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Created
Thu, 14/09/2023 - 02:30
McCarthy snaps to On August 28th, Donald Trump had had enough of his House Republicans dilly-dallying around. He took to his social media platform Truth Social and issued an order: The Republicans in Congress, though well meaning, keep talking about an Impeachment ‘Inquiry’ on Crooked Joe Biden.Look, the guy got bribed, he paid people off, and he wouldn’t give One Billion Dollars to Ukraine unless they ‘got rid of the Prosecutor.’ Biden is a Stone Cold Crook-You don’t need a long INQUIRY to prove it, it’s already proven. These lowlifes Impeached me TWICE (I WON!), and Indicted me FOUR TIMES – For NOTHING!Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US! Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy heard him loud and clear. On Tuesday he announced that he was unilaterally ordering an impeachment inquiry into the president during his term as Vice President nearly a decade ago. No one was surprised that he went back on his stated principle that an impeachment inquiry can only be launched with a full vote of the House or the still binding determination by Trump’s Department of Justice which came to the same conclusion.
Created
Thu, 14/09/2023 - 00:30
Evidence-free since … pretty much forever We’ve seen this show before. Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended for bringing meritless lawsuits, unsupported by evidence, alleging massive voter fraud in the 2020 election. He had it, oh yes, massive amounts of evidence he hyped endlessly before cameras but never produced to be independently scrutinized. House Republicans are playing that game again with their budding Biden impeachment inquiry. “What actual evidence do you have as opposed to allegations to show to the American public that would merit an actual impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden?” the off-camera reporter asked Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) Perry did not take it well. Mediaite: Notably, during a CPAC event in March Perry made clear his penchant for political revenge. Perry, whose cell phone was seized by the FBI during its investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, fantasized aloud at CPAC about “leftists” and “Marxists” “quaking in fear” and “losing weight because they’re not eating” because they are so afraid the government may jail them.
Created
Wed, 13/09/2023 - 23:00

There’s a raw and sinewy energy to Elisa Gonzalez’s line. Her debut collection, Grand Tour, clarified and found its final form in the years after her brother was shot to death. So it is a first book and also a shattered elegy, an announcement and an aftermath, by turns impassioned and dispassionate as it registers grief in many forms. It begins with “Notes Toward an Elegy,”

The Cypriot sun is impatient, a woman undressed
who can’t spare the time to dress, so light
like a vitrine holds even a storm.
One day in the Old City, a pineapple rain.
And I’m on my way home from the pharmacy, carrying my little bag of cures.
Refuge at the café in the nameless square.
Nihal brings espresso poured over ice, turns off the music.
We listen to rain fall through the light until the end.

That’s the end of the stanza and the rain but the beginning of the poem and the book. It’s as if the poet’s point of departure is the place where two Yeatsian gyres meet just as they go their separate ways:

Created
Wed, 13/09/2023 - 23:00
Bloody Tradies! For those looking for an excuse to use “gobsmacked.” An X-post video clip from Tuesday: Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become “arrogant” since COVID and “We’ve got to kill that attitude.” Financial Review: The current unemployment rate needs to rise by 40 per cent to 50 per cent to boost the Australian economy’s productivity, Tim Gurner has said. “In my view, we need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around,” he said. Gurner told the Summit that the cultural shift towards a more pro-employee climate had led to tradies pulling back on productivity. “When there’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude.” Gurner has received some blowback over his remarks about “tradies.” “Just a reminder corporate profits and CEO pay are at historic highs,” wrote Greens MP Stephen Bates.
Created
Wed, 13/09/2023 - 22:00

We, the computer scientists and engineers of this nation, are pleased to announce that we have invented actual, real-life portals. However, we are saddened to announce that they are fucking horrible.

We’ve built hundreds of variations of these things, and we promise none are cool. Rent-payment portals, student portals, health insurance portals—just name the portal, and it will suck.

In sci-fi, you might go into a portal and pop out millions of light-years away. We swear we tried to replicate that. But as of now, if you enter one of our portals from the comfort of your own home, at best, you might come out thousands of miles away from your closest accepted primary care physician.

We’ve completely reimagined what a portal can be. Unfortunately, our collective imagination was limited to picturing what dozens of pages of tedious dental information might look like rendered on Microsoft Excel in 1988.

We’re not sure what we’re doing wrong. Our portals successfully transport you to another time, but only to a year sometime between when computers were made of tubes and the last time somebody typed out “www.”

Created
Wed, 13/09/2023 - 20:46

When the NHS was founded, it was a central part of the UK’s post-war social contract. Now, it is struggling to perform, and there are increasing calls for so-called ‘reform,’ which is often a euphemism for privatisation and the introduction of insurance-based funding.  They are calling for a fundamental change to the business model of […]

Created
Wed, 13/09/2023 - 20:00

Jeffrey Zients recused himself from dealings with his brother-in-law’s company, which is backed by the U.S. and a key player in green energy projects around the globe.

The post White House Chief of Staff’s Wealth and Connections Collide With Biden’s Clean Energy Strategy appeared first on The Intercept.

Created
Wed, 13/09/2023 - 19:54
The remarkable story behind the disciplining of a major charity shows how power really works. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th September 2023 Economic power seldom needs to discipline those who might challenge it. Most of the time, they do it to themselves. However extreme the ideologies promoted by corporations and oligarchs, organisational […]
Created
Wed, 13/09/2023 - 19:27
Kevin Lewis points us to this recent paper, “Can invasive species lead to sedentary behavior? The time use and obesity impacts of a forest-attacking pest,” published in Elsevier’s Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, which has the following abstract: “Invasive species can significantly disrupt environmental quality and flows of ecosystem services and we are still […]
Created
Wed, 13/09/2023 - 18:00
Álvaro Fernández-Gallardo, Simon Lloyd and Ed Manuel Since the 2007–09 Global Financial Crisis, central banks have developed a range of macroprudential policies (‘macropru’) to address fault lines in the financial system. A key aim of macropru is to reduce ‘left-tail risks‘ – ie, minimise the probability and severity of future economic crises. However, building this … Continue reading The transmission of macroprudential policy in the tails