Peter Thiel’s influence over US foreign policy runs deep, from funding Israel's wars to backing Vice President J.D. Vance. Alan MacLeod and Robert Inlakesh join MintCast to reveal how war profiteers shape Washington’s agenda.
The post AI’s Dark Architects: Palantir, USAID and the Alt-Right Pipeline appeared first on MintPress News.
The bloated Department of Defense spends more money than any other government agency. So where is Elon Musk and DOGE?
The post Hey Elon: We Found a Place to Cut More Than $2 Trillion in Wasteful Spending appeared first on The Intercept.
Dear Mr. Jame Egan, Chief Executive Officer at Lumon Industries,
First, I congratulate you on implementing the severance procedure, which successfully blocks your employees’ memories and knowledge from the outside world when they are at work so they can completely focus on their jobs, unencumbered by distractions from what is happening out there.
The procedure is so wonderful that I want to join your organization as a full-time employee—and I do mean “full-time.” I would like you to set the severance device in my brain fully on “innie” mode for the next four years. I am willing to work nonstop for the entire time if it allows me to avoid the panic attacks I have every day from hearing the news about teenage social media influencers becoming senior government advisors.
The Bureau of Prisons rescinded rules shielding trans women from being searched by male guards, The Intercept has learned.
The post Trump Administration Abolishes Rules Protecting Trans Prisoners appeared first on The Intercept.
A decades-old Israeli blueprint to break Syria into ethno-states is taking shape, with Tel Aviv deepening ties to Syria's Druze as a tool to secure new territorial gains.
The post Ethno-State Strategy: Israel’s Backing of Druze Militias Is Reshaping Syria’s Borders appeared first on MintPress News.
“Gallery-goers might have been outraged not only because of the work’s simplicity—it is a 79.5-centimeter-square canvas bordered thickly in gray and white, filled in with black paint—but because it was not even a square.”
In 1915, long before the release of Spinal Tap, and longer still before sculptor Anish Kapoor purchased the rights to Vantablack, the Polish Russian artist Kazimir Malevich first exhibited Black Square in Saint Petersburg, at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 (called simply “zero-ten”). The number indicated a “point zero” for a new arts movement, suprematism—from whence all possibility might begin—and for the ten featured artists. “Up until now… painting was the aesthetic side of a thing, but never was original and an end in itself,” Malevich wrote in a handout accompanying the exhibition.
Friday’s economic boycott is a one-day attack on corporate interests. The degrowth movement calls for a broader societal shift.
The post How to Turn an “Economic Blackout” Into an All-Out War on Corporate Power appeared first on The Intercept.
It was, with the somewhat unexpected return of Jadis, White Witch and Queen of Narnia and Empress of the Lone Islands, the hopes of this Editorial Board that Queen Jadis’s second reign would be marked by more understanding and compassion than her first reign was. In some ways, we feel that in the instability of these times, there have been moments of alarm combined with moments of a return to normalcy.
For many Narnians, the reign of High King Peter, Queen Susan, King Edmund, and Queen Lucy was an era of fraught political tensions. Having begun their reign with a war against the forces of the White Witch, many felt that these four rulers failed to unite all of Narnia behind their cause. While a significant number of Narnians pointed to the Pevensie monarchs’ association with Aslan as a net positive, a vocal plurality stated that, as he is the son of the Emperor-over-the-Sea, he should have focused his efforts on improving Aslan’s Land, instead of inserting undue foreign influence over Narnian monarch selection.
In an endnote to The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (2021), Cynthia Cruz explains that she uses the phrase ‘working class and poor’ because often, ‘to be working class is to be poor.’ That such a statement appears obvious – and grounded in the overwork and underpayment that exists in most […]
So, Nick Kristoff is crying about USAid, and I agree, mostly:
I’m hearing from experts around the world about what the destruction of USAID is meaning: “a global health massacre,” in the words of a doctor who has devoted her life to humanitarian work on the front lines. Millions of malnourished children left to starve. Pregnant women not getting micronutrients to prevent neural tube defects. Programs against schistosomiasis abandoned. HIV positive patients left without ARV’s. Water no longer purified. Surveillance against Ebola and bird flu set back. TB patients unable to get medicine. I’ve long argued that USAID should be reformed, but this Trump/Musk demolition is cruel and incompetent and benefits China, while killing children just as wonderful as our own.