In a recent interview on Perth radio, Opposition Spokesman on Immigration, Dan Tehan, asserted: “I’ve been saying now for well over 18 months, it’s [meaning immigration] too high”. I have been unable to find any public statement by Tehan 18 months ago that immigration levels were too high. But his leader, Peter Dutton, publicly said Continue reading »
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This week Prabowo Subianto has been in Beijing at the invitation of President Xi Jinping. It’s the Indonesian president-elect’s first major overseas trip after winning the 14 February election. No come-soon card yet from Washington, so China’s getting in first. Should we be worried? Duncan Graham reports: China already has our near neighbour in a Continue reading »
With Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe, assassinated, Japan’s current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has been saying he wants direct talks with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un -a reversal of Abe’s position. February reports said Kishida was willing for the talks to be without conditions. On this basis, Kim Yo Jong -Kim Jong Un’s Continue reading »
They are not meeting the moment Dan Froomkin is back from vacation and he’s not happy: The nation stands on the edge of a precipice, and our political media is so addicted to neutrality that it is casting both choices — survival or cataclysm — as equally plausible. It’s sickening. We are one election away from becoming a Christian nationalist state, losing our democracy as we know it, and putting the fate of our country in the hands of a corrupt madman filled with fever dreams of retribution. And yet political journalists seem to think this is just fine. Fun, even. I barely surfed the web while I was gone, but I did open a few emails here and there. And there was one I found particularly enlightening – in a very troubling way.
1. Spirit Week continues into perpetuity. No theme will ever be repeated, and your children will need unique costumes every day for the rest of their lives.
2. Out of nowhere, you have another child you have no memory of giving birth to. He’s in third grade, and tomorrow is the first day of Spirit Week. He tells you he needs a toga to wear to school and that you have forgotten to vaccinate or feed him for the past eight years.
3. You are contacted by the middle school you attended. In 1998, you failed to return the Paso a Paso Spanish-language student learning CD-ROM companion set to the library and, therefore, never graduated eighth grade. If you do not redo the semester, it will invalidate all subsequent education you ever received. They are expecting you tomorrow at 8 a.m. It’s Spirit Week, and you have a major project due. You are forty years old, and tomorrow you will give an oral presentation in Spanish in your wackiest pajamas.
A federal appeals court will decide whether Douglass Mackey should go to prison for his posts about Hillary Clinton and the 2016 election.
The post A MAGA Troll’s Memes Were Blatant Disinformation. But Were They a Crime? appeared first on The Intercept.
Thomas Neuberger, one of my favorite bloggers, has an excellent post on the fact that swathes of types of insurance are going to go extinct because of climate change. Property, fire, home (except from theft, though that may get hit during collapse) and so on. It’s worth a read.
This has already started to happen. Insurance companies are refusing to write new fire insurance policies in parts of California, for example, and no one with sense wants to insure buildings against hurricane risk in Florida. But it will spread: rivers will swell during climate change before they shrink, for example. Acts of God will become more and more common everywhere. Crop insurance, for example, is something that will become more expensive.
Universal Music Group CEO and prominent Pro-Israel advocate Lucian Grainge has been labeled a co-defendant in a lawsuit aimed at hip hop mogul P Diddy, alleging the trafficking of children. Meanwhile, A-list actor and Zionist hype man Ashton Kutcher is expecting to be subpoenaed.
The post P Diddy Pedo Party Lawsuit Snags Another Pro-Israel Lobbyist: Music Exec Lucian Grainge appeared first on MintPress News.
These people are just plain nuts SOLAR ECLIPSES, LIKE the upcoming one on April 8, are a well-documented scientific phenomenon. As early as 763 BCE, ancient Assyrians were charting the process by which the path of the moon temporarily obstructs the sun, and astronomers have continued to do so for thousands of years since. Our knowledge of eclipses predates our knowledge of gravity, algebra, and toilet paper. We are well aware of their existence, and we are well aware of what causes them. (I mean, I personally am not, but other people ostensibly are.) What the ancient Assyrians could not have possibly predicted, however, was the singular stupidity of the current incarnation of the American right. Unconvinced by thousands of years of scientific inquiry, as well as driven by a general sense of apocalyptic bloodlust, many on the right are trading conspiracy theories about the upcoming eclipse, ranging from the belief that it signals the End Times to the idea that the Biden administration is using it as an opportunity to shut down cell phone service or bring in the National Guard in an effort to make beautiful blond children who play sports transgender.
The MAGA minority means to impose its will ICYMI, the effort in Nebraska to change the state’s electoral vote allocation to winner-take-all failed last night. It is more evidence that the GOP is pulling out all the stops in seeking ways to tip the presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor, even for a single electoral vote. But do not lose sight of other places (and other 2024 races) where the MAGA GOP is hoping to place heavy thumbs on the scales. Pay attention (Bolts): The Texas supreme court closed out 2023 by blocking an abortion during a medical emergency, forcing a woman to flee the state. Just days before Christmas, Wisconsin justices struck down the state’s GOP-drawn gerrymanders. So far this year, Montana’s supreme court has stepped in to protect voting rights, while a decision in Alabama threatened in vitro fertilization treatments. In each of these states, unlike at the federal level, voters chose who sits on the bench and which judges get to dictate such profound consequences. And the 2024 elections may now reshape who holds power on supreme courts across the country.
Reading words is hard enough for me without having to read faces too.
“Say her name!” Marjorie Taylor Greene shouted from the House floor during President Biden’s State of the Union Address. The same slogan was on the T-shirt she wore under her red jacket, which had a pin with a picture of the person whose name she was referring to — a pin she’d also handed out to colleagues before that session as well as to the president as he passed her on his way to the rostrum. The name was Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student murdered in Georgia, Greene’s home state, on February 22nd. The man accused of killing her, Jose Antonio Ibarra, had been identified as an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. Greene’s theatrics that night were obviously meant to put... Read more
Source: How About These Names, Marjorie Greene? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
by Daniel Wortel-London
Economies that operate within planetary boundaries are likely to be heavily localized compared to economies today. Planners will need to shift modes of transportation and redesign cities. Businesses will need to shorten supply chains. This is because freight and passenger travel impact the environment extensively. Respecting planetary boundaries requires that we create economies that do not rely heavily on long-distance travel.
To help accomplish this goal,
The post Introducing the Mileage Fee Act appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
A “multipronged assault” Last week, I questioned the sufficiency of the “comically long” list of MAGA “nightmare scenarios” the Biden campaign is planning for that could arise leading up to and in the aftermath of the November election. We witnessed live on Jan. 6 the lengths to which MAGA Republicans would go to maintain power. Even then it took many months of investigation to uncover the plotting Trump’s confederates did not put on public display. It’s likely that people without criminal minds are not devious enough to anticipate all the ways Insurrection 2.0 might unfold. This time, the prospect of jail time if he loses increases Trump’s incentives for instigating mayhem. As with stochastic terrorism, his followers don’t require explicit orders from the chief to know what he wants. From Daily Beast (via Yahoo Finance): Maria Bartiromo didn’t even bother to wait for the 2024 election to pass before suggesting it could be stolen.
The cult movie Withnail and I is getting a stage play starring Robert Sheehan (The Umbrella Academy), Sooz Kempner (Doctor Who), and more.
Hi, I’m wondering if I could interest you in a brand-new sparkling water brand. I don’t have a name for it, because it doesn’t yet exist. Every aspect of this product is still very early in the planning stage. But I can assure you that the name will probably be something fun and catchy, like Zoinks or Floop. Now that I hear it out loud, we’ll probably end up closer to Zoinks than Floop on the Zoinks-Floop Spectrum.