Reading

Created
Wed, 25/09/2024 - 04:55
This is an emotional story for me. It is personal. It is a story about my experience. It is not about mandates or compulsion. It is about choices. It is about giving individuals the right to choose how they want to end their lives, should they later be afflicted by life-ending, dignity and quality of Continue reading »
Created
Wed, 25/09/2024 - 04:54
South Australia has joined an elite global club, after being listed alongside Denmark as the only other energy system in the world to be successfully managing significant volumes of surplus variable renewable energy across the year – albeit with a lot of hard work ahead. In its latest global stocktake of variable renewable energy integration Continue reading »
Created
Wed, 25/09/2024 - 04:53
Peter Dutton’s campaign to make Palestinian refugees into figures of fear mirrors the provocations to the recent UK Islamophobic riots. These were inspired by politicians such as Nigel Farage as much as by far-right influencers. Both examples are connected to Donald Trump’s debate amplification of the far-right American lie that Haitian immigrants are eating the Continue reading »
Created
Wed, 25/09/2024 - 04:52
Australia is blanketed in a climate of secrecy with over 800 secrecy offences criminalised with jail terms and large fines under nearly 200 pieces of legislation. Peter Cronau, investigative journalist, former producer for ABC’s Four Corners, Gold Walkley winner, co-founder of the website Declassified Australia, independent publisher, discusses largely hidden stories that reveal the big Continue reading »
Created
Wed, 25/09/2024 - 04:51
Considerable heat has been generated lately about whether the treasurer should have the power to override Reserve Bank policy where it is deemed necessary. Howls of protest can be heard from the defenders — most economists among them — of Reserve Bank independence, that such a possibility could even be considered. The notion that the Continue reading »
Created
Wed, 25/09/2024 - 03:00

Amid the rise of artificial intelligence, technophobes and Luddites have continued to insist that machines “can’t really write”—at least not the way humans can. Those naysayers will be hard-pressed to wave away The Great Gatsby, the debut novel from the super-advanced Xerox 914 photocopier—an exciting new voice that wrote Gatsby after being trained on a data set comprising a paperback copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Created
Wed, 25/09/2024 - 02:45

As the state keeps details around the death penalty hidden, an investigation into its execution team raises questions about how incarcerated people are treated in their final moments.

The post In Alabama, Officers Accused of Violence and Misconduct Carry Out Secretive Executions appeared first on The Intercept.

Created
Wed, 25/09/2024 - 02:01
It is instructive to consider cases in which most people readily accept causal claims in the absence of randomized experiments. Nowadays, few people doubt the effects of tobacco smoking on lung cancer. But in the 1950s, tobacco lobbyists embraced the idea that a genetic predisposition caused both a tendency to smoke and lung cancer … […]
Created
Tue, 24/09/2024 - 23:31

My name is Frida and my community is military dependent. (I feel, by the way, like I’m introducing myself at a very strange AA-like meeting with lousy coffee.) As with people who have substance abuse disorders, I’m part of a very large club. After all, there are weapons manufacturers and subcontractors in just about every congressional district in the country, so that members of Congress will never forget whom they are really working for: the military-industrial complex. Using the vernacular of the day, perhaps it’s particularly on target to say that our whole country suffers from Militarism Abuse Disorder or (all too appropriately) MAD. I must confess that I don’t like to admit to my military dependency. Who does? In my... Read more

Source: Militarism Abuse Disorder appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Created
Tue, 24/09/2024 - 22:00

There are several common lines of inquiry when someone learns you’re vegan. These scripted responses will spare everyone a tedious conversation and might even make you less annoying at dinner parties (but probably won’t).

Where do you get your protein?


From peanut butter, seitan, and the ten thousand french fries I eat every time I join my non-vegan friends out for dinner.

Would you break your veganism if you were stranded on a desert island and had to choose between eating animals and starving to death?


No, I’d survive on a nutritious diet of moral self-righteousness. Okay, fine, and a single guppy that lived a full happy life and died of natural causes.