From an in-depth look at the Gaza crisis to a $64 billion banking scam, here’s a roundup of our reporting from the past week.
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Threatening the nation that protects them Sometimes in grazing the net, a theme appears in otherwise disconnected bits of internet flotsam. The current of electrons this morning delivered several random entries pointing toward the cultural degradation of the very people in this country who decry cultural degradation the loudest. This is the real American carnage, to borrow a phrase. The meme at the top is one example. The man who entered American carnage into the lexicon spoke of “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.” His most ardent followers are working at this very moment to decimate public education, to proscribe what children can learn, and to ensure children remain in poverty. Violent crime is rampant, he suggested, and does to this day. People believe him. In fact, violent crime is down. Yes, property crimes are up, but along with hate crimes targeting Blacks, Latinos, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Antisemitic crimes are up as well.
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Back in February of 2017, my dear mother passed away, at the age of 86. While she had been weathering a plethora of health issues for a number of years, the straw that ultimately claimed her (pancreatic cancer) was diagnosed mere weeks before she died. In fact, her turn for the worse was so sudden that my flight to Ohio turned into a grim race; near as I could figure, my plane was on final approach to Canton-Akron Airport when she slipped away (I arrived at her bedside an hour after she had died). And yes, that was hard. Since I obviously wasn’t present during (what turned out to be) her final days, I asked my brother if she had any “final words”. At first, he chuckled a little through the tears, recounting that several days prior, she had turned to him at one point and said “I wish I had some wisdom to impart. But I don’t.” I laughed (Jewish fatalism-it’s a cultural thing). Then, he remembered something. The hospice room where my mother spent her last week had a picture window facing west, with a view of a field, a pond, a small stand of trees, and an occasional deer spotting.
This is the test Ron Brownstein with a typically astute analysis of Biden’s current challenges and whether his long experience will now be seen as an asset: The escalating confrontation between Israel and Hamas is offering President Joe Biden a crucial opportunity to begin flipping the script on one of his most glaring vulnerabilities in the 2024 presidential race. For months, polls have consistently shown that most Americans believe Biden’s advanced age has diminished his capacity to handle the responsibilities of the presidency. But many Democrats believe that Biden’s widely praised response to the Mideast crisis could provide him a pivot point to argue that his age is an asset because it has equipped him with the experience to navigate such a complex challenge. “As you project forward, we are going to be able to argue that Joe Biden’s age has been central to his success because in a time of Covid, insurrection, Russian invasion of Ukraine, now challenges in the Middle East, we have the most experienced man ever as president,” said Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg.
This latest moral panic is even dumber than usual Greg Sargent on the latest: Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s Republican governor, signed a law in May that, among other provisions,requires schools to remove books that depict a “sex act.” That statutory phrase has now helped unleash a frenzy of book-banning across the state, one that illustrates a core truth about these types of censorship directives. Their vagueness is the point. When GOP-controlled state legislatures escalated the passage of laws in 2022 and 2023 restricting school materials addressing sex, gender and race, critics warned that their hazy drafting would prod educators to err on the side of censorship. Uncertain whether books or classroom discussions might run afoul of their state’s law, education officials might decide nixing them would be the “safer” option. What’s happening in Iowa right now thoroughly vindicates those fears. This week, the Iowa City Community School District released a list of 68 books that it removed from schools to comply with the law.
One of the privileges of being civilized is that it gives you the right to do very uncivilized things to the barbarians. In his public address to Joe Biden in Tel Aviv on October 18, Benjamin Netanyahu remarked, “You’ve rightly drawn a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism.” History […]
The post The Many and the Few appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
Trump doesn’t think it is Trouble in wingnut paradise? Fox News was essential to Donald Trump’s success in both of his last presidential runs. Now, as the former president navigates another campaign through a tidal wave of indictments and legal problems, he’s facing a much frostier relationship with the cable giant—and that could be bad news for both of them. In recent months, Trump’s inner circle has become convinced that Fox News is essentially sidelining the former president by restricting live appearances on the network. “Trump is not allowed live on Fox,” a Trump operative told The Daily Beast, chalking it up to “fear” that Trump could level a baseless allegation that could leave the network in a legal mess. A Trump adviser told The Daily Beast a similar story—that the former president isn’t allowed live on air anymore, and that Fox News prefers to have Trump in a pre-recorded setting. “Fox sent down word from the top that they don’t want to ‘platform’ Trump like they did before,” a Trump adviser told The Daily Beast. “I find it hilarious.
Worth recalling Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre undermining the rule of law and DOJ independence; we have hardly advanced from that. Indeed, Trump is promising its return. https://t.co/KYprXck79l — Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) October 21, 2023 Trump came close in the post-election period. He was going to fire the whole top layer of the DOJ and put in that coup-plotting toady Jeffrey Clark in as Attorney General in order to get the department to back his play to overturn the election. He was talked out of it when the White House lawyers convinced him that that entire executive team in the department would leave and it would affect his public standing. He would not take that advice today.He’s learned by now that there is no price to pay for maximalism. Next time, he won’t hesitate.
A former Israeli adviser and a former Palestinian adviser say individual member states must push harder for an end to the wanton destruction. These are painful and dangerous times. Following Hamas’s launch on October 7th of an attack on Israel that has resulted in the confirmed killing of 1,300 Israelis so far, Israel on Friday Continue reading »
A modernising Treasurer, the author and founder of Medicare, the re-shaper and builder of the post-War Labor Party, Foreign Minister and finally, in high office, Governor General. Bill Hayden was a great servant of Australia. A modernising Treasurer, the author and founder of Medicare, the re-shaper and builder of the post-War Labor Party, Foreign Minister Continue reading »
Oceans could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by a third. Toxic materials from abandoned and currently operational metal mines are polluting half a million kilometres of rivers and their floodplains. What do you know about Tassie Devils? Oceans combating climate change Seven ocean-based initiatives could deliver 35% of the cuts needed to reduce greenhouse gas Continue reading »
The Lords Of Humankind are not morally righteous. They are Saturn devouring his children. And they do have human form. They pretend That they are Morally righteous The Presidents The Prime Ministers The Foreign Ministers The myriad of homicidal monsters And their henchmen Occupying positions of power Getting wealthy and fat They threaten Continue reading »
The terms of reference for the Inquiry into the Commonwealth Government Covid-19 Response were released on the 21 September. Ostensibly the inquiry is “to identify lessons learned to improve Australia’s preparedness for future pandemics”. However, what if the next pandemic is nothing like Covid? And how prepared are we for other potential disasters? Complacency and Continue reading »
Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos Horta has been pressing the Albanese government to somehow enable Woodside Petroleum to go forward with the development of the Greater Sunrise Gasfields and the processing of the gas on Timor-Leste’s south coast. He says that his country could turn to China if Australia doesn’t help. On September 23, 2023, Timor-Leste’s Continue reading »
Almost all geopolitical “soft power” explanations draw on the seminal analysis by the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye, who promoted the term in his 1990 book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. At that time, he wrote, “When one country gets other countries to want what it wants (this) might be called co-optive Continue reading »
On BBC Newsnight, host Kirsty Wark listened to Husam Zomlot, head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, describe how six of his family members had been killed by Israeli air strikes. Wark reacted oddly: ‘I’m sorry for your own personal loss. I mean, can I just be clear, though, you cannot condone the killing Continue reading »
It turns out that when the owner of the social media site is a narcissistic, control freak, troll the site ends up being a hellhole of lies and propaganda. Who could have guessed? A handful of influential but unreliable accounts, some of which have been promoted by Elon Musk, are dominating the flow of news on X around the Israel-Hamas war and easily outpacing established mainstream news outlets, according to research published Friday by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. Researchers analyzed viral posts about the conflict during a three-day period starting from the beginning of the attack against Israel on Oct. 7. They concluded that the most popular posts about the crisis revealed how news on the platform is “faster, more disorienting, and potentially more shaped by Musk himself.” The new work adds data to a swell of recent anecdotal accounts from researchers, academics and journalists who have noted a change for the worse in the way news and information moves and is incentivized on Twitter over the last year, especially since the start of the Israel-Hamas crisis.
In my academic job, I’ve just started a new 5-year project called ‘Visions for the future‘. In the first year of the project, I’ll tackle some methodological questions, including working out the discussion we had here some years ago on normative audits, and the question what ‘synthetic political philosophy’ is (on which Eric also has, […]
