Any talk about disability in Australia is very likely to quickly lead to mention of ‘the System,’ which controls everything in the lives of People With Disability. This phrase comes from Australia having started its European settlement period as a British penal colony, so we inherited ‘the System’ as a foundation stone of our society. Continue reading »
Reading
The elephant can only be ignored for so long: we need to talk about academics. Rather like journalists, academics exhibit a profound mismatch between self-image and reality. Everybody has heard by now that British higher education is in a parlous state. Indebted students. Overworked staff on squeezed pay. Misery all round. The question is who Continue reading »
On Valentine’s Day next year, Indonesia will go to the polls for its most important election in ten years. The incumbent president, Joko Widodo (known as “Jokowi”), has built a broad supporting coalition of political parties and oligarchs, which has delivered stability but also power and wealth for a small elite. He has also presided Continue reading »
Protest votes are not. They only help the worst people. To anyone contemplating not voting for Biden over the Israel war, it’s probably a good idea to also contemplate what will replace him if you do that: Trump: All the resident aliens that joined in the pro jihadist protests this month.. Come 2025, we will find you and deport you. pic.twitter.com/n00sGlzSnH — Acyn (@Acyn) October 28, 2023 Trump on murdered Israels: “They’ll be avenged even beyond what you’re thinking about” pic.twitter.com/gIFcOvxSLa — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2023 Trump brags about cutting off all aid to Palestinians while he was president pic.twitter.com/bOtvT3DcKV — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2023 Trump promises to cancel student visas of Hamas sympathizers pic.twitter.com/3uN6dgCuxN — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 28, 2023 To all those who say that it’s simply too painful for them personally to vote for the lesser of two evils, I’ll just quote that old establishment puppet Noam Chomsky who famously said, “of course you should vote for the lesser of two evils — you get less evil.”
Catherine Tate's Donna Noble, Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor (?), Neil Patrick Harris' Toymaker, and Meep get the spotlight in new Doctor Who images.
What a healthy church needs, a healthy political party needs too This message from a retired minister in Knox County, Tennessee has wider application than southern churches: God may not be dead, but his church is headed for hospice if we don’t get our heads out of our ecclesiastical backsides. My wife and I visited a mainline church on a Main Street in a deep red southern town last month and found … the audience from a 1972 episode of Lawrence Welk. Every hymn sounded like a dirge from the funeral I feared we had stumbled in on. But, no, the only thing dying was this church. We couldn’t count five people under the age of 50. That is a problem Democrats have as well in many places. Political life in this country is dominated by a gerontocracy. That is one reason so many younger people are rejecting political parties and opting to register to vote unaffiliated. If they register. If they vote. Churchgoing is on a steady decline. Buzz Thomas suggests that if churches don’t evolve, they will die.
From a Medicaid scheme targeting children to defense industry consultants covering the Gaza crisis, here’s a roundup of our reporting from the past week.
The whole world is watching Geopolitically, Israel could no more not retaliate for the Hamas butchery and hostage-taking than the U.S. could brush off the 9/11 attacks. The question in each case was always how. “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it,” President Joe Biden cautioned on his 7 1/2-hour visit to Israel after seemingly ISIS-inspired Hamas attacks. “After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.” Some of us still remember the mistakes. The PATRIOT Act, the Office of Special Plans, “Curveball,” aluminum tubes, yellowcake uranium, Colin Powell’s U.N. address, the Iraq invasion, Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo. Plus, “We’re an empire now.“ Speaking of ISIS, ISIS was the product of our mistakes too. Did Israel listen to Biden? This is from the Times of Israel on Friday (which I’ve not seen reported elsewhere): Cabinet said slated to okay police use of live fire against protesters blocking roads during multi-front war.
How an elite clique of math-addled economists hijacked climate policy.
The post When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics appeared first on The Intercept.
Regn och höstrusk ute på ön idag. Men vad gör det — så länge man kan lyssna på programmet Text och musik med Eric Schüldt! Jag har i flera år nu lyssnat på Erics program varje söndag. En helg utan hans tänkvärda och ofta lite melankoliska funderingar och vemodiga musik har blivit otänkbart. Som så ofta […]
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: SAG-AFTRA, Matthew Perry, Star Trek: Prodigy, Doctor Who, South Park/Gina Carano, Bodies, Fear TWD, and more!
Protean Mag: Letters From Gaza In collaboration with The Institute for Palestine Studies, Protean magazine has been publishing translated messages from Gaza sent amid the current bombing…
Jessica Martin is a Renaissance Woman, here at MCM London Comic Con October 2023. And thirty-five years since she appeared in Doctor Who.
I’ve not done much bird photography. It is actually pretty hard, since they move fast, change direction, disappear as soon as they see you, and are generally uncooperative subjects. But I’m resolved to do more and I’ve started to figure out some of the technical issues. There’s something serendipitous about this one, as I was […]
For the past three weeks, the ES/PE community is aghast and dumbfounded. On the early morning of October 7th, a Jewish holiday, the Hamas terrorist organization launched a brutal and unprecedented attack in the south of Israel. During this planned, heinous massacre Hamas terrorists intentionally, systematically and viciously murdered more than 1400 innocent people, mainly […]
(With apologies to Rod Serling for my frightfully tacky paraphrasing) Good evening, and welcome to a private showing of 25 films. Each is a collector’s item in its own way—not because of any special artistic quality, but because each captures on a celluloid canvas, streaming in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare. And …Happy Halloween! Beauty and the Beast (1946)– Out of myriad movie adaptations of Mme. Leprince de Beaumont’s fairy tale, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version remains the most soulful and poetic. This probably had something to do with the fact that it was made by a director who literally had the soul of a poet (Cocteau’s day job, in case you didn’t know). The film is a triumph of production design, with inventive visuals (photographed by Henri Alekan). Jean Marais is affecting as The Beast, paralyzed by unrequited passion for beautiful Belle (Josette Day). This version is a surreal fairy tale not necessarily made with the kids in mind (especially with all the psycho-sexual subtexts).
Judi Dench was on Graham Norton last night to push her new book about her life and work with Shakespeare. After making the point we quote Shakespeare daily without knowing it, this happened: pic.twitter.com/CIhP39b4Bs — Justin Sherin (@wychstreet) October 27, 2023 One of the greats.
That’s all he said about Ivanka. As you can see, it’s really all about him. It is perfectly justified to bring Ivanka to testify. She wasn’t made part of the case because of the statue of limitations. A technicality. She was one of the main conduits between the Trump org and its major lender, Deutsche Bank so she is certainly an important witness. “It doesn’t get better than this,” Ivanka Trump boasted in 2011, in an email celebrating the low interest rate she’d just won on a $125 million loan her father needed for his Miami golf course. Lawyers for the New York attorney general’s office, who plan to call Ivanka Trump to the witness stand on Friday at their ongoing, $250 million Trump fraud trial, agree it was quite the deal. As Donald Trump’s top loan negotiator, Ivanka Trump indeed excelled at securing rock-bottom interest rates, they say, saving her father as much as $150 million on $400 million in Deutsche Bank loans used to develop Trump’s palm-studded Florida golf course, his luxury hotel in Washington, DC, and the Chicago tower that is his tallest skyscraper.
Former Labour MP Paul Farrelly explains the circumstances surrounding a new legal investigation into whether members of Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), looking into phone-hacking and press criminality, were systematically hacked by Murdoch empire
Lately, it seems like all the very richest, most successful people (men, mostly) are batshit crazy. Here’s a primary example: The Adidas team was huddled with Kanye West, pitching ideas for the first shoe they would create together. It was 2013, and the rapper and the sportswear brand had just agreed to become partners. The Adidas employees, thrilled to get started, had arrayed sneakers and fabric swatches on a long table near a mood board pinned with images. But nothing they showed that day at the company’s German headquarters captured the vision Mr. West had shared. To convey how offensive he considered the designs, he grabbed a sketch of a shoe and took a marker to the toe, according to two participants. Then he drew a swastika. It was shocking, especially to the Germans in the group. Most displays of the symbol are banned in their country. The image was acutely sensitive for a company whose founder belonged to the Nazi Party. And they were meeting just miles from Nuremberg, where leaders of the Third Reich were tried for crimes against humanity.