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The Opposition’s shadow minister for home, foreign and veteran affairs, Barnaby Joyce, has called upon his National colleagues to dump their leader David Littleproud and get behind him and start playing #BarnabyBall. ”Look, old mate Davey boy has had his... Read More ›

Things are better than we think. Ed Kilgore takes on the question of why Biden isn’t getting any credit for our improving circumstances. (It’s because people don’t feel it yet…) These days it often seems like we’re caught in a deluge of bad and worrying news on everything from artificial intelligence and UFOs to homelessness and smoke in the air. But you could argue that life has been getting better in the USA overall, as Washington Monthly’s Bill Scher did recently in examining some of the issues people, and especially Republicans, blame on President Joe Biden.

The only possible winner is Ukraine. Both Putin and Prigozhin are losers. The situation remains unclear and what happens next remains to be seen. Rationality does not seem to be part of events. Prigozhin’s attempted coup appears to have failed for lack of support from the Russian military. Given his constant carping criticism of the Continue reading »

Does it want to maintain its “primacy” or improve the livelihood of its people? Washington today lacks “sophisticated, long-term thinking on geopolitical issues,” said Kishore Mahbubani, Singaporean political scientist and distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He said Biden should adopt a different policy from the Trump administration toward China Continue reading »

Some thoughts on the insurrection attempt in Russia. I wonder who or what lured Yevgeny Prigozhin into staging this farce. In twelve or so hours things are likely to have calmed down. ‘Western’ anal-cysts will spend weeks fantasising about their wished for outcome which, of course, was never to happen. The whole story reminds me of Continue reading »

While the boom in unsuccessful on-shore (ie non-boat) asylum applications started in 2015 when Peter Dutton was Home Affairs Minister, as time goes by it will be Dutton and the Murdoch press that will try to make it Labor’s Achillies heel. In May 2023, primary asylum applications were 1,896, the highest monthly level since international Continue reading »

The vices exposed by the consulting firm, PWC, allegedly leaking confidential tax information, are not limited to one firm’s malpractice. The scandal is not merely the overuse of consultants or the misuse of the public service. The scandal has exposed a loose thread in how we are governed. Good government is woven from a warp Continue reading »

We have a lot to learn from the PWC debacle and Julian Cribb’s paper “Look out! Here Come the Elders”. Older people and the young have the time, and the ability (due to not owing an employer support), to change the world. In this paper I will summarise four examples of learnings relating to employing Continue reading »

The recklessness of Australian politicians and mainstream media and the damage which that has caused, is abundantly clear in the latest poll, carried out by the Lowy Institute on Australian attitudes to China. The irresponsibility began with Clive Hamilton’s ‘Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia’ (2018), with its provocative cover picture of a massive Chinese Continue reading »

Coverage of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and Nord Stream pipelines shows a western media willing to prioritise anti-Russian propaganda over facts. The hypocrisy gets starker by the day. The same western media that strains to warn of the dangers of disinformation – at least when it comes to rivals on social media – Continue reading »

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 25, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

In Delaware, Corporations Are Dangerously Close to Acquiring the Right to Vote 

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 6-22-2023]

Again He breaks the law and his cult members have to pony up to pay his expenses: Facing multiple intensifying investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has quietly begun diverting more of the money he is raising away from his 2024 presidential campaign and into a political action committee that he has used to pay his personal legal fees. The change, which went unannounced except in the fine print of his online disclosures, raises fresh questions about how Mr. Trump is paying for his mounting legal bills — which could run into millions of dollars — as he prepares for at least two criminal trials, and whether his PAC, Save America, is facing a financial crunch. When Mr. Trump kicked off his 2024 campaign in November, for every dollar raised online, 99 cents went to his campaign, and a penny went to Save America. But internet archival records show that sometime in February or March, he adjusted that split. Now his campaign’s share has been reduced to 90 percent of donations, and 10 percent goes to Save America.

From Amy Walters at The Cook Report: For a while now, political prognosticators and armchair campaign analysts have mused that the GOP presidential primary is almost a carbon copy of the 2016 contest. A crowded field of candidates, few of whom are willing to confront Donald Trump directly, will once again ensure that Trump will roll-up primary wins and ultimately capture the nomination in 2024.  Yet it’s also true that things are very different from the 2016 cycle.  First, Trump is a lot more popular among Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters than he was in 2015-2016.  A Marist poll taken in July 2015 found just 41% of Republicans had favorable opinions of Trump compared to 49% who viewed him unfavorably. By July 2016, most Republicans had warmed to the GOP nominee, but a considerable percentage still viewed him unfavorably: 65% favorable to 29% unfavorable. This month, the former president — who has been indicted in two cases, found liable in a battery and defamation lawsuit and faces more potential legal jeopardy stemming from his role in the Jan.

Nobody really knows… The internet is recommending this early analysis from Yaroslav Trofimov in the WSJ of the failed Russian coup over the weekend. I thought I would share some of it: One widely shared conclusion in Russia, however, was that none of the key players in the power struggle that began when Prigozhin seized the southern city of Rostov on Saturday morning has been strengthened by the ordeal that brought the country to the edge of civil war. Putin, who earlier in the day demanded his security forces crush what he described as a treasonous mutiny, ordered amnesties for Prigozhin and his men by the evening, after Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko negotiated a face-saving compromise. Prigozhin, who showed Wagner’s strength by marching two-thirds of the way toward Moscow with little opposition, ended up aborting the rebellion and accepting, at least for now, exile in Belarus. The Russian army and security forces, meanwhile, displayed little glory as their troops proved reluctant, if not outright afraid, to try stopping Wagner. Flying Russian flags, large Wagner columns on Sunday were driving south on the Moscow-Rostov highway.

You’ll be shocked You know you want one. Now there’s a study to support why: Millions of Americans who had never owned a gun purchased a firearm during a two-and-a-half-year period that began in January 2019, before the pandemic, and continued through April 2021. Of the 7.5 million people who bought their first firearm during that period, 5.4 million had until then lived in homes without guns, researchers at Harvard and Northeastern University estimated. The new buyers were different from the white men who have historically made up a majority of gun owners. Half were women, and nearly half were people of color (20 percent were Black, and 20 percent were Hispanic). “The people who were always buying are still buying — they didn’t stop. But a whole other community of folks have come in,” said Michael Anestis, the executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, who was not involved in the study. “The real question I wanted to answer was, What do people get out of having a gun?” said Nick Buttrick, a psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Det är inte lätt alltid att vara PK …

Ah, the good ol’ days! Do you remember #SecondCivilWarLetters? When in 2018 Alex Jones announced a Second Civil War starting on the 4th of July? Twitter erupted in mockery with Ken Burns-ish “letters” from the front? Nikki Haley touched off a sort of reprise (though much less fun) on Saturday with one tweet It was blowback a go-go! Seriously? Medhi Hasan: It was so simple when she was growing up that, per her own memoir, she wasn’t allowed to be in a child beauty pageant because it was divided into Black kids and white kids and she was neither. The good ol’ days! That memory probably makes Nikki smile now. Roger Sollenberger: When Nikki was growing up, she sure had it simple — the president of the HBCU where her father was a professor was shot by cops in the Orangeburg massacre while protesting racial segregation Ted Lieu: Dear @NikkiHaley: I remember growing up, when folks called me Chink. Threw eggs at our house. Slashed our tires. Called the police on us because they thought Asians like us were stealing wild ducks for food. And no one in government looked like me or you. Jeff Sharlet: 1970s?

Flamman (F): Först och främst, vad är MMT? Lars Pålsson Syll (LPS): I grunden är det en reaktion på sättet som pengar och hur de skapas beskrivs i den traditionella ekonomiska litteraturen. Där beskrivs pengar som något som man sparar genom att  in dem på banken, och som banken i sin tur kan låna ut […]

The ranting about “communism” from Trump and the right is unsettlingly familiar.

The post Trump’s “Final Battle” appeared first on The Intercept.

In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: WGA/DGA/SAG-AFTRA/AMPTP, Rick and Morty, Superman & Lois, Justified: City Primeval, Doctor Who, and more!

Some of Doctor Who's most emotional moments all share a common thematic thread: the fear of being forgotten after one's gone.

Suppose there is a series of Bernoulli trials, that each trial has the same probability p of success, and that the trials are independent—like the standard model of coin tossing, treating ‘heads’ as ‘success.’ Then the Law of Large Numbers guarantees that the rate of successes converges (in probability) to the probability of success. If […]

“Without TCM, classic movies will die and with them, part of our culture.” -from the “TCM Mantra” In 1994, media mogul Ted Turner launched Turner Classic Movies, a commercial-free subscription channel dedicated to airing uncut classic and deep-catalog films ranging from the silent era to the early 80s. At the time of its inception, TCM’s only real “competitor” in the cable market was American Movie Classics, which operated under a very similar programming philosophy. However, by the early 2000s, AMC (for assorted business reasons) was interrupting film presentations with commercial breaks; and once the channel went down that road, they were soon kowtowing to ad agency and sponsor demands – e.g., being pressed to incorporate more contemporary films into their programming. By default TCM was now the sole haven for classic film buffs on cable TV. Consequently, over the ensuing years TCM has built a sizeable, passionate, and fiercely loyal coterie of fans (myself among them), as well as a (mostly) genial social media community (we’re not unlike the Deadheads; albeit more Ty Power than tie-dyed).