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Starting in 2009 and especially after Citizens United, I’ve been advising Americans who can get out to do so. I recognize that many people can’t: you have to “shelter in place”, but for those who are able to leave America and haven’t, well, the advice is the same, but more urgent.

The US is no longer meaningfully a Democracy. The funneling of wealth and income to oligarchs continues unabated and even accelerated during the pandemic. Official economic statistics from the US are now almost entirely fantasy based: completely unrelated to reality due to how inflation and other statistics are “calculated” and due to the over-reliance of GDP, which is no longer tracking welfare.

The massive increases in necessities like food is a very very bad sign.

The possibility of civil war is real, and so is the chance of collapse. Nothing is going to get better for the majority of Americans; everything is going to get worse.

Trump’s vice presidential pick pressured regulators to let police access the records of people who cross state lines for abortions.

This is frighteningly close to reality.

Trump is getting so cocky. He picks Vance which was a mistake. And then this: Uh huh. Honestly, this surprises me. I thought he’d have her at the convention sitting in the audience for his speech. And maybe he will. But not to have called her immediately was a huge error.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Greg Stoker, ex-Army Ranger, offers a critical analysis of the security failures that led to a deadly shooting at a Trump rally, highlighting systemic incompetence and the potential impact on the upcoming election.

The post Lax Security at Trump Rally Leads to Deadly Shooting: Analysis by Ex-Special Forces Soldier appeared first on MintPress News.

Recent studies show it wasn’t the climate that did them in.

The post What Happened to Ancient Megafauna? appeared first on Nautilus.

“My view on this has been very clear. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term. It’s whether a child should be allowed to live even though those circumstances of the child’s birth is inconvenient or a problem to the society.” This is absurd! Trump VP Pick JD Vance calls rape an "inconvenience" When asked about not allowing women to have an abortion when they are the victims of rape or incest, his response is disgusting. It's as if he's a character from the Handmaids Tale. “My view on this has been… pic.twitter.com/Fv8nbhfsbI — Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) July 15, 2024 Clearly, Trump has decided to just say “fuck it, I’m going for it.” He thinks he can just bulldoze his way into the White House with little resistance because Biden whiffed in the debate. We’ll see about that. A lot more women than men vote in every election. Even more will vote this time.

For years, The Lever has exposed the Ohio senator’s hypocrisies and what they mean for the American people.

My youngest daughter, after a couple of years of tough studies and hard work, last week succeeded in getting into her highly sought-after program. You never gave up. You never gave in. Congratulations, Linnea!

“It is incredible that such an act can take place in our country.” — Donald Trump, writing on Truth Social after an attempt on his life, 7/13/24

It is a sad time in American history, folks. A crazed gunman attempted to assassinate me, Donald Trump, in an act of hatred and violence that sits in stark contrast with the political era of hatred and violence I have single-handedly created.

This article by David Frum sums him up perfectly. Apparently, Vance used to write for Frum a decade or so ago and was part of his inner circle who said he was modeling his career on Barack Obama. Frum thought he was a thoughtful “reforminst conservative” who “scorned culture-warring, valued expertise, endorsed social inclusion, rejected partisan rancor, and supported America’s important role in world security.” He thought he was sincere. And he wasn’t the only one: Before the 2016 election, Vance’s future political path looked straightforward. He would await the expected Trump defeat, then emerge as a next-generation Republican savior: a candidate who could speak from his origins in Appalachia to the suburbs of Columbus, all while preserving his connections to his donors in Silicon Valley. Trump’s Electoral College victory complicated the calculation. Some Democrats wooed Vance to change parties. Obama’s campaign guru David Axelrod had Vance as a guest on his popular podcast the month after Vance’s Times article was published.

Australian Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has taken time away from his little American Vacation to lecture the Australian media on the need for the country to look at greater potato peeler control laws. ”We live in a country that is... Read More ›

Reflections on my new book titled IPE and the Problem of History: Adam Smith to Robert Cox that was presented recently in Australia - it is part disciplinary and part intellectual history, and its angle of encounter is to consider how IPE as a field of study, as a social science if you will, has engaged with and used the idea of history as part of its scholarly enterprise.

The post IPE and the Problem of History: an Australian experience appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Senator Mike Lee, ladies and gentlemen: Somebody get him a cigarette. This convention is going to be like one of those ecstatic religious revival meetings. They’ll all be speaking in tongues before it’s over. Let’s not forget President U.S. Grant who commanded the Union Army or the father of our country George Washington. And many, many more. Not one of them had the pampered richie rich life of Donald Trump, even the ones born into money. His hammy fist bumping as he’s hustled off the stage by a phalanx of secret service agents is the exact opposite of “tough.” The whining about finding his shoes is before they did it was much more indicative of his true self.

It is ironic that a past and would be President who has been a strong supporter of 2nd Amendment freedoms to own assault rifles was nearly killed by one. It is ironic that a past and would be President who has been a strong supporter of 2nd Amendment freedoms to own assault rifles was nearly Continue reading »

For the sake of America’s security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favour of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence. In 1992, U.S. foreign-policy exceptionalism went into overdrive. The U.S. has always viewed itself as an exceptional nation destined for leadership, and the demise of the Soviet Union in December 1991 Continue reading »

Becoming the latest recruit in a well-organised global program, Australia has joined the 24 nations which have appointed envoys to combat anti-Semitism. We still await an envoy for resisting Islamophobia. On 9 July, Australia’s Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus weighed into the perennial debate about what constitutes anti-Semitism, telling the National Press Club that anti-Semitic statements are Continue reading »

The security vetting process has gone off the rails in Australia. It’s been outsourced to the private sector, which has a financial incentive to make renewing a security clearance as lengthy as possible. Those with high-level jobs in many government departments, agencies and the defence bureaucracy have to renew their clearance every five years. They Continue reading »

Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights has tabled a report that makes a persuasive argument for comprehensive legislation to protect Australians’ fundamental human rights. Its Inquiry into Australia’s Human Rights Framework (2024) identifies a catalogue of deficiencies in the nation’s disaggregated systems of human rights protection. The report provides a new and compelling case for Continue reading »

For most of the past year, Joe Biden has been calming panickers in the inner circles of the Democrat Party, persuading them that the campaign was under control, that things were moving his way, not least because of Donald Trump’s criminal law problems. The big reveal at the first presidential debate showed an emperor without Continue reading »