Climate scientists reveal data that earth’s heating is accelerating, heat extremes are increasing and 1.5C has been breached faster than forecast. We are failing to treat climate change as the single greatest threat to humanity. At the same time our government has announced a gas strategy which increases emissions and the earth’s heating. Either we Continue reading »
Reading
The jailing of military whistleblower David McBride, who exposed alleged war crimes by Australian troops in Afghanistan, for 5 years and 8 months by the ACT Supreme Court shines a light on a number of issues and one of them requires urgent consideration. The need for a public interest defence to protect individuals like McBride. Continue reading »
How long can Australian politicians continue with the pretence that the American alliance aligns with the nation’s interests? Trump or Biden? It doesn’t really matter except for determining the path of America’s decline into illiberalism. ANZUS must be exited. There are three compelling arguments for leaving the ANZUS alliance. The first is cynical but persuasive; Continue reading »
Imagine being Tony Blinken, and facing the arduous responsibility as US Secretary of State to rule the globe! This seems a daunting task, but fortunately, Blinken doesn’t have to strain his brain too much because he has a manual already written to instruct him. This manual is called The Grand Chessboard. It tutors you to Continue reading »
Australia’s most severe China knowledge gap is the virtual collapse of University-level advanced Chinese language study, together with the study of Chinese society, politics and culture. This is the major finding of a report, Australia’s China Knowledge Capability, published in 2023 by the Australian Academy of the Humanities. The main program that provided this expertise Continue reading »
Grassroots anti-AUKUS campaign, Labor Against War, has called on the Federal Labor Government to come clean about just how much it is pouring into US and UK coffers to rebuild their ageing nuclear shipyards, both of which build nuclear-armed submarines. Marcus Strom, national convenor of Labor Against War, said: “It’s quite telling that the budget Continue reading »
Fuelled by well armed pro Israel groups and by university administrators’ decision to move police and riot squads to break up peaceful encampments, a terrible thuggery has invaded US universities. On Australian campuses, despite the arrival of counter demonstrators at Monash and Sydney, university Vice Chancellors appear to have decided that resort to police intervention Continue reading »
To say Australian media has a poor record of getting things right in relation to Chinese ‘spying’ allegations is an understatement. It’s possible, in almost every media outlet for anyone who knows anything about China, to look beyond the headline and see an entirely different story; the ABC’s latest offering is no exception. As a Continue reading »
The complaint by Canberra about the latest Chinese military flare-up close to China’s coast is not only hypocritical but highly escalatory. An Australian MH-60R Seahawk helicopter was 8,535km from home and flew close to China’s northeastern coasts. So a Chinese warplane shot flares to warn it off. Suppose a Chinese military aircraft flew 8,535km to Continue reading »
CARRIED unanimously, Councillor Tony’s Judge’s motion to protect the iconic poinciana trees in Woolgoolga’s town centre sailed through City of Coffs Harbour’s council meeting on Thursday 9 May 2024. Importantly, point four of the motion provides longevity to the decision to protect the trees and requires transparency regarding any future proposals to remove the trees....
The post Council votes to protect Woolgoolga town centre’s iconic poinciana trees appeared first on News Of The Area.
James Fallows has a fascinating analysis of that weird rally last Saturday: Among Donald Trump’s virtues is that he does not drink. That is useful to remember in considering his current speaking style. On Saturday night Deb and I sat through the nearly two-hour entirety of his rally performance at Wildwood, on the Jersey shore, as televised by Fox. The whole thing is archived here, courtesy of Right Side Broadcasting. To me this version of Trump sounded genuinely different from the crowd-pleasing showman who rode televised rallies to success (and big audiences for the cable outlets) in 2015 and 2016. Maybe it’s just that his material is now so familiar and tired. Maybe it’s that Trump has nearly exhausted the “what will he say next??” Evel Knievel-style suspense and excitement of his live shows. Maybe it’s that he goes on at such length. Whatever: the result is less “outrageous” than … boring. It could also be that there is something more visibly wrong with him.
The ironic result of the triumph of the machine may be the creation of an ecosystem in which supra-rational gnostic appeals flourish.
Whether there’s something in my teeth.
Whether my breath smells like fish after eating fish, or whether it smells like fish anyway.
Whether I look older now than I do in any given picture.
Whether my stomach is sticking out.
Whether I’m yelling.
Whether there is a slight chance someone may discover that I’m wearing underwear.
Which shirts make me look wide.
When anything jiggles.
Whether I should just give up.
Frances Coppola looks at the rise of Global and reveals that much of the UK’s radio network is controlled by an opaque offshore entity
The Bulwark is featuring a fascinating piece today about Trump and fascism, a very urgent topic: IN THE INITIAL, HEADY DAYS after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory over Donald Trump, many public commentators played down Trump’s threats of not leaving the White House quietly, with some outright dismissing concerns about his electoral lies. Others, though, saw Trump for exactly who he was—and his actions for exactly what they were, even from the outset. One of those discerning voices was Federico Finchelstein, a professor at the New School who studies the history and dissemination of fascism. Just a few days into Trump’s refusal to concede, Finchelstein authored an op-ed in the Washington Post linking Trump directly to a series of previous authoritarians who clung to power, helping introduce Americans to the term auto-golpe (self-coup). It was one of the most prescient pieces of analysis of America’s post-election troubles—vindicated especially on January 6th, when Trump helped sic insurrectionists set on violently overturning the election results.
Life will stand a better chance against climate change if we mix big- and small-picture thinking.
The post The Case for Scientific Transculturalism appeared first on Nautilus.
“Why Hannibal Lecter?” And has a thing for “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” a “wonderful man.” What a catch! Cohen will be back to testify before this goes live, so I’m bailing. Enjoy. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
I’ve spent most of my life as an advocate for a more peaceful world. In recent years, I’ve been focused on promoting diplomacy over war and exposing the role of giant weapons companies like Lockheed Martin and its allies in Congress and at the Pentagon as they push for a “military-first” foreign policy. I’ve worked at an alphabet soup of think tanks: the Council on Economic Priorities (CEP), the World Policy Institute (WPI), the New America Foundation, the Center for International Policy (CIP), and my current institutional home, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (QI). Most of what I’ve done in my career is firmly rooted in my college experience. I got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Columbia University,... Read more
Source: Reflections on Student Activism appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Who do we wish to be? In conversation at The Ink, Eddie Glaude, Jr., Princeton professor of African American studies, ponders, in essence, “Who do we take ourselves to be?” in the wake of 50 years of Reaganism, Thatcherism, neoliberalism. That framework is collapsing. What kind of society have we created? Madison and others insisted on the importance of character, that we had to be certain kinds of persons in order for democracy to work. And this 50-year run has exacerbated some of the distortions in what makes us who we are. We’ve always dealt with the dangerous and disfiguring effects of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of class ideology. But over the last 50 years, they’ve congealed in a particular sort of way. For democracy to work, we have to admit that we have to become better people. If we are the leaders that we’ve been looking for, then we have to become better people. And if we’re going to be better people, we have to build a more just world, because the world as it’s currently organized actually distorts our sense of self, our relationship with each other.
Zoë Garbett on a tense London mayoral race, how the Greens plan to push Sadiq Khan, and how she got her seat
For this week's upcoming Doctor Who adventure, former showrunner Steven Moffat regenerates into a freelancer to write the episode "Boom."
On 12 October, as Israel indiscriminately bombed Gaza, the French police fired tear gas and water cannons at protestors gathered in Paris. Days earlier, the country’s Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin had called for local authorities to ban pro-Palestine demonstrations, citing supposed threats to public order. The Hamas attack on 7 October was treated in France […]