£20bn in cuts with no increase in revenue!

Further funnelling of money into slushfunds for private energy and health care!

Harsher crackdowns and reductions in benefits and welfare than even the Tories!

No increases in taxes on the rich, ultra rich, or anything they do!

No price or rent controls to ease with cost of living!

(I’m sure that’ll all go very well and people will just be pleased to have a serious, sensible, boring adult in charge when living standards continue to plummet, inequality widens, supermarket shelves empty, and overlapping crisis have no answers.)

🎵 THINGS / CAN ONLY GET BETTER / CAN ONLY GET / BETTER 🎶

The Reich has managed to limit liability and outsource risk for their fascism via Israel the same way oil companies create shell companies as liability shields. Truly the most appropriate modern form of fascism.

And potentially offer mercs with larger, more advanced hardware that couldnt remain under the radar. Academi has been building a private airforce for example.

Self-preservation alone would be enough I’d argue.

It’s a hideous and dangerous precedent even in a long and terrible history of dangerous precedents. And Assange was a relatively well connected, broadly (at the time, as far as most were concerned) apolitical figure. If the US had been able to walk through what they wanted, with little to no concern or push back from other states and legal groups, I’m certain they’d already be black bagging and trying left wing journalists and whistleblowers of much lower profiles in secret military courts.

I don’t think this plea deal or any amount of public outcry is going to stop the likes of the CIA pulling that kind of thing if they really want or need to enough. But it does make it harder. It does indicate there’s stakes for governments who go along with it. It does add a cost to that kind of activity. And it may have helped stop it becoming policy more broadly used.

No way there isn’t already US mercs there. I assume this means they’re looking at starting a massive slushfund for much larger numbers.

Pretty place to get stuck though. You could probably walk in the sunshine to the nearest pub for a pint and a pie.

Don’t forget a fascist party that, whilst it has been quieter lately, famously had a shit load of support within and from the police.

In a bid to increase productivity in its economy (now mostly owned by Northern Europe after the financial crisis) and ‘fill gaps in skilled work’ Greece is now moving to a 6 Day Work Week in many sectors.

Congratulations European technocrats, you’ve managed to roll back hard won progress by almost 200 years.

Michael Gove got pilloried by every shitlib media figure, Labour politician, and civil servant for saying “the public have had enough of experts”.

Now all those same people may not say it out loud, but have adopted a much more deeply destructive and craven hatred for experts, actual science, or policy research and are enacting it regularly to kill the public.

These people deserve to be dragged before a court of the people they’ve harmed and loved ones of the people they’ve callously killed with this bullshit and be sentenced accordingly.

It can feel oddly dated but that’s probably because it took about ten years to get made and is based on a book from about two decades ago. I’ve seen a lot of criticism of it as being myopically focuses on a very particular type of upper-middle class blackness that neglects some of the broader class dynamics of the book and… yeah, it does, but when it’s deliberately focused on that I’m not sure how strong a criticism that is. I also feel like breaking the fourth wall to get yourself out of having to stake your flag in the ground of a single answer to the questions and issues the film raises can feel like a bit of a cop out, but at least it’s an honest one that works with the whole thematic and character discussion at play.

Beyond those slight issues though I think it’s pretty phenomenally acted, generally well written, wonderfully shot considering it was basically made over a few weekends, and often genuinely funny. It also does a pretty amazing job of putting the act of writing on screen, which is a tough thing to do.

I enjoyed it and can understand why some people really love it. I can also see how it got so many accolades and awards.

*martyr

This has nothing to do with analysis and everything to do with being a dipshit comes from endlessly consuming empty, self-aggrandizing slop of the ‘I Am Very Smart’ variety.

Filmmakers, film critics, and film writers more generally are nearly always by far and away the absolute, most film obsessed viewers and most of them could tell you exactly how every shot is constructed, what lens it’s shot on, picture the script layout in their head etc. It doesn’t ruin their ability to enjoy film at all.

So I’d suggest actually going deeper into understanding and analysing film, from people who aren’t fucking lazy edgelord YouTubers trying to seem clever, to unlearn some of the shit habits they’ve conditioned themselves with.

Additionally, human empathy will get you a long way with being absorbed by characters. Try going outside, talking to people, not self-consciously trying to be the smartest person in the room, and then apply that same mindset to fictional characters. You’ll never enjoy a film if you’ve decided you’re already above it and the characters are just puppets you want to dance in particular way instead of the representations of real people.

It sounds like the people around him are confident it’s a done deal, with his time in Belmarsh acting as ‘time served’ for a more minor breach of thae espionage act.

But I’d still be worried the US pulls some shit as:

Assange is scheduled to appear in a federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth in the western Pacific, where he is expected to plead guilty to one charge under the Espionage Act of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defence information. The extradition request is expected to be dropped and Assange won’t face any other charges.

The hearing is taking place in the Northern Mariana Islands because of Assange’s opposition to travelling to the US mainland and the court’s proximity to Australia.

Prosecutors have agreed to a sentence of five years, but have said the time already served in a British prison will count towards this. This means that he will probably walk free after the sentencing.

The guilty plea must still be approved by a judge, but if it is, he is expected to return to Australia after the sentencing.

What if the judge says ‘no’ and gives him a much harsher sentence to be detained by the US?

What if they just straight up black bag him?

On a tiny Island with only one or two witnesses instead of a busy city with a (nominally) free and interested press.

I hope this is the end of the ordeal for him, I truly do, but I don’t think I’d ever believe it until I was safely in a country I was sure would never extradite or collaborate with the US. Although right now it’s clear he doesn’t have much of a choice.

I can’t believe how destructively these dastardly powers would use the internet to nudge conversation around actual factual issues towards highlighting things that go against the US narrative.

Oh, by the way, here’s a huge mainstream report on how US CentCom blasted much of the ‘developing world’ with targeted anti-vax propaganda during Covid to ensure low vaccine uptake in those countries, contributing to the death of who knows how many thousands, while also prolonging the pandemic, and increasing anti-vax sentiment globally (including likely in the US too).

If I remember rightly there’s a lot of nihilistic violence, a decapitation, at least one sexual assault and rape, a castration, Neo Nazi violence.

Yeah. The light pollution would be bad, but I just kind of assumed Manhattan was probably a lost cause when it comes to that.

Best (worst) ones…

• Twin Towers but just gold
• Big stack of three presents wrapped in USA flag
• Building everywhere except the original footprint of the two tower
• Colourful tentacles of peace that don’t seem to have any usable space in them
• The terrible one that spells 911 like a doodle in school notebook

Only one they should have done:

• Twin Towers made of light projected out of a park

It wasn’t just a bunch of residents, it was an organised campaign by a designated hate group, boosted by Fox and backed by many Democrats.

The mosque and interfaith cultural center was going to be at least two city blocks from the site of WTC, but both the name ‘the Ground Zero Mosque’ that stuck and the campaign itself was started by Stop Islamification Of America.

It was an offshoot that was specifically started at the request of the leader of Stop Islamification Of Nations in Europe, which is a straight up anti-Muslim hate group, proscribed in some countries despite their own government’s Islamophobia, and connected to other racist orgs like Generation Identity and the English Defense League here in the UK.

Oh god, please don’t let these get popular again. I thought we were done with this gimmick like a decade or more ago.

Basically this, but also because often Elbit is leasing the properties for their factories without giving a full accounting of what they produce and for who. So the ‘victim’ in a lot of these cases is a third party property company who, when attention is brought onto the issue at trial, don’t want the potential legal liability or just getting tied up in investigations over war crimes / genocide. So they’d rather treat it as though this is an issue caused by a ‘bad tenant’ (Elbit etc) and deal with it by cancelling Elbit’s lease. This is why so many actions have permanently shut down Elbit sites; because they lose the lease and other property companies are less and less likely to lease to them as they don’t want the trouble either.