Linkage

The presence of these individuals has been a persistent issue at CPAC. In previous years, conference organizers have ejected well-known Nazis and white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes.

But this year, racist conspiracy theorists didn’t meet any perceptible resistance at the conference where Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker since 2017.

At the Young Republican mixer Friday evening, a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed “race science” and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

One member of the group, Greg Conte, who attended the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, said that his group showed up to talk to the media. He said that the group was prepared to be ejected if CPAC organizers were tipped off, but that never happened.

By blaming poor children’s school learning failure on their brains, the billionaires are continuing a long pseudoscientific charade extending back to 19th century “craniology,” which used head shape-and-size to explain the intellectual inferiority of “lesser” groups, such as southern Europeans and blacks. When craniology finally was debunked in the early 20thcentury, psychologists devised the IQ test, which sustained the mental classification business. Purportedly a more scientific instrument, it was heavily used not only to continue craniology’s identification of intellectually inferior ethnic and racial groups, but also to “explain” the educational underachievement of black and poor-white students.

After decades of use, IQ tests were substantially debunked from the 1960s onward, but new, more neurologically complex, so-called brain-based explanations emerged for differing educational outcomes. These explanations conceived of the overall brain as normal, but contended that brain glitches impeded school learning and success. Thus entered “learning disabilities,” “dyslexia,”and “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)” as major neuropsychological concepts to (1) explain school failure, particularly for poor children, although the labels also extended to many middle-class students; and (2) serve as “scientific” justification for scripted, narrow, pedagogy in which teachers seemingly reigned in the classroom, but in fact, were themselves controlled by the prefabricated curricula.

Bannon went on to claim Trump “will go down as the best president since Abraham Lincoln” and hoped he will win in “a massive frickin’ landslide” come November. Bannon was joined by other far-right influencers on Wednesday, including Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. Trump is set to address the conference on Saturday.

“Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it,” Posobiec told the crowd as Bannon added, “Amen”

The federal government last year announced it would triple the incentives paid to doctors who bulk-bill children under the age of 16, pensioners and Commonwealth concession card holders.

Health Minister Mark Butler said the national bulk-billing rate rose by 2.1 percentage points in the first two months of the initiative.

He said the incentives applied to three in every five consultations with a general practitioner.

WA GP Damian Zilm said industry professionals welcomed the subsidies, but said the scheme excluded a large cohort of people struggling with cost-of-living pressures.

Dr Zilm said more patients were delaying care as a result.

"We're seeing a lot of conditions presenting later than they should be," he said.

"These have long-term health consequences which end up costing the Australian government and Australian health care system more money in the long run."

This is one of the best summaries of the problems of car dependency I've seen (and I've seen many).

I’ve loved cars since I was a kid. I’ve owned 60 cars in my life and currently own 9. How did I go from being an absolute car fanatic to someone that can’t stand car dependency? In this video, we delve deep into the issues surrounding our automobile-centric society:

• The endless hours lost to traffic congestion.
• The threats posed to our children.
• The alarming fatalities from distracted driving and flawed vehicle designs.
• The troubling reasons behind bigger cars and the higher risks they pose.
• The questionable decisions of traffic engineers and the infrastructure built for speed over safety.
• Unveiling how the auto industry actively promoted car dependency.
• The disturbing history of how low-income neighborhoods bore the brunt of freeway constructions.
• The alarming shift from pedestrian rights to vehicle dominance.
• How the car industry redefined 'crashes' as 'accidents'.
• How other nations are getting public transportation right.
• And importantly, the crucial role car enthusiasts can play in reshaping this narrative.

Discussion with Prof Roger Griffin on fascism and neo-fascism, comparative fascist studies and his lecture "'What's in a name?': Fascism's value as a taxonomic term in interwar and contemporary history"  held online at the Faculty of Political Science and International Relations / Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica (Slovakia) on 11 March 2021 (moderated by Anton Hruboň).

 After decades in which macroeconomic policy focused primarily on inflation, the announcement of a renewed commitment to full employment, made by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in 2021, was a major step. Labour’s election campaign included not only a commitment to full employment but the promise of a Jobs Summit leading to a new White Paper on Full Employment, modelled on that of 1945.

Upon taking office, the Labor Government backed away from this commitment. The Jobs Summit was relabelled a ‘Jobs and Skills Summit’ and much of the discussion focused on supposed skills shortages. This was a misnomer. The problem faced by employers was not a shortage of particular skills but the difficulty of filling vacancies of any kind in a situation of full or near-full employment. After decades in which the number of unemployed workers routinely exceeded vacancies, employers found this situation difficult to accept.

An even more consequential change was the removal of the word ‘Full’ from the name of the proposed White Paper. The decision to break with Labor’s history on this crucial issue seemed to portend the abandonment of the entire process.

The lettuce lady, reborn as Joe McCarthy:

Truss, who announced her resignation as prime minister after just 44 days in office in 2022, addressed an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), at the National Harbor, in Maryland, on Wednesday (21 February). 

[…]

Truss, who earlier this week “took delight” in revealing the cover for the US version of her book, Ten Years to Save the West, told the audience that she ran for Number 10 because “Britain wasn’t growing” and the “state wasn’t delivering”.

She went on to say: “I wanted to cut taxes, reduce the administrative state, take back control as people talked about in the Brexit referendum. What I did face was a huge establishment backlash and a lot of it actually came from the state itself.

“People are joining the civil service who are essentially activists,’ she then claimed. “They might be trans activists, they might be environmental extremists but they are now having a voice within the civil service in a way I don’t think was true 30 or 40 years ago.

Killed by Google is the Google graveyard; a free and open source list of discontinued Google services, products, devices, and apps. We aim to be a source of factual information about the history surrounding Google's dead projects.

Contributors from around the world help compile, research, and maintain the information about dying and dead Google products.

In today’s incendiary society, it’s sometimes hard to remain confident of one’s views. When many prominent people are telling lies, and when those lies are amplified on Fox News and right-wing radio, and then repeated by people you know (perhaps even inside your own family), it can be challenging to remain sure of oneself.

I don’t mean to suggest that you should hold on to your views if they are contradicted by evidence, or that you should remain steadfast in the face of reasonable arguments to the contrary. In fact, I’ve often told my students that the best way to test their views is to talk with people who disagree.

My point is that at a time such as we’re in, “preaching to the choir” is not a waste of my time. I sometimes think it’s the most important thing I can do.