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“Musk’s Super PAC Offers $47 to Those Who Help It Find Trump Voters”
— New York Times, 10/7/24

Please help. My brain is like the Cybertruck nav system. I know something’s wrong there, but no one can figure it out.

I’ve read all the psychology books, but none of them address desperately needing the validation of someone named “Catturd.”

Any therapists out there? What’s the name of the syndrome that causes you to turn into the MyPillow guy?

When I watch the movie Tremors, why do I identify with the worms?

Why is there a void in my soul bigger than the debris field of one of my rockets?

Why can’t I ever just shut up? Better to stay quiet and be thought a fool than to retweet #EndWokeness and remove all doubt.

I really liked and admired Agnes Callard’s essay, “Beyond Neutrality: The university’s responsibility to lead” in The Point (September 29, 2024) [HT Dailynous]. My post is, despite some quibbles, primarily about amplifying a point Callard (Chicago) makes. I do so not just because there is considerable overlap between our positions (recall here and here), but also because she advances the discussion on the […]

Hezbollah managed to breach the Iron Dome with an attack on a military base that resulted in the deaths of four soldiers and the wounding of over 60 - amid concerns Hamas may have found a way to breach the iron curtain dividing Gaza from Israel

An evolutionary biologist explains how human language can shift as slowly or rapidly as organisms adapting to life on Earth

- by Klaus M Stiefel

Read at Psyche

For centuries, the only way in which to illuminate the mysteries of black holes was through the power of mathematics

- by Steve Nadis & Shing-Tung Yau

Read at Aeon

The summit, which is being hosted by Hungry's far-right President Viktor Orbán, will take place days after the US goes to the polls.

The troops are fighting on as the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump puts Ukraine's future on the frontline of US politics

This Tuesday report will provide some insights into life for a westerner (me) who is working for an extended period at Kyoto University in Japan. Life is settling down here again – it always takes a week or so to put my Japanese shoes on so to speak and get used to the different sounds…

If you thought the master planners would be content to end their assault on democracy with Citizens United, think again.

When we want to change the world we’re usually reacting to a problem. Even positive visions usually come out of negatives. We want liberty because we have tyranny. We want health because we have sickness. We want prosperity because we have poverty. We want equality because some people have way more than they need and others less than need.

When we solve a problem it’s generally mediated by a principle. Very often the principle is just the problem stated slightly differently.

Problem: Some people have more than they need, others have less than they need.

Principle: Make sure no one has more than they need while anybody has less than they need.

A principle tells you, generally speaking, what you should be doing about a problem. It doesn’t tell you how to do it.

So, for the example above, post-war Welfare states generally came upon the solution:

The world is reeling in horror of the people burned alive sheltering inside tents in Al-Aqsa martyrs hospital. First hand accounts and devastation flood our feed. ABC’s media watch chastises Australian media on lack of coverage of journalist’s death. In Britain, Anti-Zionism is now a protected belief. Bob Carr on the power of the Israel Continue reading »

You should… That’s right. The RCP average at the end of October in 2012 was a virtual tie between Obama and Romney. I’ve been saying for a while that I think this election is more like 2012 than 2020 or 2016. We’ll see. But I thought it might be worth looking at where we were in October in a recent election the Democrats won handily.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Weirdo billionaire Trumper Bill Ackman responded to Stevens by daring him to respond to his full post, point by point —- and Stevens did it. I think it’s worth sharing with all of you here: Bill, saying you support the candidate who has promised to cut taxes for billionaires vs. the candidate who will raise taxes on billionaires, but you don’t really support the tax cuts is a bit like the old “I read Playboy for the articles.” But fine, let’s assume you are convinced that all the benefits of a Trump presidency compensate for the burden of having your taxes cut. Let’s look at your 33 reasons. But first, let’s dispense with the misty-eyed absurdity that you can vote for an openly racist Trump, but you’d like it known that you don’t support racism. The ballot box isn’t a cafeteria where you can go down the line and pick and choose what you like. If you vote for Trump, you are voting for a criminal out on bail who describes non-white immigrants with the same language as National Socialism described Jews. Don’t pretend that by voting for Trump you get some pass because you insist that’s not who you are.

Alexander Graham Bell reflects on the very first telephone call in a letter to his father.

The post “This Is a Great Day with Me” appeared first on Nautilus.

A tale of ecological salvation in Mexico.

The post Ranchers, Cattle, Tequila, and Bats appeared first on Nautilus.

Same boat parade: Eric and Lara forgot to put life jackets on their small kids which is bad enough. And they had their children on a boat with a huge Trump head with blood all over it which was, at one time, considered to be so outrageous that they destroyed Kathy Griffin’s career over it. But that’s just the Trump family. You would think, however, that someone would have said something about the Nazis in the boat parade and maybe told them to leave or at least said something about it today. But no, like his father, Eric obviously believes there were very find people on both sides.

Proud Toyota Hilux owner, Jayden Jaydensen has formed an unlikely bond with a local magpie. The 26 year old tradie said he was scoffing down his daily four and twenty during his second lunch break when he saw the magpie... Read More ›

I think everyone reading this already knows that Trump is planning to purge the nation of millions of non-citizens. Most people think he’s just going to round up undocumented immigrants (of color, he certainly won’t target any Swedes or Brits who’ve overstayed their visas and are working illegally.) This past weekend he amended that to say that he’s going to deport Haitians who are in the country legally so I think we can assume that he’s not going to stick to any of those pesky legal niceties. He plans to deport millions and millions of foreigners from the “shithole countries” he loathes so much. But as Philip Bump points out in this piece, and I’ve been writing here non-stop for months, on the stump he’s more and more often targeting “the enemy within” by which he means his political enemies: “You know, I always say: We have the outside enemy, so you can say China, you can say Russia, you can say Kim Jong Un, you can say — but that’s — it’s going to be fine.

Both of us are researchers who are deeply influenced by the work of French philosopher Louis Althusser. Responsible in large part for a vigorous approach to Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s (dubbed “structural Marxism”), Althusser the scholar was always controversial.

The post Althusser, “levels” and a scholarly dialogue appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Chris Wallace was on TV promoting his new book about the 1960 election and they featured this quote from Nixon after he presided over the counting of the electoral votes as VP after his razor thin loss to Kennedy: “I don’t think we can have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our Constitutional system and of the proud tradition of the American people of developing and respecting and honoring institutions of self-government” I hadn’t heard that before. Nixon was famously bitter about that loss and there were plenty of reasons to be suspicious about it. But he didn’t whine like a little baby and throw a tantrum. Even he had more dignity than that. Here’s Al Gore, in the same position, presiding over the same process in 2000, when he and the Democrats had a much better case for objecting to the results than Nixon in 1960 or Trump did in 2020. (He won the popular vote and the election was decided in a 5-4 partisan decision of the Supreme Court …) That’s how it used to be done.

Volunteers raised funds for a new ambulance in Lebanon’s south. Israel quickly destroyed it in an airstrike — killing five emergency workers.

The post Israel Escalates Attacks on Lebanese First Responders — Potentially a War Crime appeared first on The Intercept.