https://democracyproject.substack.com/p/...irect=true


Allegedly an attempt to help smokers give up, there's a 50% reduction in the health taxes on 'heated tobacco'.

No doubt its merely coincidence that Heated Tobacco Products are now subject to only half the tax they were formerly.
They claim that its a just a trial...

Big Tobacco must love this govt.

How HitlerÔÇÖs Failed Beer Hall Putsch Helped Fuel His Rise

https://www.history.com/news/hitler-fail...all-putsch

Affecting banks and supermarkets.
Also affecting Australia.
I suspect a cyber attack.
https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/07/19/custo...g-outages/

So much about this in the media in recent. 
Even everyday items such as dental floss contain it.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/...w-ban-pfas

This is a win for consumers. 
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2390252/...r-ink.html

Hardly surprising given the govt attitude to beneficiaries & of course there are more of them now thanks to govt disestablishing  positions. 

According to CTU director Craig Renney treasurey had forecast 47,000 would lose their jobs but he believes that will be an underestimate, & about a third of those people are likely to end up on a benefit.


https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/35034733...se-more-50

testing

President Joe Biden tests positive for Covid-19 at pivotal moment in reelection campaign



https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/07/17/polit...e-covid-19

Only after I posted it did I realise that really, I probably shouldn't have commented in a post about the cost of an operation on Trumps ear wound that perhaps they could just keep the ear...

The J. D. Vance I Knew

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...um/629814/

Well worth a quick read to see who the left will be up against.

Hope you all will be able to read it and it is not a membership only article.

Quote from the article:

"The anti-populist conservative Vance persona of 2010ÔÇô17 was well designed to please the individuals and constituencies that held power over his future at that juncture in his career. The angry-white-male persona of 2017ÔÇô22 was as perfectly aimed at the Thiel-Trump-Tucker nexus as the earlier iteration had been to the Allen-Aspen-Atlantic one.

With a Senate nomination secured, Vance now has new constituencies to please. Ohio today is not the swing state it used to be, yet itÔÇÖs still home to many non-Trumpy constituencies, including tens of thousands of voters of Ukrainian descent. If elected to the Senate, Vance may rekindle still-higher ambitions, ambitions that cannot be realized by the narrowly based support that got him not quite a third of the vote in last weekÔÇÖs Ohio Republican primary. I very much doubt that the ÔÇ£Vance for PresidentÔÇØ dream has diedÔÇönot in him, and not in his backers.

So the question I ponder is not: What happened to the J.D. I knew? It is: Who will J.D. become next?"