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“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

One of the more unusual side stories in this presidential campaign cycle is a renewed look at Donald Trump’s pre-presidential years as a Reality TV star and it offers some new insights into how he has transformed our politics into a spectacle we couldn’t have imagined just a decade ago.. The publication of new book “Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass” by co-editor in chief of the Hollywood Reporter, Ramin Setoodeh offers a unique perspective on Trump’s post White House years and a long article in Slate by a former Apprentice producer named Bill Pruitt gives an inside look at the phoniness of reality television and how it perfectly fit Trump’s already well-developed phony persona. It’s amazing that we are still trying to figure out what really makes this strange man tick but I think that era of his life illuminates one of the most mystifying aspects of his appeal. How is he able to convince tens of millions of people to believe him when all the evidence and facts prove otherwise?

Plan to survive the worst SCOTUS is down to the wire for this session (Politico): As the Supreme Court rushes to deliver the final decisions of its current term, the justices face a pile-up of cases that are sure to shape the presidential campaign — and could upend the legal landscape in areas from abortion to air pollution to free speech on the internet. The court is scheduled to issue opinions Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. By far the biggest pending decision is Donald Trump’s bid to be declared immune from federal criminal charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Other cases still left on the court’s docket could curtail access to emergency abortions, shrink the power of federal agencies and boost conservative voices on social media. I’m passed believing that common sense will prevail. Foreign leaders are worried too, but not so much about SCOTUS: Days before Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, a conservative foreign affairs analyst told me to ignore the president-elect’s tweets. They won’t represent the incoming president’s foreign policy, he insisted, dismissing my astonishment in an exchange that went viral.

. We live in an unequal society where inequality is increasing in many areas, especially regarding income and wealth. The differences in living conditions for different groups, in terms of class, ethnicity, and gender, are unacceptably large. In the world of education, family background still has a significant impact on pupils’ performance, and it becomes […]

Longstanding accusations against Israel for using human shields resurface as a new video shows a Palestinian man tied to an Israeli military vehicle.

The post Jenin Video Rekindles Human Shields Allegations Against Israel appeared first on MintPress News.

David Meller CBE allegedly appeared to acknowledge on the recording that the money belonged to Michael Sherwood and asked that the request be kept "secret"

Okay, panic This isn’t politics. Or is it? A single phrase made my head snap around during the intro to a morning economic report on the radio Tuesday. A show sponsor (I missed the name) during the intro touted its “hallucination-free AI” product. Hallucination-free is a selling point now? You recall the unsettling encounter last year with Microsoft’s Bing chatbot written up in the New York Times: As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead. (We’ve posted the full transcript of the conversation here.) Kevin Roose fretted: These A.I. models hallucinate, and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion — a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same.

Richard Rojem’s death sentence was twice overturned by appellate courts, but his conviction itself has never been fully revisited.

The post Oklahoma Prepares to Kill Another Man Who Says He’s Innocent appeared first on The Intercept.

I was a doubter about Xi. His early anti-corruption drive seemed most likely to be a way to purge the Party of his enemies, and I assumed he was driven primarily by ambition for personal power.

I was wrong.

If you want to join the CCP, you have to be accepted. It isn’t automatic. Once accepted you undergo training and if you want real power you have to rise: you have to be in charge and deliver.

In this the CCP is similar to the old Roman Republic: high political rank required you to rise up thru the cursus honorum. Doing so required you to gain experience with government: roads, sewage, trade, law and so on. In practice, few people were elected to the highest offices without military experience, and the result was that high elected officials had some actual experience with how both military and civic affairs ran.

Why do fans & tabloids still believe Millie Gibson has left Doctor Who even after Russell T. Davies confirmed she will be back for Season 2?

In a magnificent moment for conservation, the first northern hairy-nosed wombats have been released to explore their new home at Powrunna State Forest near St George in south-west Queensland.