Has there ever been a more nakedly ambitious politician in history? I honestly don’t think so. I still don’t think Trump is going to choose her for VP no matter how hard she licks his boots. She just isn’t out of central casting in his book. But she’s certainly giving a hell of an audition.
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Few countries are offering ships and reportedly a significant number want their support to remain secret! The token Australian response has turned out to be not out of keeping with that of many similar countries. In an earlier P & I article (The Red Sea: Think it through before jumping! December 22, 2023) I argued Continue reading »
If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to Continue reading »
Orchestrated components are coming together to enable the US to recruit Australia in future wars of choice. Our media must begin to ask questions about the crude but successful ways the Australian people are being groomed to provide passive or enthusiastic consent. A version of the long awaited Defence Strategic Review for public consumption will Continue reading »
Hamas was voted in by Palestinians in Gaza in a fair election (as agreed by international monitors). It was primarily a welfare organisation providing services and infrastructure for the general population. It primarily still has this role, with an attached small military wing. It reminds me of my time in Sri Lanka working for CARE Continue reading »
The dismissal of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by Queen Elizabeth’s Vice-Regal representative, Sir John Kerr, was an extraordinary event. For almost fifty years a debate has raged about why the Governor-General took the unprecedented action he did on 11 November 1975. This five-part series puts a spotlight on the on the external events that Continue reading »
Now that the dust has begun to settle, we can look at the referendum result with a little more clarity. Those of us who supported the Voice saw with some dismay how the initial widespread support in favour of a yes vote began to wither away. yet we should not be fooled by the headlines Continue reading »
Hong Kong tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying urged the US to use its “moral authority” to impose “very draconian” sanctions on mainland China, prosecutors told the court on Tuesday, as they played footage from the publisher’s past media interviews. Prosecutors at the West Kowloon Court played six interview clips that showed Lai expressing support for foreign Continue reading »
Trump and Biden each believes that he alone can fix it. One will wreck it; the other could.
The post U.S. Democracy Hangs on Two Men’s Egos appeared first on The Intercept.
Jamelle Bouie writes in his newsletter about the shock of 2016 and how it led to the media obsessing over “the Trump voter” and what they were thinking: One inadvertent consequence of this understandable bout of introspection was, I think, to validate Trump’s claim that he spoke for a silent majority of forgotten Americans. It was easy enough to look at the new president’s political coalition — disproportionately blue-collar and drawn almost entirely from the demographic majority of the country — and conclude that this was basically correct. And even if it wasn’t, the image of the blue-collar (although not necessarily working-class) white man or white woman has been, for as long as any of us have been alive, a synecdoche for the “ordinary American” or the “Middle American” or the “average American.” You may remember the constant discussion, while Trump was in office, over the effect his chaos and corruption might have on voters. Would they care? Where this “they” often meant the blue-collar voters associated with Trump’s victory.
Trump did more than nothing ABC News has a this tantalizing Jan. 6 story this morning: Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has uncovered previously undisclosed details about former President Donald Trump’s refusal to help stop the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol three years ago as he sat watching TV inside the White House, according to sources familiar with what Smith’s team has learned during its Jan. 6 probe. Many of the exclusive details come from the questioning of Trump’s former deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, who first started working for Trump as a teenager three decades ago and is now a paid senior adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign. Scavino wouldn’t speak with the House select committee that conducted its own probe related to Jan. 6, but — after a judge overruled claims of executive privilege last year — he did speak with Smith’s team, and key portions of what he said were described to ABC News. […] Sources said Scavino told Smith’s investigators that as the violence began to escalate that day, Trump “was just not interested” in doing more to stop it.
Scenes from a slow civil war on women Jeff Sharlet posted a long thread on Saturday reflecting on reporters’ initial reaction to his use of the the term “fascism” in “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.” One element dovetails with a post I’d already prepped from Jessica Valenti’s “Abortion, Every Day” substack. “The anti-abortion movement is launching a national campaign to trick women into carrying doomed pregnancies to term,” Vessica Valenti wrote in October in a post titled “Calculated Cruelty.” She summarized it in a followup post on Friday and cautions that the movement has moved upstream of abortion clinic protests to targeting prenatal testing that might reveal fatal fetal abnormalities: The short version, though, is that a coalition of the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country are working together to ban abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities, and to do away with the prenatal testing that provides those diagnoses.
From faulty health insurer provider lists to a troubling regulatory win for the crypto industry, here’s a roundup of our reporting from the past week.
After being tasked with editing David Ricardo’s Collected Works in 1930, Piero Sraffa, with the assistance of Maurice Dobb, published them between 1951 and 1973. This work earned him the 1961 Söderström Gold Medal from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. For the edition, Sraffa wrote an interesting and thought-provoking introduction. Its purpose was to demonstrate […]
There will be no weekly roundup today or next Sunday. It should return on the 21st of January.
Hezbollah just hit Meron airbase hard, in retaliation for Israel assassinating a Hamas leader in Lebanon. This was a major intelligence center, commanding drones and connecting other radar centers.
They have recently withdrawn two brigades from Gaza and intend to pull back more. They don’t control even the land in Gaza they claim to control, and are being bled white by an insurgency they can’t come to grip with and which is outfighting them.
I finished the Obelisk Gate today; it’s book 2 of NK Jamison’s Broken Earth series. I want to write some notes here about the book to cement them in my mind. Spoilers ahead. I mentioned on Mastodon that the series had been pretty striking for me. It’s the story of a future (probably) world in … Continue reading The Obelisk Gate
This food timeline started as a way to explore the revolution in Australian food that has occurred during the baby-boomers’ lifetime, but has since expanded to include more about the previous decades (and century) as well. Also included are overseas events and trends that had an impact here. The entries are brief, but there are lots of links if you want more information.
*Note: In light of (I am loathe to say, “in honor of”) the 3rd anniversary of the January 6th insurrection, I am re-posting this piece, originally published March 25th, 2023. In my 2008 review of Frost/Nixon, I wrote: There’s an old theatrical performer’s axiom that goes “Always leave ‘em wanting more.” In August of 1974, President Richard Nixon made his Watergate-weary exit from the American political stage with a nationally televised resignation soliloquy and left ‘em wanting more…answers. Any immediate hopes for an expository epilogue to this 5-year long usurpation of the Constitution and Shakespearean tragedy were abruptly dashed one month later when President Gerald Ford granted him a full pardon. Like King Lear, the mad leader slunk back to his castle by the sea and out of public view. […] [Actor Frank Langella] uncannily captures the essence of Nixon’s contradictions and complexities; the supreme intelligence, the grandiose pomposity and the congenital craftiness, all corroded by the insidious paranoia that eventually consumed his soul, and by turn, the soul of the nation.
You have to watch whole thing. He is the dumbest man to ever obtain the presidency. He’s basically saying that Lincoln wanted to be famous and so he refused to negotiate and started the war. The entire comment is so incredibly ignorant, shallow and basically infantile it’s stunning: Any “negotiation” he would have entered into would have ended up allowing slavery to expand to the entire country. That’s how good he is. He cannot learn. This isn’t the first time he’s made an ass out of himself with this issue. Here he is from 2017: “People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Examiner, according to a transcript released Monday. “People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?” Trump ruminated after lauding Jackson, the populist president whom he and his staff have cited as a role model. He suggested that if Jackson had been president “you wouldn’t have had the Civil War.
If I adopted MSNBC’s policies against showing Trump or his followers spreading lies, I wouldn’t post that. I have more respect for my audience. I think you’re all smart enough to be able to understand why I do it. These videos are an example of how cultists think and how some of them can possibly come to understand how illogical their thought processes are: “People do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world,” William J. Bernstein writes, in “The Delusions of Crowds” (Atlantic Monthly). Instead, they “rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions.” Bernstein’s book, a survey of financial and religious manias, is inspired by Charles Mackay’s 1841 work, “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Mackay saw crowd dynamics as central to phenomena as disparate as the South Sea Bubble, the Crusades, witch hunts, and alchemy.
Just a little reminder: Most Republican officials know that he’s lying. The election was not stolen. They knew it then and they know it now. They are fine with this because they believe it benefits them.