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They’re gearing up: A growing number of prominent Republicans are rallying around the idea that to solve the fentanyl crisis, America must bomb it away. In recent weeks, Donald Trump has discussed sending “special forces” and using “cyber warfare” to target cartel leaders if he’s reelected president and, per Rolling Stone, asked for “battle plans” to strike Mexico. Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) introduced a bill seeking authorization for the use of military force to “put us at war with the cartels.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said he is open to sending U.S. troops into Mexico to target drug lords even without that nation’s permission. And lawmakers in both chambers have filed legislation to label some cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move supported by GOP presidential aspirants. “We need to start thinking about these groups more like ISIS than we do the mafia,” Waltz, a former Green Beret, said in a short interview. Not all Republican leaders are behind this approach.

When he was eight years old, my dad taught himself to take apart watches and put them back together. He supported his mother by doing watch repairs at that age out of her little jewelry stand, and a few years later by delivering clothes for a Chinese laundry. As a laundry delivery boy, he earned […]

The post My father’s story appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

I follow current events pretty closely but I was surprised to see that there’s a huge controversy over Bud Light beer and I had no idea what it was about. The right wingers are all up in arms and boycotting the beer and naturally, it turns out, it’s because of … hate. Philip Bump explains: The marketing plan was obviously courting controversy from the outset. Bud Light, the most popular beer in the country, was going to put together a campaign centered on a group that makes up less than 9 percent of the population of the United States? The beer brand planned ads targeting this small subgroup, despite the political overtones of doing so — despite the risk of associating the brand so closely with a lifestyle that was foreign to most Americans. But Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s vice president of marketing, celebrated the move in a statement. The beer brand had “deepened our commitment to the state of Texas with our ‘Brewed in Texas’ campaign,” she said in 2022, pointing to ads featuring a bull rider and a star player on Mexico’s national soccer team.

‘I believe the time for the Voice has come’. With those words from the Liberal MP Julian Leeser announcing his resignation as shadow minister for Indigenous Affairs, the path to a successful referendum on an Indigenous Voice to parliament just got a lot clearer, as did Peter Dutton’s dire miscalculation in opposing it. Leeser is Continue reading »

Two recent news stories say it all. On the 4th of April the Sydney Morning Herald carried a report of an interview with Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, in which he claimed that Australia was a vital partner in the organisation’s campaign to confront the security challenges posed by China and in particular Continue reading »

Australia’s health system is under significant pressure. The Labor government has inherited a system with declining bulk-billing rates for GP visits. These fell from almost 90 per cent of all GP attendances bulk billed in December 2021 to just over 80 per cent a year later. Significant workforce shortages remain in rural and remote Australia, Continue reading »

The Albanese Government’s flagship housing legislation has stalled in the Senate, with the PM alarmingly flagging a risk that the package might be abandoned until the next election. To understand what’s going on here we need to wind the clock back to the ALP’s platform taken to the 2022 election. Let’s remember that, when it Continue reading »

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but has ASPI’s China-like propaganda model run its course? There he was last week, ASPI’s pro-U.S. executive director with a penchant for wearing CIA cufflinks, Justin Bassi, speaking at his first big event since taking the helm a year ago. Younger and, some might argue, a Continue reading »

President Biden has resorted to extortion to destroy one of China’s leading digital companies ByteDance, the owner of the highly successful social media group, TikTok. Strongly backed by Congress, Biden insists ByteDance must be sold to an American company, or he will ban it in the US where it has 140 million monthly users. The Continue reading »

It’s the biggest story next door but barged offside by the Australian media for the Trump indictment and the ‘No’. There’s another factor: Soccer’s not our national game. But it is Indonesia’s, and the reaction to the loss of the Republic hosting the Under-20 World Cup because Israeli youth will play is showing the Great Continue reading »

~ Today's Water Cooler ~

Nikki Haley tonight in Iowa spoke at length about the 2015 Charleston church shooting and her push to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state Capitol — a defining moment in her governorship that she has largely avoided talking about on the campaign trail. Haley said of her push to remove the Confederate flag: “Half of the state saw the flag as heritage and service, the other half saw it as slavery and hate. My job as governor wasn't to judge either side. My job was to bring out the best in them to get them to see a way forward.” Haley argued after the mass shooting of nine African Americans by a white supremacist that the “national media came in, they wanted to make it about racism, they wanted to make it about gun control, they wanted to make about the death penalty.” “The goal was, how do you hold the state together and not let that happen?…This was on the heels of Ferguson, you knew that everything was about to fall apart. And we basically, rather than falling into fear, we turned toward God and we made sure we came together as a state.” Originally tweeted by Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) on April 12, 2023.

Due to rising prices, regressive attitudes toward pay raises, and my 2002 Honda Civic’s engine exploding, I’ve had to come up with creative ways to pay the bills. That’s why I’m announcing my Patreon.

I know what you’re thinking. “Pay for education? That’s not what public school is about!” But I want to reassure you I’m not putting your child’s education behind a paywall. I’m merely offering more to those who want to help me afford rent, groceries, and a used scooter for getting around town. Think of it as Education+.

To further assuage your fears, here are my Patreon levels.

$10 a month: Thank you for being a supporter. I’ll give you a personalized shoutout during roll call every Monday.

$50 a month: Pressure is poison to education. So let’s give your student an extra five minutes on every spelling and math test. Plus, three “phone a friend” lifelines to use throughout the semester if they need a little extra help.

This paper revisits a traditional theme in the literature on the political economy of development, namely how to redistribute rents from traditional exporters of natural resources toward capitalists in technology-intensive sectors with a higher potential for innovation and the creation of higher-productivity jobs. Porcile and Lima argue that this conflict has been reshaped in the past three decades by two major transformations in the international economy.

The last few years have seen a new round of vigilante killings in America, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the civil rights movement. And under a new interpretation of the meaning of self-defense, many are getting away with it. Recall a few years back when an armed man named George Zimmerman down in Florida thought a young Black kid named Trayvon Martin looked suspicious so he jumped him and when the startled teenager fought back, Zimmerman shot and killed the boy. He said he felt threatened and was only defending himself. The jury acquitted him. More recently, a young white man named Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murder charges in Kenosha, Wisconsin when he waded into a protest armed with an AR-15 and killed two unarmed men, wounding a third. Rittenhouse may have been the one armed with a semi-automatic rifle but he said he felt threatened by the protesters so he opened fire. The jury found that to be a reasonable reaction. This interpretation of self-defense exists partly because the right has legalized carrying loaded firearms in public which makes any public confrontation potentially lethal.

The Ohio congressman warned that, if he refused to testify, he would have “no other choice” but to call for himself to be jailed.

Big Pharma has feels for mifepristone Corporations are not people, my friends. They have no feelings, only appetites and strong instincts for self-preservation. In that way, they are primitively animal-ish the way A.I. simulates thought. But damned if they aren’t territorial, too. David Dayen considers Big Pharma’s reaction to the potential banning of mifepristone: The pharmaceutical industry is very upset. Right-wing federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of abortion medication mifepristone could severely damage companies’ ability to develop and market prescription drugs. Companies could spend a fortune getting a drug approved, only to see the courts take issue with the process, and the money washed down the drain. To them, it’s the worst thing a court ruling can be: bad for business. That’s why Big Pharma is speaking out.

Housing secretary Michael Gove is facing pressure to abandon popular plans to reform England and Wales' feudal leasehold system, Josiah Mortimer reports

Effie Webb talks to past and prospective junior doctors who describe a crumbling healthcare system and the demise of what was once a prestigious career