In honor of Intergalactic Friendship Day, check out a video of Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek) and Russell T. Davies' (Doctor Who) SDCC 2024 panel.
Reading
The election isn’t going to go smoothly Trump has been telling everyone who will listen that he doesn’t need a get out the vote program because he will personally get his people out. He told the RNC and his campaign that they need to concentrate on stopping the “cheating” (by which he means Democrats voting.) The strategy is to suppress the vote wherever possible and contest the vote no matter how close the election is if he loses. There is no Democratic margin of victory that he will declare legitimate. (After all, even when he won in 2016 he said that he actually won the popular vote which he lost by 2 million votes.) Rolling Stone took a look at how some of the red dominated swing states have set up a system to deny the election results if Trump doesn’t win and it’s sobering: WHEN ELECTION NIGHT comes in November, it will be up to thousands of local election officials to certify election results in their counties.
Journalist Gil Duran has been following this new movement of tech billionaires who are heavily influencing right wing politics in America. They are way more out there than I realized. I just went down the rabbit hole to read these articles and frankly I’m a bit unnerved. You might want to pour yourself a strong drink before you do it: I’ve spent this year writing for the @newrepublic about how a group of Silicon Valley billionaires has gone WEIRD. Now their weirdness is mating up with Trump’s MAGA weirdness in the 2024 election. Here’s a few things to understand about these guys. #1: They despise democracy. These Trump-loving billionaires believe democracy is bad. They want to create their own corporate dictatorships called Network States. They are actively trying to build these weird little dictator cities all over the world. The People of Solano County Versus the Next Tech-Billionaire Dystopia If these Silicon Valley plutocrats have their way, a swath of Solano County will be transformed into their own nation-state. #2. They want control over existing governments.
Especially the people who know him best This guy is a smarmy loser and nobody can’ stand him: On the heels of a CNN analysis that showed Vance was the least-liked non-incumbent vice-presidential nominee in at least 44 years, the network also revealed that the GOP lawmaker has a double-digit unfavorable rating with voters across the Midwest. According to CNN, Vance had a 28% favorable rating and a 44% unfavorable rating — or a minus 16-point favorability rating — among voters surveyed in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin in July. For Republicans banking on Vance to help boost the party across the Midwest, his standing is far below where he’ll need to be in order to win over swing voters in key states like Michigan and Wisconsin. CNN data reporter Harry Enten during an appearance last week also pointed to data showing that Vance had a minus 5-point favorability rating after the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “The people who know him best, the region that knows him best, they like him even less than America likes him,” he told the network’s Erin Burnett.
Richard Marles has the Navy out in force firing torpedoes at AUKUS critics. On Friday last, Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead claimed the critics need to produce evidence of any challenges to AUKUS being realised, then on Saturday, Vice Admiral Hammond, Chief of Navy, raised his periscope claiming the AUKUS debate was being ‘hijacked’ by people Continue reading »
While all eyes will be fixed on Paris ahead of the Olympics, we should not forget those athletes who have missed out, through no fault of their own. Continue reading »
The media and politicians are inevitably arguing Albanese’s decision to move Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles and replace them with Tony Burke at Home Affairs reflects their failure to fix our immigration system. The reality is much more complex as few Australians would be aware of the mess they inherited, particularly following the mis-management of Continue reading »
New analysis by the Productivity Commission of donations to school building and other funds highlights how antithetical private school funding is to the concept of needs-based funding. A new report by the Productivity Commission on Philanthropy has highlighted defects in the funding of private schools. The report shows that private schools receive millions of dollars Continue reading »
The latest Reuters Institute and University of Oxford report on media in Australia and the world has been published – and it’s bad news for almost all the media – and to some extent the reading public. In a comment on the Australian part of the report Sora Park of the University of Canberra said: Continue reading »
Following the 7 October Hamas outrage Australia has been suffering an outburst of race and religious hate. Lawyer Jillian Segal has been made a “special envoy” to counter antisemitism. A similar appointment is expected to confront Islamophobia and challenge the alleged linkage of Muslims with extremism and terror. Indonesia has more citizens following Islam than Continue reading »
Yingyao Wang opens the black box of the Chinese bureaucracy to reveal the agency of the men and women who designed and redesigned Chinese economic policy. The People’s Republic of China is not a monolithic entity, and here is a new book delving into the intricate world of Chinese bureaucracy, highlighting the pivotal roles played Continue reading »
The thing I hate about western electoral politics in general and US presidential races in particular is that they take the focus off the depravity of the US-centralised empire itself, and run cover for its criminality. In the coming months you’re going to be hearing a lot of talk about the two leading presidential candidates Continue reading »
The Grayzone’s publication of an embarrassing phone call with a National Endowment for Democracy VP triggered an institution-wide meltdown at the US government’s regime change laboratory. Following the call, the group’s founding president privately admitted the “fiasco” exposed major “problems beneath the polished surface.” Now, leaked emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal the organization has since descended into chaos, with two senior officials fired due to the fiasco, and remaining staff engaged in civil war between the neocon old guard […]
The post The Grayzone caused ‘biggest PR fiasco in history’ for US govt regime change arm, leaked emails reveal first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post The Grayzone caused ‘biggest PR fiasco in history’ for US govt regime change arm, leaked emails reveal appeared first on The Grayzone.
. In loving memory of my brother Peter, a big Jimi Hendrix fan. But in dreams, I can hear your name. And in dreams, We will meet again. When the seas and mountains fall And we come to end of days, In the dark I hear a call Calling me there I will go there […]
Good luck with that Donnie… The problem isn’t Fox. It’s you and your people, all of whom sound like batshit loons.
Support for WNYC is brought to you by: It Needs More Lemon. Taste this chicken for me, will you? It’s missing something. Yep, more lemon. Okay, taste it again. Better? Use code MORELEMON at checkout for 50 percent off your first order. Wait, now it’s missing salt.
Support for WNYC is brought to you by: We Have Food at Home. Have you ever driven by a restaurant? Your mouth waters, your eyes droop with exhaustion from a long day. Well, guess what? We have food at home. For more, go to the fridge and actually look inside it this time.
Support for WNYC is brought to you by: I Can’t Find My Glasses. This isn’t an ad, I just really need help finding my glasses. Do you remember where I last had them? Go check on top of the piano.
Support for WNYC is brought to you by: My Podiatrist. Got feet? Then you should call my podiatrist. He doesn’t take insurance, but he’ll ask you about your family and talk about the crazy weather we’ve been having. I don’t remember his phone number.
In this piece yesterday, I mentioned Trump’s meeting at the Bitcoin convention and his newfound love for crypto. As you can see from the above clip by Rachel Maddow, he’s just pretty much selling out all policies to the highest bidder these days. Here are a few other policies he’s put on the auction block: Here are just a few of the policies he is selling to donors. $1bn from oil companies At a lavish dinner at Mar-a-Lago in April, the former president gathered with around two dozen executives from the biggest oil companies in the country. His campaign was facing a sizeable cash shortfall against his opponent, President Joe Biden, and he was desperate to make up the difference. As the executives complained about how the Biden administration’s environmental regulations were hurting their business, Trump made a starkly transactional pitch: raise $1bn to send me back to the White House. If he won, he said he would immediately reverse dozens of Biden’s environmental rules and policies. The $1bn would be a “deal” for the companies, he added, because of the money they would save from deregulation.
While American politicians and media predictably denounce the socialist victory in Venezuela, dozens of American electoral observers on the ground endorsed the process. MintPress reports from Caracas.
The post Venezuela: While US Politicians Call Fraud, American Election Observers Endorse Results appeared first on MintPress News.
Here’s the case, put relatively well:
Moral superiority aside, a somewhat general rule of thumb is that if you have children AND they live in the same country, then you have a HIGHER vested interest in the wellbeing of your country.
I’ll take “wellbeing of your country” to mean wellbeing of the residents of your country, though it doesn’t have to mean that.
Now, this argument is one that’s true sometimes. But only sometimes. It also assumes that parents care about the wellbeing of their children, which isn’t always true, but we’ll assume it is for now.