On Sunday's edition of "Last Week Tonight," host John Oliver recounted President Donald Trump's disastrous week, which culminated with the firing of White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.
"We begin tonight with the White House," Oliver said, "still a beautiful building in spite of what's happening inside it."
The mention of Bannon's firing brought a huge roar of approval from the audience.
"Yes, yes, Steve Bannon is gone," Oliver said, "presumably to spend more time sucking his own c*ck."
And while the past week has been hard on many in America, it has perhaps been hardest on crying Fox News host Melissa Francis, who tearfully said that, “But I feel like there is nothing any of us can say right now without being judged.”
"Here's a tip," Oliver said. "If you're getting emotionally overwhelmed and feeling judged for defending Trump in his 'Nazi sympathizer' phase, stop f*cking doing it!"
He continued, "It's that simple. No one is making you do it. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, how did you manage to make this about you? That's almost impressive."
CBS host Margaret Brennan grilled South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) after she suggested President Joe Biden's dog, Commander, should be killed.
During a Sunday interview on Face the Nation, Brennan questioned Noem about her view on dogs after writing in a new book that she had shot her hunting dog, Cricket, to death.
"But on this point, though, because you have been rumored to be a potential vice presidential candidate, as you know, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said killing the dog and then writing about it ended any possibility of her being picked as VP," Brennan explained. "You talk multiple times about it."
"In fact, at the end of the book, you say the very first thing you would do if you got to the White House that was different from Joe Biden is you'd make sure Joe Biden's dog was nowhere on the grounds, Commander, say hello to Cricket," the CBS host noted. "Are you doing this to try to look tough? Do you still think that you have a shot at being a VP?"
"Well, number one, Joe Biden's dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people," Noem replied. "So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog and what he's not living at the White House?"
"You're saying you should be shot?" Brennan exclaimed.
"The president should be accountable to is what is the number?" Noem continued. "And I would say about Republicans criticizing me, these are the same Republicans that criticized me during COVID."
"You're not going to retract the book?" Brennan pressed.
Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump argued Sunday that ballots should not be counted after elections are over.
While speaking to Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, Trump explained why her party had filed a lawsuit in Nevada to stop vote counting after the election.
"You cannot have ballots counted, Maria, after elections are over," Trump opined. "And right now, that is one of the many lawsuits we have out across this country to ensure that just that happens, that we have a free, fair, and transparent election."
"So in Nevada, as you pointed out, we are saying we want, on election day, that to be the last day that mail-in ballots can be counted," she added. "And we've been very successful in a lot of lawsuits."
Trump pointed to another lawsuit in Pennsylvania.
"They wanted to take off dates from mail-in ballots, of course, the Democrats, in an effort to make it easier to cheat," she claimed.
There is a long history of planned city building by both governments and the private sector from Brasilia to Islamabad.
More recently, two trends have come together in a new wave of visionary urban planning.
On the one hand, there are the neoliberal “special economic zone” policies that accelerated in the 1980s and which have become an almost unquestioned global economic article of faith. On the other, there is the “smart city” in which ubiquitous sensing and surveillance generate big data, from which solutions to all the problems of cities are supposed to be found.
Some of this transitional work has involved the extension of Saudi Arabian “soft power” into areas that are of personal interest to the kingdom’s prime minister, and de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. This is perhaps most visible through the entangling of Saudi Arabia with lucrative professional sports from golf to tennis.
However, the other bet that Saudi Arabia has been making is in cities.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia does not have much in the way of homegrown digital or technological enterprises, so Riyadh is instead investing on the principle of if we build it, they will come. Simply put, Saudi Arabia is attempting to attract foreign entrepreneurs, manufacturers, logistics companies and tourists to ease its transition to a post-oil economy.
The published plans and publicity for NEOM are a sight to behold.
NEOM will include everything in one massive development. It will have a free port and logistics hub, a seaside tourist town and even a mountain sports playground. NEOM’s centrepiece attraction is unquestionably, however, The Line.
The Line was envisioned as a 170 km linear city clad in reflective material, that would cut into the deep desert from the Red Sea like one of the swords on the Saudi flag.
The evangelical advertisements for NEOM promised freedom and multiculturalism in one of the most authoritarian and monocultural nations on Earth, as well as total surveillance and advanced AI to underpin innovation for all its residents.
A teaser video for The Line project produced by NEOM.
The initial advisory board included the likes of British architect Norman Foster and the CEO of Google’s Sidewalk Labs, Dan Doctoroff. Most of the more famous advisers seem to have quietly disappeared from the project in recent years.
Was The Line all just a public relations exercise designed to generate likes and speculative foreign investment capital? In public there may have been much wonderment. However, behind the scenes the entire Line project has been nothing more than a weird, unsustainable and hubristic fantasy.
NEOM is planned to be built in one of the most geopolitically significant — and at times turbulent — areas of the world, where Saudi Arabia borders Egypt, Israel and Jordan. Perhaps even more significantly, NEOM will be built in a region where summer daytime temperatures are already heading above 50 C in our era of global heating.
An artist’s rendering of The Line project.
(Shutterstock)
Who was going to want to live at the far end of a 170-kilometre long parallel terrace from which your only means of exit was an “intelligent” train system? And how was security going to be managed for a place which promised freedom and legal systems compatible with international human rights norms in one of the most authoritarian nations in the world, both internally and externally?
It is currently unclear as to whether other parts of the NEOM plan will be scaled back.
Work has already started on the Red Sea tourist resort town of Sindalah and it is unlikely Bin Salman will abandon the potentially lucrative Port of NEOM. Beyond that is anyone’s guess.
Many plans for ideal cities have been impractical fantasies. But NEOM also typifies a massive and persistent failure of the imagination driven by a capitalism — blinded by fossil-fuel ideology — and unable to come to terms with the necessity of confronting the climate crisis, growing global inequality and the persistence of war and genocide.
It’s about time for wealthy corporations and nation-states with the historic and contemporary responsibility for driving the climate crisis, like Saudi Arabia, to start taking this responsibility seriously. The world should be investing in making existing cities sustainable and just at a human scale — not pouring money into speculative, unsustainable and authoritarian urban mega-projects.
