Opening the one-day event, the MCC director, Frank Furedi,
….
Furedi, once a member of a Marxist fringe party, now a leading ideologue for the new right,
Furedi? Wasn’t he “Living Marxism” or some such then Spiked?
Fun that he ended up funded by Orban of course. But my, my, isn’t The Guardian sniffy about that past?
So, apparemtly Britain requires more air conditioning.
Furthermore, dealing with extreme heat represents a huge engine for new skilled jobs and profitable state enterprise that the left should embrace. The French government holds major stakes in critical industries including energy, transport and communications. As temperatures rise, cooling systems will become just as fundamental to a functioning society as other essential infrastructure. Leftists should seize the opportunity to demand public ownership of the cooling sector, bringing democratic accountability while preventing corporate profiteering at the expense of increasingly desperate consumers.
Therefore we must nationalise the air conditioning sector.
What are Trump’s connections to the Tate brothers exactly?
Rebecca Solnit
Well, after assertions that both Epstein and Tate are bad people – something that could be true of course – it appears to be that Tate has been to Mar a Largo. Possibly.
And that’s it.
So, The Guardian’s US office is now running as a home for D operatives, is it?
The BBC could be our best weapon against Trump, Musk and fake news. Here’s how that could work
Jane Martinson
The BBC. A weapon *against* fake news. Eh?
Prostate beam therapy spares patients daily hospital trips
I think it’s likely that this is proton beam therapy for prostate cancer. Not, you know, prostate beam therapy…..
Jakupovic was referring to the comic book Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which depicts the lives of four turtles who live in the New York City sewer system. The turtles, who are brothers, were exposed to radioactive waste as youths, which turned them into human-turtle hybrids. Trained in martial arts by a large rat, the turtles fight New York criminals. The story is not based on real events.
Donald Trump called me “crooked as hell” as he spread lies about the fraud that occurred in Minnesota. Any keen observer will recognize the pattern of inciting hostility against me and the Somali community whenever his own failures and corruption catches up to him. He routinely reaches for the same tired playbook of lies, racism and deflection.
This is not a new strategy. Lyndon B Johnson once said: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” This is exactly what Trump’s doing: demonizing Black and brown people so that we pay less attention to him picking our pockets in broad daylight. He uses fraud as a political cudgel while protecting his donor base and enriching himself.
Accuse someone else of exactly what it is that you’re doing. In this case, the “No, look over there!” defence.
The piece itself is terribly boring. In fact, surprised that The G published it. Except that they did tells us something interesting about The G. We all know that they’re trying to become a US newspaper. A global English language one indeed. But this does mean that they’ve got editorial staff doing editorial things in different countries. With different views.
Here the US side is clearly running with the more extreme end of the D Party. And doing so fairly nakedly. There’s nothing in this that is relevatory or even interesting – it’s a straight piece of party political positioning. But it gets published which is that commentary upon the editorial position.
And, well:
What are we losing in this fire? Writing is not just about rendering thoughts through words in a certain style: analysis, literary fiction, storytelling. It is about the particular alchemy of a single individual drawing on their own unique profile to construct an idea. It is about the way their brain works, the quirks they have picked up along the way, their politics, their history, their relationships, the very way they see the world.
Awww, Gawd. No, don’t lassie. Writin’ ’bout ‘ritin’ is very boring.
That is surely the US calculation: that Cubans will be so exhausted by an intolerable, externally imposed economic nightmare that they will acquiesce to anything that promises to end it.
Anything, anything, but admitting that socialism doesn’t work….
Since then, I’ve published many thousands of words, with countless more left on the cutting-room floor. But even the discarded words never felt wasted, because they were the byproduct of thinking. Any writer can attest to the transformational nature of the writing process: you can start out with one idea, only to end up somewhere quite different. Writing is more than a matter of merely outputting words. It’s a matter of discovering what your values are and convincing yourself that they’re worth fighting for.
I dunno. Typing to a deadline maybe? Telling a story? Fighting for your values might not be the real thing, you know?
It’s even possible to use writing as a way to find out what you think. Because in order to write it down you’ve got to structure it and – at least try – lay it out so someone else can understand the point. But that bit about fighting for – more than a little self-aggrandising there I’m afraid.
Much of the rest of it is Gramps “You really appreciated bread before all this tractor nonsense!”
When the Democratic National Committee finally released its autopsy on the 2024 election disaster, not even the DNC chair could defend it. “I don’t endorse what’s in this report,” Ken Martin conceded as the autopsy went public on Thursday. After several months of withholding the autopsy on the grounds of not wanting it to be a distraction, Martin fessed up at last: “When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close. And because no source material was provided, fixing it would have meant starting over, from the beginning.”
In response, a former Obama speechwriter, Jon Favreau, summed up eight stages of Martin’s tortuous process that has spanned more than a year: “Promise to release autopsy; put incompetent friend in charge; incompetent friend produces incoherent product; announce you’re not releasing the autopsy; lie about why; gaslight people who ask, saying they’re the problem; face internal revolt; release autopsy.”
It reminds, nicely, how jaw gapingly pompous American political journalism is. That it was all just a bad candidate following a senile one, badly run, isn’t enough. And near all American political journalism is like this. It’s near unreadable in fact.
Britain can choose to be a partner in that project or accept a role as adjunct. National power could be boosted in an alliance of neighbours with broadly aligned global interests. Or it can be circumscribed by the Brexit cult of sovereignty that sees regulatory harmonisation with Europe as colonisation but welcomes subordination to US tech giants and industrial lobbies, which it calls free trade.
I’d call it Brexit Derangement Syndrome but BDS means something different these days, doesn’t it?
But the words that fill our papers and airwaves have consequences. They shape the beliefs and political views of the people who have, make no mistake, turned against their neighbours and voted Reform.
The media follows the prejudices of the population, not causes them. That things Nes is not happy about are believed by significant portions of the British population is because things Nes is not happy about are believed by significcant portions of the British population.
This is, obviously, the problem with democracy. The things the plebs believe, eh?
British Palestinians feel unable to speak openly about Israel’s war on Gaza, the director of the British Palestinian Committee has said, amid what campaigners believe is a growing climate of hostility around Palestinian identity and activism in the UK.
Given that we have weekly riots in the streets demanding the death and drowning in the sea of all Jews silly enough to live in the Middle East I dunno. What is it anyone wants to say that isn’t already rioted about?
Queen backs decision to keep pilot who bludgeoned wife to death in prison
Why was the wife in prison? How did he get in there to bludgeon her?
Royal consort told campaigners she supported their efforts to prevent the early release of a notorious killer
Ah, that headline needs rewriting, no?
In our view, that’s a good thing. But as the anti-datacenter movement has grown, it’s come under fire from all sides, including from liberal critics who dismiss it as another privileged form of nimby (not in my backyard) politics with naive demands. A New York Times op-ed, for example, called the fight against datacenters a “myopic” “distraction” from the “real fight”. In truth, anti-datacenter organizing is the real fight, one centered on an industry choke point that people can reach out and touch. This brewing populist resistance isn’t just about limiting local development – it represents a critical new front in the fight against tech-enabled authoritarianism. Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes, and autonomous drone strikes?
We’ve found some trivial issue we can organise around and thereby haave comfy jobs sa anti-capitalists.
Well done, Lads
Afeature of living at the end of an era is that some events in the present already feel like future artefacts – things you expect to see in a school history book, or a documentary many years from now. Here is King Charles’s 2026 state visit to the United States, right between the chapters on the war on Iran and the global energy crisis. Here is an image of the entire constellation of Trumpland, dining on spring-herbed ravioli and dover sole. Look at this interesting antiquity of the time: the gold plates, the universal sign of a regime at the peak of excess. And there you see the foreign dignitary, making a speech that at the time felt like bold truth-telling, but as we all now know was little more than naive theatre while the whole world teetered on the precipice.
Presumably the belief is that if Nesrine talks portentously of Great Things then Nesrine is a very serious commentator on Great Things. Rather than just being portentous.
The Donald is evil, the US cannot be stood, I’m leaving!
‘I don’t want to be part of a dictatorship’: the Americans queueing up to renounce their citizenship
OK.
In the 00s, the numbers of US citizens renouncing were in the hundreds annually; since 2014, they’ve been in the thousands. This is expected to be a bumper year (matching 2020’s 6,000-plus)
OK.
0.0017% are tryig to leave in any one year.
There are about 800,000 naturalisations each year….the queue running the other way, to get in. If you’re running at 133x the number trying to get in as get out then, well, you know, you might be doing OK?
Still gives Zoe something to write about, no?
Neither figure comes close to the true cost of renouncing if you get a lawyer, which, with no complications at all, will cost $7,000 to $10,000, says Alexander Marino, who heads Moody’s, the largest renunciation law practice in the world.
Blimey. Wonder who suggesated this article to Zoe/the Editor then?
Trump defies attempts to make his actions cohere with any particular strategy. His wars, killing of innocents, and indeed, the threatening of entire civilisations are reshaping the world, but without him even having orchestrated some master plan. He is animated by little more than momentary impulses and resentments.
Not really necessary to read more of Nesrine here. It’s not informative, analytical, it’s performative, political porn for The Elect.
That dreadful man, why isn’t he forced to use the servants’ entrance?
Oh well, guess it sells newspapers.
Imagine your house is on fire, and when you dial 999 the call handler suggests you try putting the blaze out yourself. Resources are tight, you see, and demand high, and the service increasingly relies on volunteers. Or perhaps your child’s maths teacher is off sick. The headteacher texts and asks if you can leave work to explain algebra to the class. It’s your family, after all, so shouldn’t you be the one to help?
The idea is ludicrous of course. And yet that’s exactly what is happening to the almost 6 million people in the UK who are unpaid carers for sick, disabled and older relatives. While we rightly wince at headlines of DIY dentistry and patients on NHS waiting lists crowdfunding for surgery, it has long been normalised for family to fill the gaping holes in the social care system.
Or a horrific one, obviously.
Is the state there to fill in the gaps between society’s activities? Or should the state do everything and society fill in the State’s cracks?