Ron DeSantis is touring Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio and Pennsylvania, ostensibly in support of Republican primary candidates. Photograph: Lynne Sladky/APThe Florida governor has been dubbed a ‘mini-Trump’ and was once boosted by the ex-president but a potential rivalry in 2024 has turned relations sour
As Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, packs his suitcase for a five-day trip to campaign for Trump-endorsed candidates, he might afford himself a dastardly chuckle.
I don’t think many Americans appreciate just how tense and tenuous, how very touch and go the energy situation in Europe is right now. |
For months, as news of the Ukraine war receded a bit, it was possible to follow the energy story unfolding across the Atlantic and still assume an uncomfortable but familiar-enough winter in Europe, characterized primarily by high prices. |
In recent weeks, the prospects have begun to look darker. In early August the European Union approved a request that member states reduce gas consumption by 15 percent — quite a large request and one that several initially balked at. In Spain, facing record-breaking heat wave after record-breaking heat wave at the height of the country’s tourist season, the government announced restrictions on commercial air-conditioning, which may not be set below 27 degrees Celsius, or about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. In France, an Associated Press article said, “urban guerrillas” are taking to the streets, shutting off storefront lights to reduce energy consumption. |
We’ve reached the stage of American history where everything we see on the news must first be understood as political theater.
In other words, the messaging layer of news now almost always dominates the factual narrative, with the latter often reported
so unreliably as to be meaningless anyway. Yesterday’s sensational tale of the FBI raiding the Mar-a-Lago home of former president Donald Trump is no different.
I thought — and I wrote — that it would take probably until 2030 or so. To get here.
But let me let the people on the front lines of this calamity speak to you directly themselves.
““There’s nothing left to eat,’ one farmer, Laurent Roux, told the local radio station France Bleu. ‘The terrain
is so dry that in places, it looks like ash. It’s dust.’
The FBI finally raided Trump’s beloved Mar-a-Lago.
I almost don’t care.
Sure, my lack of emotion surprises me. I thought I’d feel the slightest sense of vindication. In truth, we’re
crossing into an era where “I told you so” and being proven “right” really doesn’t matter anymore, because the
stakes are too high. I just watched a video of a flood sweeping hundreds of cows down a river. To me, that feels like news.
America This Week: August 8-14, 2022
A historic search warrant SNAFU, Covid corruption, journalists strike, a Ukraine arms scandal, Apocalypse Watch,
"Experts Say," Three Finance Headlines and more
Many default settings buried deep inside our technology make us share superfluous amounts of data with tech companies. In my last column, I went over how to shut those off.
An image from Fall. Photograph: LionsgatePre-release debates over the title of Jordan Peele’s patchy summer hit Nope were settled last month when the secretive writer-director revealed that no, it wasn’t an acronym for “not of planet earth” but was something far more simple. It was, as others had expected, a nod to what many audiences are accustomed to wearily shouting at the screen during a horror film. Investigate that unsettling sound coming from a barely lit basement in a remote house late at night? Nope! Accept a lift from a creepy stranger in a blood-spattered pick-up truck? Nope! Climb up an ancient and abandoned 2,000ft radio tower without support, food or alerting anyone else first? Nope!
A still from Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe: television’s densest duo. Photograph: Anyone seeking a window into the absurdities and stupidities of late-20th-century life could do far worse than the original televised misadventures of Beavis and Butt-Head. Of course, Mike Judge’s animated sensation, which disguised its high satire as the lowest of lowbrow comedy, was something of a mirror, too. Who were its eternally apathetic, horny and destructive adolescent heroes but boardwalk caricatures of the teens watching from home? With Beavis and Butt-Head, MTV lampooned its own audience – a whole generation of fellow tittering coach potatoes – alongside the countless other American stereotypes that passed into the pair’s orbit over seven seasons.
https://www.theguardian.com/
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