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The other day I received an email from what might be one the few colleagues still checking into Twitter (most seem to have moved to Bluesky, as have I). The email was just a link with the subject title Did you see? I hadn’t. Gosh, I wrote in response (which I gather they found a little understated). My […]
Is this what MAGA voted for? Elon Musk’s takeover of federal government infrastructure is ongoing, and at the center of things is a coterie of engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college. Most have connections to Musk and at least two have connections to Musk’s longtime associate Peter Thiel, a cofounder and chairman of the analytics firm and government contractor Palantir who has long expressed opposition to democracy. WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer. Wired has now reported the names and backgrounds of all these young fellows.
The late journalist Alexander Cockburn had a good line on the legacy media. Referring to the little ‘Correction’ boxes that would appear most mornings in The New York Times, he suggested that the principal reason the paper made such a show of its fallibility was to bolster its reputation for veracity. In owning to these […]
The notion of the Anthropocene was first proposed twenty-four years ago by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen. It denotes a geological epoch defined by human activity, and remains an unofficial designation, with the International Commission on Stratigraphy—whose processes appear to be geologically slow—yet to approve it for technical use. Nevertheless, in that quarter of a […]
Six years ago, at the time of the first Trump administration’s Muslim ban and its initial round of vicious anti-immigrant policies, I visited a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos to see how Europe was handling its own immigrants and refugees. Within a day, I met two Syrians, Eyad Awwadawnan and Hasan Majnan, who had fled Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship only to end up in a filthy, overcrowded camp in a country that didn’t want them with a future they could not foresee. That was June 2018 and I’ve kept in touch with them both ever since. So, when Assad’s regime fell on December 8, 2024, ending two generations of perhaps the most murderous dictatorship in the modern... Read more
Source: “The Lion Has Fallen!” appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
This is an excerpt of a piece by legal expert Sam Bagenstos laying out a few of the illegal acts committed by Trump and Musk in the past two weeks.
Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has told colleagues that he has been doing the hard yards when it comes to Coalition policy, and will soon be announcing that he plans to convert the controversial, American designed Project 25, to the metric... Read More ›
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 02, 2025
By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
David Dayen, January 27, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Israeli media has extensively discussed the implications of the recent prisoner exchange, emphasising the significant gains achieved by the Palestinian Resistance Movement, Hamas. Among the key figures expected to be released in the second phase of the deal are Marwan Barghouti, a senior Fatah leader (pictured above), and Ahmed Saadat, Secretary-General of the Popular Front Continue reading »
At 7,688,287 square kilometres Australia is the sixth largest country in the world. It is the oldest continent, also home to the oldest continuing civilisation, the history of Aboriginal people reaching back some 75,000 years. Why then, has such a large nation, with such long existence and a civilisation, become so small in its thinking? Continue reading »
Mark Dreyfus wrote an article in, The Guardian (29 January 2025) entitled, ‘ For my great-grandparents, for all Jews, for all humanity, I say never again ‘. Here is my response. I write to make people, who are not Jewish, aware that the Jewish community is not only not monolithic, but that many dissent from Continue reading »
What do Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Howard have in common with the Piltdown Man? They all managed to sell a hoax that lasted for decades, before it was exposed as completely false. But wait, their hoax is still central to transglobal neoliberal capitalism’s stranglehold on us all, whereas Charles Dawson’s 1912 forged ‘missing Continue reading »
Cambridge Union I don’t believe the US has any right or any ability to put in place a democracy in any other country. Nor do I believe, by the way, that American democracy functions as a real democracy anymore on the life and death issues… This is not democracy. This is a game. And it’s Continue reading »
What does the acquisition of iconic Melbourne independent Text Publishing by US-based multinational Penguin Random House tell us about the health or otherwise of the Australian book publishing industry? In itself, and without the details of the agreed financial terms having been made public, not a great deal. Text has been for most of its Continue reading »
It seems that with every utterance from certain members of the political landscape, the humanity bar is lowered. The latest from ABC News to catch the attention of anyone with a modicum of common sense is a speech at a Church by the Deputy Leader of a would-be Australian government, Sussan Ley. To use one Continue reading »
“We must never forget, this must never happen again.” Since the WW2 Holocaust, it is said genocide should ‘Never Happen Again’. But it is happening, again. Every genocide is different, yet the deliberate act of ethnic cleansing is devastating, every time. After the Red Army liberated Auschwitz Concentration Camp in January 1945, several thousand children’s Continue reading »
In the short period since his election, President Trump has started to tear down the edifice of western rules-based law and international order. Ironically this is the international political and economic system of which the USA has been its main beneficiary, definer and enforcer, and over which it has engaged in conflicts and wars around Continue reading »
Mao Zedong once said: “A single spark can start a prairie fire!” Some think the same may be said now about Taiwan starting a conflict with China that the U.S. and Russia will join leading to a catastrophic global war. The reasons? There are two wars in progress in the world now. Why not a Continue reading »
By controlling what I listen to, and the order in which I listen, I’m slowly designing an infinite collage of my evolving musical tastes.
The post My weekend project appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
One of my Sunday routines is usually to post a photo here. Sometimes that’s easy, since I’ve taken something in the past few days, and sometimes that involves trawling through my archive to select something, sometimes from years ago. One problem with that is that there are just so many photos, and it is hard […]