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Dear Mr. Jame Egan, Chief Executive Officer at Lumon Industries,

First, I congratulate you on implementing the severance procedure, which successfully blocks your employees’ memories and knowledge from the outside world when they are at work so they can completely focus on their jobs, unencumbered by distractions from what is happening out there.

The procedure is so wonderful that I want to join your organization as a full-time employee—and I do mean “full-time.” I would like you to set the severance device in my brain fully on “innie” mode for the next four years. I am willing to work nonstop for the entire time if it allows me to avoid the panic attacks I have every day from hearing the news about teenage social media influencers becoming senior government advisors.

When power oppresses, civil society must hold it to account. Like media and the arts, university campuses in Australia have become sites of censorship and suppression of free speech on the question of Palestine. In fact, the level of repression faced by pro-Palestine staff and students, and the stifling atmosphere, have led to the establishment Continue reading »

The melodramatic media story about the small Chinese naval flotilla exercising with “live” ammunition off the Australian and New Zealand coasts has run solid for more than a week. I’m beginning to suspect the Chinese military may have a sense of humour. Here the political snafu, led by the ABC, has been fixated by the Continue reading »

Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, addressed the UN Security Council on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question. A video of the session from UN TV can be can viewed below. Daniel’s statement is from minute 22.00 to minute 34.40. Text of statement Thank you to the Council and Continue reading »

I don’t know if you noticed, but the federal election campaign began on Sunday. The date of the election has yet to be announced – it may be mid-April or mid-May – but hostilities have begun. And they began with an issue that’s been big in election campaigns for 50 years: Medicare. On Sunday, Anthony Continue reading »

For a self-promoted tough guy — particularly if it involves refugee women and children — Peter Dutton’s career has been marked by many instances of being missing in action. Abul Rizvi (P&I 6/2/20) wrote that: “For years now Peter Dutton has boasted of his border protection achievements. But a brief examination of the detail of Continue reading »

The Bureau of Prisons rescinded rules shielding trans women from being searched by male guards, The Intercept has learned.

The post Trump Administration Abolishes Rules Protecting Trans Prisoners appeared first on The Intercept.

People say they care about climate change. Why won’t they talk about it?

Following is an unedited, automated transcript for the Lever Time episode “The Planet is Heating Up Whether You Care or Not.”

The maelstrom of the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidency doesn’t show any signs of winding down. Each day brings another atrocity, whether it’s randomly firing massive numbers of workers, purging the Department of Justice and the Pentagon, slashing the FAA and the National Weather Service, rolling back civil rights regulations, eviscerating the scientific research infrastructure of the country and destroying our health and safety organizations. The entire nation is reeling from the wrecking ball Elon Musk has taken to the federal government. Meanwhile, Trump himself is busily tearing up the global order and working hard to blow up the economy with his daft misunderstanding of how things actually work. A case in point, his continued insistence that tariffs are not paid for by a country’s own businesses and consumers. Reporter: Americans who are concerned about higher prices believe, as most people do, that tariffs are paid by consumers and importers when they import things into this country.

Social media posts using generative AI were widely circulated by far-right supporters and the AfD

More “Coming soon to an election near you” Think you’ve seen everything? N.C. Republicans propose that future voter registration drives be conducted with sample forms — facsimiles, not official forms. The sample forms shall be “for informational purposes only and shall not provide spaces for an individual to fill in the individual’s personal information.” So, Republicans would like to see voter registration drives that don’t actually register voters, just provide information on how someone might register on their own. It takes a criminal mind. Anyone who uses a genuine form in their voter registration drive shall be a Class 2 misdemeanor under proposed House Bill 127. Of course, there is a lot of heat coming down over N.C. Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin’s Trumpish attempt to steal a state Supreme Court seat.

A decades-old Israeli blueprint to break Syria into ethno-states is taking shape, with Tel Aviv deepening ties to Syria's Druze as a tool to secure new territorial gains.

The post Ethno-State Strategy: Israel’s Backing of Druze Militias Is Reshaping Syria’s Borders appeared first on MintPress News.

If you are familiar with DiS1972, you know that this little cookbook is one of my favorites and one I go back to again and again.  Today’s drink originated at the The Blind Melon of Cincinnati Ohio. I always do a little research to see if any of the establishments featured in these Benson &Continue reading Benson & Hedges 100’s Presents Drink Recipes from 100 of the Greatest Bars: Howard’s Surprise (1979) →

“Gallery-goers might have been outraged not only because of the work’s simplicity—it is a 79.5-centimeter-square canvas bordered thickly in gray and white, filled in with black paint—but because it was not even a square.”

A rotating guest column in which writers reexamine critically unacclaimed works of art

In 1915, long before the release of Spinal Tap, and longer still before sculptor Anish Kapoor purchased the rights to Vantablack, the Polish Russian artist Kazimir Malevich first exhibited Black Square in Saint Petersburg, at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 (called simply “zero-ten”). The number indicated a “point zero” for a new arts movement, suprematism—from whence all possibility might begin—and for the ten featured artists. “Up until now… painting was the aesthetic side of a thing, but never was original and an end in itself,” Malevich wrote in a handout accompanying the exhibition.

Friday’s economic boycott is a one-day attack on corporate interests. The degrowth movement calls for a broader societal shift.

The post How to Turn an “Economic Blackout” Into an All-Out War on Corporate Power appeared first on The Intercept.

It was, with the somewhat unexpected return of Jadis, White Witch and Queen of Narnia and Empress of the Lone Islands, the hopes of this Editorial Board that Queen Jadis’s second reign would be marked by more understanding and compassion than her first reign was. In some ways, we feel that in the instability of these times, there have been moments of alarm combined with moments of a return to normalcy.

For many Narnians, the reign of High King Peter, Queen Susan, King Edmund, and Queen Lucy was an era of fraught political tensions. Having begun their reign with a war against the forces of the White Witch, many felt that these four rulers failed to unite all of Narnia behind their cause. While a significant number of Narnians pointed to the Pevensie monarchs’ association with Aslan as a net positive, a vocal plurality stated that, as he is the son of the Emperor-over-the-Sea, he should have focused his efforts on improving Aslan’s Land, instead of inserting undue foreign influence over Narnian monarch selection.

Labour has announced plans to make the same amount of welfare cuts proposed by the Conservative Government, writes Kasmira Kincaid and Charles Aprile

In an endnote to The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (2021), Cynthia Cruz explains that she uses the phrase ‘working class and poor’ because often, ‘to be working class is to be poor.’ That such a statement appears obvious – and grounded in the overwork and underpayment that exists in most […]

So, Nick Kristoff is crying about USAid, and I agree, mostly:

I’m hearing from experts around the world about what the destruction of USAID is meaning: “a global health massacre,” in the words of a doctor who has devoted her life to humanitarian work on the front lines. Millions of malnourished children left to starve. Pregnant women not getting micronutrients to prevent neural tube defects. Programs against schistosomiasis abandoned. HIV positive patients left without ARV’s. Water no longer purified. Surveillance against Ebola and bird flu set back. TB patients unable to get medicine. I’ve long argued that USAID should be reformed, but this Trump/Musk demolition is cruel and incompetent and benefits China, while killing children just as wonderful as our own.

The UK Government's big increase in defence spending will likely hugely benefit Reform UK's biggest donor

An artist receiving long-overdue recognition reflects on the motifs of circles and numbers that have inspired her all along

- by Psyche Film

Watch at Psyche

Byung-Chul Han’s relentless critiques of digital capitalism reveal how this suffocating system creates hollowed-out lives

- by Josh Cohen

Read at Aeon

Anat Shenker-Osorio and Sunjeev Bery discuss sustained civil resistance on The Intercept Briefing.

The post How to Really Resist appeared first on The Intercept.