From Russell T. Davies's fairytale tropes to "Mrs. Flood" clues and more, here's our deep dive into Doctor Who S01 finale, "Empire of Death."
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More smackdowns, please Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) brought some heat to her stumping in Nevada for Joe Biden this week. This, this is what I’m talking about. Behold: But what little coverage AOC’s appearance drew missed the fire. Las Vegas Sun: “For women and gender diverse people, it is life and death,” said Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., during a discussion about reproductive rights Thursday in Las Vegas. Ocasio-Cortez later appeared in downtown Las Vegas for a rally to support Biden’s reelection campaign. “It’s not hyperbole. It’s reality.” And Axios? Axios felt the need to both-sides Democrats, placing more emphasis on dissension in the ranks than on her message: AOC holds first 2024 rally for Biden as progressives rage over Gaza. This is what Democrats fight in convincing progressive voices and younger voters that their vote is their voice, that their vote is their power, that their power matters, and that Democrats have their backs. If there is media bias, it is against progressives’ most powerful voices. Democrats themselves are uneasy about putting up a public fight.
Plus, a judge rejects a fossil-fueled lawsuit, the IRS keeps going after the rich, shots are fired against a deadly disease, and cannabis convictions vanish.
Perfection rarely is A casual friend introduced me to his buddy at a public concert last night. The usual. Tom works with the Democratic Party, etc. The buddy replied with the familiar “fed up with both parties” bit. Rebecca Solnit wrote about that stance in 2016: Cynicism is first of all a style of presenting oneself, and it takes pride more than anything in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both these things. That the attitude that prides itself on world-weary experience is often so naïve says much about the triumph of style over substance, attitude over analysis. […] If you set purity and perfection as your goals, you have an almost foolproof system according to which everything will necessarily fall short. But expecting perfection is naïve; failing to perceive value by using an impossible standard of measure is even more so. Cynics are often disappointed idealists and upholders of unrealistic standards.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: The Walking Dead: Dead City, The Boys, Doctor Who, IWTV, OMITB, Suicide Squad ISEKAI, Yellowstone, and more!
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. No vax/anti-vax.
. My favourite French teacher. Not only does he speak at a pace that makes it possible to follow along, but he also has interesting thoughts about the things he discusses. Highly recommendable!
The administration says the “Azov Brigade” is separate from the old, Nazi-linked “Azov Battalion.” The unit itself says they’re the same.
The post The U.S. Says a Far-Right Ukrainian Army Unit Can Now Get Aid. A Photo Shows Training Was Already Happening. appeared first on The Intercept.
Palestinians have experienced 70 or 80 years of dispossession, occupation, and human rights violations. Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On June 13, I analysed the report of The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel for the UN’s Human Rights Council, which found Hamas guilty of war crimes and found Continue reading »
The army probe identified numerous examples of Israeli forces targeting Israeli civilians, as well as overreacting or failing to act on October 7. Mainstream media has smeared The Grayzone for exposing Israel’s “Hannibal Directive” scandal months ago. Editor’s note: The Washington Post and Israel’s Haaretz have published numerous scurrilous and error-filled attacks on The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and other colleagues for helping expose the Israeli military’s deliberate killing of Israeli civilians while held captive by Palestinian militants on October 7. […]
The post Israeli army probe finds multiple cases of friendly fire on October 7 first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Israeli army probe finds multiple cases of friendly fire on October 7 appeared first on The Grayzone.
Doctor Who Season 1 finale "Empire of Death," sees Russell T. Davis answering all of the big questions with both bombast and poignance.
Two beluga whales are rescued from war-ravaged Kharkiv, Ukraine and taken to an aquarium in Spain. Salma Abdelaziz has more on their remarkable journey. pic.twitter.com/Tnll5fryp9 — Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) June 21, 2024 From the New York Times ( good news gift link for you!) It was a whale of an evacuation. Actually, two. In what experts said was among the most complex marine mammal rescue ever undertaken, the pair of beluga whales were extricated from an aquarium in the battered city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and transported to Europe’s largest aquarium in Valencia, Spain, on Wednesday morning. As Russian aerial bombardments of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, have intensified, the evacuation of Plombir, a 15-year-old male, and Miranda, a 14-year-old female, came just in time, marine mammal experts said. “If they had continued in Kharkiv, their chances of survival would have been very slim,” said Daniel Garcia-Párraga, director of zoological operations at Oceanogràfic de Valencia, who helped lead the rescue. Belugas, whose natural habitat is the Arctic, need cold water to survive.
This time it’s for “debauchery” This morning I wrote about the use of the Comstock Act and other zombie laws to help the right take America back to the 1890s. Get a load of this one: A government watchdog group filed suit in Delaware federal court this week, seeking to compel the Justice Department to produce records that may determine whether Hunter Biden should be further investigated under a 1910 law relating to “prostitution or debauchery.” The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project petitioned the same Wilmington bench where Biden was found guilty on gun charges this month, contending that there is a significant amount of evidence the first son was being probed on Mann Act grounds. The law, stemming from a time when prostitution was more prevalent in urban areas, states it is a felony to “knowingly transport… in interstate or foreign commerce… any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery.” The legal brief, obtained by Fox News Digital, includes part of a 2023 interview transcript from IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler before the House Ways & Means Committee.
Trump keeps telling his fans that he doesn’t need any votes. He says he has more than enough. He says everything depends on stopping Democrats from “cheating” (by which he means voting.) So it makes sense that they wouldn’t be putting much effort into get out the vote. They figure they don’t really need it. Bill Sher at the Washington Monthly discusses the Trump “ground game” here and it turns out that they’re outsourcing it to a grifter. Yep: CNN reported that “Donald Trump’s campaign is taking a vastly different approach to 2024 compared with 2020, with plans for fewer staff and expenses [and instead] relying on wealthy conservative groups for data, infrastructure, and significant bank accounts.” It further noted that one of the most important of these groups is Turning Point Action, part of the Turning Point network that began with Turning Point USA. Turning Point USA is a right-wing student group founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk, an 18-year-old soon-to-be college dropout, and Bill Montgomery, an elderly Tea Party activist. You know about Kirk by now.
Issue 55 of the Nautilus print edition is our Rebel Issue. It includes contributions from science writer Elena Kazamia, astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter, film producer Namir Khaliq, philosopher Jonathon Keats, and more. This issue also features new illustrations by Angie Wang and Mark Belan.
The post Print Edition 55: The Rebel Issue appeared first on Nautilus.
The summer after I graduated college, a group of friends and I moved out west and lived together in Berkeley, California. There were about ten of us in Rochdale Village, a complex of student cooperative housing on Haste Street, just off Telegraph Avenue, not far from the Berkley campus. I hadn’t thought about those apartments, or their name, till this afternoon, when I was reading Marx’s chapter on cooperation (chapter 11) in the first volume of Capital. I’m reading Capital in a new and amazing translation by Paul Reitter; it’s edited by Paul North. Wendy Brown has a foreword, and Will Roberts has an afterward. It’s due out this September. I’ll be reviewing it. In the middle of chapter 11, […]
In today’s excellent newsletter, Brian Beutler is absolutely right about this. We know that most of the kvetching about the economy at this point is coming from Republicans and even then they are reporting that their own finances are fine it’s everyone else who is suffering terribly under the horrors of Joe Biden’s economy. There are some independents and Democrats who are complaining as well which is where the real problem lies. Beutler points out that this phenomenon is asymmetric: [S]urvey data reliably shows that Republican economic sentiment is much, much more sensitive to partisan control of the White House than Democratic sentiment. Republican voters are trained by their media, or acculturated by their communities, to dissemble about their economic sentiments depending on who’s president—or, more generously, to feel so invested in who holds power in America that they lose touch with reality. Every poll like this one from Monmouth will sweep in voters whose responses are tethered to facts, and others, mostly Republicans, whose responses are shaped by partisanship and tribalism.
Labor’s cowardice on the world stage stems from a deep-rooted fear that to do anything other than slavishly follow American policy would be to hand government over to a Coalition which has always done exactly that. The trouble being that, as the cringe of Labor perceives it, many if not most Australians are comfortable with Continue reading »
One’s immediate thought on looking at any of the multitude of photos of the devastation of Gaza is a profound sense of sorrow and grief at the capacity of humans to wreak such destruction and suffering. There is mind-numbing despair at the plight of children who have lost everything – their parents, other family members, Continue reading »
Former Australian defence force chief and admiral retired, Chris Barrie frankly discusses with Michael Lester his deep concerns that Australia is complacent in its unwillingness to face up to the threat to our national security posed by global climate change. Barrie speaks of his years of campaigning and advocacy on the issue and characterises government Continue reading »
In Asian media this week: Anwar slams ‘insane’ US over Gaza. Plus: Putin, Kim reduce dependence on Beijing; Where child brides are considered normal; India prosecutes Arundhati Roy for Kashmir speech; American arms-makers struggle to match China; Big cities become lethal heat traps. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is in conflict with many Western countries Continue reading »