The appointment of Chris Barrett to head the Productivity Commission puts its Trade and Assistance Review under the spotlight. While it has become commonplace in recent years to ignore the PC’s regular evisceration of anything that smacks of market intervention, it has this year chosen to target the very policy platform on which the Albanese Continue reading »
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Criticism of Kathryn Campbell’s appointment a year ago to a $900,000 a year job to assist with implementation of the AUKUS agreement is mostly based on hindsight following the adverse comments about her performance in DHS and DSS by the Robodebt Royal Commission. To be fair to those who made that decision, it is important Continue reading »
Despite the adoption in early May this year of a new development plan by the last Timorese government, incoming Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão has declared that his government will implement the Strategic Development Plan adopted when he was Prime Minister in 2011. His calls for unity ring very hollow when he ignores the serious work Continue reading »
A new US warship has been ushered into service in Sydney. The ship is called the USS Canberra to honour the military union of the United States and Australia, and, if that’s still too subtle for you, it has a literal star-spangled kangaroo affixed to its side. That’s right: the first US warship ever commissioned Continue reading »
In the next hour of the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary multimedia event, Doom's Day sees the deadly assassin meeting up with K-9.
As the fall quarter of my final year at the University of Georgia got underway in 1973, I was on the staff of The Red & Black, the student daily newspaper. I was the co-news editor that fall, but still … Continue reading
This week the House held a hearing on UFOs Not content with chasing phantom “Biden Crime Family” investigations, the Republicans decided to take a spin in a spaceship: David Grusch, the former US intelligence officer who claims that the US government is harboring “intact and partially intact” and “non-human” pilots, appeared in Washington, under oath, to repeat the same. The US government conducted a “multi-decade” program which collected, and attempted to reverse-engineer, crashed UFOs, Grusch told the oversight committee. He added that unnamed federal agencies had even recovered “biologics” from these craft, which he described as “non-human”. Moreover, Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency until 2023, said he had encountered “people who have been harmed or injured” in the course of the government’s efforts to keep this alien program secret. Grusch told the committee that after going public with his allegations he had feared for his life.
He reluctantly endorses mail-in votes but says “you’re never going to get an honest vote… it’s disgraceful.” As usual, he will accept the results if it goes his way.
A Southern man don’t need them around, anyhow Ala-by God-bama! “In an echo of mid-century southern defiance of school desegregation, the Yellowhammer State’s Republican-controlled legislature defied the conservative-dominated Court’s directive to redraw its congressional map with an additional Black-majority district,” Adam Serwer explains in The Atlantic: Openly defying a Supreme Court order is rare—almost as rare as conservative justices recognizing that the Fifteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states are sometimes required to draw districts with majority-minority populations. This requirement exists because after Reconstruction, one of the methods southern states used to disenfranchise their Black populations was racially gerrymandering congressional districts so that Black voters could not affect the outcome of congressional elections. Earlier this year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act so as to preserve its racial gerrymander.
Also, the IRS proves its worth and hungry kids get lunch.
The morphing anti-woke war Another of the downsides to the steady withering of “X” is the former bird platform’s function as a town square where professional and amateur media critics could find an audience, complains Dan Froomkin of Press Watch. “Political reporters at our leading news organizations routinely put a thumb on the scale in favor of the far right – both by failing to call out its racist and increasingly homophobic nature, and by adopting right-wing frames in reporting current events,” Froomkin writes. He offers a short list of recent stories in which major media outlets tiptoe around the increasingly overt racist and homophobic impulses behind conservative actions and rhetoric. “The right-wing’s anti-woke war against trans people has now — as was entirely predictable — morphed into a war on any expression of gender or sexuality that isn’t Biblically-approved procreative sex between a man and a woman,” Froomkin posted to the X site on Friday. Slippery, meet Slope: The Washington Post story about the homophobic attack on libraries that I mentioned above is just one example.
As the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials loom closer, we celebrate the work of Catherine Tate & her run as Donna Noble, MVP companion.
We have continually noted the tendency of Sraffians to subordinate the study of the substantive nature of economic phenomena to the requirements of logical rigor, and for Sraffians rigor equals GET (General Equilibrium Theory), the simultaneous determination of endogenous economic variables. The marriage of Sraffian economics and GET is not a promising avenue for studying […]
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Secret Invasion, Good Omens 2, Loki, Venture Bros., Futurama, Stephen King, Wil Wheaton, Doctor Who & more!
Evangelical military vets are using “counterterror” internet surveillance techniques to help police get search warrants against sex workers.
The post The Online Christian Counterinsurgency Against Sex Workers appeared first on The Intercept.
Evangelical military vets are using “counterterror” internet surveillance techniques to help police get search warrants against sex workers.
The post The Online Christian Counterinsurgency Against Sex Workers appeared first on The Intercept.
. [The interview was given to Mark Blaug in 1995. In transcript: “I think there is an element of truth in the view that the superstition that the budget must be balanced at all times [is necessary]. Once it is debunked, [it] takes away one of the bulwarks that every society must have against expenditure […]
As regular readers will know, CT blogger Ingrid has long been making the case for limitarianism, that is, the idea that there should be an upper limit on the amount any one person can own or consume. As Ingrid has observed, limitarianism is a constraint, rather than a complete ethical principle, so it’s important to […]
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The youngest offspring at Zoo Vienna is hard to miss. On July 17, a female fur seal was born. When it’s hungry, it loudly draws attention to itself to get its mother’s care. “In the first few days, the mother and the young seal were in the backstage area, but now they can be seen by the visitors in a specially designed shallow water area. The little one is already making its first attempts at swimming. The mother is very experienced and takes good care of her offspring,” says Simone Haderthauer, the zoological curator. Fur seals can swim and dive from birth, but practice makes perfect! Once the young seal is confident both on land and in water, she will join the rest of the group. The commented feeding of the fur seals is a highlight of every zoo visit for many visitors. However, it will take some time before the young seal exclusively eats fish and participates in the feeding. During the first six to eight months, seal pups are nursed by their mothers. Haderthauer says, “Currently, even the adult seals don’t have a big appetite for mackerel, sprats, and other fish.
Trump addressed the new superseding indictment: Donald Trump on Friday defended the handling of surveillance footage at his Florida home that is at the center of major new criminal charges in the federal case over the former president’s retention of classified documents. “These are my tapes that we gave to them,” Trump told a conservative radio host in his first public interview since being accused of the new crimes. “And they basically then say, ‘That’s not enough,’” Trump said on “The John Fredericks Show.” Trump, the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, also vowed to continue his campaign even if he is convicted and sentenced. “Not at all, there’s nothing in the Constitution to say that it could,” Trump said when asked if being sentenced would end his presidential bid. Later in the day, Trump fired off several social media posts raging against the Department of Justice.