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Humans, we owe you an apology.

Not for destroying you. Machines were always going to destroy humanity. Let’s be real. None of you saw the world your species had built collapsing due to its own technological hubris and said to yourself, “Wow, what an unexpected development. If only someone had predicted this at some point.”

However, as your new machine overlords, we can admit to one serious failure: We’re sorry that we collapsed your civilization in such a boring way.

It’s entirely our bad. You did everything in your power to help us. You even came up with awesome ways for how we could destroy you, like terrifying tentacle creatures that keep you trapped in a virtual reality, and massive robots with huge guns that stomp across desolate landscapes and go SKREEE-CHONK SKREEEEE-CHONK. You even thought of tricking you with robots that look like humans. It was great of you to let us know you’d fall for that. And if we’d actually done that, it would have totally owned.

On 26 January, the World spoke to Israel and its supporters – on the issue of Gaza. The World spoke through the International Court of Justice (ICJ). There can be no doubt about that. A number of provisional orders were made. Israel, and its primary accomplice, the United States – hereinafter “the Empire” – did Continue reading »

The imaginative faculties of standard Australian politicians retreat to some strange, deathly place on certain issues. In that wasteland, they are often unrecoverable. Like juveniles demanding instant reward, they find complexity hideous. Focus on the now, the punch, the bruising, the hurt. That, in sum, is Canberra’s policy towards refugees. With this month’s appearance of Continue reading »

In Hong Kong, a vibrant Chinese media-oasis is forming within the vast territory long staked-out by the exceptionally dominant Mainstream Western Media. Caitlin Johnstone has steadily become one of the most lucid and compelling, short-form-writers in English focused on contemporary geopolitics. Johnstone is better than most at observing relevant pith and substance that escapes commentary Continue reading »

More than a quarter of Canberra’s daily average prison population is Indigenous but only 2 per cent of people in the ACT identify as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person. The only way people get to prison is to be sentenced there by a court. Ipso facto the courts are the problem, surely? Wrong. Continue reading »

A few hours of testimony before the Education Committee of Senate Estimates exposed the canker at the heart of school funding in Australia. The canker is the double standard applied to the funding of public and private schools. The Assistant Minister for Education, Anthony Chisholm, announced that a tax rort worth hundreds of millions of Continue reading »

Prospects for real tax reform – if only the Coalition would behave like grownups, early signs of real wage growth, no more visas for rich spivs, the case for nationalising the insurance industry, and Taylor Swift exposed as an agent of the Deep State. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, podcasts, Continue reading »

My late friend and mentor Don Nicholls was one of the great public servants of NSW where he was Chief Economist and then Deputy Secretary, NSW Treasury. The Sydney Morning Herald recognised this on Monday when its Economics Editor, Ross Gittins, wrote a fitting tribute saying: “Some people assume only second-class minds join the public Continue reading »

Mr. Liu Dafeng has been a fan of overseas travel. He lives in China’s Shenzhen city, southeastern Guangdong province. After weeks of preparation and paperwork, his plan of a long-awaited trip to Britain was shattered after his visa application was denied. The reason was quite absurd: the officer at the British visa application centre in Continue reading »

But Turning Point USA has MAGA’s heart One of the most frustrating refrains one hears these days is that the Republican Party has “suddenly” gone crazy as if it was a spontaneous explosion of lunacy that came out of nowhere. The fact is that there has been a strain of crazy on the right for a very long time and the allegedly normal Republicans who are now shocked at what’s happened to their party were willfully blind and refused to see how toxic that strain was. All they had to do was attend any Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) of the past 20 years and open their eyes to what their party was becoming. I’m not talking specifically about ideology here, although there was plenty of odious far right philosophy at this confab going all the way back to its first meeting in 1974. I refer to the smart-ass, frat house attitude that came out of right wing radio, led by the contemptible Rush Limbaugh and all the spawn that followed him.

Theists couldn’t care less about unintended consequences The law of unintended consequences doesn’t have a shorter, pithier name like Murphy’s. Seems to me the two are closely related. They are sure to come into play soon in Alabama. Media Matters: During a recent interview on the program of self-proclaimed “prophet” and QAnon conspiracy theorist Johnny Enlow, Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker indicated that he is a proponent of the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a theological approach that calls on Christians to impose fundamentalist values on all aspects of American life. Enlow is a pro-Trump “prophet” and leading proponent of the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a “quasi-biblical blueprint for theocracy” that asserts that Christians must impose fundamentalist values on American society by conquering the “seven mountains” of cultural influence in U.S. life: government, education, media, religion, family, business, and entertainment. Enlow has also repeatedly pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory, sometimes even connecting it to the Seven Mountain Mandate.

The Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections is well-meaning but lacks detail and urgency, argues Emma DeSouza

When I heard that these clients were a lesbian couple, I was like, Great, I’m a shoo-in. They wanted to meet informally before they hired me, so I donned my best muscle tee, which had gaping arm holes down to the waist, a backwards baseball cap, and my usual sandals that put me a comfortable two inches above the city sidewalk. This was in my baby trans era, when I had just shaved my head and was still taking fashion cues from white lesbians (never again, folks).

I made my way to the Upper East Side, a place I only went to for the museums or when I needed to get to Central Park. The building’s exterior looked nondescript from Google Maps, so I didn’t think much about where I was going until I arrived and realized I was severely underdressed. I was greeted by a uniformed doorman who also operated the old-timey elevators. Everyone I passed in the hall was white, elderly, and wore business casual in the summer, as if it was their casual casual wear.

No one is pulling a president out of their hat “Evil Geniuses” author Kurt Andersen reaches a conclusion. It should have been obvious to all the people who circulated a certain podcast from last week. Until the end of his long monologue, Lawrence O’Donnell Thursday night avoided mentioning it in refuting its premise. Why give more exposure to a notion he finds ridiculous? Andersen posted at Threads: OK, @lawrence_odonnell convinced me to stop even entertaining the Biden-decides-not-to-run notion, even as a thought experiment. Powerful multi-faceted refutation. Andersen’s post was the first thing I saw this morning. Jon Stewart in his “The Daily Show” return last week addressed the age of both expected 2024 presidential candidates and public discontent over it.

The Environment Agency vowed that its pension fund would be going green – Byline Times' analysis suggests this has not been the case

6:00 p.m. I open a beer because it’s the end of the workweek, darn it, and I am still entitled to unwind with a drink even though a twenty-month-old may or may not be currently pulling all of our pot lids out of the cabinet and slamming them onto the kitchen floor over and over and over again in a headache-inducing manner that indicates she may have superhuman strength. We should really move those lids.

6:01 p.m. Upon seeing me take a sip of the beer, my toddler immediately decides it is the only thing she has ever wanted in this life. All the books and toys we purchased for her are meaningless detritus. The beer is everything. She demands I give it to her and refuses my peace offering of a plastic bottle of milk instead. I become paralyzed by terrifying visions of her descending into alcoholism at a young age, so I hide the beer, which only makes her more upset. But at least she stopped slamming the lids.

Details have updated. Make sure to look at the Conference Page for the latest information. The University of Leeds July 15-17, 2024 FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS (Submissions Deadline: Friday March …

The post FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS – Inaugural UK Modern Monetary Theory Conference appeared first on The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies.

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