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Oh my god, hi!! I am SO sorry to do this, but we have your wife Jenna, and if you don’t pay us $20 million in unmarked bills by tomorrow night, we are gonna have to kill her. So sorry about this!!

We are a group of private individuals who disagree with your amoral business practices and have kidnapped your wife, because four of us are Scorpios, and you know how we are when we get together—you better be glad we didn’t make a worse mess of this, LOL. We follow your public stock holdings and know you have the money. Please follow our instructions to the letter if you want to see your wife again, and I know you do because she is super pretty!!

Just to say it again: SO sorry about this, I know this is annoying, ugh.

To prove that we have her, we’ve enclosed some hair—that’s right, we gave her bangs. She is going through a tough time right now because she is kidnapped, and everyone agreed that letting her get bangs would make her feel free and in control of her own future. She looks SO cute!!!! You should absolutely pay us so you can see the bangs.

Many of these highly skilled former soldiers, including a former major general, are now working in low-wage jobs such as cleaners or delivery drivers due to current rules

Donald Trump is all too literally the candidate from hell and, yes, he’s threatening to take the United States and the world to — no place else! — hell and back. He’s the greatest danger to this planet imaginable. And I’m not even thinking about what else he’d do, were he to win election 2024 and return to the Oval Office, having reassured his religious voters that, should they opt for him this November, they’ll never have to do so again. (“Get out and vote, just this time… You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”) Forget all of that,... Read more

Source: The Candidate from Hell appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Last week’s far-right riots brought chaos to communities across the country, perhaps most notably in parts of the North East. The pattern of locations might initially have seemed random, but it quickly became clear that there was a concerted effort to seize upon some of the country’s most deprived areas to drive a racist agenda. […]

The post Doctor Who Magazine 606 winners appeared first on Doctor Who Magazine.

Reproductive justice advocates warn that stopping at enshrining Roe’s protections would allow abortion bans and restrictions to flourish.

The post By Vowing to Codify Roe, Kamala Harris Ensures Continued Government Meddling in Abortion Care appeared first on The Intercept.

. Einer der grundlegenden Denkfehler in der heutigen Diskussion über Staatsverschuldung und Haushaltsdefizite ist, dass man nicht zwischen verschiedenen Arten von Schulden unterscheidet. Auch wenn es auf makroökonomischer Ebene zwangsläufig so ist, dass Schulden und Vermögen einander ausgleichen, ist es keineswegs unerheblich, wer die Vermögen besitzt und wer die Schulden trägt. Lange Zeit war man […]

Tim Walz is America’s dad.

George Washington is America’s father.

Pedro Pascal is America’s daddy.

Jimmy Carter is America’s “one that got away.”

Stanley Tucci is America’s second husband who breathed new life into America as America was picking up the pieces after America’s divorce.

Kamala Harris is America’s cool aunt who gets called in the middle of the night to come to the rescue and pick America up because America is stuck at a keg party with a bunch of weird townies in the middle of a field and no ride home. And while she’ll be disappointed, she’ll be cool and not tell America’s parents.

Kathryn Hahn is America’s other cool aunt who would also come pick America up, but she will stay at the townie party for an hour and shoot some bottles off the hood of a Chevy Silverado.

Betty White is forever America’s favorite grandmother—the good one who tells you stories about getting zooted on quaaludes in the ’50s and not the one on the other side of the family who says “oriental” when describing people and not rugs.

Dolly Parton is America’s mom.

RuPaul is Mother.

I was busy working (scrolling Instagram) when an ad for this product caught my eye. The promo page contained an alarming amount of content about a fictional merger (“THE MERGER”) between Peanut Butter Group and Chocolatey Corp to create a company playfully nicknamed “PBC.”

The website included a timeline of the two businesses, bios about the CEOs (one of whom was played by Gerri from Succession in a tiny movie that accompanied the text), even a twenty-three-slide PowerPoint presentation, which I admit I downloaded but only glanced at, because I draw the line at performing labor for peanut butter under late capitalism.

Clearly, Jif’s marketing department understood the assignment and really, really committed to the bit. But corporations skew evil and the characters on Succession were soulless greed goblins. And while that made for some excellent prestige TV, why would comparing the creation of choco-fied peanut butter to a corporate acquisition make me want to eat it?

As the climate changes, how much should we intervene to save species?

I ran across an article on a century old collection of grain seeds. Seems that saving them may turn out to be important:

A UK-Chinese collaboration has sequenced the DNA of all the 827 kinds of wheat, assembled by Watkins, that have been nurtured at the John Innes Centre near Norwich for most of the past century.

In doing so, scientists have created a genetic goldmine by pinpointing previously unknown genes that are now being used to create hardy varieties with improved yields that could help feed Earth’s swelling population.

This is what an old lesbian looks like: the huge, joyful project capturing queer elder women’s stories before they’re lost

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

The tide has turned – evidence shows ordinary citizens in the Western world are now richer and more equal than ever before

- by Daniel Waldenström

Read at Aeon

Why did such a keen proponent of reason turn to the Eleusinian Mysteries to explain his ideas about knowledge?

- by Sam Woodward

Read at Psyche

Anjem Choudary was not a Muslim cleric as the media loved to present him, but the media’s cleric, a rent-a-gob, drinker and playboy turned cosplay Mullah. 

Presidents tend to resist the checks put in place after Vietnam, but in the past Harris and Walz asserted Congress’s authority over war-making.

The post A Presidential Ticket That Supports the War Powers Act? appeared first on The Intercept.

Vania Esady Monetary policy actions transmit to inflation and real activity with ‘long and variable’ lags. However, it is not obvious how the effectiveness of monetary policy varies across economic states (for instance pace of economic growth). The academic literature suggests the possibility effects of monetary policy being state dependent. For example, Tenreyro and Thwaites … Continue reading State-dependent effects of UK monetary policy →

Today (August 15, 2024), the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Labour Force, Australia – for July 2024, which shows that the labour outlook continues to remain positive. Employment growth was relatively strong and biased towards full-time jobs. The unemployment rose by 0.1 point to 4.2 per cent but only because the participation…

Representatives of two key blue collar unions were featured panel members at a 1 August film screening on Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide to build this year’s Rising Tide blockade of the Newcastle coal port.

The post SA union leaders join discussion on climate action and Rising Tide’s Newcastle blockade first appeared on Solidarity Online.

This food timeline started as a way to explore the revolution in Australian food that has occurred during the baby-boomers’ lifetime, but has since expanded to include more about the previous decades (and century) as well. Also included are overseas events and trends that had an impact here. The entries are brief, but there are lots of links if you want more information.

… at least in the “Anglosphere” One of the striking features of the racist riots in Britain has been the wide spread of ages among those (nearly all men) convicted so far[1]. This is unusual, since criminal violence of all kinds is most commonly associated with young men. And it’s a counter-example to what has […]

As requested by a couple of commenters, I’ve created a separate thread to discuss the issues raised by commenter “closet conservative” in response to my post on US academia. I’ll moderate, but not participate

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