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What the physical violence in the US Congress portends Philip Bump takes a look at the possible meaning of GOP officials resorting to threats and physical violence this week on Capitol Hill. It is probably not terribly useful to draw sweeping conclusions from Sen. Markwayne Mullin’s demand Tuesday that a witness at a Senate hearing stand up and fight him. Mullin’s background is atypical for a senator, including a brief stint about 15 years ago during which he did mixed-martial arts fighting. The witness, meanwhile, was the head of the Teamsters union; his willingness to goad Mullin (R-Okla.) into the challenge was probably also atypical for someone appearing on Capitol Hill. We might also be cautious about the weird, probably overheated interaction between Reps. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), also on Tuesday, in which the latter accuses the former of elbowing him. Or the scuffle in January when the Republican Party was trying to elect McCarthy speaker in the first place. These were all isolated incidents, explainable in isolated contexts.

There is no way of stopping people from trying to escape the awful conditions of their lives through the Rwanda scheme – another, sensible, solution is required, writes Brian Latham

Cheesy Flatbread Bolognese

Parmesan Toast Rippers

Italian Tostada

Mozzarella Sauce Cruster

Open-Faced Pepperoni Sandwich

Four Cheese Marinara Burrito, Unrolled

Topless Calzone

Mexican Pizza (Italian-Style)

Deep Dish Pinwheel o’ Cheddar

Wet ’n’ Starchy Caprese Salad

Detroit Style Discus Margheritus

The Papa John Special

Dehydrated Cheesy Gazpacho

Reconstructed Pizza Casserole

Busted Panini

Cheesy Beanless Chili on Bread Plate

Reppeponi Zippa

Donatello’s Surprise

Eese-Chay Izza-Pay

Yesterday, the Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeal’s ruling that the UK government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is unlawful. The court ruled that there was a real risk deported refugees could have their claims wrongly assessed and that they could be returned to their country of origin to face the very […]

Tread carefully or go for it? Pick your metaphor. Whistling past a graveyard. Tiptoeing through a minefield. Every day feels like the country is doing a tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. And we know what happened to them. The question of Donald Trump’s qualification for any elected office is a hot potato neither the courts nor election officials nor Congress want to touch. Hayes Brown writes: Efforts to block former President Donald Trump from being on the ballot next year have yet to score a major win in court. Nobody in power seems willing to decide whether the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause disqualifies him from returning to the White House. Instead, judges and state officials have either pawned off that decision to someone else or determined that there will be some other, better time to make a judgment. The result is a rapidly shrinking window for that decision to be made. And, based on the standard in a ruling issued in Michigan on Tuesday, we might not know the answer until after all the votes have been cast on Election Day next year. It might be after the presidential electors have met and submitted their ballots.

From November 1-2, the UK government hosted its inaugural AI Safety Summit, a gathering of international government officials, AI business leaders, researchers, and civil society advocates to discuss the potential for creating an international body to govern AI, akin to the IPCC for climate change. On its surface, ‘safety’ appears to be an unobjectionable concern […]

A whole generation, if not more, has already built a perception of Israel as a genocidal regime, and no number of future lies, Hollywood movies, or Maxim Magazine spreads will ever lessen that in any way.

The post Rape, ISIS, Mein Kampf and other Lies: How Israel Lost All Credibility appeared first on MintPress News.

The Prime Minister's glaring political deficiencies have been highlighted in a disastrous week for the Conservatives

I’m a voracious reader of American fiction and I’ve noticed something odd in recent years. This country has been eternally “at war” and you just wouldn’t know that — a small amount of veteran’s fiction aside — from the novels that are generally published.  For at least a decade, Americans have been living in the shadow of war and yet, except in pop fiction of the Tom Clancy variety (where, in the end, we always win), there’s remarkably little evidence of it. As for myself — I’m a novelist — I find that no matter what I chose to write about, I can’t seem to avoid that shadow. My first novel was about Vietnam vets coming home and my second... Read more

Source: In the Shadow of War appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

What happens when you gut the liberal arts Finally: an explanation for how the United States of America could elect an under-educated, grandiose, narcissist reality TV star to the presidency. Social media (especially TikTok) is a digital Petri dish for breeding them. This TikTok freak show is completely nuts. The Wrap: The Guardian made the unusual move Wednesday to delete a 21-year-old letter written by Osama bin Laden from their site after several TikTokers urged followers to read the al Qaeda leader’s missive, causing “Letter to America” to go viral on the social media platform. Guardian readers are now met with the message, “This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to the American people,’ as reported in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002. The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.” In a statement to TheWrap, a spokesperson for the U.K. outlet said, “The transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared on social media without the full context.

Walmart’s Great Value Original Fruit Smiles is not exactly a new food, for the recipe has clearly been handed down through fluorescent generations. But given a recent update, they are truly the only fruit snack worth eating. The only fruit snack with substance, tang, and mouthfeel akin to banana flesh combined with a pencil eraser.

In a nondescript orange pouch, I did not believe they would be good. Especially given that they cost just $2.50 a box. But my son pressed a grape smile into his small, warm palm and shoved it through my clenched jaw as I briefly dozed on the sofa with an NFL game on. I involuntarily chewed and felt the snack adhere to my molars on the deepest level, the 70 percent daily value of vitamin C permeating every bone.

These smile-shaped gems are chewy and perfectly dense. Unlike some of these new fruit snacks that are soft, transparent, and aspic-like in texture. These generic babies take me back to recess in the rain, primary colors, and hitting yourself in the shin with a Skip-It on the playground. If you were alive in the 1980s, this is the fructose hit you’re looking for.

The door is wide open to hostile states seeking to meddle in the next election through AI-generated fake content

“The new Supreme Court ethics code released on Monday looks good on paper, experts in legal ethics said. But only on paper. Its lack of an enforcement mechanism means that it will operate on the honor system, with individual justices deciding for themselves whether their conduct complies with the code.” — New York Times, 11/14/23

Fellow justices, now that we’ve adopted a “new” “ethics” “code,” you may be wondering about compliance. Accordingly, I have composed the following series of scenarios based on past conversations I have had with you. Please note that recusal is still up to you, and there are still no penalties for failure to disclose anything. So, while the below should be taken as strict guidance, you should also be aware, just among us, that you can still do pretty much whatever the hell you want.

Since the 7 October attacks, it has become common for politicians and commentators, whatever their political orientation, to behave as if mourning is a limited commodity. The logic according to which a march for peace can’t exist alongside a remembrance ceremony is also a logic that rejects our capacity to mourn the deaths of Israeli and Palestinian civilians alike.

Any civilian government that wants to unify Myanmar society will face a conundrum: how to deal with the crimes committed by its own side without turning the groups that have joined together to fight the junta against one another. 

Spiritual guidance is rare in Vernon Lee’s stories. Her ghosts are usually the undoing of those who encounter them; they represent compulsive desires rather than fears, and the glamour of history more than the anxieties of modern life. Lee’s tales speak for those who are in love with the past. 

Byron took from Milton the idea that the mind, being ‘its own place and time’, could be its own hell. Torment in the tales and other ‘dark’ poems may be both a physical space – a dungeon, a set of chains – and a mental environment, built out of the dominant images within which Byron’s figures live.

The invitation​ said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’

If we loosen our grip on suffering, discard any claim to own it, then perhaps we can ask a different question: how much pain can anyone hold in their mind at once? Must my pain always be greater than yours for it to count?

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 23 (Friday 17 November 2023)