Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.
Victorian CFMEU branch became 'hateful, greedy rabble' under John Setka, report finds
A redacted report into the Victorian branch of the CFMEU is among the documents released by Queensland's Commission of Inquiry today.
In it, author Geoffrey Watson SC alleged the branch descended into a "violent, hateful and greedy rabble" under former boss John Setka.
The Victorian government said it was not involved in the report, and defended its track record on the troubled construction industry.
$15b ‘poured into criminals’ hands’: Bombshell findings CFMEU tried to hide
Mandelson, Palantir, Israel and you
For those not on Twitter, stories about the links between Mandelson, Epstein and Palantir, as well as Mossad, might not have been available yesterday. I share this one, posted in good faith …
The IRS improperly shared confidential tax information of thousands of individuals with immigration enforcement officials, according to three people familiar with the situation, appearing to breach a legal fire wall intended to protect taxpayer data.
How can we maintain the right to hold the powerful to account?
There is a slight sense of being overwhelmed this morning.
We have lived through a tumultuous week.
Through it all, attention has been paid to the wrong things.
Mandelson is not the victim here, as he implies in a notice issued to the press yesterday, which The National published despite explicit instructions not to do so. Mandelson enabled his own fate.
So, too, did Keir Starmer. His claim that he was conned is as laughable as Mandelson's demand for privacy. Starmer knew what he was doing. He showed indifference to the victims of Epstein by apppinintg Mandelosn. All the links were known. He revealed his indifference through his actions. Ignore his words.
Trump is FURIOUS Over MORE MASS RESIGNATIONS Talking Feds with Henry Litman, YouTube
Donald Trump Has Built a Clicktatorship
The Atlantic [no paywall]: Even the administration’s budget proposals read like Truth Social posts. “…No one better exemplifies the clicktatorship than the president himself.
Trump routinely makes policy announcements via social media. Consider when, in August, he attempted to fire the Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook on Truth Social. When a government lawyer was questioned by the Supreme Court on the lack of an appeals option for Cook, he suggested that Cook could simply have made her case on Truth Social.
In the clicktatorship, due process is reduced to the right to post. You can see it everywhere. The administration’s official social-media feeds pump out far-right xenophobic memes and celebrate deportations with ASMR videos of undocumented immigrants in shackles. Just days before the killing of Pretti, the White House posted an image of a woman who was arrested after a protest at a church in Minnesota.
It had been edited, presumably using generative AI, to show the arrestee as weeping uncontrollably. The effect is to reinforce an impression of dominance and control. Truth matters less than attention. Reporters who pointed out the manipulation were mocked by a White House spokesperson who posted: “uM, eXCuSe mE??? iS tHAt DiGiTAlLy AlTeReD?!?!?!?!?!”
(“The success of the White House’s social media pages speak for itself,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me in an email. “Through engaging posts and banger memes, we are successfully communicating the President’s extremely popular agenda.”)
Aspects of the clicktatorship existed during Trump’s first term, when the president used Twitter as a bully pulpit. But it has ratcheted up to new levels in his second go-round. His appointees are more likely to be keyboard warriors. They are obsessed with spectacle, and every government decision presents a potential opportunity to own the libs. Our government lost 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s last year, but seemingly has more posters than ever…”
On Russia’s New Official Dictionary and the Language of Authoritarianism
Literary Hub: “Russia has a new official dictionary. The Explanatory Dictionary of the State Language of the Russian Federation, compiled by St. Petersburg State University, with the assistance of the legal department of the Russian Orthodox Church, has joined the list of official reference materials within the Russian Federation.
The dictionary, which defines authoritarianism as “the most effective form of governance in difficult times” and bans the word жопа (ass), is (as is frequently the case in such situations), less a catalog offering a description of the Russian language as it is spoken in 2025 than it is a prescriptive ideological document.
The dictionary’s compilers make no secret of the fact that they operated under the directives of Vladimir Putin’s 2022 Presidential Decree that made the “protection of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, culture and historical memory” a national strategic priority. Vladimir Putin, along with his allies in the Russian Orthodox Church, has for nearly two decades now weaponized “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values” not only as means of squashing dissent at home but also as a powerful element in Russia’s aggressive, expansionist geopolicy.
In Africa, the United States, and Europe, Russia has sought to portray itself as a defender of traditional values and Christian civilization, paying particular attention to squelching/rebuking[?] progressive policies related to gender and sexuality, and in doing so courting the sympathy and support of reactionaries abroad. This means that Russia’s new values-based dictionary is a problem for us all…”
