BBC:

Guardian:

Johnson accuses Tory MPs who forced him out of ‚herd‘ mentality

Boris Johnson’s resignation speech was short and relatively perfunctory – but revealing, although perhaps not in the way that he intended. Normally when prime ministers leave office, or start the process of leaving office, they focus on their legacy. Johnson mentioned Brexit, the UK’s response to Covid and his support for Ukraine, but it felt as if he was rattling through his standard talking point, rather than reflecting deeply on what he did and why.

Instead, the speech came alive when Johnson started considering the circumstances of his departure. In a rare moment of humility, he accepted “no one is remotely indispensable”. But he also delivered a barely concealed whinge against the Tory MPs who forced him out, effectively accusing them of groupthink and ignoring the polls.

And he said nothing about the multiple flaws and failings that led to his party losing confidence in him. Not a word, or even the most tangential reference. It seemed like confirmation that he still thinks he has done nothing wrong.

Reuters:

A peculiar granite monument that some have dubbed „America’s Stonehenge“ but a conservative politician condemned as „Satanic“ was torn down on Wednesday by authorities in rural Georgia hours after it was heavily damaged in a bombing by vandals.

United States Vice President Kamala Harris:

I want for you that you hold each other tight as a community, that you know that you have a whole nation who cares deeply about you and stands with you. This is a — an incredibly tight community. I know that. And this person will be brought to justice, but it’s not going to undo what happened.

And we — we’re here for you, and we stand with you. And of course, as we always say — because it is true — our prayers are with you.

The President and I and our administration have put all of the resources and will continue to put all of the resources that the Mayor and the Chief and others need in terms of the federal assistance. So the FBI and the ATF are here.

There’s a lot of healing that’s going to have to happen that is both physical and emotional. There is no question that this experience is something that is going to linger in terms of the trauma. And so, I’d like to urge all the families and all the individuals to do seek the support that you so rightly deserve.

And — and we’ll deal with what we need to deal with in terms of also, as we move forward, all agreeing that we’ve got to be smarter as a country in terms of who has access to what and, in particular, assault weapons. And we got to take this stuff seriously, as seriously as you are — because you have been forced to have to take it seriously.

The whole nation should understand and have a level of empathy to understand that this can happen anywhere, in any peace-loving community. And we should stand together and speak out about why it’s got to stop.

David Harvey:

We’re running out of both space and time right now. That’s one of the big problems of contemporary capitalism.

Daniel Denvir:

You talked about the future being foreclosed upon. That term is very applicable when it comes to debt on homes, obviously.

David Harvey:

That’s why I think the term “foreclosure” is very interesting. Millions of people lost their houses in the crash. Their future was foreclosed upon. But at the same time, the debt economy has not gone away. You would’ve thought that after 2007-8 there would’ve been a pause in debt creation. But actually, what you see is a huge debt increase.

Contemporary capitalism is increasingly loading us down with debt. That should concern all of us. How is it going to be repaid? And by what means? And are we going to end up with more and more money creation, which then has nowhere to go except speculation and asset values?

That’s when we start actually building things for people to invest in, not for people to live in. One of the most amazing things about contemporary China, for instance, is that there are whole cities that have been built and not yet lived in. Yet people have bought them, because it’s a good investment.

Daniel Denvir:

It’s precisely that issue of credit that led you to borrow a phrase from Jacques Derrida, “the madness of economic reason.” Colloquially, madness and insanity are invoked to stigmatize or pathologize individuals with mental illness. But what Marx shows us, and what your book shows us, is that the system is actually insane.

Ω Ω Ω

David Harvey:

The neoliberal argument had a lot of legitimacy in the 1980s and 1990s as being liberatory in some way. But nobody believes that anymore. Everybody realizes it’s a con job in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

But we’re beginning to see the possible emergence of an ethno-nationalist protectionism-autarky, which is a different model. That doesn’t sit very well with neoliberal ideals. We could be headed into something which is much less pleasant than neoliberalism, the division of the world into warring and protectionist factions who are fighting each other over trade and everything else.

Associated Press:

Judge won’t block law banning most Mississippi abortions

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — As attorneys argued about abortion laws across the South on Tuesday, a Mississippi judge rejected a request by the state’s only abortion clinic to temporarily block a law that would ban most abortions.

Without other developments in the Mississippi lawsuit, the clinic will close at the end of business Wednesday and the state law will take effect Thursday.

One of the clinic’s attorneys, Hillary Schneller of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said the judge should have blocked the law.

“People in Mississippi who need abortions right now are in a state of panic, trying to get into the clinic before it’s too late,” Schneller said. “No one should be forced to live in fear like that.”

Craig Murray:

Acres have been written in the mainstream media about Johnson’s lying and personal immorality, but there is very little serious effort to understand why so many in society have been prepared to tolerate this. The answer is that neo-liberalism has succeeded in destroying societal values, to the extent that anti-social and even sociopathic behaviour no longer appears peculiar.

In a society where authority condones, and constructs a system to enable, personal fortunes of US $200 billion or more while millions of children in the same country are genuinely hungry and poorly housed, what values is the socio-political structure telling people to hold? What value is placed on empathy? Ruthless ambition and resource grabbing is applauded, encouraged and held up as the model to be followed.

More and more, you are either part of the elite or you are struggling.

Julia Hertäg, New Left Review:

Mainstream film critics have charged that the boom in historical drama has gone hand-in-hand with a shift towards commercialized productions, and away from risky or challenging films. Funding has increasingly gone to films that ‘stay inside a corset of conventional narrative’, wrote taz film critic Cristina Nord. ‘The subjects can be controversial, not the form.’ The result, claimed veteran cultural commentator Georg Seeßlen in Die Zeit, was ‘cineastic low-fat quark’.³

Valstybės diena – Lietuvos valstybinė šventė, kuri yra švenčiama liepos 6 d. minint pirmojo ir vienintelio Lietuvos karaliaus Mindaugo karūnaciją. Diena oficialiai yra švenčiama nuo 1991 m.

Kasmet liepos 6 d. 21 val. viso pasaulio lietuviai raginami vienybės vardan sugiedoti „Tautišką giesmę“. Ši tradicija gyvuoja nuo 2009-ųjų, kai himnas buvo giedamas minint Lietuvos vardo tūkstantmetį. Tyrimų duomenimis, 2015 m. Tautišką giesmę giedojo 46 proc. Lietuvos gyventojų.^[3]