Reading
Look what they’ve done There is no doubt in mind what’s causing that bizarre disconnect: Last year, the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson summarized the national mood succinctly: Everything is terrible, but I’m fine. He was reacting to research published by the Federal Reserve evaluating how confident Americans were about their own finances and the nation’s more broadly. What the data suggested was that there was a gap, that while three-quarters of Americans said their own finances were doing all right, only a quarter said the national economy was doing well. On Monday, the Federal Reserve released the 2022 iteration of those same numbers. When Thompson was writing, there was a 54-point gap between confidence in Americans’ own finances and those of the nation generally and a 30-point gap with perceptions of the local economy. Now, the gap with the local economy is 35 points, with fewer than 4 in 10 Americans saying their local economies are doing well. Only 2 in 10 Americans say the same of the national economy. I include social media in that indictment. There is no material reason that Americans should be so sour about the economy.
Exclusive witness interviews and archival documents detail killings of hundreds of Cambodian civilians.
The post Survivors of Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings appeared first on The Intercept.
The post Doctor Who Magazine 591 appeared first on Doctor Who Magazine.
This biochemist calls BS on extending human lifespan. Is he right?
The post The Longevity Skeptic appeared first on Nautilus.
BY the way, Texas Attorney General Paxton is under indictment for fraud. And there’s this mysterious activity, also from today These Texas Republicans are very busy upholding the traditional values to which we all wish the country would return: drunken, corrupt white men running everything. That’s just how God intended it.
Psychoactive drugs have long been hailed as miracle cures. But you can only understand the paths they blaze through the mind if you’ve traveled them.
The post Why Scientists Need to Get High appeared first on Nautilus.
Apparently, they just convey quite enough hate and bigotry toward LGBTQ people: On air, Fox News personalities have been endlessly attacking so-called “woke corporations.” But now, Fox News finds itself in the right’s cultural crosshairs — with conservatives accusing it of promoting “trans ideology” in its own workplace. The inciting incident is a Monday morning story in the Daily Signal, the media arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.
Former PM (yep, he was) Scott Morrison, has put out the feelers to the Richmond football club to see if they have any interest in having him replace Damian Hardwick as Coach. ”I do love my Sharkies, up, up Cronulla... Read More ›
Biden negotiating a debt ceiling with Kevin McCarthy was Harry Reid’s worst nightmare.
The post That Time Joe Biden Was Banned From Negotiating With Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.
Trump is hard at work trying to woo voters Trump backed out of the recent campaign event in Iowa and it doesn’t appear that he is planning to leave his beach club any time soon (unless it’s to decamp to his Bedminster club for the summer.) But that doesn’t mean he isn’t campaigning. Here’s what it looks like: Some interesting commentary on all this: “Forcing reality” is a great term. All that bullshit about great polling is nonsense. He posts polls from fly-by-night partisan pollsters and some with no attribution at all that show him winning. The thing is that it works. If he pushes it hard enough and with the back-up of sycophants and partisan opportunists, millions of people will believe him. He has good reason to believe that he can “force reality” on a whole lot of Americans. He’s made tens of millions of them believe that the election was stolen and he is the rightful president. He had help, of course, from the right wing media but really it was almost all him. He “forced reality.” Can he do it again?
We the undersigned are scholars of the humanities and social sciences and other disciplines with expertise in the following issues. We write this open letter to express our concerns regarding the Australia, United Kingdom, United States (AUKUS) trilateral security agreement. Specifically, our concerns relate to pillar one of the agreement, the joint development with the Continue reading »
When US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met face-to-face with Mr Antony Blinken’s China counterpart Mr Wang Yi for eight hours in Vienna on May 10-11, a meeting both sides described as “constructive”, where was America’s top diplomat, Mr Blinken? The Sullivan-Wang meeting not only makes US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s long-awaited China visit a Continue reading »
The cancellation of Joe Biden’s visit to PNG is a gift. A gift of more time to step back from a precipice. The brutal choice, Mr. Prime Minister, is now between your nation’s finest hour and its flip side, its darkest, its recolonisation, this time, as an American client state, a pawn in America’s plans Continue reading »
There is understandable disappointment that the Government did not do more to improve the adequacy of JobSeeker, with many highlighting how this could have been done by scrapping the Stage 3 tax cuts. But the revenues from scrapping Stage 3 are not as great as most commentators suggest; and, though the Budget’s welfare measures provide Continue reading »
In his opening statement to the recent Senate Estimates hearing, Department of Home Affairs (DHA) Secretary Mike Pezzullo again proved he does not understand immigration policy or administration. At the hearing, he said: “I wish to advise the Committee that the average visa refusal rate for the six-year period from 2001-02 to 2006-07 was 1.8 Continue reading »
“We are thankful you are here. We are happy to a be recipient of [the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association] APPEA’s largesse in the form of coming here more often…The South Australian government is at your disposal…” (South Australian Labor minister for energy and mining, Tony Koutsantonis, May 15, 2023). It is more shocking Continue reading »
The streets fall unusually quiet. No local buses blaring pop music, no bikes zipping through toot-tooting their presence. Then you hear it. All the blaring and the toot-tooting multiplied by election fever. It is democracy time in Timor-Leste, and no nation quite does it like this one. Today, Dili, like the rest of the nation, Continue reading »
In Ukraine, grim visions of a new age of nuclear warfare are the natural counterpart of western hardliners’ march of folly towards the nuclear brink. Thankfully, there is an alternative, one that has been possible since the very beginning of the conflict and now has growing support among Western publics. The Harvard-based website, Russia Matters, Continue reading »
A proposed PCB dump site in the town of Lee has residents and town leaders seeking options to stop the plan.
The post A Massachusetts Town Is Suing Monsanto for Its Cancer-Causing PCBs appeared first on The Intercept.
The debt limit talks are still roadblocked by Republicans insisting that the government cut all programs that help children and other vulnerable people to the bone while protecting the tax cuts for the rich. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of those rich people: House Republicans are bidding for steep spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. First, though, they paused during their private weekly meeting on Tuesday to bid for something else: Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s used chapstick. Really. The fundraising auction of McCarthy’s used cherry lip balm ended when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) placed a winning $100,000 bid, as confirmed by her spokesperson. That’s adorable isn’t it? For some reason it makes me feel like crying.