It probably wasn’t the best time to venture near to the Belarus border. But that’s exactly what I did a month or so ago. I spent a couple of weeks with my extended family in a small Polish town called ‘Azmol’ (not it’s real name). And extended the family certainly is, concentrated in a single Continue reading »
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Picture the Western media’s outrage if a Russian helicopter gunship went into an occupied Crimean city neighbourhood and began shooting missiles at civilian homes, claiming a militant lived in one. “War crime” would resound. When this occurred in the Jenin refugee camp nearly two weeks ago, killing seven people, including a teenager, it was framed as a Continue reading »
The denialists will never, ever accept climate change The world is burning up right now with temperatures soaring even in places like the arctic. The scientific consensus is that this is caused by climate change and common sense can tell any yokel on the street that this is not normal. However, the wingnuts will never accept this presumably because they either care more about their fossil fuel portfolios or they care more about owning the libs than anything else in this world. Here’s an example from Paul Hindraker (aka Hindrocket for those of you who remember the good old days of blogging.) This last week, the press has been full of alarmist headlines: Tuesday was the hottest day ever! No, Wednesday was the hottest day ever! Of course, you have to 1) define “ever,” and 2) believe that we have any idea what the average temperature is, over the whole Earth, on a particular day–let alone a particular day 1,000 years ago. At Watts Up With That?, Paul Homewood comments: Then there is this: Wait, what? I didn’t know they had SUVs 125,000 years ago. What made it warm then? You’re not supposed to ask.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, sending a strong sign of Democratic unity from one of the party’s most liberal members. “I think he’s done quite well, given the limitations that we have,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the “Pod Save America” podcast Thursday. “I do think that there are ebbs and flows.” Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist from New York, has sometimes bucked Biden and the party’s leaders, including voting against the deal the president negotiated with Republicans in May to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and casting the lone Democratic vote against a spending bill to keep the government operating and avoid a partial government shutdown. She endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary and demurred in an interview last year when asked if she would support the incumbent president in 2024. Biden is facing nominal primary challenges for next year’s election in self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Wow. Twenty years. I’ve recently (perhaps not so recently) aged into the demographic who recall events from twenty years back, even though those events occurred in an already reasonably established professional life. That still seems wild to me. I learnt quickly that saying things to the youth like ‘Well, I’m old’ doesn’t yield reassuring denials. […]
As Chris suggests, one of the most memorable disasters at Crooked Timber was the seminar on David Graeber’s book, Debt. Timothy Burke described it at the time as conveying: that feeling of grad school as Hobbesean nightmare, of small arguments quickly and casually intensified into thermonuclear exchanges, losing all potentially meaningful disagreements along the way. […]
Twenty years and a few months ago Chris asked me to join a group of bloggers who were going to create a group blog so as to reduce the pressure on each to post frequently and combine audiences. First I asked him what a blog was. After he explained I told him that I, a […]
No SNL cold open. Season’s over and writers are on strike. Politico: A Washington, D.C.-based bar discipline committee concluded Friday that Rudy Giuliani should be disbarred for “frivolous” and “destructive” efforts to derail the 2020 presidential election in support of former President Donald Trump. “He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the three-member panel declared in a 38-page decision. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law.”
Burn it down and start from scratch? It should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans do not know much about what their government does or why or who is in charge. Fewer than half can name all three branches of government. A quarter cannot name even one. Philip Bump wrote recently, “On any given Election Day, after all, some chunk of the electorate is misinformed about who and what is on the ballot.” But there is lots of governement waste, fraud, and abuse squirreled away somewhere that should be eliminated so we can lower taxes. They’re sure of that. Like this genius Vivek Ramaswamy who wants to eliminate 75% of career federal employees. People we’ve trained to know their jobs. People who know important shit most Americans aren’t even aware is being done. Yeah, those people have got to go. I sat down recently with a grade-school friend I had not seen since I was maybe 15. He was retired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He’d captained vessels and flown planes as part of the agency’s data-gathering efforts. I asked if he’d read “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis.
I did something both awesome and ill-timed. Well, first I should back up and remind you of something I told you before at some nebulous time in the past, and that is that I am an immersive daydreamer. I said that I was a maladaptive daydreamer but I didn’t even think that was right, because […]
Not quite 20 years ago, I got an invitation to spend a week as a visiting blogger at an exciting new group blog called Crooked Timber. In the manner of the most catastrophic house guests, I managed to turn that into permanent residence. Looking back at posts from that time, it’s startling how active we […]
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The leader of the anti-Putin Russian Volunteer Corps is publicly connected to Robert Rundo and Christopher Pohlhaus.
The post Russian Militia Has Links to American Neo-Nazi and Anti-Trans Figures appeared first on The Intercept.
Caterpillars are a remarkable bellwether of environmental changes.
The post The Very Hungry Caterpillar and the Ecosystem appeared first on Nautilus.
It literally doesn’t get any dumber than this Terri Otten at TNR: She’s a Barbie comrade, in a Communist Barbie world—or so say Republicans, who are doubling down on accusations that the upcoming Barbie movie is Chinese propaganda. The film, which comes out July 21, stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, who leave Barbie Land to explore the real world. In one scene before they leave, a rough, hand-drawn map of the world can be seen in the background. The map includes the so-called nine-dash line, a much-disputed division of territory in the South China Sea. Senator Ted Cruz was one of the first U.S. lawmakers to weigh in, sarcastically tweeting, “I guess Barbie is made in China…” Fox News commentators speculated outright whether Barbie was Communist or not. More Republicans have joined them.
Apparently, even Trump is sick of his mini-me Vanity Fair: Last month, an incredible report emerged about the lengths that failed-gubernatorial-candidate-slash-rabid-election-denier Kari Lake was going to in her quest to become Donald Trump’s 2024 vice presidential pick. Lake, sources told People, “spent a significant portion of her time at Mar-a-Lago during its open season,” so much so that she was apparently at the Florida resort “more than Melania Trump,” a.k.a. Trump’s wife. “Kari Lake is there all the time,” a person familiar with the matter told the outlet. “There’s a suite there that she practically lives in.” Yet, unfortunately for the VP hopeful, practically becoming roommates with Trump does not appear to be helping her chances. In fact, according to a new report, it’s quite the opposite. Trump has apparently grown “less enthusiastic about Lake,” the Daily Beast revealed on Thursday. Why?
As Annika Brockschmidt has already detailed for readers of RD, the June 30 – July...
Nuclear winter is scary as hell. Spread the word.
The post When Sowing Fear Is a Public Service appeared first on Nautilus.
Crooked Timber is twenty years old today, which is an awfully long time for a website, never mind a blog, never mind one that is strictly non-commercial and run on volunteer labour. So here’s to us, and here’s to all those who have been on board at various times during our journey. To quote the […]
I think this creeps me out more than anything I’ve seen in recent days. A Hollywood desperate to make money at the dying box office is sure to see this and decide that we need more of it: Type the words “sound of freedom” into Twitter (decent people who wish to live good, happy lives should under no circumstances actually do this) and the search will yield dozens of triumphant reports crowing about the improbable victory of a film by that title over the likes of Indiana Jones at the box office this week. That’s not, strictly speaking, accurate – Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny had already been out for five days, the first three of which out-earned Sound of Freedom’s opening-day take, when the new independent thriller came to theaters on Tuesday. But for a fleeting moment this past Fourth of July, while the intended audience of Indy’s latest outing was presumably spending time with their families and friends at barbecues or in other social situations, an unoccupied fandom rallied by the star Jim Caviezel claimed the day with a $14.2m gross versus Dial of Destiny’s $11.7m.
“My country, the U.S., is unrecognisable. I’m not sure who runs the country. I do not believe it is the president.”, says Jeffrey Sachs in a speech at a Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE) seminar, Melbourne, Australia. “U.S. actions are putting us on a path to war with China in the same way that Continue reading »
When states says that they support the rules-based international order, they are pledging their support for American empire. No more, no less. Since the lamentable Russian Federation invasion into eastern Ukraine, there has been much talk about defending democracy, international law and the rules based international order from the collective West led by Washington. For Continue reading »