Reading

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 05, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

 

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

[The Register, via The Big Picture 01-01-2025]

Perplexity offers several advantages over Google as a search engine, making it a compelling alternative for many.

Chesebro has admitted what he did and has been sanctioned numerous times, even pleading guilty in the Georgia case. But in the end it was a tiny price to pay and he was one of the few has paid anything. What a slap in the face to honest people everywhere that these people have been put back in power. It’s a shocking indictment of our country one from which I wonder if we’ll ever be able to recover.

You know that Elon Musk is sitting next to Donald Trump every night at Mar-a-Lago, talking to foreign leaders, kibitzing with fellow billionaires and whispering in the ear of the soon-to-be most powerful man on earth. You may have also heard that he’s exercising his own power on the internet to influence congressional leaders and fight for dominance over MAGA. He’s branching out. He wrote an op-ed in a conservative German newspaper endorsing the neo-Nazi right party, saying they are Germany’s only hope (and causing the editorial editor to resign from the paper.) And now there’s this: In the first three days of 2025, Elon Musk commandeered global politics through dozens of rapid-fire,often inflammatory posts to his 210 million followers on X. The world’s richest person called for the release of a jailed British far-right extremist. He shared a post pressing King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and order a new general election, as he posted memes and a flurry of attacks directed at Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

We are constantly assured that our governments don’t lie. But in this case the enormity goes beyond a mere cover-up to protect deemed “national security”. That war was a lie from beginning to end. In fact, the actions in 2003-04 endangered our national security for decades as did other acts of ill-considered military intervention, for Continue reading »

Rolling back your voting rights Michael Podhorzer finds, as Digby posted on Saturday: the defining feature of American politics this century is that neither party can “win” elections anymore; they can only be the “not-loser.”  Donald Trump was the not-loser in November. (It’s just what he wanted for Christmas.) Trump “won the same share of the eligible population” in 2024 as he did in 2020 while the Democrats’ share dropped 3.5% from 2020. Hurrah!The country did not turn more MAGA. That’s little consolation for the left and doesn’t change the facts on the ground. In an age where facts don’t seem to matter, those facts nevertheless could get suckier under Trump 2.0, writes Sam Levin for The Guardian: Donald Trump could use a second term atop the justice department to gut enforcement of US federal voting laws and deploy an agency that is supposed to protect the right to vote to undermine it, experts have warned. Trump has made no secret of his intention to punish his political enemies and subvert the American voting system.

Compare and contrast On this Sunday morning, a question springs to mind: How much of an idiot is “Captain Underpants“? Elon Musk is beside himself that President Biden awarded philanthropist George Soros the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his pursuit of “global initiatives that strengthen democracy, human rights, education, and social justice.” (Biden gave the award to 18 others, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.) Musk posted a meme mocked up to show Biden handing the medal to the evil Emperor Palpatine. “Must be the lighting,” he quipped. Naturally, the right is as incensed that their liberal bogeyman received the award as it wasn’t when Donald Trump awarded one to Rush Limbaugh during a State of the Union Address in recognition of Limbaugh’s Three Decades Hate. What draws attention to Musk besides his infantile sense of humor, his inability to string more than 10 words together in most of his tweets, and his turning Jack Dorsey’s world forum into a MAGA cesspool, is the contrast with a real genius.

Doctor Who has a wonderfully evil and clever Big Bad in The Master, a constantly retconned character, with Sacha Dhawan being the maddest yet.

Understanding the Physical and Social Constraints of the Public Sector

A curious one, this. We were looking through some old postcards (from the 1930s) and came across one with a picture of this church interior. Where’s that? Well, it turns out that it is just off the motorway on our journey between Bristol and Liverpool. A remarkable mosaic interior from the 1920s, modelled on originals […]

Back in August, I wrote about some of last year’s best Blu-ray reissues. Here’s a few more 2024 releases worth your consideration: City of Hope (Sony) – John Sayles’ sprawling 1991 drama about urban decay and political corruption (beautifully shot by Robert Richardson) is set in fictional Hudson City, New Jersey (Cincinnati stands in). Vincent Spano plays the central character, the ne’er-do-well son of a property developer (Tony Lo Bianco)  who has dubious ties with local mobsters.  Utilizing his patented network narrative structure,  Sayles weaves in many of his pet themes, such as family ties, culture clash, tests of faith, class warfare and local politics. There are similarities with the previous year’s Bonfire of the Vanities; but this is a far superior film. I see City of Hope as a precursor to The Wire. The populous cast (uniformly excellent) includes Chris Cooper, Joe Morton, Angela Bassett, David Straithairn, and Gina Gershon. Save the commentary track by Sayles, Sony’s Blu-ray edition is bereft of extras, but features a nice high-def transfer.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Here is another piece of Michael Podhorzer’s in-depth analysis of the election using some of the very reliable vote cast data. He finds that the problem is not that voters moved right — Trump got essentially the same proportion of the electorate he got in 2020 — it’s that a lot of Democrats decided not to vote, especially in Blue states. There may have been many reasons for the loss but it does not appear that it was a rousing endorsement of Trumpy fascism. One reason this happened is because Trump the pathological liar has the benefit of people not believing anything he says, which I would never have thought would be an asset for a politician but here we are: Anat adds: “Further, as we heard from this cohort across focus groups, they’re skeptical that electing Democrats would actually prove an effective check on MAGA’s power.” This is the one-two punch that knocked out Harris’s chances this year: disaffection with Democrats, combined with incredulity at the idea that Trump might actually implement the worst parts of the MAGA agenda. Why did they think the Democrats would be an ineffective check?

I’ ve been reading some of the reporting on the Las Vegas Tesla suicide attack and it just gets weirder and weirder. I won’t go into all the crazy stuff out there right now about Chinese drones and Afghan war crimes because it all seems way too out there to even analyze at the moment. You can click that link if you’re curious. But there is some easily verified stuff in the attacker’s “manifesto” that’s been released that isn’t getting any coverage and it’s ridiculous. Yes, he was obviously a disturbed man who suffered from PTSD after many deployments. He needed mental health help that he reportedly didn’t obtain from the military for fear of losing his position as a special forces specialist. But he was also a radicalized, red-pilled MAGA cultist little different than the ISIS radicalized former vet who killed all those people in New Orleans. Josh Marshall writes: [A]t least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents or what I guess we might call minifestos that investigators found on his iphone.

In this video, Tulsi Gabbard pledges her undying love and devotion to her guru Chris Butler who, as reported in the New Yorker, asks his followers to eat his toenails as a gesture of devotion. pic.twitter.com/GMjO26TBNI — I was warning about this back in 2005. (@brucewilson) January 3, 2025 Wonkette took a look at Gabbard’s cult in its inimitable fashion: The group is called Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), founded by an acid-dropping white surfer guy named Chris Butler, AKA Guru Dev Srila Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, AKA Jagad Guru, AKA Sai Young, in the 1970s, as an offshoot of the Hare Krishnas, AKA the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.  Butler got his start as a guru teaching mediation and yoga, and was drawn to the Krishnas, but he didn’t want to shave his head or wear robes or do other Hare Krishna stuff. So he founded his own thing, which involved him living with two dozen 18-to-22-year-olds in a Quonset hut under a freeway, beating bongos and arranging his followers’ marriages. Two of his hut-dwellers were Tulsi Gabbard’s parents, Mike and Carol, who joined the group in 1983.

Via Raw Story: Politico reported Friday evening that Johnson securing the 218 votes necessary to be speaker came with conditions. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who is a member of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, told the outlet that there would be potential “consequences” for the speaker if he failed to uphold his end of the bargain on certain sticking points “Let’s make no mistake about it. There will be things that are, in fact, red lines that we need to deliver,” Roy said, referencing Johnson’s reliance on Democratic votes to push a must-pass government funding bill across the finish line in late December. “We can have no more of the nonsense that happened before Christmas.” They changed the rule on the Motion to Vacate to require 9 votes to take out the Speaker. Roy pointed out that there were 9 votes that objected in one way or another to the speaker yesterday. He said there were more ready to join in if Johnson didn’t do exactly what they wanted him to do. It’s not going to be pretty. But nobody deserves it more than this wrecking crew.

The 2000 residents of Diego Garcia were forcibly removed to make way for a giant US military base. A repost from May 30, 2024 Will the same happen to the 593 Australian residents on the Cocos Islands that lies south of Sumatra in the Indian ocean? The Australian Government has committed over $600 million to the military Continue reading »

The wall I am talking about here is known as the separation wall, which the Zionist occupiers of our land began building in 2002. Two years later, on 30 July 2004, The International Court of Justice issued a “first advisory opinion”, finding that the construction of a separation wall inside the occupied Palestinian territories had to Continue reading »

Voted many times by UK and US magazines as the most important public intellectual in the world, Noam Chomsky, scientist, linguist, human rights activist, suffered a stroke at age 95 and can no longer speak. Yet as 2025 begins, Chomsky at 96 gifts the world his examples of inquiry and dissent. These qualities he might Continue reading »

On June 21 1994 Indonesia’s information ministry withdrew the press permits of the weekly magazine Tempo, the weekly political tabloid Detik, and Editor, a new news weekly. Their critical reporting upset President Soeharto, particularly Tempo revealing conflict between cabinet ministers in the government purchasing naval vessels from the former East Germany. Journalists, rights activists, academics, Continue reading »

If only for Australia’s own security concerns, the strict application of ABC Editorial Policies in regard to Syria is vitally important. For the ABC to display bias for radical Islamist groups cannot bode well for us. It contravenes Australian beliefs and values meant to unite us. [This text below is a complaint sent to the Continue reading »

There is a belief widely held across the Western world: Chinese students are schooled through rote, passive learning – and an educational system like this can only produce docile workers who lack innovation or creativity. We argue this is far from true. A repost from November 05, 2024 In fact, the Chinese education system is Continue reading »

How long will Elon Musk last in the Trump orbit? Currently he seems to be ubiquitous but that presents a problem for Donald Trump and his massive ego. Musk has been a major presence in the Trump campaign – financially, through social media and also through encouraging tech bro endorsements. He has been promised big Continue reading »