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Taylor Swift fans won't have to worry about any jokes from BAFTAs host David Tennant - he has "Swifties" at home he would have to answer to.

. To many conservative and neoliberal politicians and economists,​ there seems to be a spectre haunting the United States and Europe today — Keynesian ideas on governments pursuing policies raising effective demand and supporting employment. Some of the favourite arguments used among these Keynesophobics to fight it are the ‘doctrine of sound finance’ and the […]

This was ultimately what they expected to happen. They wanted the real winners of the election to riot so they could justify calling for the Insurrection Act and put the military on the streets of America. That’s what Trump meant when he said that he pre-authorized the Department of Defense to be prepared to deploy troops in DC in the days before the Insurrection. And, in fact, that’s what Trump and Steven Miller are planning to do in the second term except this time they plan to use immigration as their excuse. They just want to use the military against Americans one way or another. There is no doubt that he will do it this time.

The sleepy little town of Canberra is bracing itself this week after it was announced that the Opposition’s shadow minister for home affairs, Barnaby Joyce, had been tasked with organising Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s upcoming bucks party. ”It’s an honour... Read More ›

Terraforming Mars could risk exterminating the very lifeforms we dream of discovering.

The post The Thorny Ethics of Making Alien Planets Habitable appeared first on Nautilus.

Guess what? The Biden administration is meeting its commitment to under served communities There was a bit of a brouhaha on Xitter in the last couple of days when an economic reporter for the NY Times posted that his friends in Brooklyn didn’t know about Biden’s economic successes and when confronted with the fact that the media bore some responsibility for that he fired back that he isn’t the Biden administration’s PR company. Let’s just say it wasn’t well received. Apparently, Biden hasn’t been entertaining enough for them to cover it. He needs to up his “PR” so the news media will feel it’s important to cover it. Having said that, here’s a shout out to Axios for reporting this, which I did not know before: There’s an unprecedented building boom underway in America. With it has come a less-noticed phenomenon: a surge of investment into communities left behind in the last economic expansion. Why it matters: Poorer counties with lower employment rates have attracted a large share of the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated for clean energy projects, semiconductor mega-factories and more.

Comedian Sooz Kempner shared with Richard K. Herring how she came to join the Doctor Who "Whoniverse" as the time-hopping assassin Doom.

The Fribbles are canonically “knee high to a grasshopper,” but the grasshopper in question is very large and has abnormally long shins. Please keep this in mind when the Fribbles go on adventures. They are not so small that a Tic Tac would be a particularly filling meal for them, but they cannot reach high shelves (unless those shelves are in a home made for a ladybug, in which case, it would not be merely plausible, but likely).

Fribbles are the personification of caring and love. When two Fribbles meet on the road, they always make time to inquire about any health issues the other Fribble may struggle with, whether said issue be a toe stubbed on a dandelion, or advanced pancreatitis. Their traditional greeting is ALWAYS, “Hi ho, my Fribble-dee-bibble-o!” after which they kiss one another full on the lips. This kiss is NOT SEXUAL and is offered in the spirit of peace and love. This is true even if they use tongue.

Fribbles have one power, and that is CARING. Caring is visualized by a “Fribbleblossom ray” that shoots from their eyes, killing their enemies.

One of the more frustrating aspects of this “But He’s Old!” theme that the media has made into this year’s “But Her Emails!” is the fact that Biden is not slipping and we know this because he’s always been gaffe prone. It’s his personality, not his age. I suppose if people really don’t like that about him, that’s legitimate, but then they are back to square one deciding if this guy is the better choice: “When I say that Obama is the president of our country they go: ‘He doesn’t know that it’s Biden! He doesn’t know,’” Trump said Wednesday. “So it’s very hard to be sarcastic.” He went on to say: “I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan, and I when I purposely interpose names, they said: ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki, from tricky Nikki.’” “I interpose [the names], and they make a big deal out of it,” Trump said. “I said: ‘No, no, I think they both stink. They have something in common—they both stink,’” he added.

Wednesday, February 14, turned out to be an unanticipated Happy Valentine’s Day for Julian Assange supporters. The Australian House of Representatives passed a motion introduced by Tasmanian Independent, Andrew Wilkie on behalf of the Parliamentary Friends of Julian Assange, urging the US and the UK to bring their prosecution of Julian Assange to a close, Continue reading »

Three big things have happened with the passage of the second half of the ‘Closing Loopholes’ Bill through Federal Parliament on Monday. One is world leading, one is not far from it, and one is playing catch up with the rest of the world. A fourth big thing happened a couple of months ago, with passage Continue reading »

You know there is a shocking decimation taking place when news footage shows only two colours – grey and red. Images of the persecution and murder of Gazans are utterly heartbreaking. Israel is asking the world to allow it to commit genocide. The US, and the West, are saying “Yes, go ahead”. If Israel were Continue reading »

It is almost impossible to devise a scenario in which the Labour Party does not win the UK election in 2024. The biggest remaining question may well be whether the victory is sufficiently large to almost guarantee a second term and possibly splinter the Conservative side of UK politics for a decade or more. There Continue reading »

Reading the latest Scanlon Foundation social cohesion report makes you aware that there are two quite distinct images of Australia. One – totally dark and doom laden – is depicted in the mass and social media and the other – clear-eyed about both serious problems and opportunities – is depicted in the 2023 Scanlon Foundation Continue reading »

Natural resources are owned by the people of Australia, but mining companies don’t like paying us for the resources they take out of the ground. And when they look like having to pay more, their response is swift and brutal. The way Lang Hancock told it, he discovered the vast iron ore deposits in the Continue reading »

The release of the latest PISA results provided another opportunity to bash schools and teachers. Amy Haywood and Jordana Hunter, from the Grattan Institute joined the chorus of denigrators. They, along with most academics, mainstream media and, of course politicians ‘validated’ our students’ performance in the International Student Assessment or PISA tests is in decline Continue reading »

An undutiful daughter’s atonement trip after four years. When my mum asked me to bring a king-size wool quilt on a flight back to China, I was hit with a strange familiar feeling – time for Lunar New Year again. It was a gift she wanted for one of my grandmothers (her aunt). In this Continue reading »

While bellicose rhetoric continues to be lobbed across the DMZ, North Korea appears focused on bolstering not just its weaponry, but its farms as well. The mood on the Korean Peninsula has been fraught since the very start of 2024. Does North Korea really intend to start a war? Are we facing the prospect of Continue reading »

The UK is officially in recession. A recession is defined as two successive quarters of negative growth, and the UK has now reported negative growth in both the third and fourth quarters of 2023. GDP fell by 0.3 percent from October to December 2023, after falling 0.1 percent in the previous quarter. No sector of […]