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Created
Sat, 08/02/2025 - 04:56
Contrary to what Peter Dutton would like the electorate to believe, reducing administrative waste will save very little money. If Dutton is serious, he would review major capital projects which lack proper evaluation, starting with his uneconomic nuclear energy proposal. Dutton has done his best to make inflation and the cost of living the major Continue reading »
Created
Sat, 08/02/2025 - 04:55
The AUKUS agreement aims to increase US, UK and Australian submarine capability in the Indo Pacific and the deterrence impact they offer. The current plan will fail for four fundamental reasons. Between now and 2032 the US Navy will drop from 49 nuclear powered attack submarines (SSN) to 32-35; the US will not have sufficient Continue reading »
Created
Sat, 08/02/2025 - 04:54
On 24 December 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilisation against barbarians.” His words echoed the rhetoric adopted by violent aggressors throughout history to deny their own atrocities. A hierarchy of humanity: good against evil barbarians intent on annihilating civilisation. At the Continue reading »
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Sat, 08/02/2025 - 04:52
This series is built on the firm belief in “a paradigm of care” being the answer to the cancer of neoliberal economic rationalism, and its bedfellows bullying managerialism, monetarism and compliance surveillance. But following the maxim that “no one likes a whinger”, I am also advocating the timeless message from Swiss American psychiatrist and expert Continue reading »
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Sat, 08/02/2025 - 04:00
While President Trump flamboyantly signs executive orders banning little trans girls from playing softball and celebrating his delusional order to have the Army Corps of Engineers dump millions of gallons of water in a California flood plain, his man-Friday Elon Musk and his teen-age cyberpunk gang have taken a sledgehammer to the federal government. Systematically infiltrating one agency after another (the latest being the Social Security Administration!) they are fulfilling the Project 2025 blueprint to smash everything they come in contact with. It’s only been two and a half weeks and they’ve already accessed the Treasury Department and are fooling around with the computer system that pays America’s bills, they’ve destroyed the Office of Personnel Management and USAID and are now working on Medicare and Medicaid,the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of Education. There are surely more on the menu that just haven’t come to light yet.
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Sat, 08/02/2025 - 02:30
And yours Raw Story: Adding to reports that billionaire Elon Musk is making the lives of Donald Trump’s inner circle a living hell with his freelancing, Wired’s Jake Lahut reported on MSNBC that some are looking to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to step in and right the ship. That would be the same Susie Wiles who, when her boss spoke this week of the U.S. ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip to occupy and develop the prime beachfront property, looked like this: Lahut spoke with MSNBC’s “Way Too Early” this morning on the tensions Elon Musk’s Agents of DOGE are generating inside the White House. By the kids the South Africa-born boy genius enlisted to take a wrecking ball to the federal government — like 19-year-old hacker “Big Balls” and the racist-eugenecist Marko Elez — Musk means to wreak as much havoc as he can without considering or caring about the consequences for others. Much like the Narcissist-in-Chief who’s letting him trash federal personnel and policy infrastructure unsupervised. This is the plot of a Superman movie.
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Sat, 08/02/2025 - 02:06
Anyone that has read chunks of Marx’s Capital will know that he often explicitly and not trivially implicitly draws on data and evidence gathered and published in reports by select committees of the British Parliament. Most of these reports he draws on were written before the great expansions of the franchise, and so are effectively produced […]
Created
Sat, 08/02/2025 - 01:47

Trump’s actions—from defunding USAID to attacking NATO and imposing tariffs on America's closest allies—are eroding the mechanisms that have sustained American hegemony for decades.

The post Foreign Policy Reset: Trump’s Trade Wars Push US Allies Into Open Rebellion appeared first on MintPress News.

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Sat, 08/02/2025 - 01:02


“I like thinking about the cut in film as a kiss. It brings things together.”

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I met Martine Syms at a microscopic art gallery in Los Angeles’s Chinatown in 2012. We’d both been invited to give presentations to an audience so small we were essentially performing for each other, and although I can’t remember what either of our talks was about, Martine’s slides had a deep purple background—her signature color—and featured an elegant font I’d never seen before (a year later, the font, Lydian, was everywhere). At the time, she was calling herself “a conceptual entrepreneur.” Thinking about it now, I’m not sure if she meant she was an entrepreneur only conceptually, or that she sold ideas. Both might have been true, but neither quite encompasses the artist she was then, and has since become.

Created
Sat, 08/02/2025 - 01:00
Get familiar with it and stop it The Musk-Trump administration is not looking to reduction-in-force its way to cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. That’s a smokescreen. What they’re attempting, says Paul Krugman, is an autogolpe, a self-coup. And with “the full support of every Republican in the House and the Senate.” “The federal work force is no larger now than it was under Dwight Eisenhower,” writes the economist. Laying off federal workers doesn’t even put a dent in $2 trillion. So why do it? It’s an attempt to capture the government wholesale. It’s a purge. Pure and simple. Throw out the old. Indescriminately. Bring in the newer, truer believers. Even if some Trump babies get tossed out with the bathwater. Republicans have long been willing to scarifice their own so long as they believe far more on the left will die a swift political death. * Krugman writes: Musk-Trumpocracy’s illegal shutdown of USAID should be seen through this lens. Musk clearly hates the idea of helping people in need: just look at the rage he has expressed over the philanthropy of MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife.