They do not hide their vision for America. They plan to make the legal system subservient to dogma. They hate the “secular humanist” society based on science and reason. They dream of making the Ten Commandments the basis of the legal system… Power in the age of Trump is based on blind personal loyalty… Lies… Read More Chris Hedges: Trump’s War on America
Zhang Yadi was due to begin a degree in the UK but the activist vanished on holiday amid tensions over Dalai Lama Jessie Lau As Zhang Yadi toured remote villages in the Chinese province of Sichuan last year, she updated her friends with messages and photos of lush forest landscapes, colourful streets and locals wearing… Read More ‘She didn’t realise how dangerous it was’: London-bound student held in China over Tibet support
NB: A very instructive book on Soviet history is named The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939; by, J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov (1999). I think the current period of American history will be known as the implosion of the USA. All the engineered coups, from Iran to Vietnam to… Read More Self-shafting America
Once, I believed that humanity’s problem was an information deficit. Now, I know you can’t speak truth to power if power controls your words.. But perhaps the ground is shifting. Citizen journalism is flowering, through the Bylines network, openDemocracy, Double Down News , Novara, Declassified and DeSmog, and in particular at the local level. George Monbiot The BBC I joined on my first… Read More I have now been a journalist for 40 years. The forces ranged against my profession have never been so powerful
Opinion by Chris Truax Confabulation is sometimes called “honest lying,” because the person doing it genuinely believes what he’s saying, even if it is obviously and patently false. A person confabulates when they are telling completely invented stories that don’t provide them any particular tangible benefit. In other words, it’s not like lying to try and get out… Read More Trump’s mental decline is undeniable / Trump’s agram-Bagram on Afghanistan airbase
Genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks…. The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise… Read More The Last Days Of Social Media
Dan Shortridge Benjamin Nathans logged on to the Pulitzer Prize live announcement feed in early May just in time to hear his name read as a finalist. A split-second later, he heard his name read again, as the general nonfiction winner of one of the United States’ most prestigious arts-and-letters prizes. “It came as a complete… Read More To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
The campaign of erasure banishes intellectual inquiry and the dispassionate examination of history. It celebrates magical thinking… The Israeli government bans public commemorations of the Nakba… a day of mourning for Palestinians who seek to remember the massacres and expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians carried out by Jewish terrorist militias in 1948 for this reason. Palestinians… Read More Israel’s Assassination of Memory
Two bizarre weeks in a Boston courtroom and the threat to intellectual life in America… It is a feature of our intractable times that political conflict nearly always takes the shape of a conflict over the nature of reality. By Charlie Tyson It was the first day of a federal trial, in Boston, for a… Read More Can Academic Freedom Survive the Surveillance State?
One word, in particular, stood out to researchers as a kind of linguistic watermark. “Delve” has become an academic shibboleth, a neon sign in the middle of every conversation flashing ChatGPT was here. NB: I’ve found ‘delve‘ occuring very frequently in students assignments. DS Sara Parker Join any Zoom call, walk into any lecture hall, or… Read More You sound like ChatGPT
After the truth-shower 