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Magicians regularly use distraction to trick us into perceiving one thing while another is happening. Politicians use similar tricks to signal concern about public policy problems. Recently there has been an organised campaign to get us to believe that NAPLAN literacy results can all be explained by differences in the methods used to teach reading. Continue reading »

Inherent in the nature of insanity is the fact that those inflicted by it are unaware of their mental state. As the emission of greenhouse gases continues, global warming accelerates, bushfires and floods engulf the planet, new fossil fuel projects are subsidised, climate science is ignored, climate change projections are kept away from the public Continue reading »

“War is good for business.” So reads a quote from an arms industry executive in a recent Reuters article titled “At London arms fair, global war fears are good for business” about Europe’s biggest arms show, the biennial Defence and Security Equipment International. You will probably be unsurprised to learn that Reuters does not name Continue reading »

Amnesty’s new report accusing Eritrea’s government of gruesome war crimes relies heavily on anonymous testimony, grainy satellite images, and zero field investigation. It is the latest salvo in the West’s campaign to topple the country’s independent government. Eritrea is a small country with a geostrategically significant coast on the Red Sea. Fiercely independent, it is one of only two African nations that refuse to collaborate with AFRICOM, the US Africa Command. Committed to an incremental, self-reliant development strategy, it has […]

The post Amnesty International pushes regime change in Eritrea with dubious, unverifiable report first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post Amnesty International pushes regime change in Eritrea with dubious, unverifiable report appeared first on The Grayzone.

The author of letters to social media companies demanding the financial punishment of Russell Brand is a British lawmaker implicated in London’s war on Covid-19 and Ukraine dissenters. Her husband was a commander in the Army’s psy-ops division. Allegations of sexual impropriety and abuse by comedian and podcaster Russell Brand by the British media prompted YouTube to demonetize the star’s popular channel on September 20.  The Grayzone can now reveal that YouTube’s financial censorship of Brand is the result of […]

The post Intel-linked UK official pushing censorship of Russell Brand  first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post Intel-linked UK official pushing censorship of Russell Brand  appeared first on The Grayzone.

In 1754, eleven men came together in a Covent Garden coffeehouse, agreeing to pool their money to spend on initiatives for the public good. The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) was born. From education to environmentalism, the society has championed many important causes. It fought to outlaw the practice of children sweeping chimneys, and its […]

The mystery as to why a top prosecutor working on the Durham investigation abruptly resigned has been solved. It is exactly what we thought it was: A former federal prosecutor who helped investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe said Wednesday she left the team because of concerns with then-Attorney General William Barr’s public comments about the case and because she strongly disagreed with a draft of an interim report he considered releasing before the election. “I simply couldn’t be part of it. So I resigned,” Nora Dannehy told Connecticut state legislators during her confirmation hearing as a nominee to the state Supreme Court. It marked the first time Dannehy has spoken publicly about her sudden resignation from the probe overseen by former special counsel John Durham. Durham, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, was appointed in the spring of 2019 by Barr to investigate potential wrongdoing by government officials and others in the early days of the FBI probe into ties between the Trump 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.

Jotting down some ideas? That counts as writing, since brainstorming is an essential part of the writing process.

Taking a shower or bath? That’s letting your unconscious brain do some work, so it definitely counts as writing.

A long walk? Yes, same as above, totally counts as writing.

Attempting to locate a pen that actually writes? That’s pre-writing, which is writing.

Wandering around a bookstore and thinking about all the effort each author put into each book, not to mention the agents, editors, designers, proofreaders, and booksellers, and then getting a half-caf iced latte with oat milk and not buying a single book, but adding a bunch of books to your list of books you plan to borrow from the library? That counts as writing, yes.

Some light gardening? If you think about gardening metaphors while doing it, that’s writing, for sure.

Commenting on a Buy Nothing post about a free lawnmower? That’s writing.

Reading a Substack post about writing every day? That is absolutely writing-adjacent—so yes, it counts.

Here’s the latest on maneuverings to out-maneuver the MAGA crazies: The long-shot idea that Democrats could bail out the beleaguered Speaker Kevin McCarthy is suddenly getting real. Small groups of centrist Democrats are holding secret talks with several of McCarthy’s close GOP allies about a last-ditch deal to fund the government, according to more than a half-dozen people familiar with the discussions. The McCarthy allies engaging in those conversations are doing so out of serious concern that their party can’t stop an impending shutdown on its own, given the intransigence of a handful of conservatives. Lawmakers involved in the talks — who mostly belong to the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, the Republican Governance Group or the centrist New Democrat Coalition — have labored to keep their work quiet. Many Republicans involved are incredibly worried about revealing their backup plan, wanting to wait until every other tool in McCarthy’s arsenal has failed. That moment may not be until next week, just ahead of the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline.

We've got #WhoSpy back with another teaser image for the BBC, Disney+ & Russell T. Davies's upcoming Doctor Who 60th-anniversary event.

Sic transit gloria mundi The Guardian on Wednesday: Rupert Murdoch loathes Donald Trump so much that the billionaire has not just soured on him as a presidential candidate but often wishes for his death, the author Michael Wolff writes in his eagerly awaited new book on the media mogul, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty. According to Wolff, Murdoch, 92, has become “a frothing-at-the-mouth” enemy of the 77-year-old former US president, often voicing thoughts including “This would all be solved if … ” and “How could he still be alive, how could he?” CNBC Thursday (today): Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chairman of the board of both Fox Corp. and News Corp., the company said on Thursday. The move will be official in November. Murdoch, 92, will be appointed chairman emeritus of each company. Lachlan Murdoch, one of his sons, will become sole chairman of News Corp and will continue as Fox Corp.’s executive chair and CEO. “Our companies are in robust health, as am I,” the elder Murdoch said in a note to employees.

‘Going online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed,’ Klein found instead ‘The Confusion: a torrent of people discussing me and what I’d said and what I’d done – only it wasn’t me. It was her. Which raised an alarming question: Who, then, was I?’

‘You like poetry?’ he said. ‘Oh god,’ I said. ‘Alright, alright – one word then,’ he said. ‘One word?’ I said. ‘Yes, one ordinary word that you don’t need to think about.’ ‘Alright,’ I said, ‘that’s easy enough.’ ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good, darling.’ ‘Raw,’ I said. ‘Raw?’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘now you have it.’ ‘I’m not sure I do though,’ he said. ‘Well I don’t know then,’ I said, ‘let’s just leave it.’

The need for prosthetic brainpower has been apparent throughout human history, evidenced by the continual development of techniques and technologies to compensate for our biological inadequacies. The first number systems were developed around five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, making it possible for users to write down what memory might struggle to retain.

While the Romantic view of Vesuvius saw it as a unique phenomenon, a spectacle, for the scientists it was a specimen, a comparator for investigations into the nature of volcanic activity. Newtonian physics had long since opened up space, but for calculating the age of the planet there wasn’t much to go on beyond mythology and the Old Testament.

Antiquities remain, with the possible exception of wildlife, the only illicit commodity that transnational criminal gangs can trade on the open market. You can’t buy or sell people, drugs or weapons on eBay or at international auction houses.

Because each year of your life amounts         to less of your lifethan the year before, the things in it change you less.Horse chestnuts, for example,     ...

Both James and Jahangir were obsessed with hunting, wilfully ensuring that court timetables were disrupted and dictated by the prolonged pursuit of prey, to the frustration of officials. Even so avid a huntsman as James might, however, have struggled to match the emperor’s claim in the Jahangirnama that, since the age of twelve, he had hunted 17,167 animals.

The voice, the face and the gaze, all crucial to our ‘being with others’, are ‘disrupted and distorted’ by chatbots, artificial intelligence, eye tracking, iris scanning, facial coding and all the rest. ‘Pathways to a different world will not be found by internet search engines,’ Jonathan Crary states matter-of-factly. If there is to be a future, it will be offline.

Is Bill Browder an oligarch? His critics think he ticks many of the boxes. He made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, profiting heavily from the newly privatised industries. He was a vocal supporter of Putin even after the dark truths of his regime had become clear, even after Putin had cracked down on numerous other oligarchs, and was allowed to continue to accumulate wealth – until suddenly he wasn’t.

Despite the evidence of what the world ‘has done’ to Neel’s sitters, her portraits are never mawkish. She kept something back: wasn’t it more fun, she said, to play hide and seek with her thoughts, ‘to hide them artfully in little corners?’