Reading

A few weeks ago a friend of mine from Nicaragua visited. One aspect of American culture he admired was our lack of corruption.

“Oh dear, Marlon,” I replied. “We are a deeply corrupt nation. The difference between our two nations is that in Nicaragua you have both ‘corruption of the poor,’ such as bribes to police officers, bribes to health inspectors, home inspectors, low level bureaucrats and the like and ‘corruption of the rich’ which is usually institutionalized, a part of the legislative process, includes the corrupt purchase of large scale national rents collection, and is unambiguously unethical. Everyone, in Nicaragua, wets their beak, whereas only the rich and powerful in America participate.”

Today Responsible Statecraft offers up the epitome of American corruption:

That is not an overstatement: In a video obtained by CBS News, the leader of an “election protection” activist group of 1,800 volunteers in North Carolina is seen instructing attendees at a virtual meeting to flag voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names” as one way to identify potentially suspicious registrations as the group combs through voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election. “If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered, and they’re missing information… and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they’ve got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter,” said James Womack, the leader of the effort, who chairs the Republican Party in Lee County, North Carolina. “It doesn’t mean they’re illegal.

Two psychologists explain how we think about freedom.

The post When Do We Have Free Choice? appeared first on Nautilus.

“A man is nothing without his conscience,” the Florida health department’s top lawyer wrote in his resignation letter.

The post State Lawyer Quits Over Ron DeSantis’s Unconstitutional Attacks on Abortion Amendment appeared first on The Intercept.

The experimental world of speculative fiction is like a history of political economy. It explores topics like dystopias, post-scarcity, automation, and AI. But it doesn’t stop there!

The post Political Economy Through Speculative Fiction: The Case of New York 2140 appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

LISTEN TO THIS: His closing argument is: Vote for me. I’m batshit insane!

The wood ant stalks its prey in colonies of thousands.

The post The Demolition Ants appeared first on Nautilus.

Green Beret Alan Shebaro returns from the occupied West Bank to reveal how Israeli military tactics focus on land grabs and displacement, not the defeat of resistance forces.

The post Green Beret Alan Shebaro: Israeli Tactics and the Reality Behind the Gaza Conflict appeared first on MintPress News.

Israel and the United States are already speaking about a Lebanon post-Hezbollah. They’re getting way ahead of themselves. 

The post Don’t Believe the U.S.–Israel Fantasy for Lebanon appeared first on The Intercept.

This should be devastating for Donald Trump but since his cult has been trained not to believe anything bad about him, it probably won’t have much of an impact. Still, it’s pretty shocking for a man who depends on older people to vote for him: Former President Donald Trump’s campaign plans would significantly accelerate the already-fast-approaching date when Social Security is projected to run out of money, a nonpartisan budget group said Monday. Trump’s agenda would make the popular government program, relied upon by millions of American seniors, insolvent in six years — shrinking the current timeline by a third, the group found. The Republican nominee’s proposals would also expand Social Security’s cash shortfall by trillions of dollars and lead to even steeper benefit cuts in the coming years, said US Budget Watch 2024, a project of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “We find President Trump’s campaign proposals would dramatically worsen Social Security’s finances,” the CRFB budget group said in a blog post.

Like a comet closing in on Planet Earth, the US presidential election is hurtling toward...

Interest groups backed by conservative operatives and billionaire interests are pushing the high court to use upcoming Facebook and Nvidia cases to gut consumer protections.

An urgent inquiry has been called in to security at Canberra’s Parliament house after King Charles’ visit was marred by former PM, Tony Abbott, getting within knighting distance of his majesty. ”We nearly had a disaster on our hands what... Read More ›

Yeah, I know he entertained his crowd over the weekend with talk about Arnold Palmer’s allegedly huge male member and then shut down a McDonalds so he could pretend to work there for 15 minutes to somehow prove that Kamala Harris is a liar. But I think this is yet another low point: I hope he didn’t mean that FEMA would do a better job if they knew that armed gunman would shoot them if they didn’t. But you never know. I think he meant that it was important that people tell them when they’re not doing their jobs but in reality he’s saying that they should be able to lie with impunity during a disaster for political purposes. It never ends… The chef’s kiss? The guy with the beard standing over Trump’s left shoulder is this guy: Even Republicans are getting fed up with MAGA’s hurricane conspiracy theories. Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina is one of them. In a press release put out on Tuesday, Edwards condemned the misinformation about Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene that has been circulated online by the likes of Donald Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Whoever owns the narrative owns the world – and things just got a lot tougher for those of us opposed to the metastasising brain cancer known as US influence campaigns – or “perception management”.  In a staggering increase in funding for propaganda and covert action the US House has passed the Countering the PRC (People’s Continue reading »

It may be that in his post-Public Service life Mr Mike Pezzullo has been watching lots of classic films. When asked about the recent stripping of his Order of Australia, the former Home Affairs supremo said that the matter wasn’t “worth a hill of beans in this crazy world.” They’re precisely the sentiments Humphrey Bogart Continue reading »

As Israel risks yet further charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity  in its siege of northern Gaza,  its defense of the indefensible is  built on a preposterous inversion of  morality. That is, the portrayal of Israel  as the West’s protector of its very civilization in a sea of evil. Continue reading »

It’s often said that faith moves mountains. This might be true for people who have faith in their mythical God. The faith I have is the unshakeable faith in, the courage, the heroism and the steadfastness of my people, the Palestinians. Western leaders, western journalists and western pundits would like you to believe that the Continue reading »

Albanese once said his purpose in life was to “fight Tories.” In government he has done little more than surrender to them. The menu for Anthony Albanese over the next few weeks provides good examples of Labor’s problems in controlling the agenda and sticking to the narrative over the lead-up to the next federal election. Continue reading »