A radical theory that pagan cults gave rise to early Christianity.
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Reagan won re-election in a landslide. People get very upset when you suggest that maybe this immense amount of whining about other people’s economic problems (most people say their own finances are fine) might be a bit self-indulgent. Mea culpa. I was wondering the other day about our more recent experience: the Great Recession. That was just 15 years ago and it was extremely painful and the recovery was much slower than this one has been. Looking at the index of consumer sentiment over the period of 2009-2012 when Obama was handily re-elected (if not in a landslide) the trajectory is about the same. It was in the doldrums until 2012, at which point it ticked up to exactly the level it is today.
One of the most popular and entertaining feeds on twitter is one called “NY Times Pitchbot” which has even been name checked by President Biden. It mocks the NY Times, obviously, usually for its “both sides” tendencies. But it’s getting harder and harder to mock them. Here’s Kevin Drum on one recent egregiously misleading headline: This is one of the more cowardly headlines I’ve read in a while: Emerging Portrait of Judge in Trump Documents Case: Prepared, Prickly and Slow If you read the actual piece, it contains one (1) example of judge Aileen Cannon being prepared—set against half a dozen where she was confused or mistaken. But the main thing the story makes clear is that practically everything Cannon does is to Donald Trump’s benefit. The headline says nothing about this. A more accurate hed would have been, “Inexperienced, Slow, and Always On Trump’s Side.” Why run the article at all if you’re going to bury it under an innocuous and misleading headline? That’s just one example. I’ve highlighted quite a few in the last few weeks as well.
When we first introduced this drink, we were of two minds about it. “Tastes as fresh-faced as summer, we said. But was it, perhaps, a trifle “unsophisticated?” By this time the Bullfrog has acquired a modest but growing following who don’t seem to have any problems with it at all. Which raises the question: canContinue reading The Smirnoff Bullfrog (1975)
Australia is on a collision course with the major source of our prosperity. The collision is not yet a fait accompli. To avoid the collision will require breaking the shackles of the Rules-Based Order. Australia faces a geopolitical conundrum of major, if not epic, proportions. With the recent release of the National Defence Strategy (NDS), Continue reading »
Chinese Minister of National Defence Dong Jun is set to visit Singapore from May 31 to June 2 to attend the Shangri-La Dialogue at the Shangri-La Hotel. The U.S. Department of Defence has announced that U.S. Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin will meet with Chinese Minister of National Defence Dong Jun during the Dialogue, marking Continue reading »
For weeks encampment protests in universities have been occurring throughout Australia. Media coverage has to a significant extent been adverse, and undeservedly so. The public record suggests the protestors have been overwhelmingly well-behaved. And yet, Vice-Chancellors are said to have been pressed to stop the protests. There has even been conjecture that offending students might Continue reading »
Home Affairs Minister James Paterson has recently been extolling Peter Dutton’s record on immigration integrity and dealing with foreign criminals. So let’s just test those claims. Labour trafficking abusing the asylum system A key responsibility of any immigration minister is to prevent the system being exploited by labour traffickers. Attempts by labour traffickers to exploit Continue reading »
The recent public uproar about the comments made by ABC journalist Laura Tingle, where she stated that in her view Australia ‘Australia is a racist country’, demonstrates how, as a society, we are still incapable of having a nuanced, mature and respectful conversation about a wicked social problem that continues to be a blight on Continue reading »
At last the crime of coercive control in marriages and partnerships has been recognised and criminalised in Australia. This is a crime that can remain invisible for years, concealed behind the image of a fine, friendly man whose wife has problems. Once exposed, the victim’s bruises — or worse — make us ashamed of our Continue reading »
It has always seemed to me that the Northern Territory, and especially its Indigenous peoples, have been Australia’s ‘poor relation.’ Out of sight, inaccessible, incomprehensible, hostile, threatening. From the birth of what became a Nation, the vast expanses of the Northern Territory, and its unfamiliar peoples, were unwanted, bumped from one State to another, then Continue reading »
Since October 2023, much has been said about what Jewish Australians think about Israel’s war in Gaza. If you’ve been reading the statistics quoted in media articles, you can be forgiven for thinking that the vast majority of Australian Jews support Israel’s war in Gaza and believe that the student protests on Australian University campuses constitute antisemitism Continue reading »
Each winter the surface of the sea freezes around Antarctica, over a vast area, mostly to a depth of about one metre. But this is starting to change. Last year, the sea ice reached an unprecedentedly low maximum extent of only 17 million square kilometres. Why aren’t we talking about sea ice? Perhaps it’s because Continue reading »
Tucker Carlson interviews Jeffrey Sachs on the Untold History of the Cold War and the war in Ukraine. Continue reading »
‘Honestly I’m so shocked right now, to be treated this badly,’ said a visibly shaken Faiza Shaheen, on the verge of tears last night. She was on Newsnight, describing how she’d been sent an email an hour earlier telling her she was being deselected as the Labour candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green. Shaheen, a […]
I’ve been belatedly listening to the Rachel Maddow podcast “Ultra” which is about a far right, Nazi-sympathizing, authoritarian plot to overthrow the FDR administration during the late 30s and early 40s. I knew about the German Bund, of course, and I’ve written about the big Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. But I confess I was not aware of the massive investigation and trial to put Nazi spies and collaborators on trial. The echoes of today are overwhelming which is why Maddow dug into the story, I assume. (She never mentions it in the podcast, though, which is very effective.) Being in that mindset, I guess it’s not surprising that I love the lede of this piece in The New Republic: In his book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson cites a cable sent to the State Department in June 1933 by a U.S. diplomat posted in Germany that provided a far more candid assessment of the Nazi leadership than the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was then conveying to the public.
Trump’s campaign thinks he wins whether he’s found guilty or not: Donald Trump’s pollsters have been tracking the impact of his indictments throughout his first trial and, moving to get ahead of events, are arguing that regardless of the verdict in the New York hush-money case, they can spin it in his favor. In the campaign’s internal polling, two-thirds of respondents say politics played a role in his criminal indictments.That is at odds with public polling, which has found that somewhere between a plurality and a majority of Americans believe the case has been handled fairly, with a sharp partisan split. Some 60 percent of voters have said they think the charges are very or somewhat serious. Even 6 percent of Trump voters say they would be less likely to back him if convicted. But the Trump campaign’s interpretation of its own polling suggests what its strategy might be for dealing with a guilty verdict. Trump’s advisers and allies say the public, which has largely tuned out the trial, may have already factored the possibility of a conviction into how it sees Trump.
PARENT 1: Welcome home!
CHILD: Manipulative!
PARENT 1: Wait. What?
CHILD: Toxic!
PARENT 1: Who? Me?
CHILD: Narcissist!
PARENT 1: You keep saying words, but without verbs.
CHILD: Gaslighting!
PARENT 1: I’m just thinking that if you put these words into a sentence, I might get a better sense of what’s on your mind.
CHILD: You’re a manipulative, toxic narcissist!
PARENT 1: Me? How?
CHILD: Ah! See? Gaslighting!
PARENT 1: Okay, I feel like you’ve learned some new words at school, and now you’re just cycling through them without any context or evidence. Maybe you’re hungry. Would you like a sandwich? I’m making sandwiches.
CHILD: Manipulative! Toxic! Gaslight!
PARENT 1: You forgot narcissist.