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Philistines, Philistines Everywhere

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Created
Mon, 07/04/2025 - 22:56
Philistines, Philistines Everywhere

It seems like the highest fruits of civilization are the target:

President Trump on Friday signed an executive order that aims to eliminate seven federal agencies, including ones that focus on media, libraries, museums and ending homelessness…

…

The president targeted the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which is the parent company of Voice of America (VOA), as well as the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an agency that supports libraries, archives and museums in every state.

Copy and Paste Any of These Out-of-Office Replies for Your Personal Use

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/copy-and-paste-any-of-these-out-of-office-r…
Created
Mon, 07/04/2025 - 22:00

I am out of the office today and Friday to solve every existential quandary I’ve been putting off arguably since 2023 when, as far as I can tell, I simply quit thinking.

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Hi, I’m out of the office. If you have anything urgent, please get in touch with the fact that there’s probably nobody better suited than me in our organization to handle that matter, and I’m taking a day off to think about love, survival, and time.

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I am currently out of the office and changing my entire past and future by Monday. Everyone remembers when I tried this three weeks ago. I will not be piloting a rented boat this time, and expect much less legal fallout.

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I will be out of the office today. I’ve been reading a lot of breakup songs. I don’t listen to them, but I google the lyrics and read them, and the one that’s been getting me through these days goes, “And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar (oh). Said, ‘I’m fine,’ but it wasn’t true.” It reminds me of coming back from our Creative Offsite in February. See you guys Monday.

Arrested Over Tea and Biscuits

https://www.monbiot.com/2025/04/07/arrested-over-tea-and-biscuits/
Created
Mon, 07/04/2025 - 20:31
It’s not disruption that’s being prosecuted in this country. It’s dissent. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 3rd April 2025 The faces are different, but it’s the same authoritarianism. Keir Starmer’s team might not look or sound like Donald Trump’s, but its policies on protest and dissent are chillingly similar. So is the reason: […]

Trump’s Tariffs, McKinley, and the Bonapartist Executive

https://crookedtimber.org/2025/04/07/trumps-tariffs-mckinley-and-the-bonapartis…
Created
Mon, 07/04/2025 - 17:37
With collapsing stock markets, retirement portfolios, and consumer confidence, there is an all-too-human tendency to focus on the economic effects of tariffs by their critics: they are a tax on consumption, they will raise inflation, reduce efficiency, and reduce take-home income, etc. This is familiar. But this mistakes the full significance of a tariff-centric public […]

to be fair, what IS a naruto

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4316
Created
Mon, 07/04/2025 - 17:00
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April 7th, 2025next

April 7th, 2025: Hi friends, some personal news: I'm still working through those muffins >:(

– Ryan

Meet the DC think tanks impoverishing masses of Latin Americans

https://thegrayzone.com/2025/04/06/dc-think-tanks-make-people-poorer/
Created
Mon, 07/04/2025 - 11:55

These top Washington think tanks are lobbying lawmakers for sadistic sanctions on some of the hemisphere’s poorest countries while raking in millions from corporations and arms makers. Sanctions are a form of hybrid warfare that harms or even kills the target populations at little cost to the country imposing them. In Latin America alone, US sanctions (correctly known as “unilateral coercive measures”) have killed at least 100,000 Venezuelans. The US blockade of Cuba has been so destructive that one in […]

The post Meet the DC think tanks impoverishing masses of Latin Americans first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post Meet the DC think tanks impoverishing masses of Latin Americans appeared first on The Grayzone.

Elon Musk, Meet Christine Sheckler

https://tomdispatch.com/elon-musk-meet-christine-sheckler/
Created
Mon, 07/04/2025 - 07:33

What put the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with an annual budget hovering at just about 1% of federal spending, at the top of Elon Musk’s budget-cutting target list? Was it just a political calculation that foreign aid is a safe target because it’s unpopular with so many Americans and cutting those funds will only hurt foreigners, not U.S. voters? Or was Musk motivated by some other grudge we haven’t even heard about? A related question: Why is his invective about that particular agency — “a criminal organization,” “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” and similar blasts — so much more inflammatory in tone and content than his statements about other government programs? As reported by... Read more