The White House budget director Mick Mulvaney is a rabid tea partier and so it should be no surprise that the budget proposals that he unveiled this week consist of everything desired in the fevered dreams of the US oligarchs: massive tax cuts for the wealthy, deep and wide cuts in programs that benefit the poor and middle class, and increases in defense spending.
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Mehdi Hasan argues that the way we react to the atrocities like the Manchester bombing is exactly the goal of ISIS.
IF YOU WANT to defeat ISIS, listen to former ISIS hostage Nicolas Henin. The group is “heartened by every sign of overreaction, of division, of fear, of racism, of xenophobia … [and] drawn to any examples of ugliness on social media,” the French journalist wrote in November 2015 in the wake of the Paris attacks. “Central to their world view is the belief that communities cannot live together with Muslims, and every day their antennae will be tuned towards finding supporting evidence.”
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This photo of Donald Trump’s meeting with pope Francis, who looks like he wishes he was anywhere but there, and Melania and Ivanka Trump looking like they are in a scene from The Godfather, is sparking another round of guffaws, similar to the reaction to Trump blessing the magical glowing orb.
Ever wondered what phone calls are like between heads of state? The Intercept has obtained the transcript of the phone conversation between Donald Trump and Philippine’s president Rodrigo Duterte. It is quite fascinating to read because it shatters the idea that conversations between heads of state are staid and serious exchanges. While they talked about serious affairs (drugs and North Korea), the tone of the discussion sounded like the low-level chatting of two slightly drunk fraternity guys just shooting the breeze about international affairs.
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Like every new president before him, Barack Obama hoped to make some headway in resolving the bitter dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. But he and his secretary of state John Kerry eventually realized that Israeli intransigence was too strong especially since, thanks to the Israel lobby in the US has a lock on the US congress, they could not use as a bargaining chip the only real leverage they have, the massive amount of aid that the US gives that country. So they essentially gave up.
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Here’s Ben Smith writing about what he sees as a major shift in Democratic party policies.
Donald Trump has already changed the Democratic Party more than his own Republican Party.
While the president has merely reduced his own party into a panicked mess, the Democrats’ trajectory seems to have moved subtly and decisively away from the center-left Clinton liberalism toward a politics whose planks make Barack Obama look like Al Gore.
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Yann LeCun is the director of AI research at Facebook and an expert on many aspects of deep learning. As such he receives many invitations to speak at institutions around the world. He recently received one from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and here is his response.
Yesterday I posted the weird photo of Donald Trump, the Saudi King, and Egyptian dictator al Sisi placing their hands on a glowing orb, something that has sparked plenty of mockery and internet memes. Some have said that touching the orb was what caused a sinkhole to suddenly open up in front of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida at roughly the same time.
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It is a common tactic for people to invoke some high-falutin’ kind of ‘principle’ as a shield to deflect criticisms of their appalling views. The one that is most commonly invoked these days is to say that you are ‘fighting political correctness’ when you are denigrating minorities, gays, women and other marginalized groups whom you think are getting too uppity. The next step is to claim that your right to free speech is being denied when you get criticized for your words. These people seem to think that the right to free speech means that one has the right to not be criticized for exercising that right.
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I saw this photograph of Donald Trump in Saudi Arabia along with others laying their hands reverently on a glowing orb.
