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According to the evening news, Australia stands on the precipice of one of the greatest security threats to Australia since World War II, with the Imperial Japanese Army in the Owen Stanley’s overlooking the lights of Port Moresby. A few dozen impoverished, bedraggled refugees right up there with the Imperial Japanese Army as threat! It Continue reading »

The cabinet of Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is filled with religious extremists who believe that Israel’s brutality in Gaza is at God’s command. According to the Book of Joshua in the Hebrew Bible, dated by scholars to the 7th century BC, God promised the land to the Jewish people and instructed them to destroy Continue reading »

The contents of the Israeli Association of Rape Crisis Center’s paper alleging “systematic” Hamas rape derive largely from discredited second-hand testimonies and debunked media reports. Among its most heavily cited sources is a dubious NY Times article that triggered a staff revolt at the paper. Western media outlets are hyping a new report by the Israeli government-affiliated “Association of Rape Crisis Centers” (ARCC) which maintains that Hamas combatants carried out a campaign of “systematic and intentional” rape on October 7.  […]

The post New Israeli report alleging ‘systematic and intentional rape’ by Hamas relies on debunked Western media reports first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post New Israeli report alleging ‘systematic and intentional rape’ by Hamas relies on debunked Western media reports appeared first on The Grayzone.

by Dave Rollo

”Economic growth” is commonplace in the daily news. We assume it’s a good thing, that a 2–4 percent increase in GDP is beneficial to all. Likewise, we hear that our communities are growing, and we see a 2–4 percent increase in population as reasonable and benign. Meanwhile, visionary community leaders are busy planning for a steady feed of single-digit annual growth. So we’re in good hands, right?

But what the news reports miss is that any steady rate of growth is an exponential function that contains within it a knowable doubling time.

The post Envisioning a Steady-State Comprehensive Plan appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

Page A1: Page A16 This is what we’re dealing with. It shouldn’t have to be this hard. Check this out from Politico: That’s right. He’s four points up in that poll. But that headline is how they chose to frame the story. How about this? What does being beleaguered have to do with student loan forgiveness? How about “determined” or “committed”? Here you can see that they originally had a neutral headline and actually revised it to make it demeaning toward Biden: Every headline is about how poor, old Biden is just floundering, over and over and over again. It’s astonishing.

Of all the instances of disrepute to shame Westminster in recent years, yesterday’s fracas was undoubtedly the system at its lowest. Speaker Lindsay Hoyle’s decision to deny MPs the opportunity to vote on a Gaza ceasefire was not just an affront to the millions of people demanding action from politicians, but it revealed Britain’s deeply […]

The £1.2 billion tunnel is arguably the biggest infrastructure project Khan has approved – but he rarely brings it up

Hekmat Aboukhater reveals the concealed agenda of the newly extended Caesar Act, exposing the Israel Lobby's influence and examining the broader impact of sanctions on Syria and the world.

The post Deconstructing H.R. 3202: The Israel Lobby’s Persistent Role in Sanctioning Syria appeared first on MintPress News.

Emo Trump revisited “Nah.” This clip evoked a memory from Donald “91 Counts” Trump’s tenure. Post by @fightforprogress View on Threads USA Today (2/13) op-ed: Donald Trump on Friday acknowledged his cowardice when it comes to America’s epidemic of gun violence and the resulting slaughter of this country’s children. Being Trump, he tried to make that sound like a virtue. Speaking at a National Rifle Association gun show in Pennsylvania’s capital city Friday, Trump bragged about his record of inaction. “During my four years nothing happened,” Trump said. “And there was great pressure on me, having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield.” That’s Trump telling the truth for a change.  “We did nothing,” Trump brags. It’s a Republican thing. You wouldn’t understand. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

A murder mystery that is also an impressive sociological imaginary.

Long ago, I came to believe that being a Jew, even a secular one like me, entailed certain responsibilities. A people who had suffered so much yet survived were obligated, if not honored, to serve as witnesses and supporters of other oppressed people and to live in the public interest, to model ethical lives. Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, and Sandy Koufax all made me proud, while I felt ashamed of Roy Cohn, Alan Dershowitz, and Henry Kissinger. I never reached such lofty, self-righteous, or even chauvinistic heights or depths, but such figures, positive and negative, offered a comforting structure for my casual, shallow life as a Jew. I rarely observed high holy days. My children were neither bar nor bat... Read more

Source: I’m Heartbroken by the War in Israel appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Plus, the truth about your credit cards, the scourge of our distraction economy, Honest Abe’s dying wish, banning your right to cold beer, and much more.

It’s Free States and Slave States again “If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention,” writes Charles Blow, reacting to the Alabama Supreme Court’s Tuesday ruling that frozen embryos are children. Destruction of those embryos, even by accident, the court ruled, falls under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.  From the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe to plans by Trump-aligned think tanks to restructure the United States to suit Christian nationalists to Alabama’s Tuesday ruling, Tali-bans will pop up all over in a second Trump term. A national abortion ban is clearly on the agenda. “Control of women’s bodies is the endgame,” Blow continues. But is it? Reducing women to birthing vessels and daycare attendants is only one part of the plan. Theists who have long argued that the founders intended to create a Christian nation publish textbooks, build theme parks, ban books, and rail against public education on that basis in a bid to force the rest of us to live according to their worldview. And not just women.

Buchi Emecheta said that all her books were about survival, but survival doesn’t always mean gritting your teeth. Sometimes it means acting the tourist for a day, skipping the royal press conference for a Vespa ride through Rome, leaving your kids a note saying you’re joining the circus. 

You step inside the bathroom and shut the door.

You lock the door.

Get a good look at yourself in the dim lighting. You look great. Remember this because you’re about to look more vulnerable than a baby antelope at the watering hole during lion lunch hour.

Unsnap (they’re always snaps) the top two snaps. Then, resnap them.

You go back to the door. Double-check to make sure that it is locked. Jiggle the handle. Shake it.

Once you’re sure it’s locked, unsnap all the snaps and zipper (there’s always a zipper too), and slide your arms out of the sleeves. Unpeel yourself, you big, stupid banana.

Look down at your chest: you’re either wearing the bra you’ve had for too long and that you tell people you wash, but you’ve never washed it, because you’re worried it’ll lose some of the comfort it brings you. Or you’re completely naked. There is no in between.

Hold the top of the jumpsuit under the back of your thighs so that it’s not touching the floor (gross) and also not touching the toilet (gross). This will be difficult but necessary.

A crown decayed or unfinished. Disarticulated bricks. An echo.The cannon face the rolling breakers,aiming at the line where sky and sea collude.What do they defend? The wild enclosure,which for...

One thing Enright’s The Wren, The Wren is sure of is that there is no such thing as completion, or a fresh start. Many of its images are variations on the theme of traces, leftovers, the aspects of self or history you can’t quite redeem or get rid of.

Memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity, and most demands for recognition and reparations, have been built. Universalist reference points are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist.

Acid house wasn’t a genre of dance music so much as a new way of experiencing it: audiences dressed down, parties ran all night and – so dancers reported – social divisions disintegrated, helped along by the empathetic rush of the new drug.