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Corporate media needs ad revenue and click bait. They treat Trump with kid gloves. They enable his third run for office despite obvious flaws, treasonous intent, glaring cognitive red flags, and his namesake scam company plummeting to worthlessness in real time.

The double standards are obvious.

The journalistic integrity has vanished by design.

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Comedians felled by their unfunniness: Ellen Degeneres

As a study in evasion, self-mythologising – and world-beating servility on the part of her audience – For Your Approval takes some beating. If, like me, you can’t bear standup that courts affirming cheers rather than laughter – well, getting to the end of this will require considerable forbearance. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/sep/25/ellen-degeneres-netflix-return-toxic-most-hated-for-your-approval

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Sick America

Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said she was unaware of another case in which someone was executed after a sitting prosecutor objected and confessed to constitutional errors that undermined the conviction. Since 1973, at least 200 people sentenced to death have been exonerated, according to her group.

Williams’s execution is one of five scheduled across the US in a one-week period. On Friday, South Carolina executed a man days after the state’s main witness recanted his testimony.

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Algorithmic Total Control

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Amazon, Tesla and Meta among world’s top companies undermining democracy – report

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Breaking screen addiction

I bought a Nokia flip phone with no internet and no WhatsApp, and immediately transferred my sim card. I gave out my home phone number to the few people I spoke to regularly, warned all my friends that I might be slow to reply, and put my smartphone in a drawer.

Unsurprisingly, the results were instant. Perhaps I was riding a wave of enthusiasm that came from simply taking action, but I immediately found myself in control of my attention, like I was waking up to the world after a decade-long sleep. I became comfortable with silence, I could hear myself think, and, for the first time in months, I had a proper conversation with my wife over dinner. And no – I didn’t know what boots my old schoolfriend’s workmate was going to wear to five-a-side that weekend; but it turns out the conversations that truly matter find a way of happening regardless.

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Rich folk making art is what makes art so boring.

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Putin regime will collapse without warning, says freed gulag dissident

Kara-Murza’s grasp of history underpins his certainty that Putin’s regime will collapse – quickly and without warning. “That’s how things happen in Russia. Both the Romanov empire in the early 20th century, and the Soviet regime at the end of the 20th century collapsed in three days. That’s not a metaphor, it was literally three days in both cases.” He believes passionately that the best chance of a free and democratic Russia and peace in Europe rests on Russia’s defeat in Ukraine.

“A lost war of aggression” has been the country’s greatest driver of political change, he says. Though it’s not just the Russian people, in his view, who need to take collective responsibility but western leaders too, who “for all these years were buying gas from Putin, inviting him to international summits, rolling out red carpets.”

He tells me he thinks the truth will out. “These guys keep meticulous records. When the end comes – and it will – the archives will open, we will find out about Trump and Marine Le Pen and your British guys too.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/22/putin-regime-will-collapse-without-warning-says-freed-gulag-dissident

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Need database of Sex Crime Republicans

It is beautiful, how they out themselves and each other… The minor, who was a junior in high school at the time, arrived in her mother’s car for a July 15, 2017, party at the Florida home of Chris Dorworth, a lobbyist and friend of Gaetz’s, according to a court filing written by defense attorneys who interviewed witnesses as part of an ongoing civil lawsuit Dorworth brought in 2023.

The lobbyist claimed he had been unfairly dragged into the alleged sex trafficking scandal that has dogged Gaetz and his allies for years. Dorworth ultimately dropped the case, but lawyers filed these documents in an attempt to recoup attorneys fees for a lawsuit they say should never have been brought.

One eyewitness cited in the court filings, a young woman referred to as K.M., provided a sworn affidavit that claimed the teenage girl was naked, partygoers were there to “engage in sexual activities,” and “alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy … and marijuana” were present. The teenage girl was identified in the filings only as A.B.

"The Department of Justice investigated Gaetz and ultimately declined to file criminal charges." BEGIN AGAIN THEN.

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Tax the ultra-processed

National dietary guidelines should tell people to avoid UPFs as far as possible, Monteiro says, pointing to evidence shows that even a relatively high-quality diet can be derailed by an increase in such foods.

“You lose the protection,” he argues. “This means you cannot say, ‘Well, I already ate fruits and vegetables today, I can [drink] three cans of Coke.’ No, you can’t.”

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Get their murderous names, these shy pharmas

South Carolina had unofficially paused executions in 2011 as pharmaceutical companies stopped supplying lethal injection drugs, fearing public pressure. But the state restocked its supply after it passed a law last year shielding the identity of suppliers.

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Piketty: Great disparities are unnatural

Piketty rejects the thesis – implicit in the way economics is often taught in our universities, and explicit in the way some economists and many conservative politicians and commentators discuss policy issues – that very large inequalities are the inevitable outcome of a well-functioning market economy. That idea – that great disparities are somehow “natural,” because ability or entrepreneurialism is unevenly distributed across individuals (or countries, or ethnic groups) – is also used to argue that efforts to reduce inequality will either be ineffective or reduce growth and prosperity, or both.

Piketty points to familiar counterexamples: Sweden, where social democratic policies led to a country that had been highly unequal as recently as the interwar period becoming one of the most equal in the world, while at the same time becoming one of the richest. And the US, where very large tax cuts during the Reagan era led to spiralling inequality, but without any commensurate improvement in economic performance. In both cases, the key drivers were political and historically contingent.

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

Police shooting each other on subway

The need to expand and make more accessible the already existing half-price Fair Fares program — which only a third of eligible New Yorkers currently use — should be a priority. Funneling more money into police coffers while cutting budgets for social services only serves to prove a circular logic, in which greater desperation is met with more policing, producing greater desperation still — and thus providing further grounds for right-wing calls for even more policing.

“The NYPD spent $150 Million *extra* last year to catch people who weren’t able to afford to pay the subway fare. They owed just $104,000,” wrote civil rights attorney Scott Hechinger on X, referring to the total of fares unpaid by fare evaders caught by police in 2023. “$150 million could buy free fares (at going rate) for 95,000 poor New Yorkers per year.”