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An empty bucket, a Zappos shoebox, potting soil, a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a broken lamp wrapped in duct tape, some synthetic firewood—the flotsam and jetsam of the half-forgotten years. These leftovers from past lives accumulate in suburban garages as the people who once wanted them get older and older. Useless and unnoticed, […]

The post The Memory Hole appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The only winning move is not to play Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? Joahua, the artificial intelligence defense computer in War Games (1983), almost launches World War III while playing “Global Thermonuclear War” with itself. A young computer enthusiast played by Matthew Broderick thought it was just a cool game he’d found on a military supercomputer he’d hacked. He invites Joshua to play. Joshua was actually in control of missile launch commands. The presumptive Republican candidate for president in 2024, the imbecile Donald “91 Counts” Trump is no computer, and seems to lack intelligence, artificial or otherwise. But he did have an uncle who taught at MIT, so same difference. Trump last night publicly entertained inviting global thermonuclear war. In the Broderick role in this year’s War Games reboot, we have the mainstream press. Reporters are busily pecking away at their keyboards trying to coax the American electorate into playing “but her emails” once again … because it was so much fun (and good for clicks and ratings) in 2016.

Renegade Nell, a new 8-part historical swashbuckling fantasy by Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley), premieres on Disney+ on March 29th.

From more Boeing revelations to the dark money in TV broadcasting, here’s all news from The Lever this week.

Be a shame if something happened to it Wicked Witch of the West voice: And your western economy, too! “The president of a big country stood up, said, ‘Well, sir…” the former president told a MAGAfied crowd in Conway, South Carolina. Here we go. Another bullshit “sir story.” Washington Post: “One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?,’” Trump said during a rally at Coastal Carolina University. “I said, ‘You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent.’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.” “This is crazy. And 8 years later, Trump shows that he STILL doesn’t understand how NATO works! It’s not a protection racket. They don’t pay us to protect them. Geez,” tweeted former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. Foreign policy wonks gasped. Why, at this point, who can say?

Three years after Trump’s unprecedented killing spree, the death row visitation project offers a lifeline for those who survived.

The post Amid the Lingering Trauma of Trump’s Executions, a New Project Brings Families to Federal Death Row appeared first on The Intercept.

In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Super Bowl LVIII, Superman: Legacy, Puppy Bowl XX, True Detective, TWD: Daryl Dixon, Doctor Who, and more!

In a word, Economics is an Impossible Science because by its own definition the determining conditions of the economy are not economic: they are “exogenous.” Supposedly a science of things, it is by definition without substance, being rather a mode of behavior: the application of scarce means to alternative ends so as to achieve the […]

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Masha Gesson sat through the whole Putin interview. Here are a few of her thoughts. She speaks Russian, of course, so this doesn’t rely on the Kremlin translators as Tucker’s show does: : What Putin Saw When He Was Interviewed by Tucker Carlson Here was an easy mark. Carlson meekly tried to interrupt Putin a couple of times, to ask a question he seemed stuck on: Why hadn’t all this history and these territorial issues come up when Putin first became President, in 2000? It was an ill-informed question—Putin has trafficked in historical revisionism from the start and became increasingly obsessed with Ukraine after the Orange Revolution, in 2004—and an easy one for Putin to ignore. It seemed to show that Carlson was less well briefed than Putin, who dropped biographical trivia about Carlson into the conversation, a trademark intimidation tactic of a K.G.B. agent. He mentioned, for example, that Carlson had unsuccessfully tried to join the C.I.A.

Ron Brownstein has written an in-depth piece for the Atlantic about Trump’s 2nd term immigration agenda. It is terrifying. But Trump and his henchmen are dead serious about carrying it out this time. And the reasoning isn’t just to get rid of immigrants they don’t like. It’s to demonstrate and consolidate power to rule by force in many other ways as well. Don’t think you won’t be affected. Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.

If you want to go deep on the Hur Report to see just how incredibly disingenuous his novelistic little hit job really is, nobody does it better than Emptywheel. Highly recommend, particularly if you’re interested in Hur’s shoddy legal reasoning. I thought I would share a good thumbnail version from twitter if you don’t have the time or inclination to dig into the details: So I went through and read Hur’s report, and the way the media at large has been presenting things is borderline malpractice. Please take the two minutes it requires to read this tweet because it really does matter. Let me lay it out for you. Hur is alleging there are two counts of Biden willfully retaining classified documents: The Afghanistan docs that were found in his Delaware home and his own personal notebooks. During an interview with a ghostwriter, he made reference to classified documents that were “downstairs” in his rented Virginia home. The supposition is that these are the Afghanistan documents that were later moved to his Delaware home in 2019 and then found by the FBI.

It’s different for everyone James Fallows has a great newsletter that you should subscribe to if you can. He’s been writing about all this, particularly the political press, for many years and his perspective is extremely valuable. This week he starts off interrogating the idea that age is a static thing for everyone and he quotes some experts on the subject: Last month several doctors and other authors assessed evidence that Biden was on the fortunate side of that divide, a “superager” on the Holmes / Stevens / Carter model. This is even though Biden “reads” as older than his near-contemporary Trump, mainly because of the stiffness of his gait. In this piece at MedPage Today and this in The Hill the authors emphasized differential aging rates and said about Biden: Then he asks a pertinent question. Might age be an advantage? In our youth obsessed culture that’s heresy but he makes a good case: The job of president finally comes down to judgment calls. Emphasize this bill, and not that one.

On October 7, 2023, fighters from Hamas invaded Israel and killed around 400 soldiers and around 800 civilians. They raped, injured and kidnapped hundreds of others. By October 13, the Intelligence Ministry of Israel had produced a plan for how to deal with these attacks. Led by the Likud Party member Gila Gamliel, the document … Continue reading The Gamliel Plan →

How germs made history. Greenhouse gas emissions keep rising but USA and Europe are still the major causes of global warming.   Measles and malaria banish Muhammad and Mao Move over Alexander, Attila, Genghis Khan, Hannibal, George Washington, Napoleon and all your attention-grabbing mates. We’re rolling out the red carpet for Yersinia pestis, Variola major, Continue reading »

If anyone ever imagined that commemoration of our war dead was not an opportunity to make political points look no further than the Daily Last Post ceremony at the Australian War Memorial at the recent opening of Federal Parliament. We need to honour any Australian who died in war and remember those who came back Continue reading »

In December, an impressive young Papua New Guinean named Jason Siwat, the director of the refugee program for the Catholic Bishops Conference of PNG and the Solomon Islands, travelled to Canberra bearing two important documents. The first was a letter from the bishops to Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil asking the government to urgently bring Continue reading »

In most democratic western countries, certainly in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand, politics manifests as a duopoly. Why is it that in spite of cultural, racial and social divisions the world over, personality takes precedence over policies? Decisions about which party to vote for is more often than not based on the perceived Continue reading »

The campaign to ‘punish’ enemies of the USA and Israel shows that states which argue from strength have no wish for justice – merely revenge. Response? Vengeance? Punishment? Retaliation? Holding to account? Culpability? Justice? Choose your euphemism in the fight against ‘terror’. Following the death of some US military personnel on the border of Syria Continue reading »

Australia’s former foreign minister Bob Carr and 49 others are supporting an appeal for easing of hostility between the two superpowers. The Asean leaders’ meeting in Melbourne could provide a platform for discussions on peace security and boosting areas of cooperation with China and the US. A congregation of Asean leaders in March could prove Continue reading »

The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation, has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it. There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the Continue reading »

And I’m not talking about Biden Following up on Tom’s post below …. there’s more: Actually it’s also that he is losing what’s left of his limited faculties and it’s been happening for a long time. The mainstream media never questioned this lunatic’s mental fitness the way they are Biden’s: And then there’s the pathological lying and narcissistic personality disorder. Meanwhile, Biden has successfully brought the nation back from economic catastrophe in record time and better than any of our peer countries, managed to get major bipartisan legislation passed under almost impossible circumstances and reassured allies that we haven’t gone completely batshit insane.