How our inhospitable neighbor can help us find life elsewhere.
The post Life Lessons from Hell-House Venus appeared first on Nautilus.
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Conservative justices, swimming in gifts from billionaire benefactors, just ruled that corruption is perfectly legal.
More Republicans should do that. That’s what I’m talking about. There must be some Indies and moderate GOPers who are getting tired of Trump’s whiny, sore-loserism. They can’t all have Fox News Brain Rot. Can they? Here’s another one:
Are hiking and biking incompatible with protecting wildlife?
The post We’re Polluting Our Forests—with Noise appeared first on Nautilus.
Despite the various factors that contributed to Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s loss, progressive strategists said there was one clear takeaway from the results.
The post Progressives on AIPAC’s Defeat of Bowman: “Now We Know How Much It Costs to Buy an Election” appeared first on The Intercept.
Here’s Dan Pfeiffer with a super-interesting newsletter about the Biden team’s message. [T]he concept of a “message box” … is an exercise every campaign should do at the outset. It’s a simple quadrant filled out to understand the message your campaign and your opponent’s campaign will communicate. While a little lost to time, a message box is still the fundamental building block of a successful campaign strategy. The best campaigns run every ad, tweet, speech, and statement through this filter to ensure they advance their message and undermine their opponent’s. For nearly a decade of running against Trump, Democrats have struggled with the lower left quadrant. We never really settled on a consistent argument about Trump. One of my maxims for politics (and life) is that the only thing worse than a wrong decision is no decision at all. That was the collective error our party made when it came to our anti-Trump message. We never picked one. He goes into the fact that Trump is notoriously difficult to define because he’s just such an asshole (my word not his) on every level.
The history of discrimination against gay people in our country — all countries, actually — is absolutely shameful. Biden took a step to rectify one of those past wrongs at long last: Joe Biden has moved to correct a “great injustice” by pardoning thousands of US veterans convicted over six decades under a military law that banned gay sex. The presidential proclamation, which comes during Pride month and an election year, allows LGBTQ+ service members convicted of crimes based solely on their sexual orientation to apply for a certificate of pardon that will help them receive withheld benefits. “Today, I am righting an historic wrong by using my clemency authority to pardon many former service members who were convicted simply for being themselves,” Biden said in a statement. “Despite their courage and great sacrifice, thousands of LGBTQ+ service members were forced out of the military because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
It would be the political persecution of the 21st Century. A publicly orchestrated campaign of mobbing, libelling and black balling by the most powerful country on the planet of a publisher who, using novel technological means, enlivened a moribund fourth estate by linking, ever more closely, the leaking whistleblower and the scribbling journalist. After 2010, Continue reading »
Much water has flown under the bridge since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the collapse of communism, and America’s triumphalist proclamation of a new world order. Three decades later America’s global dominance is under challenge as never before. In today’s world, the United States has to contend with Continue reading »
An open letter to Anthony Albanese, Prime Minister of Australia, Mr Dutton, Senator Wong, Senator Birmingham and Senator Patterson. Yesterday you, or your party, opposed a motion which would have encouraged Australia to join a growing majority of the world’s countries that recognise Palestine. Why did you do that? Dear Prime Minister, Mr Dutton, Senator Continue reading »
With much less drama than its famous 1971 Pentagon Papers, the New York Times has disclosed three documents confirming that Russia and Ukraine were close to war-ending agreements in the first half of 2022, shortly after Moscow began its so-called ‘special operation’ attack on Ukraine, February 24, 2022. The newspaper says it has obtained and Continue reading »
The media is abuzz with Dutton’s Nationals-inspired plan to go nuclear in terms of electricity, due to “aging coal plants” shutting down, as Insiders host David Speers put it on Sunday, yet he neglected to note that another reason coal’s no longer viable is its emissions are cooking the planet. Dutton announced on 19 May Continue reading »
This is a mildly edited part of my 1995 Boyer Lectures, which we have seriously failed to follow. I offer it now as evidence of our failure to include the social part of our lives in the Gross Domestic Product model of society by assuming monetised individuality and competition as the basis our futures! On Continue reading »
Australia’s mainstream media groups are trying to pressure the government in order to obtain funding to cover the $70 million that was provided by Facebook in a deal in 2021 and which the social media group has said it will not renew when the deal lapses later this year. The 2021 deal was made under Continue reading »
“At a public meeting in 1971, C.P. Ellis – head of the Ku Klux Klan in Durham, North Carolina – tore up his KKK membership card in what was basically an act of love. Some may know this story from the 2019 movie ‘The Best of Enemies’. One telling scene in the film is when Continue reading »
“The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position.” – Shanghai Communique, United States government, 1972 In his essay, Sleepwalking Towards War, eminent Yale scholar Odd Arne Continue reading »
Media Matters writes “We found 144 articles focused on either or both Biden’s and Trump’s ages or mental acuities in the period studied, with 67% focused just on Biden’s age or mental acuity and only 7% on just Trump’s.” And yes, people aren’t reading the papers much these days but that’s where social media “influencers” get their news and TV journalists take their cues. It’s not like Tik Tok stars are doing their own reporting.
It’s a universal modern-life experience to talk about something and immediately see an ad that seems like it must be a result of that conversation. Maybe you tell someone you’re planning a vacation and then start seeing advertisements for flights and hotels. Maybe you talk about how you want to take up running and find yourself bombarded by banners hawking sneakers. Perhaps you open up about how tough it is to be single and notice a series of sponsored posts about dating apps. When this happens, you might suspect your phone is “listening to your conversations.”
This belief is false and paranoid. We do not live in some tech dystopia in which our smartphones clandestinely use their mics to pick up every word we say and then feed us commercial messages based on them. The truth is simpler and not at all alarming: your phone only seems to be listening to you because it’s collecting data about every word you type, every website you visit, and, through GPS tracking, everywhere you go in the physical world.
An appeal, backed by prospective Labour MPs and members of the Trade Union Movement, has identified a number of key changes it wants a Starmer-led government to make to ensure that Ukraine wins the war