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Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

During Trump’s final days it was reported that he and Bill Barr were speeding up federal executions to kill as many people as possible before he left office. (I wrote about it here.)He and Bill Barr had gleefully reinstated the federal death penalty and were afraid they’d leave some possible victims alive if they didn’t move quickly. By 9:27 p.m. Bernard was dead. In that moment, he became the ninth of 13 people executed in the final six months of the Trump administration — more federal executions than in the previous 10 administrations combined. Of the 13, six were put to death after Trump lost the election, his Justice Department accelerating the schedule to ensure they would die before the incoming administration could intercede. Before Trump, there had been only three federal executions since 1963; in January 2021, Trump oversaw three executions during a single four-day stretch Two years before that stretch, Trump had signed perhaps the lone broadly popular major initiative of his presidency: a bipartisan criminal-justice reform bill. By 2020, however, his political calculus had changed.

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My journey to meet the people herding frozen leviathans on the maritime frontier.

The post The Iceberg Cowboys Who Wrangle the Purest Water on Earth appeared first on Nautilus.

Following the money behind a Texas lawsuit against Beto O’Rourke that could pave the way for punishing political candidates who criticize wealthy donors.

Susan Glasser at the New Yorker also takes a look at the GOP field and her observation about Pompeo is especially tart: Most, like the former Vice-President, take the route of simply avoiding unpleasant facts from the Trump years that do not fit with the story they want to tell. Which pretty much sums up the state of Republican discourse headed into the 2024 election cycle. At least Pence admits that January 6th happened, and that it was wrong. In the latest example of the genre, Pompeo’s new memoir, “Never Give an Inch,” published this week, manages more or less to skip the catastrophic ending to the Trump Presidency, aside from offhand references to January 6th as “the mayhem at the Capitol” that “the Left wants to exploit for political advantage.” This is known, in my household, as “pulling a Kayleigh”—a feat of political contortion Peter and I have named in honor of Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump press secretary who managed to publish an entire 2021 memoir, “For Such a Time as This: My Faith Journey Through the White House and Beyond,” that never so much as mentions the insurrection at the Capitol.

Australians deserve an independent ABC. Not one that purposely mirrors other often politically compromised reporting, like Murdoch media, to avoid "left-wing" labels. read now...

Let's save some lives!

Doctor Who Showrunner Russell T. Davies covered a lot of ground in a recent interview, including "Star Trek" influencing his return & more.

I’ve been writing and saying on various radio shows and podcasts over the past few months that even in his weakened state, at this point in the cycle (granted way too early to make any serious predictions) Trump is still the most likely nominee for the GOP nomination. There are reasons for this that have little to do with his popularity (which is still pretty strong in the base.) It’s a structural problem for the GOP which they refuse to deal with. This piece in the Daily Beast spells it out well: If you’re one of the millions of Americans who want desperately for the country to move on from Donald Trump and his toxic brand of politics, I’ve got some bad news—he’s the odds-on favorite to be the 2024 Republican nominee for president. I don’t make the rules here (and I’m not happy about it either), but the numbers don’t lie. In the latest poll from the polling firm Morning Consult, Trump is winning 49 percent of the GOP field, which gives him a 19 percentage point lead over his nearest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Chris Hedges speaks with film producer and brother of Julian Assange, Gabriel Shipton, on his new film about his family’s journey to get Julian free.

The post The Chris Hedges Report: Will Julian Assange Ever Be Free? appeared first on scheerpost.com.

~ Today's Water Cooler ~

Sven Nyholm, currently associate professor of philosophy at Utrecht University, will be joining the Faculty of Philosophy at LMU Munich, where he will be Professor of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Professor Nyholm works in applied ethics (especially the ethics of technology), ethical theory, and the history of ethics. You can learn more about his work here and here. He takes up his new position at LMU Munich this summer. (via Christian List)

The best thing Biden ever did was to refuse to give Trump the customary ex-president security clearance: He said creating a new health care plan would be “so easy” too….

Gold ruble in the works? Longish. Many details. Speculative so far.

Supply of main battle tanks will commit the NATO allies and partners to the war in a way that makes their involvement irreversible and could be effectively the first major step toward a war with Russia. The tactical advantages provided by main battle tanks (MBTs) are readily apparent to anyone that has been inside a Continue reading »

Western powers appear to have no viable strategy to bring the Ukraine war to an end. The best they can do is keep Ukraine on life support. But, as Sun Tzu put it, tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Imagine if Ukraine had capitulated three days after the Russian invasion commenced in February Continue reading »

A spate of articles have argued protection of the environment is incompatible with population and economic growth. But they do not address how to stop this growth and its public acceptability, nor how more determined efforts to protect the environment can succeed. Over the last few weeks Pearls and Irritations has posted several articles asserting Continue reading »

‘Australian history does not read like history but like the most beautiful lies.’ – Mark Twain, 1897 65,000 BCE Homo sapiens first arrived in Australia about 65,000 years before ‘the common era’, or BCE.  We cannot pin down a specific day for their arrival. We don’t use the abbreviations AD or BC of the Christian Continue reading »

The Voice – up against Dutton and the Greens on a unity ticket; surely there is no case for Stage 3 tax cuts; and the Liberals’ election post-mortem. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, reports, podcasts and other media on current political and economic issues in public policy. Many say that Continue reading »