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Fri, 10/05/2024 - 04:00
Scratch his back and he’ll scratch theirs The Washington Post reports: As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year. Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation. Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people He doesn’t need to hide it because he knows that nothing will ever happen to him. He has “immunity” from accountability for everything in life and always has.
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Fri, 10/05/2024 - 03:00

Despite near-constant whining about how impossible it is to be a mother, really, it’s simple: you just have to be perfect. No, not like that. Not annoyingly perfect, like a show-off or something. You need to be effortless and self-deprecating in your perfection. Not that self-deprecating—is this a joke to you? Are you mocking the moms out there who are struggling? Honestly, how hard is it to be perfect in a precise, scientifically calibrated way designed to be 100 percent infallible without ever being exhausted, needing a break, or losing your cool for a single second from the time your children are born until each one goes to college?

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Fri, 10/05/2024 - 02:00
Instead of being on the campaign trail Donald Trump flew down to Mar-a-Lago to host a dinner for people who bought his NFTs. I assume he made money on the party. NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are part of a suite of non-campaign-focused ventures that Trump has been balancing with his White House run and his legal issues throughout 2023 and 2024. After Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump, the former president told reporters that he’d like to be campaigning as opposed to being tied up in a courtroom. Over the last three years, Trump has used naming rights agreements with Florida-based LLCs to personally profit off his name and likeness. Financial disclosure statements showed that Trump made at least a six-figure dollar amount from his previous “superhero” NFT digital trading cards. Trump has previously used similarly structured LLCs to promote and sell a Trump sneaker line, a Trump branded perfume and cologne, and a pricey copy of the Bible.
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Fri, 10/05/2024 - 00:31
“It’s about trends” — former Sen. Claire McCaskill Signs don’t vote, say campaign veterans when anxious partisans freak out over seeing large numbers of opponents’ signs around the neighborhood. On the other hand, they can be an indication of how the neighborhood is trending. Right now, “signs” are trending Joe Biden’s way. Quinnipiac: President Joe Biden leads former President Donald Trump 50 – 44 percent in a head-to-head matchup, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University poll of registered voters in Wisconsin released today. Democrats (97 – 2 percent) and independents (50 – 43 percent) back Biden, while Republicans (95 – 3 percent) back Trump. CNN describes 6 points as “a slim lead.” Explain that one. The race is too close to call with third party candidates included in Quinnipiac’s accounting. On MSNBC, former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) was measuredly optimistic. Individual polls are not important. “It’s about trends.” And right now, things are trending Biden’s way.
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Thu, 09/05/2024 - 23:32

Persisting in his support for an unpopular war, the Democrat in the White House has helped spark a rebellion close to home. Young people — least inclined to deference, most inclined to moral outrage — are leading public opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The campus upheaval is a clash between accepting and resisting, while elites insist on doing maintenance work for the war machine. I wrote the above words recently, but I could have written very similar ones in the spring of 1968. (In fact, I did.) Joe Biden hasn’t sent U.S. troops to kill in Gaza, as President Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam, but the current president has done all he can to provide massive quantities of... Read more

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Thu, 09/05/2024 - 23:01

When COVID struck Rebecca Saltzman’s family, the virus unmasked a life-changing discovery: her husband and two of their kids had genetic heart disease. The kind where people drop dead. As their healthy wife and mother, Saltzman had a new role too—guiding her family through what Susan Sontag called the Kingdom of the Sick. In this column, she’ll explore the anthropological strangeness of this new place, the mysteries of the body, and how facing death distills life into its purest form: funny, terrifying, and sublime.

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Thu, 09/05/2024 - 23:00
It was good enough for British loyalists “By what right does a judge put a former president in prison?” asks former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Why … why, that judge was appointed! Donald Trump appointed nearly twice as many judges in four years as Barack Obama did in eight, but who’s counting? Newt’s on a roll. Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, was born in Columbia. And we know what Team Trump thinks of immigrants and immigrant judges, even if they’re not immigrants. Now this Columbian-born, immigrant judge appointed by that notorious yankee state of New York may send Trump to jail for contempt of court. The effrontery! “By what right?” asks Gingrich of Georgia does a judge dare apply the same law made for commoners to the MAGA king? Jon Stewart recently suggested that if Republicans are going to insist on such “monarchy shit” they should at least signify by wearing red coats. Gingrich is hardly alone in assailing the heirs of Blackstone and equal justice.
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Thu, 09/05/2024 - 22:01

Nobody noticed it, but the funniest thing happened when Hugo Chavez visited Britain in 2006. At the Camden Centre, a large art deco town hall in Central London near the British Library, the event hosted by then London Mayor Ken Livingstone was packed out with young people, suddenly more curious and more left-leaning thanks to […]

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Thu, 09/05/2024 - 20:42
May 1 2024 William White is right (Letters, April 29) to say that John Maynard Keynes regarded the rate of interest as “highly conventional”, but he should have quoted the whole sentence from chapter 15 of The General Theory: “The difficulties in the way of [full employment] ensue from the association of a conventional and … Continue reading Letter: The reason Keynes argued for an active fiscal policy
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Thu, 09/05/2024 - 20:32
Robert was recently interviewed by Martin Burckhardt, the German cultural philosopher, about his new book The Machine Age in Germany. Below is a link to a video of the interview: Link: https://martinburckhardt.substack.com/p/talking-to-robert-skidelsky Below are some AI generated visualisation ideas extracted from the transcript of Robert and Martin’s conversation.