Having worked in all developing countries in East Asia and several in South Asia (World Bank definition), I am very conscious of the value of soft power. Australia is a very small country in all aspects except size and my experience has been that soft power is the best way of expressing our good intentions. Continue reading »
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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 23, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
The Democrats’ Appalling Failure to Confront the Rogue, Right-Wing Supreme Court
Simon Lazarus, April 21, 2023 [The New Republic]
They won’t accept anything but a national abortion ban Trump has no room to move on this one. None of them do: A major anti-abortion group blasted former President Donald Trump on the issue Thursday, saying his contention that abortion restrictions should be left up to individual states, not the federal government, is a “morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate.” The Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group was responding to a statement by Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung for a Washington Post story about division among the 2024 GOP presidential field on abortion-related issues. The group has said it would not support any White House candidate who did not at a minimum support a 15-week federal abortion ban. “The Supreme Court made clear in its decision that it was returning the issue to the people to decide through their elected representatives in the states and in Congress,” the group’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, said in a news release.
🏝️ In May, I'll be on the Réunion island for signing sessions, conferences, and workshops!
All info: https://communs.cemea-reunion.org/
He was, as usual, a pig E. Jean Carroll’s rape lawsuit trial starts this week. Trump won’t show up for it apparently so I’m guessing that his deposition will be introduced as evidence. It’s not good. This article is from January: Questioned for a lawsuit, Trump, the former US president, angrily hurled insults and threatened to sue the columnist who accused him of raping her in the New York upscale department store Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s, according to excerpts of his videotaped testimony. The tapes were recorded last October and unsealed by a court on Friday. The New York court on Friday also rejected as “absurd” Trump’s attempt to have dismissed the two lawsuits against him by Carroll, alleging rape and libel. An April trial is planned. “She said that I did something to her that never took place. There was no anything. I know nothing about this nut job,” he said, according to the transcript of the October testimony.
Be ye forewarned I mentioned Frank Schaeffer’s Friday appearance with Joy Reid on Saturday but could not find the video. Here it is. Christian nationalists, Schaeffer strenuously argues, “are authoritarian. They fear democracy. They want to overturn elections. The Christian nationalist movement is a halfway point to a kind of authoritarian fascism.” He was pulling no punches. My inner ear told me my normally even keel was heeling to starboard. Schaeffer sounded more emphatic than I expect to see on TV, and it was unsettling. But he knows whereof he speaks. I found his rant alarming. Ordinary American voters, he says, “had damned well stand up and be counted in the next few elections, or we’re going to see these people turn our country into an evangelical Christian version of Iran.” To repeat: The problem for the left is that too few of us lack the zealot right’s conviction and commitment. Our deer in the headlights approach will end only one way. Take Schaeffer’s warning seriously. Even David French is unnerved. One of the people Schaeffer warned about announced Saturday that he’s running for governor in North Carolina.
Useless and insulting in equal measure Keir Starmer has managed to insult Scots again in his desperation to appeal to little-Englanders, by using images of the Scottish city of Glasgow in his St George’s Day video. Twitter user Michael Sharpe spotted the mismatch: But this may be more than a mere blunder – Starmer appears […]
Cleaners and catering staff are the heartbeat of our hospitals but their work too often goes unrewarded. Many are outsourced within the NHS and this is the case across the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLaM). Here, cleaners work for subcontracting giant ISS and poor pay and conditions are endemic, with some paid just […]
Letter in Guardian – apparently an incomplete draft sent in error for which Abbott has apologised – was clumsily worded but the reaction to it is yet another demonstration of how other forms of racism don’t count in Labour Keir Starmer’s Labour has suspended left-winger Diane Abbott – the first Black woman MP in UK […]
Armed and spoiling for a fight David French, recalls the unsettling incident when his son received a direct message displaying three Klan hoods. The former Republican, former National Review staff writer says his multiracial family (his adopted daughter is Black) began receiving doxxing and death threats after he rejected Donald Trump and Trumpism: Within moments, my son received another message, a picture of a road several miles from our house. Then another picture arrived. A road sign. This one was closer. Someone seemed to be coming to our home. No one arrived, but such harrassment had happened before. French grew up in Alabama, owned guns, etc., etc. But the gun rights movement has morphed into “widespread gun idolatry. ‘Guns’ have joined ‘God’ and ‘Trump’ in the hierarchy of right-wing values.” Worse, more people are walking around armed and spoiling for a fight. Things seem to have gotten out of hand, maybe: In recent days we’ve seen a rash of terrible shootings by nervous, fearful or angry citizens. A young kid rings the bell on the wrong door and is shot.
New data show 1 in 7 Americans are plugging themselves into the partisan propaganda machine, and rarely exposing themselves to inconvenient facts.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Star Trek: Picard, The Blacklist, The Orville, Justified, The Last of Us, Dead Ringers, Doctor Who & more!
They’re the Big Spenders, they can move the needle. Millennials and Gen Z-ers are now the drivers of this growth.
The Ukrainian defense officials believed they could use Kurdish forces to wage a proxy war against Russia in Syria.
The post Leaked Docs: Ukraine Planned Attacks on Russian Forces in Syria appeared first on scheerpost.com.
The Saudis had also invested in the private equity firm that sold off the tech companies that power Democratic campaigns.
The post Saudi Arabia Owns Stake in Firm That Bought Democratic Party’s Campaign Tech appeared first on The Intercept.
By Lee Camp / MintPress News Join activist Keith Akers in a fascinating deep-dive interview on climate change and ecological sustainability. In his upcoming book, Embracing Limits, Akers asks tough questions about the impact of anthropogenic climate change and proposes a truly sustainable future with economic degrowth at its core. In this conversation, Akers discusses […]
The post A Radical Approach To The Environmental Crisis (w/ Keith Akers) appeared first on scheerpost.com.
Journalist, author and filmmaker John Pilger, who has spent decades studying governments’ nefariousness, tells Katie Halper how to spot propaganda.
The post WATCH: John Pilger’s Guide to Propaganda appeared first on scheerpost.com.
The European Union and five countries in eastern Europe are at loggerheads over the tariff-free import of grain from Ukraine. The five countries say that the removal of tariffs has affected their internal markets and their farmers
The post EU’s Withdrawal of Tariffs on Ukrainian Grain Backfires as Eastern European Countries Rise in Opposition appeared first on scheerpost.com.
There’s been a lot of recent discussion about relative economic performance of the EU and US as well as (mostly separately) discussion of differences in mortality rates. One way to integrate the two is to think of living in the US as a (very) dangerous occupation, and think about the wage premium demanded by workers […]
There’s been a lot of recent discussion about relative economic performance of the EU and US as well as (mostly separately) discussion of differences in mortality rates. One way to integrate the two is to think of living in the US as a (very) dangerous occupation, and think about the wage premium demanded by workers […]
The problem of the DSGE-models (and more generally of rational expectations macroeconomic models) is that they assume extraordinary cognitive capabilities of individual agents … The fact that the assumption of rational expectations is implausible does not necessarily mean that models using such an assumption cannot be powerful tools in making empirical predictions. The problem, however, […]
Pursuing legal redress for defamation by AI chatbots like ChatGPT will likely prove fraught, reports Dr Binoy Kampmark. read now...WINNER of the 2022 Archibald Prize, Blak Douglas is speaking in Coffs Harbour on Friday 12 May as a guest of The Friends of Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery. The event is a fundraiser for artwork acquisitions to expand the current collection before the opening of the gallery’s new home in Yarrila Arts and Museum. Advertise...
The post Archibald Prize 2022 winner Blak Douglas to speak in Coffs Harbour appeared first on News Of The Area.