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Created
Fri, 12/04/2024 - 03:30
President Biden has announced an order forgiving more student loans. It hasn’t been easy since the right wing Supremes knocked down his big initiative, but they’ve kept at it, chipping away, bringing relief to many people’s debt burden. They say they aren’t done yet. The wingnuts are having their usual fit about anything that might benefit people other than the rich and the fascist, caterwauling that it’s not fair to other Americans who didn’t take out loans or who paid them back already. Why shouldn’t they get a break too? Guess what? They’re special people who deserve it, we know that. The American people should be proud to subsidize them — they’re all millionaires, of course. Those scofflaws who haven’t paid back their student loans need to be taught a lesson.
Created
Fri, 12/04/2024 - 03:00

Whaddup. It’s the flu your four-year-old brought home for spring break. Are you gonna let me in or what? You’re hoping I leave you alone? You booked a family trip to Wolf Lodge Water Park? The deposit is nonrefundable?

Listen, I just KO’ed two dozen preschoolers like complimentary chips and dip at Casa Azteca, and now I want my entrée, capisce? Vis-à-vis for the next week or so, this is my house. And lemme tell you something—Michelangelo had marble. Da Vinci had paint. I have fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. And in three days, your GI tract will be my magnum opus.

Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I’m way too contagious to pass you by. I’ve literally spent a millennia evolving my DNA to inflict maximum carnage on your O-ring. The fact we’re even having this conversation means I’m already prancing through your upper respiratory system, painting the walls with flu.

What I’m saying is the chain reaction has begun. There’s no stopping the shitstorm descending upon your world. Think of me as Franz Ferdinand, the flu.

Not a WWI buff?

Created
Fri, 12/04/2024 - 02:00
It’s not going his way Later that day… Via Daily Beast: Arizona Republicans refused to vote on a bill to repeal the state’s extreme abortion ban Wednesday, a day after Republicans—including President Donald Trump—attempted to distance themselves from the decision. State Rep. Matt Gress (R) moved Wednesday to bring a Democratic bill repealing the ban, which outlaws all abortions except to save the life of the mother, to a House vote. Before a vote could be called, Rep. David Livingston motioned for a recess and all Republicans in the House—including Gress—voted to table the proceedings. Democrats in the House chanted “Shame!” at their Republican counterparts as voting rapidly came to a close. In a livestream after the session ended, Rep. Analise Ortiz (D) said Republicans moved to recess so they “would not have to be on the record voting to repeal the abortion ban.”
Created
Fri, 12/04/2024 - 00:37
by Dave Rollo

Imagine a landscape with some of the richest wildlife habitats in North America. Settlements are scarce and water is plentiful. Birds dot the skies, mammals abound on the ground, and fishes fill the rivers and lakes.

That’s Tippecanoe County, Indiana. In 1800.

The county’s transformation over the past two centuries would make it unrecognizable to its original inhabitants. Today, much of Tippecanoe consists of flat plains of fertile soils.

The post Water Theft in the Heartland: The Case of Tippecanoe County appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Created
Fri, 12/04/2024 - 00:30
A defense like you’ve never seen Looks like Donald Trump picked the wrong week to quit snorting Adderall (ABC News): There are multiple Jeremy Rosenbergs in New York City, as former President Donald Trump’s attorneys found out Tuesday after they sent a subpoena to the wrong one. Last month, Trump’s attorneys in his criminal hush money case [Ed: falsifying business records, to be correct] in Manhattan sought to subpoena the Jeremy Rosenberg who was a supervising investigator in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Instead, according to court filings revealed Tuesday, the subpoena went to another Jeremy Rosenberg living in an $8 million Brooklyn home. A crack team of attorneys Trump has there, and I mean that crack. It’s led by one Todd Blanche. The Independent continues: “I don’t have any files for you,” the apparently bemused Brooklynite wrote back, according to a filing from the former president’s legal team. He added: “PS – The phone number you provided was disconnected.
Created
Fri, 12/04/2024 - 00:06
In this briefing, we explain how the proposed changes to the UK data protection framework that would be introduced by the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill would weaken legal safeguards around the use of personal data for political purposes, in particular by: WHY DATA PROTECTION MATTERS The use of personal data and data analytics […]
Created
Thu, 11/04/2024 - 23:29

When I was in the U.S. military, I learned a saying (often wrongly attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato) that only the dead have seen the end of war. Its persistence through history to this very moment should indeed be sobering. What would it take for us humans to stop killing each other with such vigor and in such numbers? Song lyrics tell me to be proud to be an American, yet war and profligate preparations for more of the same are omnipresent here. My government spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (and most of them are allies). In this century, our leaders have twice warned of an “axis of evil” intent on harming us,... Read more

Source: There Is Only One Spaceship Earth appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Created
Thu, 11/04/2024 - 23:00

Callie Siskel’s Two Minds is neither minimalist nor maximalist, but the spareness and efficiency speak volumes—and sometimes speak in long lines, sometimes short—making an art of saying as little as possible, but crucially no less. What’s left out presses upon what remains, and what remains is both substantial and hard as stone. Here’s the beginning of “Invitation,” which begins with an invitation:

My initials curled inside the oval like three robins
crowding a tree hollow.

The cardstock was beveled, the envelopes lined in airy pink paper.

My father was dying

quietly like the sound of his pen lifting
then touching down again.

Created
Thu, 11/04/2024 - 23:00
Biden launches ad blitz after Arizona abortion ruling Perhaps you’ve noticed. The Democratic president Donald “Now 88 Counts” Trump once called “Sleepy Joe” is hammering MAGA Republicans over their post-Roe revocation of women’s reproductive freedoms in state after state. Biden “plans to pummel Trump on abortion” (Politico): Joe Biden’s campaign plans to hammer Donald Trump for his role in erasing abortion rights largely by enlisting ordinary American women who have suffered from restrictions on the procedure, elevating their voices in place of the president’s own. This approach was immediately on display this week in a Biden campaign video featuring the story of a Texas woman released after Trump announced he would defer to state-level abortion laws, some of which impose draconian limits on women and physicians. Biden himself made no appearance in the ad, except to deliver a standard campaign finance disclosure line. As the reporters frame it, Biden is taking a back seat here because of his “complicated history” on abortion.