VOTING IS LINKED TO LIVING LONGER Penn Social Policy & Research
Could the Oldest Human Story Really Be 100,000 Years Old? ZME Science
Chinese Scientists Have Been Dying Mysterious Deaths Too Newsweek
“We must learn to disobey.” Patrick Lawrence, The Floutist
Everything is a Scam Working Class Stories
When Does Breaking the Law Become Moral Courage? The Culture Explorer
Robert Skidelsky death – some recollections Bill Mitchell. He gave a very nice blurb for my book.
The Atlantic – Gift Article: “The best thing I watched in the past year was an epically long movie about retired militants, but it wasn’t One Battle After Another, the Oscar winner for Best Picture. It was The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary from 1969 about life in Nazi-occupied France.
Reviewing the film in The Atlantic in 1972, David Denby called it “one of the greatest documentaries ever made,” and that remains true. What makes the film so effective is not how it looks at the Germans, a spectral presence, but how it chronicles the way that many ordinary citizens simply lived their lives as if nothing had changed.
The director Marcel Ophuls, who died last year at 97, explores collaboration and resistance through the lens of a small city, Clermont-Ferrand. It’s about an hour from Vichy, where the Nazis established a puppet government headed by the World War I hero Philippe Pétain. Pétain’s former protégé Charles de Gaulle fled to Britain, coordinated resistance to the Nazis, and returned to lead a free France. The idea that the French almost uniformly opposed Nazism, with only a few bad apples collaborating, is foundational to France’s postwar identity.
The problem, as Ophuls, a Franco-German Jew, demonstrates, is that this is a myth. Ophuls (who later became a U.S. citizen) interviews leaders of the Resistance, former guerrillas, an ex-Nazi soldier, an anti-Vichy politician who escaped prison in Clermont-Ferrand, and a French aristocrat who joined the Waffen-SS. Most revealingly, he speaks with ordinary residents who represented a big swath of French society:
They didn’t actively collaborate, but by declining to resist and going along with the government, they enabled the occupation. I have seen many examples, in the past decade, of journalists and historians using historical encounters with fascism and authoritarianism to comment on the present moment in the United States.
Often, these parallels are forced; the situation in the U.S. is a far cry from Nazi-occupied Europe. But Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons about complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds. Although there’s no substitute for watching the whole film, four hours is a lot, so I have distilled a few important takeaways.
Old hatreds: When a society begins to break, the fault lines aren’t new. That is true in the U.S., where xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia are rampant, and where those in power have brought bigotry from the margins back to the fore. The same was true in France. “Anti-Semitism and anglophobia are feelings that are never hard to stir up in France. Even if reactions to such things are dormant or stifled, all it takes is one event” to make them come alive, Pierre Mendès France, a politician who served as prime minister in the 1950s, says in the film. The Vichy regime, like MAGA politicians and media personalities, simply had to find the right propaganda to agitate the population and, if not win them over, at least drive them away from other groups that might threaten the government.
A dangerous right-wing solution to homelessness is to hide the unhoused in out-of-sight detention camps
Exclusive: ICE Glasses Ken Klippenstein. “Homeland Security is making “smart glasses” to collect intelligence on Americans.”
How the American Oligarchy Went HyperscaleMother Jones.
Senior DHS Counterterrorism Official Suspended Over Sugar Daddy Scandal DD Geopolitics
Central and Eastern Europe emerges as new defence industry hub, KPMG says Intellinews
It’s one thing to criticize this or any President from the comfort of the faculty lounge. It’s quite another to lose one’s job and then deliver a detailed chronicle of concrete executive branch failings resulting in untold harm to innocent people around the world. That’s what Nicholas Enrich, a longtime civil servant at the U.S. Agency for International Development, has done with his insider account of the dismantling of USAID. Appropriately titled, Into the Wood Chipper the book pulls no punches regarding what the author describes as a lethal mixture of incompetence and indifference. Can’t miss this one.
The Allan government is preparing to offer Victoria’s 52,000 teachers a 28 per cent pay rise to head off further strikes and avoid a political headache before the November state election.
Hundreds of public schools were disrupted last month when more than 30,000 teachers, principals and education support staff walked off the job for the first time in 13 years and threatened half-day shutdowns on May 6 – the day after the government hands down its pre-election budget.
Almost 35,000 teachers were estimated to have joined last month’s rally in the city. Ruby Alexander
Two government sources, speaking on condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions, confirmed Deputy Premier and Education Minister Ben Carroll informed his cabinet colleagues on Monday that the government would offer teachers 28 per cent over four years – significantly less than the 35 per cent over three years educators demanded but greater than the initial offer of 17 per cent over four years.
Carroll told cabinet he had been having “robust and intense” negotiations with the union, including during the weekends, and presented the government’s offer as fiscally sustainable. One source said the deputy premier said the revised offer would make Victorian teachers the highest-paid in the nation but was fiscally responsible.
“Teachers will not get a better deal under a Liberal government if Jess Wilson were elected in November,” a government source said.
The Allan government has been in a dispute with public school staff, who are the lowest paid in the nation, since July. The Australian Education Union’s log of claims also includes smaller classroom sizes, flexible working arrangements and reduced workloads.
The government’s offer will heap further pressure on the state’s finances, but will not be reflected in the May 5 budget, as a deal has not yet been struck, nor a formal offer made to the union.
The December mid-year budget update showed Victoria was forecast to deliver an operating surplus of $710 million this financial year, but to post a cash deficit of $10 billion and remain deep in the red over the forward estimates.
Net debt is tipped to soar to $192 billion in 2028-29, making up 24.9 per cent of the economy. Interest expenses are forecast to cost taxpayers $7.7 billion in 2025-26 and climb to $10.5 billion in 2028-29. Premier Jacinta Allan has said despite her pre-budget spending announcements over the past week, her government would deliver an operating surplus this year.
The government wants to avoid a protracted fight with teachers before the election. The union last week revealed rolling strikes would force the shutdown of schools in May and June.
Striking teachers from Melbourne’s western suburbs were planning to protest outside Carroll’s electorate office in Niddrie on Wednesday, while educators from the regional towns of Bendigo, Castlemaine, Kyneton and Maryborough are preparing to descend on Allan’s Bendigo East electorate office on May 13.
The AEU, which has campaigned for Labor in the past two state elections, has also effectively banned Labor MPs from visiting public schools as they campaign for re-election.
A Victorian government spokeswoman said negotiations with the union had “accelerated” and were being held in good faith.
“We recognise that our public school teachers and school staff have always deserved a pay rise,” the spokeswoman said. “We urge unions to keep students in the classroom and not disrupt families when considering further industrial action.”
Public school teachers are incensed that the union, under then-branch president Meredith Peace, signed a weak workplace agreement in 2022 that provided them with a 2 per cent annual pay rise over the next four years, well below the inflation rate.
In NSW, teachers received a one-year catch-up pay increase of 8-12 per cent in late 2023 followed by a three-year pay deal offering a 10 per cent increase in total pay. The 2022 deal now makes Victorian teachers the lowest-paid and the state’s public schools the lowest-funded.
By October, an experienced Victorian teacher will be paid $118,000 compared with their NSW counterparts, who will be on $133,400, according to the AEU. Entry-level Victorian teachers will receive a salary of $79,600 compared with $92,900 in NSW.
Carroll last month claimed the government’s offer was closer to 18.5 per cent, as it included a commuted allowance, which is an agreement between an employer and its workers in lieu of overtime and shift allowances. He said the government’s initial offer equated to $2.6 billion in extra wages and would immediately lift educators’ pay by up to $11,000.
“These are the dedicated professionals whose work helps to shape the course of children and young people’s lives, but Premier Jacinta Allan and Education Minister Ben Carroll are taking them for granted,” AEU Victorian branch president Justin Mullaly said last week.
“If they care about public school students and families, and want to properly address chronic staffing shortages, they need to immediately fully fund public schools and offer public school staff pay increases that properly reflect the value of their work.”
The union was contacted for comment.
