The Trump administration gives a green light to crooks. Casey Michel explains: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
A Green Light for Crooks
The Treasury has made the American economy a safe space for corruption.
theatlantic.com
Steve H
@sfh300.bsky.social
#Rejoiner. #Rhyme & #Reason. #Augenöffner (hopefully). “He do the Police in different voices." Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. 🇺🇦 💙💛 #🟦
I don't understand, perhaps somebody can explain. In 2011, just over 10,000 probation staff were supervising 235,000 offenders, roughly 24 per staff member per year. Now, 12 000 staff are supervising 250,000 offenders, slightly fewer per staff member. So why is this an impossible workload now?
Economist Julie Nelson: "The first, and most important, is the way in which certain core economic doctrines have infiltrated, and caused widespread damage to, academic and public discussion. evonomics.com/pretending-h...
from Casey Michel: "Trump simply announced that there was a whole suite of legislation that folks no longer needed to worry about. He had created a new legal architecture by fiat," providing a road map for crooked regimes and corrupt oligarchs newrepublic.com/article/2139...
How Donald Trump Made the World Safe for Kleptocrats
The president is no stranger to corrupt self-dealing. But his second term in office has been about cutting rogues from all over the world in on the action.
newrepublic.com
APPLEBAUM: I live in Poland. I've lived here on and off for 30 years. I was here during period of NATO expansion. I can tell you that NATO expanded because countries in this part of Europe felt physically threatened by Russia. They asked to be part of NATO, even had to beg and plead to be let in.
"The president’s recent financial disclosure form shows that he collected $1.4 billion from his crypto businesses last year, the majority of it from anonymous sources" www.nytimes.com/2026/08/09/u...
Trump Crypto Took $100 Million From a Businessman With Red Flags
The curious case of Guren “Bobby” Zhou shows the ease with which investors with shady backgrounds and unknown motivations can funnel money to the president.
nytimes.com
Economist Clara Mattei talks w/ Ben Johnson, author of Inequality by Design, about how you are earning thousands per year less than equivalent American workers 50 yr ago, and all that money didn’t just disappear — instead, it’s been hoarded by a tiny fraction of the population.
This is in one clip why I don't want the English back into the EU. They keep treating UK membership as a favor granted to the EU.
The News Agents@thenewsagents.co.uk · last wk."I don't think it was fully realised how clear and present the danger was of the UK leaving the EU." Nick Thomas_symonds, (former EU relations minister) and Lewis Goodall on whether the EU was "crazy" not to give the UK more when Brexit happened
Basic epistemological principle: There is no relation between the truth value of a proposition and the wealth of a person asserting it. The richest man in the world can talk bollocks as easily as any pauper:
So JDV believes in a sort of poltergeist God now, does he? How very convenient for him. Perhaps that God might tell him how his boss needs to be impeached and prosecuted? Or, just maybe, the whole God thing is, for JDV, complete self-ambition BS?
Farrukh@implausibleblog.bsky.social · 6d agoJD Vance says that a glass falling off of a wall was a sign from God. Is that God saying gas prices are too high so end the Iran war?
Fascinating look at the idea of (especially foreign) holidays leading, for me, to the inevitable conclusion that most people are living entirely the wrong way ... for employer benefit and social media validation. "Get a life" is the answer, not as snark but a real life. www.arte.tv/en/videos/12...
42: The Answer to Almost Everything - Are Holidays Really Relaxing? - Watch the full documentary | ARTE in English
Do you feel like you need a holiday? It's a sign that it's time to rest and relax. But scientists are at a loss to explain what happens when we go on holiday, or why and how it does us good. Why do we...
arte.tv
A good thread on women in Afghanistan. It is worth remembering that quite a few Western “progressives” cheered the return of the Taliban because it represented a defeat for “the West” and nothing could be worse in their view than “the West”:
Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 7d ago‘Afghanistan is the only place on Earth where girls are banned from high school and university. Women are banned from parks, gyms and most jobs and not allowed outside without a male guardian’ Important reminder from the great @christinalamb.bsky.social www.thetimes.com/article/83bb...
The belief in a non-existent "censorship industrial complex" now shapes American foreign policy. A brilliant deep dive from the MIT Technology Review www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/07/1...
How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy
Narratives about a “censorship-industrial complex” spread in right-wing circles for years; then they took hold of Washington. What—and who—is behind them?
technologyreview.com
Charlie Downes, 25 year old campaigns director of Restore Britain, has been clear that he believes having white British ancestry & being Christian are necessary to be British. His exclusion of Jews from being fully/equally British will split the right, as should his exclusion of blacks & Asians
My favourite bit of the Arday story, because it combines both the humour and the horror, is that a university department doing research into education didn’t immediately go “hmm. Let’s investigate this a bit further” is the “non-verbal until 18” part.
Shows right wing bigoted anti-choice nutjobs care nothing for foetuses or women's health and are just after control. I take it they've never heard of a crime of omission either. But it's lefties who are the problem for the rancid types whose logic is not so much weird as non-existent.
Dan.G 🇬🇧🇪🇺@dangurden.bsky.social · last wk.Passing this along as I too would burn down a significant landmark to save a life...
Listening to Lowe on Radio 4's 'Today' programme. The bloke's an obsessive racist nutjob, and he's pulling in enough voters to frighten Reform, our not quite so obsessive, not quite so racist nutjobs, who until recently were topping the polls. Burnham needs to turn this country around.
If Mitch McConnell could talk, he would have recorded a video message by now.
Brown University has a widget that tracks the cost of the Iran war to American consumers (as contrasted to whatever the Pentagon is spending). Per-household cost now exceeds $600. iranwarcost.watson.brown.edu
UPDATE II: In new filing, BBC opposes Trump's bid to amend the complaint, also argues it won't narrow discovery because his "financial records are directly relevant to assessing his purported reputational damages." Doc: www.documentcloud.org/documents/28...
BBCTrumpOppAmend080626.PDF
documentcloud.org
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social · last wk.UPDATE: BBC says there's no emergency and they're not engaged in any political attack on Trump. Also, it looks like Trump's attorneys have offered up a date (unspecified) for him to sit for a deposition in the suit, assuming it isn't thrown out by then www.politico.com/news/2026/08...
This would amount to a complete capitulation from the US. Literally no way to even attempt to spin this as a win.
Young children have a rich fantasy life, imagining themselves to be a famous celebrity, or a star footballer, or even a top general. The President of the US is a young child:
I was open-minded on this at first. I do believe in repentance, I think people can change, & I could see the logic of giving someone who was trying to do better a chance in local govt. But the evidence suggest that the abusive, persecutory mode of politics hasn't changed. He's just switched targets
James Austin@jamesdaustin.bsky.social · last wk.I'll be honest: I'd buy this a lot more if his main outlet wasn't abusively attacking opposition politicians via AI slop in ways which obviously nod to other forms of prejudice.
The experience of being chased by a murderous kamikaze drone, a flying machine that behaves as if it were alive, is not one that humans are equipped to understand: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
The Dystopian Future Dawns in Kherson
Putin’s human safari in Ukraine is the beginning of a grim new normal.
theatlantic.com
I fear we might see a new alignment between a radical right death cult and a rural revivalist "simplicity" drive, which views collapse and a return to "organic" communities as a solution to decadent urbanism. A century ago this convergence led to a very bad place. www.monbiot.com/2023/10/04/t...
The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People
The astonishing story of how a movement’s quest for rural simplicity drifted into a formula for mass death
monbiot.com
What if Freud was right (at least some of the time)? A review, by @stossel.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
What if Freud Was Right?
A neuroscientist dares to argue that old-fashioned psychoanalysis holds the key to curing mental illness.
theatlantic.com
Does she realise Dunkirk wouldn't have even been possible if French forces had surrendered as opposed to fighting a rearguard action which allowed the BEF to assemble in Dunkirk and the evacuation flotilla to be formed?
Roland Smith@rolandmcs.bsky.social · 2w agoThe war. It always comes back to the war. That happened long before they were born.
