Adani to pay no company tax despite $1bn revenue from Queensland coalmine
ABC withdraws third story by sacked reporter Mahmood Fazal over accuracy concerns
New lecture series from authoritarianism scholar Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today. “The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now.”
UK government reviews why police ceding criminal cases to US military The Guardian
A Teen Reporter Searched for His Community in the Epstein Files. Adults Freaked Out.“Once everyone was back at school on Tuesday, the high schoolers lawyered up during their lunch hour.”
Trump’s Assault on Science Continues
I appreciate the plain speech of Science magazine’s Derek Lowe in his recent piece, The Assault On Science Funding Continues.
When I talk to people about this subject (and that includes some journalists as well) and say what I’m about to at the end of this paragaph I am sometimes met with disbelief. But I mean what I say and I am trying my best to say what I mean: The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.
That’s it. That’s the story. They are naturally not putting it in those words, but instead talking about “gold standard science” and the “reproducibility crisis” and funding “bold inquiry” for “transformational breakthroughs”. This is all bullshit, and it’s important to realize that. Shameless hand-waving bullshit, delivered in a how-dare-you-think-otherwise manner is the defining style of the entire Trump administration. You can see it in every appointee, in every part of the executive branch, and in the pronouncements of all of Trump’s supporters. I realize that this is a simple heuristic to apply, and a very unambiguous and unflattering one, but I find it to be all too useful and all too accurate. Give it a try.
Yep. He’s the mob boss president — everything is about favors, taking his cut, deals, tough guy-ness, bending the world to his will, power, and white male supremacy
Rebecca Solnit on the Tate brothers, The Odyssey, and the misogyny of classical literature & the contemporary world. “Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture.”
On Japan’s visible evidence of care. “American service providers, private and public, increasingly run like ghost ships. Japanese technology and design seemed in greater service to humans, their journeys, and enterprises.”
