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From law professor Xiao Wang in the LA Times: Looking for a federal law to be declared unconstitutional? Religion may well be your best bet — and that’s true regardless of how “real” your religious beliefs are. That’s part of the thinking behind one case the Supreme Court heard this session and will resolve soon. In 303 Creative vs. Elenis, the court is considering the constitutionality of a Colorado statute prohibiting most businesses from discriminating against LGBTQ+ customers. Lori Smith, a Christian webpage designer, had wanted to expand into the wedding website business — but only for opposite-sex couples, a plan that would have violated the Colorado law at issue. Her lawyers made the case on free speech grounds, but given Smith’s religious beliefs, “religious freedom” represents an undeniable backdrop to the suit. The 303 Creative case is no outlier. Religion-based claims have proliferated in recent years, and plaintiffs have often won because courts have almost invariably found their religious beliefs to be sincerely held.

After enduring chronic illness for many decades, Dennis passed away peacefully at 11:10pm (AEST) on Tuesday the 13th of June. Dennis was born in 1943 and was an example of “some people DID know better back then”. He was curious, funny, fiercely intelligent, committed to social justice, and fairly often the world had to catch Continue reading »

The final revelation of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who died on Friday at the age of 92, was to reveal details of top secret US plans to launch a nuclear invasion of China. Millions would have died in the bombing, planned for 1958, which was set to start with Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on the Chinese mainland Continue reading »

The Defence Strategic Review reflects a profound failure of the Australian leadership to understand and accept the breadth and complexity of the range of strategic threats confronting Australia, the region, and the world. How can a realistic defence policy be determined without first understanding the risks it is supposed to address? On 24thApril 2023 the Continue reading »

Every woman in Australia, and not a few men, should experience a shiver of apprehension about the Bruce Lehrmann case. It’s not just a story about whether a particular woman was raped at parliament house in 2019. It’s even less a story about whether former defence minister, Linda Reynolds, her employer at the time, was Continue reading »

It’s easy to gain the impression that there are just two school sectors in Australia: elite private schools and public schools, the former being exclusive and over-funded, the latter inclusive and cash-strapped. True to a point, but in dwelling on this dichotomy we are missing bigger policy issues that cry out for resolution. The contrasts Continue reading »

There are no genuine homosexuals in Uganda. They don’t exist. And if it they do, it’s the fault of foreign (read Western) influence. If straight men are recruited into being homosexual, then it must be eradicated before it infects all Ugandan men. Stephen Fry went out of his way in 2022 to dispel such nonsense; Continue reading »

Any plan to try and end the Ukraine war needs to be welcomed if sincere, well-considered, unencumbered, and authored by a respected source. None of those criteria applies to the peace proposal from Prabowo Subianto at the 20th Asia Security Summit this month. The Singapore speech was outside his portfolio. It was delivered without clearance from Continue reading »

Catherine Tate shared one of the biggest differences between filming Doctor Who with David Tennant now as compared to the early 2000s.

America’s second independence day I thought this was a nice thought for this holiday: There are little joys to be found in overheard conversations, like this recent gem on an Acela train. A couple of young professional dude-bros sat behind me and were discussing why they couldn’t reschedule something for the 19th of June. “Because it’s Juneteenth — we get it off this year,” one said. And after a beat or two too long, the other replied, “Oh yeah. What’s it for anyways? Like, I know for Black people but …” The first gave a pitying chuckle and returned with, “It’s when America freed the slaves” — followed by an incredulous, “C’mon man.” I mean, well, yes. Juneteenth commemorates the day when — more than two months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant and more than two years after Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation — a Union army finally reached South Texas with news of emancipation. But I was far less interested in historical accuracy than I was in the fact that these two guys were having a casual Juneteenth civics conversation.

Julian Assange’s legal options have nearly run out. He could be extradited to the U.S. this week. Should he be convicted in the U.S., any reporting on the inner workings of power will become a crime.

The post Chris Hedges: The Imminent Extradition of Julian Assange and the Death of Journalism appeared first on MintPress News.

Last week I wrote about the misinformation being distributed by Republicans in comparing the Trump documents case to Hillary Clinton’s “but her emails” scandal in 2016. It’s taken as a given on the right that she broke the law and was granted special dispensation despite the fact that there were five different investigations that found otherwise. Unfortunately, that isn’t the only fake scandal they’re flogging these days to try to cover for Trump’s corruption and criminality. They’re back on the Burisma beat. I wrote about this pseudo-scandal back in 2020 when it was making one of its periodic rounds in the right wing media, mostly so they could have a excuse to circulate embarrassing photos from Hunter Biden’s laptop (which is a whole other story for another day.) I distilled the story into this succinct description: The “scandal” itself is actually nothing more than an example of the very common (and admittedly skeevy) business practice of hiring the family members of important people for the purpose of obtaining favors, gaining access or simply being viewed in a favorable light.

Fitting a model that has a parameter called ‘probability’ to data does not mean that the estimated value of that parameter estimates the probability of anything in the real world. Just as the map is not the territory, the model is not the phenomenon, and calling something ‘probability’ does not make it a probability, any […]

For our book club at OEF we’re reading the book Smart Cities (2013) by Anthony Townsend. I just finished the Audible audio book and wanted to get my notes down in writing before they slip away. The book covers the deployment of digital technology for managing and understanding the city. There are a two main … Continue reading Smart Cities (2013) →

Institute for Public Accuracy Pentagon Papers whistleblower and longtime peace activist Daniel Ellsberg died on Friday at the age of 92. In a pair of articles published this afternoon — “Daniel Ellsberg Wanted Americans to See the Truth About War” and “Daniel Ellsberg Has Passed Away. He Left Us a Message.” — author and activist Norman Solomon reflects on the dimensions of Ellsberg’s commitments and historic impacts.

The cable car that you pedal by hand

Slavers hid news of slavery’s end A Juneteenth tale from CNN: Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry. The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not know her exact age, shared stories of uninterrupted woe until she recounted how she and her mother discovered that they had been freed. She said her mother, a cook for their former slave owner’s family, liked to hide in the chimney corner to eavesdrop on dinner conversations.

If there’s no personal gain in it, fuck it The people who ran against Democrats over “defund the police” (never a Democratic Party policy) now want to dismantle the F.B.I., make the Department of Justice a political enforcement tool of a future Republican presidency, dismantle the civil service and more. Consider it an extension of the profit motive to our entire experiment in popular sovereignty, from regulatory capture to full repurposing the government to serve personal aggrandizement. If there’s no personal gain in it, fuck it. Now under federal indictment under a Joe Biden administration D.O.J., Donald Trump promised in a speech last week that if elected he would appoint a “real” special prosecutor to investigate the current president and his entire family. Being held to the rule of law is for Republicans an abomination. Holding your enemies to it is delicious. Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman write in the New York Times: But by suggesting the current prosecutors investigating the Bidens were not “real,” Mr.

Open Rights Group has responded to a Guardian report that the Home Office has “quietly disbanded” the unit created to reform the department after the Windrush scandal, which saw thousands of people from Commonwealth countries incorrectly classified as illegal immigrants. Rather than focusing on rectifying the harm caused by a government that is hostile towards […]

Conservatives have passed a suite of laws targeting Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil over the past two years.

In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: TWD: Dead City/Daryl Dixon, James Gunn/DCU, Strange New Worlds, Secret Invasion, The Flash/Arrowverse & more!

Many of the leave voters George Llewelyn met in 2021 were dissatisfied Eurosceptics who are now ardent rejoiners. How did it happen?