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Patrick Lawrence: Munich as Propaganda Fest

https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/19/patrick-lawrence-munich-as-propaganda-fest/?u…
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 09:35

By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost I love Wang Yi’s response when The New York Times’s Michael Crowley caught him in a hallway at the Munich Security Conference Saturday and asked the Chinese foreign minister if he planned to meet Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines.  “He simply chuckled,” Crowley wrote of […]

The post Patrick Lawrence: Munich as Propaganda Fest appeared first on scheerpost.com.

The U.S. Military is Winning. No, Really, It Is!

https://tomdispatch.com/the-u-s-military-is-winning-no-really-it-is/
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 09:24

4,000,000,029,057. Remember that number. It’s going to come up again later. But let’s begin with another number entirely: 145,000 — as in, 145,000 uniformed soldiers striding down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s the number of troops who marched down that very street in May 1865 after the United States defeated the Confederate States of America. Similar legions of rifle-toting troops did the same after World War I ended with the defeat of Germany and its allies in 1918. And Sherman tanks rolling through the urban canyons of midtown Manhattan? That followed the triumph over the Axis in 1945. That’s what winning used to look like in America — star-spangled, soldier-clogged streets and victory parades. Enthralled by a martial Bastille Day celebration... Read more

Degrowth, food loss and food waste – Part 7

https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=60644
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 09:18
Last Monday, I wrote about the global need for us to abandon meat production for food, and, instead take up plant-based diets. Many people interpreted that argument as a personal attack on their dietary freedom, which indicates they fell into a fallacy of composition trap and declined to see the global issue. As part of…

Monday Message Board

https://johnquiggin.com/2023/02/20/monday-message-board-588/
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 08:53
Another Message Board Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’ve moved my irregular email news from Mailchimp to Substack. You can read it here. You can also follow me on Mastodon here I’m also trying out Substack as a blogging […]

Reversing 30 Years of Damage from the Clintons, the DOJ Closes A Price-Fixing Loophole Wide Enough to Drive a Truck Through — Conor Gallagher

http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2023/02/reversing-30-years-of-damage-fr…
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 08:35
Between 1993 and 2011 the Department of Justice Antitrust Division issued a trio of policy statements (two during the Clinton administration and one under Obama) regarding the sharing of information in the healthcare industry. These rules provided wiggle room around the Sherman Antitrust Act, which “sets forth the basic antitrust prohibition against contracts, combinations, and conspiracies in restraint of trade or commerce.”

And it wasn’t just in healthcare. The rules were interpreted to apply to all industries. To say it has been a disaster would be an understatement. Companies increasingly turned to data firms offering software that “exchanges information” at lightning speed with competitors in order to keep wages low and prices high – effectively creating national cartels....
Naked Capitalism
Reversing 30 Years of Damage from the Clintons, the DOJ Closes A Price-Fixing Loophole Wide Enough to Drive a Truck Through
Conor Gallagher

Trump’s acting Defense Secretary doesn’t know if he was installed to delay the response on January 6th

https://digbysblog.net/2023/02/19/trumps-acting-defense-secretary-doesnt-know-i…
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 08:30
What???? Former acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said he is not sure if President Donald Trump installed him to slow the response to the Capitol attack on Jan. 6. During a Sunday discussion on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal program, a caller confronted Miller about his role in the Jan. 6 attack. “What do you say to all the people that believe that you, Kash Patel, Chad Wolf, Charles Lamb all were installed for one reason, and that’s to delay the response on Jan. 6?” a caller named David asked. “They were only deployed after the coup had failed. They failed because [then-Vice President Mike Pence] wouldn’t leave the building.” “I think it’s complete bull—you know what,” Miller shot back.

Same propaganda 50 years later

https://digbysblog.net/2023/02/19/same-propaganda-50-years-later/
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 08:00
That’s from a twitter thread by Seth Cotler: A dispatch from the same shit, different day files. In 1976 Jon Voight’s great-uncle, a virulent anti-semitic far right propagandist named Joseph Kamp, wrote an article for The Spotlight (published by neo-Nazis) identifying Jimmy Carter as a puppet of radical left “globalists.” That same 1976 newspaper (that was in the possession of Oregon's Walter Huss, a far right activist with neo-Nazi ties who became chair of the OR GOP in 1978) featured this story about how Carter was supposedly going to grab all of your guns. The same 1976 newspaper quoted far right, Christian Reconstructionist theologian R.J. Rushdoony to "prove" that Carter, with his affinity for the Bilderbergers and other "globalists," was a strange (and wrong) kind of Christian. The back page summed it up nicely. Carter is controlled by "a globalist clique" and his main advisor is a beta male who is dominated by his wife but who is also an all-powerful pinko brainwasher. Wouldn't be a far right moral panic without drugs thrown in there somewhere…and as we all know, Carter was totally a cocaine runner who was just running a peanut farm as a front.

Can they balance the budget by ending “woke”?

https://digbysblog.net/2023/02/19/can-they-balance-the-bidget-by-ending-woke/
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 06:30
It looks like they’re going to try… Each new iteration of wingnut budget “expert” is more extreme than the last. Meet the latest GOP budget guru Russ Vought who now works for a Trump think tank (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) and is the guy who was behind the Freedom Caucus’ extortion of Kevin McCarthy: Vought’s agenda represents a major departure from traditional conservative ideas about balancing the federal budget. Once, former house speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) pushed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, the main drivers of federal spending, as the answer. Vought argues for something different. A Trump acolyte, he echoes the former president’s insistence that the popular federal retirement programs — which go to the middle and upper classes as well as the poor — should be walled off from cuts. Instead, Vought has sold many Republicans on the untested premise that the GOP can push to obliterate almost all other major forms of federal spending, especially programs that benefit lower-income Americans, and dare Biden to stand in the way.

The far right is still in charge

https://digbysblog.net/2023/02/19/the-far-right-is-still-in-charge/
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 05:00
There was some polling done in Arizona recently and it’s very interesting: Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) leads Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and a series of other Republicans in potential match-ups for Arizona’s 2024 Senate race, according to a new poll.  The poll from OH Predictive Insights released Thursday showed Gallego leading in eight hypothetical match-ups, four of which against Sinema running independently and four with Gallego facing a Republican in a head-to-head race.  The four Republicans included in the poll was former Gov. Doug Ducey, former gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson, former gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and former Senate nominee Blake Masters.  In a three-person race, Gallego leads by as little as 5 points in a race with Ducey and as much as 9 points in a race with Masters. He leads by 7 points in the race with Taylor Robson and by 8 points in the race with Lake.  He also leads in the two-person match-ups, but the margin varies significantly based on who the Republican candidate is.

What Ukraine needs to learn from Afghanistan about proxy wars

https://johnmenadue.com/what-ukraine-needs-to-learn-from-afghanistan-about-prox…
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 04:59
The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world slips further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our very survival could go up in flames. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a mere 90 seconds to midnight. The world’s biggest economic loser in Continue reading »

Asking the question: making the first move in Voluntary Assisted Dying

https://johnmenadue.com/asking-the-question-making-the-first-move-in-vad/
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 04:55
On the 28th November 2023 the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2022 (NSW) (the NSW VAD Act) will come into force. NSW Health, has a massive program of work to develop a coherent transition to the new system. As the last State to introduce legislation (absent the Territories) information is already available through published papers in Continue reading »

An insurance mindset is vital for the future of the welfare state

https://johnmenadue.com/oped-on-disaster-management/
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 04:54
“Lifters” and “leaners”; “makers” vs “takers”; “strivers” and the “skivers”. The language may be different but the pejorative sentiment around the welfare state is similar, be it in Australia, the United States or the United Kingdom. However, it is highly misleading. Government payments to people who are unemployed are a fraction of the spending on Continue reading »

Disability can be progressive. Supportive regimes must be progressive too

https://johnmenadue.com/nystagmus-dysarthria-and-some-of-their-effects-on-commu…
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 04:53
In 2007, at age forty-four, I stood as a Senate candidate for Victoria in the federal election. In 2011, I moved into a shared support accommodation facility, where I suffered a severe loss of choice and control. Disability can be progressive. Supportive regimes for those subjected to physiological deterioration need to be progressive too. They Continue reading »

In Kashmir’s cycles of violence, progeny of former counterinsurgents are trapped in traumatic past

https://johnmenadue.com/in-kashmirs-cycles-of-violence-progeny-of-former-counte…
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 04:52
Ganderbal, India – The sun has just come out on a grey wintery afternoon and the snow-clad peaks of Harmukh are shining in the distance, casting sharp reflections over the horizon. When some rays fall on Rahila’s* face, sitting on the verandah of her home, she turns around and giggles. “It is too bright!” Winter Continue reading »

Troubled US could learn from its differences with China, rather than simply challenge them

https://johnmenadue.com/troubled-us-could-learn-from-its-differences-with-china…
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 04:50
Difference is intrinsically good, a vital force behind creativity and innovation, and an essential ingredient for international competition. It becomes a negative force only when people or governments try to impose those differences on others, and this is not something China has done. I have a chronic, deep-seated discomfort with US President Joe Biden’s call for Continue reading »

Starmlin’s next proscription will be Stop the War, not (yet) Momentum

https://skwawkbox.org/2023/02/19/starmlins-next-proscription-will-be-stop-the-w…
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 03:32
This is a Skwawkbox edit of a guest post submitted by a Labour figure who asked to remain anonymous. Asked by journalists last week whether he would proscribe – outlaw – Momentum, Keir Starmer responded equivocally: That one is not for me. Of course, that is neither a denial nor an indicator that it’s not […]

Don’t give up hard-won ground

https://digbysblog.net/2023/02/19/dont-give-up-hard-won-ground/
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 02:30
From the founding, the loudest “believers” never did Josh Marshall finds the Times framing on “fixing” the social safety net wanting: Social Security is not broken. Or bankrupt. Or whatever other doomsaying framing its longtime enemies deploy to trick the public into thinking so. “In about a dozen years,” Marshall tweets, “it will likely require additional revenue – not even that much. When the pentagon needs more revenue we don’t know it’s broken. There are very straightforward ways to provide that revenue – mostly tied to raising or eliminating the cap on payroll taxes. Not complicated.” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman concurs, Marshall continues. “There are no macroeconomic problems with just adding the additional revenue. None. It’s just whether you think it matters or not or whether tax cuts are more important.” What’s the issue with raising (or eliminating) the cap on payroll taxes? Marshall adds, “It’s a significant hike on anyone who makes much over 250k a year. If you make 5 million in a year it’s a big deal.

Nasty, brutish, and short

https://digbysblog.net/2023/02/19/nasty-brutish-and-short/
Created
Mon, 20/02/2023 - 01:00
A conservative vision for America Is there a single term for describing these people? Revanchist? Political Luddite? Social Darwinist? Misanthrope? None of those quite capture it. Sen. Mike Lee (R) of Utah famously told a campaign-stop crowd in 2010, “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it … Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort, they need to be pulled up.” Last week, @BasedMikeLee (yes, it’s his personal account) asked, “Until the mid-1930s, the federal government’s footprint didn’t extend much beyond the departments of state, defense, treasury, justice, and interior, along with the postal system. Are we better off with everything we’ve added since then?” His question is rhetorical. But Lee seems to think We collectively are not. We would be better off without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a host of other public services that make the United States a place of opportunity that people from around the world want to come to. That’s a problem? Maybe making the U.S.