Last month, news bubbled that the Victorian State government had inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Israeli Defence Ministry in December 2022. “As Australia’s advanced manufacturing capital, we are always exploring economic and trade opportunities for our state – especially those that create local jobs,” a government spokesperson stated in January. In March Continue reading »
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In what world does a dominant state claim they have a right to defend themselves against those they have unethically, immorally and illegally imprisoned for decades, killed and persecuted without trial? There’s been an abundance of evidence… Our intelligence sources say… It is very credible intelligence… A complete and transparent investigation… According to the intelligence Continue reading »
A number of commentators have proposed that the Aged Care Funding Taskforce would, and indeed should, recommend increasing user charges. With particular reference to services delivered through Commonwealth Home Care Program (CHSP), this step would be achieved by splitting care services and ordinary daily living supports; the former would be subsidised and clients would pay Continue reading »
A landmark event in global public health is taking place in Panama City on Feb 5-10: the 10th Conference of Parties (COP10) of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). Since 2003, the FCTC has been ratified by 183 countries, and all of them, including China, have made steady progress in monitoring tobacco Continue reading »
In recent days, U.S. media have been proclaiming that North Korea plans to initiate military action against its neighbour to the south. An article by Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker, neither previously prone to making wild assertions, created quite a splash and set off a chain reaction of media fear-mongering. In Carlin’s and Continue reading »
US politicians and others are always boasting about the US being the greatest in just about any category you can think of – from the record for eating hot dogs in a given time to their so-called democracy. But perhaps the greatest boast is that it is a peace-loving state committed to protecting the world. Continue reading »
Ai Weiwei joins a long line of dissenters such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Liu Xiaobo who became disenchanted by the West. After criticising Israel for its scorched-earth military operation in Gaza and defending Palestinian human rights, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei had his long-planned exhibition at the famed Lisson Gallery in London abruptly cancelled in Continue reading »
He is so brain damaged that he still thinks, after all this time, that NATO countries pay some sort of “dues” and if they don’t it means he can refuse to support them. It’s so stupid that it’s hard to even contemplate how dangerous it is to allow this person to be president again.
As many of you know, I spent a good portion of my career covering entertainment, and during that time I was fortunate enough to interview many talented performers, including three Beatles (George, Paul and Ringo), a bunch of movie and … Continue reading
An empty bucket, a Zappos shoebox, potting soil, a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a broken lamp wrapped in duct tape, some synthetic firewood—the flotsam and jetsam of the half-forgotten years. These leftovers from past lives accumulate in suburban garages as the people who once wanted them get older and older. Useless and unnoticed, […]
The post The Memory Hole appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
The only winning move is not to play Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? Joahua, the artificial intelligence defense computer in War Games (1983), almost launches World War III while playing “Global Thermonuclear War” with itself. A young computer enthusiast played by Matthew Broderick thought it was just a cool game he’d found on a military supercomputer he’d hacked. He invites Joshua to play. Joshua was actually in control of missile launch commands. The presumptive Republican candidate for president in 2024, the imbecile Donald “91 Counts” Trump is no computer, and seems to lack intelligence, artificial or otherwise. But he did have an uncle who taught at MIT, so same difference. Trump last night publicly entertained inviting global thermonuclear war. In the Broderick role in this year’s War Games reboot, we have the mainstream press. Reporters are busily pecking away at their keyboards trying to coax the American electorate into playing “but her emails” once again … because it was so much fun (and good for clicks and ratings) in 2016.
Renegade Nell, a new 8-part historical swashbuckling fantasy by Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley), premieres on Disney+ on March 29th.
From more Boeing revelations to the dark money in TV broadcasting, here’s all news from The Lever this week.
Be a shame if something happened to it Wicked Witch of the West voice: And your western economy, too! “The president of a big country stood up, said, ‘Well, sir…” the former president told a MAGAfied crowd in Conway, South Carolina. Here we go. Another bullshit “sir story.” Washington Post: “One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?,’” Trump said during a rally at Coastal Carolina University. “I said, ‘You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent.’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.” “This is crazy. And 8 years later, Trump shows that he STILL doesn’t understand how NATO works! It’s not a protection racket. They don’t pay us to protect them. Geez,” tweeted former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. Foreign policy wonks gasped. Why, at this point, who can say?
Three years after Trump’s unprecedented killing spree, the death row visitation project offers a lifeline for those who survived.
The post Amid the Lingering Trauma of Trump’s Executions, a New Project Brings Families to Federal Death Row appeared first on The Intercept.
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Super Bowl LVIII, Superman: Legacy, Puppy Bowl XX, True Detective, TWD: Daryl Dixon, Doctor Who, and more!
In a word, Economics is an Impossible Science because by its own definition the determining conditions of the economy are not economic: they are “exogenous.” Supposedly a science of things, it is by definition without substance, being rather a mode of behavior: the application of scarce means to alternative ends so as to achieve the […]
Masha Gesson sat through the whole Putin interview. Here are a few of her thoughts. She speaks Russian, of course, so this doesn’t rely on the Kremlin translators as Tucker’s show does: : What Putin Saw When He Was Interviewed by Tucker Carlson Here was an easy mark. Carlson meekly tried to interrupt Putin a couple of times, to ask a question he seemed stuck on: Why hadn’t all this history and these territorial issues come up when Putin first became President, in 2000? It was an ill-informed question—Putin has trafficked in historical revisionism from the start and became increasingly obsessed with Ukraine after the Orange Revolution, in 2004—and an easy one for Putin to ignore. It seemed to show that Carlson was less well briefed than Putin, who dropped biographical trivia about Carlson into the conversation, a trademark intimidation tactic of a K.G.B. agent. He mentioned, for example, that Carlson had unsuccessfully tried to join the C.I.A.
Ron Brownstein has written an in-depth piece for the Atlantic about Trump’s 2nd term immigration agenda. It is terrifying. But Trump and his henchmen are dead serious about carrying it out this time. And the reasoning isn’t just to get rid of immigrants they don’t like. It’s to demonstrate and consolidate power to rule by force in many other ways as well. Don’t think you won’t be affected. Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
If you want to go deep on the Hur Report to see just how incredibly disingenuous his novelistic little hit job really is, nobody does it better than Emptywheel. Highly recommend, particularly if you’re interested in Hur’s shoddy legal reasoning. I thought I would share a good thumbnail version from twitter if you don’t have the time or inclination to dig into the details: So I went through and read Hur’s report, and the way the media at large has been presenting things is borderline malpractice. Please take the two minutes it requires to read this tweet because it really does matter. Let me lay it out for you. Hur is alleging there are two counts of Biden willfully retaining classified documents: The Afghanistan docs that were found in his Delaware home and his own personal notebooks. During an interview with a ghostwriter, he made reference to classified documents that were “downstairs” in his rented Virginia home. The supposition is that these are the Afghanistan documents that were later moved to his Delaware home in 2019 and then found by the FBI.
It’s different for everyone James Fallows has a great newsletter that you should subscribe to if you can. He’s been writing about all this, particularly the political press, for many years and his perspective is extremely valuable. This week he starts off interrogating the idea that age is a static thing for everyone and he quotes some experts on the subject: Last month several doctors and other authors assessed evidence that Biden was on the fortunate side of that divide, a “superager” on the Holmes / Stevens / Carter model. This is even though Biden “reads” as older than his near-contemporary Trump, mainly because of the stiffness of his gait. In this piece at MedPage Today and this in The Hill the authors emphasized differential aging rates and said about Biden: Then he asks a pertinent question. Might age be an advantage? In our youth obsessed culture that’s heresy but he makes a good case: The job of president finally comes down to judgment calls. Emphasize this bill, and not that one.