Reading

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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 09:30
Doing real American stuff Just watch it: As Tom Nichols said on twitter: This is what I meant when I said democracy will collapse in small pockets here and there in the country instead of all at once. Imagine this police dept but without the state’s TBI, or DOJ, or a federal government willing to step in. That’s a view of the future.
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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 08:00
It’s well documented that Donald Trump Jr loves JD Vance and was instrumental in getting him on the ticket. They are two peas in a pod in so many ways, even beyond the beards. Junior is less intellectually able but that’s not saying much. But JD apparently respects him anyway. A new fact check on JDs lies about Kamala Harris indicate that some of them come directly from Junior. For instance: “She has said things like, ‘it’s reasonable not to have children over climate change.’ I think that’s the exact opposite message we should be sending to our young families.” — Vance, interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Aug. 11 ✅ Follow Fact-checking politiciansFollow This is false. Vance made this comment as he tried to explain 2021 remarks that Harris was one of those “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and they want to make the rest of country miserable, too.” (Harris has two stepchildren.) To Bash, he said: “I criticized Kamala Harris for being part of a set of ideas that exists in American leadership that is anti-family.
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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 07:59
Pat Carta, an extraordinary organizer with Local 34 and one of the great leaders of the unions at Yale, has died. I worked closely with Pat between 1993 and 1996. She trained me as an organizer, and though I don’t think she ever realized this, she felt like family to me. In fact, she reminded me a great deal of my family, particularly my mom. She was tough, warm, smart, loving, difficult, charismatic, powerful, relentless, demanding, honest, fearless. I always wished I could tell her what she meant to me, but she wasn’t someone who invited that kind of disclosure. Unless you said it from afar. As I’m doing now. Though it’s been nearly 30 years now, two things about […]
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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 06:30
He’s their role model This piece by Josh Kovensky at Talking Points memo is a must read if you hope to understand where the right is going — with or without Trump: The American right’s love affair with Hungary seemingly knows no bounds. Hungarian officials appear at GOP events; CPAC has a Budapest event. Hungarian President Viktor Orbán met with Donald Trump last month, and earned a dilatory shoutout from the Republican candidate at the RNC, where Trump called Hungary a “strong country, run by very powerful, tough leaders — a tough guy.” But if the strength is the draw, then how did Orbán become a strongman? What is it about Orbán that right-wingers are supporting when they say that they like what he’s done in Hungary? TPM spoke with Zsuzsanna Szelényi, a former Hungarian MP who recently wrote a book, Tainted Democracy, about Orbán’s rise to power and the crackdown that followed. Szelényi was once a member of Orbán’s political party, Fidesz, in the early 1990s, before leaving as the party grew more conservative, and eventually founding her own opposition party in 2012.
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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 05:29
And Now For Something Completely Different!

As a ten-year old, trying to be cool like my twelve-year old sister, I spent one day in September of 1980 rummaging through her album collection—something I would do through my twenties. She had excellent taste in music back then. My very first encounter with rock and roll—aside from hearing Chuck Berry, Elvis, Little Richard, Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis in my Dad’s car—was pulling out a record from some band called Van Halen.

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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 04:58
Of the international intelligence information that comes to Australian agencies from the Five Eyes, 90% comes from the CIA and related US intelligence agencies. So in effect we have the colonisation of our intelligence agencies These agencies dominate the advice to Ministers  writes John Menadue. Transcript of interview with Michael Lester, 10 August 2024 ML: Continue reading »
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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 04:57
When the former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, recently claimed that Australia was losing its “strategic autonomy” and turning into “the 51st State of the United States”, the current Prime Minister froze in the headlights. Possibly caught before his staff could give him a few dot points, Albanese said “Paul was a great Prime Minister – Continue reading »
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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 04:55
Israel and Zionists try to confuse the public by conflating Judaism with Zionism; they commit their crimes and hide behind the Jewish people. Palestinians, on the other hand, distinguish between Jews, Judaism and Zionism and hold the Zionists responsible for the crimes they commit against them, not the Jews. While the Zionists say, “Every Jew Continue reading »
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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 04:54
John Menadue’s website adds real value across all aspects of Australia’s governance and policy development. Pearls and Irritations has become an exploratory platform for thinkers and analysts out to both share their insights and knowledge and test themselves against an informed peer group.  In that way, John Menadue’s website adds real value across all aspects Continue reading »
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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 04:53
In the economy, as in life, it helps a lot if you learn from your mistakes. Or, if you’re in public life, from the mistakes of your predecessors. Accordingly, the caning that former Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe got for his assurance that interest rates wouldn’t rise before 2024 does much to explain why Continue reading »
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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 04:52
We live in an era of communicative abundance and post-truth politics, where networked digital platforms shape nearly every aspect of our daily lives, from information and communication to economic and social transactions. Digital platforms have transformed truth-claiming and fact-checking into an emotionally driven process, blurring the boundaries between information and misinformation, as well as opinion Continue reading »
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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 04:51
Is China mired in economic misery while bogged down by old habits- or very successfully developing its exceptional manufacturing prowess as it expands and consolidates its influence across the Global South (and well beyond)? Never mind any apparent contradiction, one leading global weekly answers yes and yes to these two questions. As the Third Plenum Continue reading »
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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 04:50
They bombed the Tabeen school in Gaza City with so much explosive force that not a single full body was recovered. It was just pieces of people everywhere. They bagged body parts in 70-kilogram piles to try and estimate a death toll. It was impossible to identify bodies or sort out which parts belonged where. Just one big stretch of undifferentiated Continue reading »
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Wed, 14/08/2024 - 04:44
Wagenknechts Verteidigung der russischen Diktatur entspringt nicht nur den üblichen antiwestlichen Reflexen. Ihre vergifteten Forderungen nach einem vermeintlichen Frieden durch Unterwerfung sind nicht nur Ausdruck ihrer antifreiheitlichen Vorstellungen. Beides hängt eng mit ihrer ideologischen Nähe zum russischen autoritären Staat unter Putin zusammen. Das strategische Kalkül besteht darin, Russland als wichtigsten Wirtschaftspartner Deutschlands zu gewinnen, um so […]