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James Joyce: “Maaaaaam, oh, maaaaaaaaa…”

Albert Camus (to a concerned Big Lots manager): “Lost maman in home goods today. Or maybe it was yesterday.”

George Orwell: “Mom, The Party is holding me at checkout for thoughtcrime (throwing hangers at store security cameras).”

Herman Melville (to Costco employee): “When we find her, please don’t tell mom I said she’s my white whale.”

Emily Dickinson (scribbled on an old receipt and hidden under a dressing room bench):

Mom—ma—
Mother, come—quick, or I’ll be found—
by no one.

Ernest Hemingway: “I’m scared. That’s all.”

Third party intervention led by the US and France has achieved a ceasefire in Lebanon. The US now needs to push for a settlement in Gaza where the combatants withdraw, and an external force is charged with maintaining the peace. A ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon came into effect at 4 am local time on Continue reading »

From the Committee to Protect Journalists: “The Israel-Gaza war has taken an unprecedented toll on Gazan journalists since Israel declared war on Hamas following its attack against Israel on October 7, 2023. As of November 26, 2024, CPJ’s preliminary investigations showed at least 137 journalists and media workers were among the more than tens of thousands killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Continue reading »

The US submarine base was always going to come first, not for the sake of supplying useless boats for Australia’s phantom defence needs, but for keeping an ever watchful US imperium stocked. When news comes from across the Pacific about AUKUS, that laborious, unequal trilateral pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, Continue reading »

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Like all policy instruments, the Future Fund was created to manage the challenges the country was facing at the time. The government has every right and reason to adjust and adapt the mandate to manage very different political and economic challenges today. The Future Fund (FF) was created by the Parliament at the time when the Continue reading »

The ACT Supreme Court was the scene of two uniquely powerful demonstrations of advocacy on the one evening last week. Justice Chrissa Loukas-Karlsson was presiding, with Chief Justice Lucy McCallum swapping her usual role of judge for that of examiner, before a gallery including Justice Louise Taylor, Acting Justices Rebecca Christensen and Richard Refshauge, and Continue reading »

Critics say the ruling Georgian Dream party has twice this week violated the country’s constitution following parliamentary elections now slammed by the EU as rigged

On November 27, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that he is seeking an arrest warrant against Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the head of Myanmar’s military junta, for his role in the commission of crimes against humanity against his country’s Rohingya minority. This announcement comes at an awkward moment for American politicians of Continue reading »

The leading expert on Russia says Trump’s bold claim to end the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours is highly unlikely to materialise, and only a just peace can lead to lasting peace. Below is a brief analysis by Feng Yujun, a leading Chinese expert on Russia, published in 海外看世界 Global China on November 12. Global Continue reading »

State-sponsored rape, lies and deception – then a cover-up operating right across official life. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian  28th November 2024 It’s the testimony we’ve long been waiting for. On Monday, at the undercover policing inquiry, the man whose cruel and disgusting deceptions have come to epitomise the “spy cops” scandal will […]

The Brazilian government indicted Jair Bolsonaro this week on charges that he tried to stage a coup to overturn the election in 2022. They are damning. Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, has moved a step closer to jail after a federal police investigation laid bare what it called a murderous authoritarian plot to explode the country’s democratic system with a military coup that the far-right populist allegedly helped mastermind. Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied involvement in an attempt to overturn the result of the 2022 presidential election, which he narrowly lost to his leftwing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But on Tuesday, an 884-page federal police report accused the former army captain of taking a lead role in planning and organizing the conspiracy and trying to persuade the most senior members of the military to join the criminal enterprise. Several top members of the armed forces allegedly agreed, including the commander of the navy, Adm Almir Garnier Santos, and the army’s ground operations commander Gen Estevam Theophilo.

I sin senaste bok — Superrika och jämlika — argumenterar Daniel Waldenström för att vi i Sverige idag är mer jämlika än någonsin. De flesta andra jämlikhetsforskare delar inte denna uppfattning. Vad stämmer egentligen? I dagens Starta Pressarna gästades Daniel Suhonen av Daniel Waldenström och medie- och kommunikationsvetaren Axel Vikström. I Tidningen Näringslivet kunde vi för […]

Recently French troops have had to leave Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. Now it’s Chad booting them.

The first three countries have Russian troops in them now. Wonder how long it’ll be before Chad joins the crowd?

France has been the most important country in a lot of its ex-colonies in Africa, but it’s losing its place, not just militarily but economically. Countries are turning to China for imported goods and development at the same time as they turn to Russia for security. Chinese goods, development and loans are cheaper, and neither Russia nor China interfere nearly as much in domestic politics.

It’s just a better deal. For a long time you HAD to go to the West, but now Russia and China can supply pretty much everything you need.

 

Hope for a third season of Russell T. Davies' Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson-starring Doctor Who got a big boost from a U.S./U.K. TV report.

Why does the right eat our lunch again? The existence of the infamous Powell memo (1971) is no secret to most lefty activists or to anyone who has listened to Thom Hartmann for more than 30 minutes. Movement conservatism sprouted in the 1970s in reaction to the social changes and liberalizing legislation of the 1960s. But the pushback was likely planted in the wake of Barry Goldwater’s landslide 1964 loss to Lyndon Johnson. Influential, deep-pocketed Republicans, back when they were also conservatives, knew their ideas were unpopular. They decided they needed a long-term marketing strategy to fulfill their antidemocratic visions for American oligarchy. Democrats (naively) never answered with marketing of their own. See, our ideas are popular, as self-evident as the Declaration’s ideals. They need no marketing. And here we are, decades later, facing an oligarchy led by a criminal autocrat bent on tearing down the country to its foundations. And the foundations too. Some of us who have been in this business since the Earth was young (O.G. Original Progressive Bloggers) reflect regularly on what might have been. Perhaps we’ll move from there to what to do now.

There is only one red line in this war and it’s one that Russia crosses daily

Climate Justice Alliance was the only program grantee to speak out on Palestine — and the only one whose funding is delayed.

The post Biden Makes His Own Attack on Nonprofit Over Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

Resistance is not futile yet It may feel as if half the U.S. has been hit with a Cordyceps brain infection that mindlessly seeks to spread submission to autocracy. But take heart. Pockets of resistance remain. In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, for instance (BBC): Riot police in Georgia used pepper spray and water cannon against protesters who turned out on the streets of Tbilisi after the government suspended moves to join the European Union. Forty-three people were arrested at the demonstrations in the capital on Thursday night, the government said. Crowds turned out after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said his government would drop its pursuit of EU membership “until the end of 2028” – a move criticised by more than 100 diplomats on Friday as “unconstitutional”. Kobakhidze had accused the bloc of “blackmail” after EU legislators called for last month’s parliamentary elections in Georgia to be re-run. They cited “significant irregularities”.

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

We didn’t often go to the movies as a whole family, but in 2002 we all saw Signs. This was back when we could be convinced to hit the theater en masse simply because a guy named Manoj—better known as “M. Night”—was making it big in Hollywood. This was a post-9/11, pre-representation time, before streaming services could serve us bespoke categories like “supernatural tearjerker Indian American mockumentaries.” I imagine that Indian American families like ours no longer feel that numinous sense of duty to turn out for films made by brown people. Now we can sit back and let a mediocre movie be, flapping in the wind, without pledging tribal fealty. It’s a kind of progress.

My daughter and I have three cats—all rescues: There’s Snow White, our 16-year-old queen and my daughter’s consigliere, who, despite requiring thrice-a-week medication injections to keep her kidneys functioning, rules this place absolutely. There’s subtle Mango, whose first year of life involved struggling to survive—and avoid human contact—in a weedy vacant lot adjoining the United Nations […]

The post Lessons from Cats: Jasper’s Clever Cleanup Routine appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am excited to apply for a seasonal position at Hobby Lobby. The holidays are a time of joy, and I look forward to creating a timeless masterpiece in big-box retail.

References (attached) say I’m a “Renaissance Man,” an unsurpassed polymath, the most curious man who ever lived. But the title I covet most is customer service associate.

Working the Christmas rush at Hobby Lobby would be my grandest vision fulfilled. No disrespect to your brand name, but crafts are no hobby to me. My whole life, my being, my soul, is DIY. Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. Or crocheted bobble beards.

I’m a dreamer, but more importantly, I’m a doer. Even a talent-free hack like Michelangelo had to admit, “Give Leo a glue gun and some balsa wood, and he’ll come back with an ornithopter.”