technocrit

...

Greene, a member of the House of Representatives, has long been a reliable ally and fierce defender of Trump, even sporting a Make America Great Again (MAGA) baseball hat at President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address.

But in recent months, she has taken positions at odds with the White House and her fellow Republicans, including criticising them during the just-ended federal government shutdown, saying the Trump administration needed a plan to help people set to lose health insurance subsidies as part of planned cuts.

More notably, Greene has also become a vocal campaigner for transparency and the full release of files related to late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – a recurrent scandal that continues to engulf President Trump.

Greene responded to Trump’s announcement on Friday with screenshots of a text message she sent the president about the Epstein case, claiming it “sent him over the edge”.

“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level,” she wrote on X.

...

Three Palestinian teenagers released in a recent prisoner exchange were abducted by Israeli soldiers while seeking aid and tortured in custody, a new report has revealed.

In interviews conducted by the NGO Defense for Children Palestine (DCIP), Mohammad Nael Khamis al-Zoghbi, 17, Faris Ibrahim Faris Abu Jabal, 16, and Mahmoud Hani Mohammad al-Majayda, 17, described how they were abducted by Israeli forces near aid distribution points and transferred to the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp in southern Israel.

They said they endured torture, beatings and starvation in Israeli custody. The trauma has left them unable to sleep, and they are plagued by night terrors and bed wetting.

One of the boys said he felt his detention had "stripped away his childhood".

Jabal, who was abducted along with his father while seeking aid near the Morag Corridor on 11 September, recalled being so badly beaten during his interrogation that his forehead “split open and required stitches”.

Epstein’s human trafficking organization depended entirely on the wealth management industry (WMI). It was how he obtained the capital to build it, and it was how he hid his activities from the authorities. And none of this was an abuse of the industry; it is precisely how the WMI is designed to work. Nor is it an abuse of the law, because both American and international law has been carefully designed to accomodate the WMI.

....

But capitalism didn’t just provide seed funds for Epstein’s operation. It also provided a whole legal and financial apparatus that helped him find victims and disguise his transactions. An article in Deviant Behavior by sociologist Thomas Volscho observes that at first, “the predominant means for gaining access to potential victims involved Epstein using philanthropy to gain access to youth-serving institutions.”

In particular, Epstein seems to have leveraged immense wealth to buy influence in youth organizations that focused on financially at-risk children and then used the wealth disparity to control them. This was a natural step for Epstein, since wealth managers often work with charitable organizations for tax-avoidance purposes. As his conspiracy matured, Volscho writes, Epstein’s “sex trafficking enterprise was funded by Epstein’s tax shelter advisory business, where he primarily helped wealthy people avoid taxation on the sale and/or bequeathing of their assets and incomes.”

...

So while Epstein likely used blackmail and other illegal schemes to avoid prosecution for his crimes, his primary strategy — offshore wealth management — was not just legal but a central feature of modern financial capitalism. If the Left wants to use the Epstein case to talk about elite impunity, that conversation has to begin with the strategies the rich use to hide their finances that are completely legal.

English rock group Oasis has always been a populist contradiction, rooted both in working-class culture and the individualism of post-Thatcherite Britain. But while other bands become more political, Oasis’s comeback tour offers only escapist nostalgia.

Palestinians from Gaza, recently released from Israeli detention, have given harrowing descriptions of sexual torture by their Israeli captors.

Victims described rapes by groups of soldiers, forced stripping, forced filming and sexual assaults and rapes using objects and dogs.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which collected the testimonies in recent weeks, said they reflect a systematic policy as part of Israel’s genocide, rather than isolated incidents.

Thousands of Palestinians are still in detention camps and prisons to which international monitors, including the Red Cross, have no access.

PCHR warns that detainees face the risk of death and coerced confessions extracted through torture – especially as Israel is advancing plans to impose the death penalty on Palestinian detainees.

These detainees were arrested solely for being residents of the Gaza Strip, “as part of a policy of collective punishment designed to humiliate Palestinians and inflict maximum psychological and physical harm on them,” PCHR said.

...

The egghells belonged to a long-extinct group of crocodiles known as mekosuchines, who lived in inland waters when Australia was part of Antarctica and South America.

Co-author Prof Michael Archer said "drop crocs" were a "bizarre idea" but some were "perhaps hunting like leopards - dropping out of trees on any unsuspecting thing they fancied for dinner".

On October 28, Rio de Janeiro’s police besieged the Penha favela for 15 hours, killing at least 121 people in the city’s worst massacre. Brazil’s right is hailing it as an anti-crime victory while overlooking their own links to violent gangs.

On both Left and Right, many like to take the Whitlam dismissal— as it became known — as a constitutional struggle between an old British-oriented establishment and a new, progressive Australia. But in retrospect, it’s hard to doubt that the 1975 dismissal was in fact a soft coup d’état, heavily influenced by US power and influence.

These various factors — ranging from economic interests to political maneuvering — help explain the strange paradox of countries scrambling to whitewash al-Sharaa and curry favor with a regime that was considered a terrorist entity just months ago. It is a fitting spectacle for the state of global politics in this Trumpian era.

In the wake of a measles outbreak in Canada that has infected thousands of people over the past year, an international health agency revoked the country’s measles-free status on Nov. 10, 2025.

Let’s first turn to the obvious negatives. The Trump idea is an admission that he and pretty much everyone are unserious about addressing the housing unaffordability problem because too many powerful players benefit from it. The most obvious remedy is to build more middle/lower middle class residences in high cost areas. But right away, that runs hard into NIMBYism: all those well off with their tony houses don’t want the servant classes or even dull normals living nearby and possibly harming their property prices.

... the popular freely-refinancable (as in no prepayment penalty) 30 year fixed rate mortgage is a very unnatural product and is found in comparatively few advanced. economies. On paper, it puts the interest rate risk on the lender. If rates drop, borrowers refinance, taking the loan away from creditors just when taking the risk of longer-dated loans is paying off. There are many ways to better share the interest rate risk, such as barring refis for the first five to seven years of a mortgage, or having interest rates float subject to a floor and ceiling. I had that sort of product in the early 1980s and was very happy with it. You can pencil out what your worst-case mortgage costs might be and benefit with no expenditure of effort if interest rates fall.

So why is this supposedly borrower-favoring feature, of the “freely refinancable” fixed rate mortgage, actually not good for borrowers? Because that option is NOT free! Not only do borrowers pay fees when they refinanace, but lenders have succeeded in structuring refis so that roughly 2/3 of the economic benefit of the refi is captured by financiers, not by the homeowner.

A related bad feature of the refinancable 30 year mortgage is that it increases systemic risk. Mortgage guarantors Fannie and Freddie have to hedge the refi risk. That hedging is pro-cyclical on a systemically disrupting scale.

...

50 year mortgages, compared to a 30 year obligation have more of their payments over their life in interest. That means in a refi more total interest savings. That means even more in fee extraction by middlemen! More critically, it also means much greater pro-cyclical hedging action, and thus an even bigger increase in systemic risk, assuming that there actually was consumer receptivity to this bad idea...

The Democratic leadership doesn’t want to get rid of the filibuster for the same reason the Republican leadership doesn’t want to get rid of it: The filibuster allows the leadership of both parties to keep their radical flanks at bay. Chuck Schumer needs the filibuster to protect himself from the Bernie Sanders wing in the Senate and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) wing in the House: if you can’t get to sixty, Bernie and AOC, we have to follow the lead of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Same goes for John Thune to whoever inhabits the radical role at any given moment in the GOP.

...

For Trump, swap in Trump’s most rabid allies and foot soldiers in the Senate and the House — or Schumer’s and Hakeem Jeffries’s enemies in the Senate and the House — and you get a pretty clear sense of why the leaderships of both parties need the filibuster: It checks anyone who “defies party orthodoxy,” while providing “an excuse to avoid doing things.”