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I wrote the other day about Trump’s weird “freeze” during his speech to the NRA, when he just stood there for 30 seconds making faces while the music rose. He claimed that he always did this and I contradicted it saying I’ve never seen it happen. Well, a reader pointed out that I have seen it happen, it’s just that usually there is cheering and applauding for that 30 seconds. A DKos member wrote this: He builds up to the line “greatest nation in the history of the world.” The music starts. He stands for about 30 seconds, looking around, as the crowds cheer wildly and chant his name. Then he proceeds with the “We are a nation in decline” line. ANGRY MARMOT [Dkos commenter]: See for instance the laboriously dramatic musical pause-for-effect from 1:26:57 to 1:27:23 here (Waco, March 25, 2023) and from 1:09:42 to 1:10:31 here (Greensboro, March 2, 2024), always before the “we are a nation in decline” line.

A Sydney couple have acquired nearly a quarter of a million lifetime enemies as they blithely pushed their eighteen month old around Vivid in a stroller. “God forbid we should have thought this through a tad and maybe gotten a... Read More ›

Brian Beutler has some advice in his excellent newsletter OffMessage today for the Biden campaign that doesn’t include throwing up their hands and saying “Oh my God we’re so bad that we’re giving up and will open up the convention to anyone who wants to try for it!” This might actually be useful: At the outset we should stipulate that if Donald Trump were in office today—presiding over full employment at a time when Americans enjoyed more purchasing power than ever before, and inflation was hovering steadily around three percent—he and Republican officeholders across the country would claim credit for building the greatest economy in history. In fact, if Trump defeats Joe Biden in November, they’ll all sing from that hymnal by early 2025. The news media will scratch its head and finally notice, Gosh, this is a strong economy!

It was late winter when my sabbatical began, and it’s late spring as it comes to an end. Next week I return to my post after three months’ paid leave, courtesy of Automattic’s sabbatical benefit. Three months. A season. With full pay, and zero work responsibilities. In a job full of rewards, this is perhaps the greatest […]

The post The gift of a three-month sabbatical appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Long-term evolution may be more predictable than we assumed.

The post A Crystal Ball for Evolution appeared first on Nautilus.

When Inspector Pilgrim popped up in Flash there were comparisons to be made to John Constantine and Doctor Who. But what about River Song?

The head of Israel’s probe into the Rafah bombing helped create the cutting-edge drone technology disproportionately killing civilians across Gaza – and the IDF is lying about it

Paul Krugman calls out commentators who blame everything on inflation as suffering from “inflation brain.” Let me give you two recent examples of inflation brain in action. This month, a preliminary release by the widely followed University of Michigan survey of consumers reported a significant fall in consumer sentiment. Consumers gave a number of reasons for reduced optimism, but every news article I saw about it attributed their pessimism to a jump in expected inflation, both over the next year and over the next five years. Then the final version of the May report was released, and the initially reported jump in inflation expectations more or less disappeared. Consumer sentiment was still significantly down, but the survey’s news release attributed this decline largely to concerns about labor markets and interest rates, not inflation fears. Another example: Target, Walmart and other big retail chains have recently announced a number of price cuts, both temporary and permanent. They are presumably doing this because they are seeing worrisome softness in demand.

In a calculated and vicious attack Israel bombed an area in Rafah, Gaza designated as a “safe zone’ by the Israeli military, incinerating women and children and leaving flimsy plastic tents burning in a horrifying conflagration. This inferno was fuelled by the plastic and blanket tents, the only shelter available. The attack took place in Continue reading »

Although rarely acknowledged, China is the world’s biggest economy, and it will most probably continue to grow faster than the US, its main competitor. A core American belief is that America is exceptional. A belief that is underpinned by the presumption that the US is the most powerful country in the world, both economically and Continue reading »

The Magistrate hearing the United States application to extradite Australian citizen and father of six, Daniel Duggan, was floored. Duggan’s lawyer Bret Walker SC had walked into the courtroom late and in a short statement informed him there would be “no submission” further to a document in Duggan’s own words, as there were “no legal Continue reading »

In repeating blatant Zionist propaganda to justify her support for Israel, Nova Peris erroneously and harmfully conflates Jewish identity with support for the Zionist project in Palestine, which in effect depicts all Jews as complicit in Israel’s criminality. Her abject apologism also betrays all indigenous peoples’ struggles against colonial oppression. In an interview on Sky Continue reading »

In our country and across the world, the voices of women often go unheard. Whether it is a gasping plea of ‘I can’t breathe’ or a harrowing confession of ‘He raped me,’ the voices of women are frequently dismissed, disbelieved, or outright ignored. This tragic reality stems from a deeply ingrained societal bias that views Continue reading »

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has chastised Opposition Leader Peter Dutton for proposing temporary cuts to permanent immigration numbers, claiming the 25% cut would cost ‘the budget’ tens of billions of dollars. But the far bigger costs of providing durable assets for immigrants are routinely overlooked, or mis-counted as a plus because they add to the GDP. Continue reading »

The Israeli military has repeatedly bombed a designated civilian ‘safe zone’ in Rafah, injuring and mutilating many people and causing a rising number of deaths. Medical response capacity, after many months of targeted attacks on healthcare in Gaza, is severely limited; there is one functioning hospital in Rafah. Injured survivors of the attack may only Continue reading »

If China is indeed a power to be worried about, wouldn’t Australia want to know as much about it as possible, perhaps even know what it is up to? Blocking or reducing interaction with China or other countries only reduces Australia to a petty, hollow state that is susceptible to misunderstandings. Just a few years Continue reading »

I predict Trump will be found guilty. Someone from the NY AGs office will make a statement on the steps of the courthouse. Then, instead of talking about the win for the rule of law, the focus of ALL the coverage in the mainstream media will be on the appeal. The legal experts will explain all the ways the ruling can be overturned and how an appeal can take years. The political experts will wonder if this will hurt Trump’s chances of being elected President. A New York Times poll will ask “Do you believe the conviction is legitimate?” 57% of the Republican will say no. Trump’s GOP sycophant’s will question the integrity of the “95% Democrat jury” and wonder “who was on that jury?” setting up their followers to dox them, threaten them and attack them physically. New attacks on Judge Merchan and his daughter will happen, then right before sentencing, there will be ANOTHER SWATTING attempt at someone’s home, but that won’t lead to any arrests until after the election. It’s easy to predict this, because we’ve seen this before.

Rachel Reeves is once again attempting to strengthen her credentials as a ‘sensible’ manager of the UK’s finances. She announced today that Labour would introduce a new ‘fiscal lock’, under which any new changes to government spending require a forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility. The Labour Party has already committed to tie its […]

He’s going to go after Palestinians in America That would be a big mistake: Former president Donald Trump promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, telling a roomful of donors — a group that he joked included “98 percent of my Jewish friends” — that he would expel student demonstrators from the United States, according to participants in the roundtable event with him in New York. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump said on May 14, according to donors at the event. When one of the donors complained that many of the students and professors protesting on campuses could one day hold positions of power in the United States, Trump called the demonstrators part of a “radical revolution” that he vowed to defeat.