditionalist Catholic” ideology. When a right-wing site published the document a few weeks later, the FBI headquarters promptly denounced and shelved the memo. But Jordan and his foot soldiers nonetheless have been using it as a battering ram to discredit law enforcement — just as multiple criminal investigations against former President Donald Trump are heating up.
Justices are going about their work moving the country far to the right, as Clarence Thomas’ ethics scandal unfolds.
Ten years ago Edward Snowden was helped to escape by Wikileaks and to publish his revelations by The Intercept, Guardian, New York Times and others. In 2023 Jack Texeira is tracked down by UK secret service front Bellingcat in conjunction with the New York Times and in parallel with the Washington Post, not to help […]
The post Snowden and Texeira: Ten Years of Disaster appeared first on Craig Murray.
Every Sunday, I blog about the geek-friendly radio shows the BBC are putting out in the forthcoming week! All of the following can be either listened to live or downloaded afterwards for free on the BBC Sounds app, no matter where you are in the world. Please note: I don’t include later episodes of most drama […]
How many of the “woke” make bomb threats? Ben Collins of NBC News last night posted to the Bird site a photo of himself “downloading” the Woke Mind Virus (by drinking Bud Light). Collins was satirizing the right’s latest paroxysm of outrage over capitalism platforming anyone other than big, white swinging dicks. The right-wing fever swamp’s hair-afire fury over rainbows on beer cans and a video featuring a transgender influencer is beyong parody. But it’s not beyond felony (Patch): LOS ANGELES, CA — The Anheuser-Busch Budweiser factory in Van Nuys was targeted with a bomb threat Thursday, prompting a sweep of the sprawling campus, the Los Angeles Police Department confirmed. An Anheuser-Busch employee confirmed to Patch that several Budweiser facilities across the nation were targeted with bomb threats as the company faces massive backlash for an advertising partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. […] The partnership with Mulvaney triggered intense rightwing backlash and informal boycotts of the brand, leading to a nearly $5 billion drop in the Anheuser-Busch stock value Wednesday, Fox News reported.
"Implementation of the safeguard mechanism bodes well for Australian #climate policy and may also pave the way for carbon pricing beyond the industry sector."
Denialism is an American tradition America’s original sin cannot be waved way or wished away. But if there is one way in which the country is as exceptional as it believes, it is in its ability to avoid dealing with harsh realities. The Silents seemed particularly good at this, but they perhaps learned it from their parents and their parents’ parents. The United Daughters of the Confederacy devoted decades and dollars, along with erecting Confederate monuments, to rewriting the history of the Civil War so Southerners might avoid confronting their treason and defeat in defense of slavery. So was born the myth of The Lost Cause. Even now, the history of Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election loss and the violent insurrection he inspired is being Lost Caused by his seditious supporters. Election denialism grows out of that long tradtion and generational reflex. Theodore R. Johnson considers our aversion to confronting the legacy of race in this country and why he writes frequently about it nonetheless.
In Sweden, the standard of living measured by per capita income has increased by a factor of over 50 since the mid-1800s. Overall, people in the Western world today are more than twenty times richer than they were a century and a half ago. Its population has a life expectancy that is almost twice as […]