Prepare for the mother of all scare campaigns, backed by up to $100m of Clive Palmer UAP/LNP preferential protection money. Latest Newspoll shows
/LNP on track to lose maybe 10 seats as “quiet Australians” swing their votes.It Isn’t Over When The Fat Lady Sings – The First Russian Strategic Assessment of the Australia-UK-US (Aukus) Submarine Deal
A look at the AUKUS deal in light of Chinese and Russian submarine capabilities.
When the B.C. government called on residents to show proof of vaccination in order to participate in various social activities, James Immler was inspired to print his proof on a T-shirt.
Forget your phone, put your vaccine passport on a shirt like this man
The Battle For Good Sentences
Speaker, Dorothea Salo (who is a librarian) – How Do We Not Be Facebook? University of Wisconsin-Superior
We Did the Research: Masks Work, and You Should Choose a High Quality Mask if PossibleNYT. From the authors of the Bangladesh mask RCT. Note that the coverage of this story tends to equate “high quality” with “surgical,” when (K)N95s are better. Here the authors (or the editors), sadly, equivocate: “Masks with even better filtration or fit than surgical masks, such as KF94 or KN95 masks, may provide even stronger protection than surgical masks if worn properly.” The “may” qualifier applies to anymask, including surgical. So why say it? Further, the “K” prefix for KF94s and KN95s means masks manufactured to Chinese standards. Both K and N masks have the same rating, but only the N95s are licensed for medical use in the United States, which goes unmentioned in the article. If I weren’t such a trusting soul, I’d suspect that the PMC is still reserving the best masks for itself, exactly as Fauci did when he told his Noble Lie in March 2020. In fact, as policy, reserving the best masks for medical personnel could be wise. But could the PMC please stop with the prevaricating Philosopher Kings schtick and level with people? Just for once?
A Teenager On TikTok Disrupted Thousands Of Scientific Studies With A Single Video
Israel will be ‘gone’ in 20 years– says Wilkerson, former State Dept aide Mondoweiss
Review: The shock, horror and rage of Mark Willacy’s Rogue Forces
Respected journalist Mark Willacy’s Rogue Forces is imperative reading for its detonating exposé of Australian SAS war crimes in Afghanistan and the systematic cover-ups at varying levels of the Australian Defence Force operations.
What about an excess profits tax on the accountants at Deloitte?
As the FT notes this morning: Deloitte’s UK partners will receive an average payout of about £1m after the accounting firm’s profits rebounded from a
Read the full article…
Gig work is precarious no matter the countryThe Verge
Taxing the Rich: Biden Backs Levy on Billionaires’ Unrealized Investment GainsBloomberg
The U.S. has more in common with South America than Europe The Week. Wowsers, no mention of the most obvious similarity, high levels of inequality.
747-sized asteroid skimmed by Earth, and scientists didn’t see it coming Jerusalem Post “While on the subject of space rocks.”
‘Bodies with vaginas’?! Lancet slammed for ‘erasing women’ after promoting latest issue with controversial quote RT (Kevin W). Um, I had a friend in Oz who had just gotten the chop, and from what she said, she was also stretching her tissues to simulate a vagina. So how would that fit in the Lancet’s paradigm?
1. Malcolm Gladwell on Norm MacDonald.
2. Knausgaard cultural recommendations.
3. Rawls on caste and eugenics.
4. Very good interview with Amia Srinivasan.
5. Callard on the Bergman remake and the nature of marital loneliness (New Yorker).
6. Good Steven van Zandt piece on management, his life, and The Sopranos (FT). “As Dante became Tony Soprano’s consigliere, “I was able to use my real-life dynamics with Bruce Springsteen as the basis of that relationship. I knew what those dynamics were — the one guy who didn’t want to be the boss, the one guy who he could trust, the one guy who wasn’t afraid of him.””
Guardianship, in practice, is often worse than you might think: the surveillance of Britney Spears
Britney Spears’s father and the security firm he hired to protect her ran an intense surveillance apparatus that monitored her communications and secretly captured audio recordings from her bedroom, including her interactions and conversations with her boyfriend and children, according to a former employee of the security firm.
Alex Vlasov, the employee, supported his claims with emails, text messages and audio recordings he was privy to in his nine years as an executive assistant and operations and cybersecurity manager for Black Box, the security firm. He came forward for a new documentary by The New York Times, “Controlling Britney Spears,” which was released on Friday.
Recording conversations in a private place and mirroring text messages without the consent of both parties can be a violation of the law. It is unclear if the court overseeing Ms. Spears’s conservatorship was aware of or had approved the surveillance.
Mr. Vlasov’s account, and his trove of materials, create the most detailed portrait yet of what Ms. Spears’s life has been like under the conservatorship for the past 13 years. Mr. Vlasov said the relentless surveillance operation had helped several people linked to the conservatorship — primarily her father, James P. Spears — control nearly every aspect of her life…
Mr. Vlasov said that Ms. Spears’s phone had been monitored using a clever tech setup: The iCloud account on her phone was mirrored on an iPad and later on an iPod. Mr. Yemini would have Mr. Vlasov encrypt Ms. Spears’s digital communications captured on the iPad and the iPod to send to Mr. Spears and Robin Greenhill, an employee of Tri Star Sports & Entertainment Group, the former business manager for the singer’s estate.
This arrangement allowed them to monitor all text messages, FaceTime calls, notes, browser history and photographs.
Here is the full NYT story by Liz Day. And by the way, there also was extensive surveillance of people in the “Free Britney!” movement, paid for ultimately by Britney herself.