Reading

The Great Gatsby,
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they bought regular kibble, even when specifically asked to get hairball control, and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess that Mr. Fancybiscuits had made. When confronted, they only said, “Isn’t this why we have servants?”

Macbeth
by William Shakespeare

LADY MACBETH
Out, damned spot, out, I say! All the
Perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this
Carpet. T’was I cleaned up the last one. Methinks
I shall feign walking in my sleep—to bed,
To bed! Yet who would have thought Graymalkin
to have had so much puke in him?

Enter Macbeth

MACBETH
This is a sorry sight.

LADY MACBETH
Can’t hear you—sleepwalking.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

The deliberate extermination of a large population group or nation, aiming to eradicate their future, is genocide. According to the International Court of Justice, Israel’s war amounted to genocide resulting in the deaths of 48,156 Palestinians including 17,841 children. Both major parties have supported Israel’s war and the supply of intelligence and arms. It’s time Continue reading »

This week’s big China threat story is DeepSeek, an Open-Source AI (artificial intelligence) platform that the alarmists are signalling is further proof China is stealing our personal data. Those shouting loudest are the right-wing free marketeers but what are we to make of Wall Street greeting the rise of DeepSeek by wiping $1 trillion off Continue reading »

Last Tuesday night (2 am AEDT – 10 am US EST), the Doomsday Clock yet again moved its hands closer than ever towards midnight. ‘Midnight’ in this context means an event sequence that would destroy what we call ‘civilisation’, and probably involve the deaths of all or most humans as well as cataclysmic impacts on Continue reading »

The letter below was sent to Prime Minister Albanese on 24 January 2025. In it, I refer to the abduction of Professor Rasha Al-Ali from the University of Homs. Reports indicate that Dr Al-Ali’s body has been found and that – either before or after her murder – her fingers were cut off. Her abduction Continue reading »

Towards the end of his book, after referring to the NACC initial decision not to investigate alleged misbehaviour and to the completion of the APSC’s code of conduct investigation, Rick Morton states: ‘a large group of the senior management of the Australian Public Service … would like that to be the end of things, as Continue reading »

On 10 September 2024 federal aviation minister Catherine King gave Melbourne Airport the go-ahead to build a third runway. Eighteen months earlier, on 10 February 2023, Melbourne Airport’s owner, Australia Pacific Airports Melbourne (APAM) submitted its draft Third Runway Major Development Plan to the Minister, for her approval.  The federal Airports Act specifies what APAM Continue reading »

Donald Trump and the MAGA gang point to the ‘massive mandate’ he obtained to justify any policy he may implement. There is, of course, a lot of debate about so-called mandates which seem to be less about some enduring principle and more about a flexible justification for what you want to do. Looking at the Continue reading »

Yu-Book Lim used to head a Singapore think tank and was Executive Chairman of IMC Plantations before that. He has just published an extended, thought-provoking essay: “Xi Jinping’s “Once-in-a-Century Upheaval” Prophecy.  Towards the end of this article, Mr Lim confidently argues that: “The US will become a has-been like the UK, albeit still suffering from Continue reading »

The problem with political analysis is that it often lacks historical perspective and is mostly limited to recent events. The current analysis of the Israeli war on Gaza falls victim to this narrow thinking. The ceasefire agreement, signed between Palestinian groups and Israel under Egyptian, Qatari, and US mediation in Doha on January 15, is Continue reading »

But this represents millions of our fellow Americans: Philip Bump discusses how COVID lies ended up helping Trump and how it’s affecting the way Republicans see the health institutions today: After insisting with crossed fingers that the coronavirus wouldn’t pose a significant risk to the United States, Trump in early 2020 endorsed broad restrictions aimed at limiting the spread of the virus. The economy stumbled. His reelection bid looming, Trump reverted to trying to wish the whole thing away. He turned government officials such as Anthony S. Fauci into scapegoats, casting them as hyperventilating scolds. The politics of Trump’s base are heavily predicated on rejecting authority, so the play worked like a charm. In fact, it outran Trump, whose support for the rapid development of vaccines targeting the virus became something of an albatross among Republicans who viewed the inoculations as left-wing nonsense.

Subtlety is not their agenda I’ve long described the right-wing policy ratchet this way: Find the line. Step over it. Dare anyone to push them back. No pushback, or if it fails? New line. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. That was timorous, beta pre-Trumpism. The authoritarian goal today is no line at all. David Graham describes Trump 2.0’s stumble over pausing funding already allocated by Congress as more than ineptitude. “It’s part of a carefully thought-out program of grabbing power for the executive branch,” and not simply chaos, but “a battle over priorities within the Republican Party.” They may mismanage business, but they still mean business: “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” Trump’s nominee to head the OMB, Russell Vought, wrote in Project 2025, the blueprint for a conservative administration created by the Heritage Foundation, a Trump-aligned right-wing think tank.

Whereas increasing the difference between a model and its target system may have the advantage that the model becomes easier to study, studying a model is ultimately aimed at learning something about the target system. Therefore, additional approximations come with the cost of making the correspondence between model and target system less straight- forward. Ultimately, […]

Let’s face it: Electing Donald Trump was nothing short of a suicidal act. And that’s something we humans seem to have a genuine knack for these days. If you don’t believe me, just consider those record-setting burned-out areas around Los Angeles. Admittedly, that was Nature (with a capital N), but given a grim helping hand by You Know Who. You can thank big oil, big coal, and big natural gas for that (and, in the future, add President Donald Trump to that list in a big-time way). Yes, things do turn out to burn far more fiercely on an overheating planet. And they get wetter faster, too (though not in Los Angeles when rain was truly needed). The phrase now is “climate whiplash,” and if... Read more

Source: Call Him Apocalyptic Don appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

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They don’t sprout from thin air The roll-out of Trump 2.0’s “shock and awe” effort has been pretty rocky. This week’s attempt by Trump to “pause” billions in spending on Donald’s whim caused mass chaos across the land. There was enough backlash and a court order pausing the pause that the administration covered up its backtracking by announcing it had rescinded the memo announcing the pause but not the executive commands behind it. (Never admit mistakes.) Yet already one sees critics taking solace in the apparent inability of the Project 2025 team to implement it’s 900-page vision for remaking America as a white-Christian-nationalist dictatorship. But they won’t stop. Ideologues like these are relentless and committed. Wired reports that “the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk” and to tech industry movers like JD Vance mentor, billionaire Peter Thiel.

A network of Swiss security officials and pro-Israel lobbyists worked behind the scenes to orchestrate Abunimah’s arrest and expulsion, raising new concerns about political policing in Europe.

The post Swiss Intelligence, Pro-Israel Groups Coordinated to Silence Palestinian Journalist Ali Abunimah appeared first on MintPress News.

“It’s not cake!” my wife screamed as the cleaver split the thermostat in our foyer. I pushed past her and sank my chef’s knife into the Ethan Allen sofa we had bought when we moved. Goose down spilled out of the gash. I looked at my wife and grimaced.

“Not cake!” our children screeched as they danced in the floating feathers.

Seven days prior, we had been selected for a new Netflix game show, Is It Cake? Extreme Home Edition. Once we’d signed the paperwork, we spent one night at the La Quinta off the interstate while the producers replaced one item in our home with a perfect replica made of cake. We had to find the cake within seven days in order to win the grand prize of $75,000. Our time would be up at sunset today, and the sun was getting very low in the sky.

“Hurry!” my wife shrieked. “Where is the cake?”

I tried to think. I had sledgehammered the pet memorial markers in the backyard to make sure no cake was hidden inside of them. My wife had crashed her Passat into my parked Honda Pilot to make sure the cars were not cake. After the children had gone to bed on Day 6, I had torn apart our modest collection of sex toys. Still no cake.

With no congressional debate or public mandate, the administration’s decision to target Yemen’s ruling movement raises questions about whether Israeli interests are once again shaping US foreign policy.

The post A War for America or a War for Israel? Trump Moves to Crush Yemen’s Houthis appeared first on MintPress News.