When the snake oil bites…. Trump is counting on you to be one of his rubes. Fans of Trumpism, even its operators, are going to feel its impacts very, very soon. Oh, and all y’all as well. The snake behind the oil is about to bite. CNN: Just about everyone thought it was a bluff. Top analysts from the biggest banks on Wall Street said it was highly unlikely. Stocks were trading like it wouldn’t happen. Some companies built contingency plans, but they weren’t exactly rushing to make changes. But the tariffs are coming — in full force. President Donald Trump announced Saturday that a massive 25% tariff on all goods from Mexico and most imports from Canada will go into effect Tuesday. An additional 10% tariff on Chinese goods will be enacted the same day. Trump in a message posted on Truth Social Sunday said, “We don’t need anything they have.
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“Elon Musk’s government-slashing crew, the ‘department of government efficiency,’ has been given access to the federal payment system, exposing the sensitive personal data of millions of Americans as well as details of public contractors who compete directly with Musk’s own businesses, an influential US senator has confirmed.” — The Guardian
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1. Find a functioning light bulb in a busy work area.
2. Strike the light bulb with a private-sector-manufactured hammer or other hard object.
3. Note any employee who pauses work at the noise or gets distracted. Refer them for Justice Department investigation.
4. Fire the first five people who try to sweep up the shards of glass. They are obviously Biden dead-enders who just want to maintain the wasteful and ineffective status quo.
5. Document the waste, fraud, and abuse of federal workers as they stumble around slowly in the dark, often bumping into each other and the walls of cubicles.
- by Aeon Video
- by Derek Jonathan Penslar
- by Elek Lane
Politicians are refusing to take meaningful action to resolve the perma-crisis in our health service, writes NHS Doctor, David Oliver
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February 3rd, 2025: You can confess anything at all as long as If, like me, you follow Ones and Tooze, you will know that Adam recently had heart surgery. It was a big deal. Luckily, America has some of the best surgeons in the world, to whom only a small handful of Americans have access – but Adam Tooze is one of them. In the episode dedicated […]
I am currently researching statistical and textual material as part of my plan to produce an updated version of my 2015 book – Eurozone Dystopia: Groupthink and Denial on a Grand Scale (published May 2015) – to take into account the pandemic, Brexit and other major changes that impact on Europe’s position in the world…
The other day I received an email from what might be one the few colleagues still checking into Twitter (most seem to have moved to Bluesky, as have I). The email was just a link with the subject title Did you see? I hadn’t. Gosh, I wrote in response (which I gather they found a little understated). My […]
Is this what MAGA voted for? Elon Musk’s takeover of federal government infrastructure is ongoing, and at the center of things is a coterie of engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college. Most have connections to Musk and at least two have connections to Musk’s longtime associate Peter Thiel, a cofounder and chairman of the analytics firm and government contractor Palantir who has long expressed opposition to democracy. WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer. Wired has now reported the names and backgrounds of all these young fellows.
The late journalist Alexander Cockburn had a good line on the legacy media. Referring to the little ‘Correction’ boxes that would appear most mornings in The New York Times, he suggested that the principal reason the paper made such a show of its fallibility was to bolster its reputation for veracity. In owning to these […]
The notion of the Anthropocene was first proposed twenty-four years ago by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen. It denotes a geological epoch defined by human activity, and remains an unofficial designation, with the International Commission on Stratigraphy—whose processes appear to be geologically slow—yet to approve it for technical use. Nevertheless, in that quarter of a […]
Six years ago, at the time of the first Trump administration’s Muslim ban and its initial round of vicious anti-immigrant policies, I visited a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos to see how Europe was handling its own immigrants and refugees. Within a day, I met two Syrians, Eyad Awwadawnan and Hasan Majnan, who had fled Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship only to end up in a filthy, overcrowded camp in a country that didn’t want them with a future they could not foresee. That was June 2018 and I’ve kept in touch with them both ever since. So, when Assad’s regime fell on December 8, 2024, ending two generations of perhaps the most murderous dictatorship in the modern... Read more Source: “The Lion Has Fallen!” appeared first on TomDispatch.com. This is an excerpt of a piece by legal expert Sam Bagenstos laying out a few of the illegal acts committed by Trump and Musk in the past two weeks.
Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has told colleagues that he has been doing the hard yards when it comes to Coalition policy, and will soon be announcing that he plans to convert the controversial, American designed Project 25, to the metric... Read More ›
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 02, 2025 By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy David Dayen, January 27, 2025 [The American Prospect] Israeli media has extensively discussed the implications of the recent prisoner exchange, emphasising the significant gains achieved by the Palestinian Resistance Movement, Hamas. Among the key figures expected to be released in the second phase of the deal are Marwan Barghouti, a senior Fatah leader (pictured above), and Ahmed Saadat, Secretary-General of the Popular Front Continue reading »
At 7,688,287 square kilometres Australia is the sixth largest country in the world. It is the oldest continent, also home to the oldest continuing civilisation, the history of Aboriginal people reaching back some 75,000 years. Why then, has such a large nation, with such long existence and a civilisation, become so small in its thinking? Continue reading »
Mark Dreyfus wrote an article in, The Guardian (29 January 2025) entitled, ‘ For my great-grandparents, for all Jews, for all humanity, I say never again ‘. Here is my response. I write to make people, who are not Jewish, aware that the Jewish community is not only not monolithic, but that many dissent from Continue reading »
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