Juraj Jánošík saw royal police pull fish out of the water just to watch them not breathe.
It’s a terrible situation for me personally – at the age of 58 I have invested my entire adult life in the Liberal dream only to see it trashed – and it’s not like I haven’t tried to stop it. I have given absolutely everything, sucked in a lot, tried to make it work – only to lose it all, to the ruthlessness of the wrong people in power for the wrong reasons.
I’m a Liberal MP and I cannot vote for the re-election of a Scott Morrison government
Scott Morrison looked like losing a preselection contest for the seat of Cook in the Sutherland Shire when he allegedly told key party members that a popular rival was rumoured to be “a Moslem” who would damage the party’s chances. It was 2007, just two years after the Cronulla riots.
Actually a Moslem’: The true story of Morrison’s ruthless preselection
Despotism centre-stage Times Literary Supplement. “The pit exercised power. By applauding or hooting, it determined the success or failure of plays. Its antics were part of the performance, and they illustrate an argument that I would like to advance about the immediate origins of the Revolution: theatricality and violence went together.”
The New Republic: “A new book explains why Americans know so little about other countries…How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path? And why is the U.S.—that globe-bestriding colossus with more than 700 overseas bases—so strangely isolated? The answer, Sam Lebovic’s new book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization,convincingly argues, largely comes down to American policy in the middle decades of the twentieth century…”
Washington Post: “Meet the librarians fighting bans and scrambling to preserve children’s freedom to read..Slowly — over months of meetings, investigations and secret conversations with fearful librarians across her counties — she came to understand the disturbing reality. Administrators, afraid of attracting controversy, were quietly removing books from library shelves before they could be challenged. “There’s two battles going on at once,” Hull said, referring to parallel pushes from parents who want titles stricken and from school officials who are removing books preemptively. “And it’s been really difficult to fight both of those.”
The New Republic: “A new book explains why Americans know so little about other countries…How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path? And why is the U.S.—that globe-bestriding colossus with more than 700 overseas bases—so strangely isolated? The answer, Sam Lebovic’s new book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization,convincingly argues, largely comes down to American policy in the middle decades of the twentieth century…”
“Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) produces the largest global dataset on democracy with over 30 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2021. Involving over 3,700 scholars and other country experts, V-Dem measures hundreds of different attributes of democracy.
- The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2021 is down to 1989 levels. The last 30 years of democratic advances are now eradicated.
- Dictatorships are on the rise and harbor 70% of the world population – 5.4 billion people.
- The increasing number of closed autocracies – up from 25 to 30 countries with 26% of the world population – contributes to the changing nature of autocratization.
- Electoral autocracy remains the most common regime type and harbors 44% of the world’s population, or 3.4 billion people…”
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse Report – “The latest Internal Revenue Service (IRS) statistics covering federal income tax audits through February of 2022 reveals that the agency is continuing to target audits on the poorest wage earners. So far it has completed 132,922 audits of these low-income wage earners with less than $25,000 in total gross receipts. This is up from 105,978 audits IRS had completed a year ago at the end of February 2021. If IRS continues at this same pace for the rest of this fiscal year, audit rates would inch up to 13.5 per 1000 returns—slightly higher than the phenomenally high rates that occurred last year when IRS audited the poorest families claiming an anti-poverty earned income tax credit at five times the rate for everyone else. Not only are total correspondence audits up so far this year, but IRS is increasingly targeting them on these poorest families. Last year at this same time, 51.6% of all correspondence were targeted at this lowest income group which represents only a small proportion of all taxpayers.
The concentration of correspondence audits on this single small group of taxpayers during this filing season has increased to 58.1%. Field audits, although relatively small in number, are also up for these lowest wage earners…”
In retirement, a former dean of Yale Law School seeks nothing less than a reconciliation between God and science