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  NY Times has a lengthy puff piece on Rahm Emanuel (not linking), and the absurd idea that he might run for president. The back story is that Emanuel is acting as a cutout for Hakeem Jeffries in raisng money from wealth right wing donors. I think I can guess which donors. #USpol #Aipac

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  "A long, long time ago, Albanese said he picked a side. He has never stopped counting those who didn’t pick his." Albo vindictive hatchet man who cares only about the trappings of office. And we are stuck with him, unless he screws up so badly as to give us Hanson. #auspol https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2026/09/26/inside-albaneses-factional-dominance-theyve-all-been-executed-except-one?

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  Trying to think about “crisis of liberalism”. Will post some ideas here, and invite reactions Liberalism framed as centrism. Ideologically incoherent since it means your ideas are determined by those of opponents on left and right. Requires search for decent conservatives and tankie leftists to offset reality that opponents of democracy are overwhelmingly on political right. Corresponding failure to recognise that liberals are on the right flank of the pro-democracy coalition.

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  A few days ago, I got a message asking me about some articles I wrote on John Locke’s role in American slavery, which were published in Jacobin in 2015. Unfortunatley, I can’t find the message, so I’m just poting the links. Title fo the first one gives a pretty clear indication of my views https://jacobin.com/2015/06/locke-treatise-slavery-private-property https://jacobin.com/2015/10/locke-classical-liberalism-treatise-nozick-constitution https://jacobin.com/2019/03/john-locke-freedom-slavery...

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  Has anyone connected the dots between Ashley Hinson and Susan Collins shared network of Epstein-adjacent donors? Marc Rowan central to both, Lutnick big donor to Hinson. Feeds into general narrative of Republican corruption wnich Dems need to push hard. #uspol

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  Has anyone connected the dots between Ashley Hinson and Susan Collins shared network of Epstein-adjacent donors? Marc Rowan central to both, Lutnick big donor to Hinson. Feeds into general narrative of Republican corruption wnich Dems need to push hard. #uspol

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  The race to the bottom in corporate taxation finally seems to be over https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/announcements/2026/07/corporate-tax-revenues-remain-elevated-while-tax-rates-stabilise-according-to-new-oecd-data.html

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  Article lists co-operating autocracies, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, but not US. Trump presented as a bumbler failing to counterbalance dictators. In reality he loves them and want to join (even if Iran has spurned him, and China wants to be the capo di tutti capos) https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/the-rise-of-authoritarian-cooperation-a-new-illiberal-order

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  TIL, again, that it's easy to make mistakes and important to correct them. I misread a source as saying that the UK has no equivalent to our Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. In fact, the Cabinet Office fills that role. Apologies for the error.

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  We don't need massive data centres, and gas-fired power plants, to manage the use of LLMs as a replacement for Google. Hyperscaling is a destructive waste of resources, https://act.350.org.au/petitions/protect-larrakia-country-say-no-to-new-data-centre-in-darwin

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  it was once expected that a finding of corruption in a govt department would entail resignation of the minister in charge. Now it's big news that a minister in the ACT government has done the right thing. By contrast, Jacinta Allan, hanging on like grim death #auspol https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-27/rachel-stephen-smith-elected-new-act-deputy-chief-minister/106961110

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  A general lesson from the fall of Jacinta Allan. Once a potential leadership challenge is public enough to be a serious possibiiity, it's sure to happen. And, once it happens, incumbent is bound to lose, maybe after the first vote, or the second, or (in the best case) at the next election. #auspol

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  Before we even got to the scandal stage, how could leaders of NSW Catholic Church have thought it appropriate that the head of Catholic Schools NSW should be a senior figure on the Liberal Party? McInerney has resigned but his patron Archbishop Fisher should go too. #nswpol

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  Please help me in the campaign against preventable blindness. https://johnquiggin.substack.com/p/three-sleeps-to-go

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  How we paid for the millionaire factory https://substack.com/home/post/p-208634850

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  I don't buy strong claims about AI, and I'm particularly sceptical about agents. But I also find LLMs like ChatGPT a massive improvement on Google for all sorts of purposes. Yesterday, I had to fix the electronic gear changer on my Canyon bike. Basically a matter of swapping out a button battery.

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  Some basic propositions about voting, maybe of interest to readers of Nate Silver #uspol https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/nate-silver-discovers-the-educated

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  How privatised companies got so rich - we paid. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/26/always-remember-how-macquarie-built-its-millionaires-on-outrageous-tolls-and-charges

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  Nate Silver discovers the educated poor https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/nate-silver-discovers-the-educated

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  Protests against data centers are doing the shareholders and creditors of AI a big favour, slowing down the hyperscaling race, and protecting them from a future full of stranded assets.

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  New #Apple #MacOS includes Journal application. Apparently it's Notes but with "mood". It certainly put me in one.

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  Double donations day for Fred's Big Run https://open.substack.com/pub/johnquiggin/p/freds-big-run-b11

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  Ocean biomass sinking not recommended. A long term problem for solutions based on reforestation, I think. But for the moment, let's restore as much forest as we can https://drawdown.org/explorer/deploy-ocean-biomass-sinking

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  Trump promised a self-coup and hardly anyone noticed. Michael Koziol in the Nine papers, gets it right, whereas NY Times and Guardian (article by US prof) missed the point completely, treated this as an attempt to sow distrust in results. #uspol https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/north-america/trump-lays-the-groundwork-for-emergency-declaration-ahead-of-midterms-20260717-p60g7g.html

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  Another logic fail on AI, this time from NYTimes. Meta leasing compute capacity to Anthropic is evidence that Anthropic is eating Meta’s lunch (who knew?). Evidence of AI industry hunger for computing power would be AI companies buying/leasing compute from non-AI firms. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/technology/meta-anthropic-ai-computing-power.html

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  Support my appeal to end preventable blindness https://johnquiggin.substack.com/p/freds-big-run-ff9

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  In the middle of this standard lament, a startling concession "And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before." after which the author moves on almost immediately https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/

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  Seeing lots of posts making the point that median US incomes have risen since 1970 (about 50 per cent) and that there have been massive improvements in ICT, and noticeable in other goods and services.

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  Ethereum success with proof of stake more evidence that Bitcoin is a pointless and evil waste of energy https://coinmarketcap.com/community/articles/6a51e415f8f0eb0b8ffe9b65/

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  Only real lever govt has - drop maximalist goal of suppressing vaping as well as smoking. Even if "gateway drug" claim were true, that horse has bolted. Anecdotal stuff we've been fed "17 yo vaped once and died of lung cancer" the opposite of evidence-based policy #auspol https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/federal/why-the-government-won-t-cut-cigarette-excise-to-combat-illicit-tobacco-20260710-p60ebf.html