Reading
Peace should be one of our ultimate goals as we seek a better society. Nothing is more important. But what can anyone say about peace that doesn’t sound too preachy or self-righteous? I hesitate to say anything for this reason. Yet one thing I do know, as a starting point, is that peace is an Continue reading »
A central question the Joint Committee on Public Accountability and Audit is pursuing in its inquiry into probity and ethics in the Commonwealth public sector is how to hold individual public servants to account for the failures so often being found in ANAO reports and those of other inquiries. Must we have a Royal Commission Continue reading »
“The fact that one of the least populated countries on Earth contains the world’s second most expensive housing is a national calamity, and a stunning failure of public policy,” writes Alan Kohler, in the latest Quarterly Essay. He doesn’t mince words. We are in a housing crisis – and it is a public policy failure Continue reading »
Usman Khawaja played an important batting role in Australia’s recently finished demolition of Pakistan in the first Test in Perth. The ongoing controversy, however, around his writings on his cricket boots and black armband as a protest display have raised questions about the relations of sport and politics and the role of sporting and other Continue reading »
The victimisation by Israel of Palestinian children is so profound that Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkain, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem law professor, has described it as “Unchilding,” that is, in order to “eliminate the next generation of Palestinians, Israel treats Palestinian children as both nobodies who are unworthy of global children’s rights and as dangerous and killable Continue reading »
After the birth of Jesus, there was the flight into Egypt. Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1st Century predecessor, Herod, had decreed the slaughter of all the male children under the age of two – not Gaza this time, but West Bank Bethlehem. You don’t say “No’ to God – nor to God’s messenger, the angel Gabriel. To Continue reading »
I don’t know about you, but my relationship to dentistry is somewhat infantile. I went this week. I go every six months (hygienist too) but though I brush twice a day with an expensive electric toothbrush, I’m very bad at all that interdental work you’re supposed to do. But then when I notice that the […]
I remember applying to work at the Royal Society of Arts. It seemed perfect — a historic social change organisation that shared my progressive values and strived to build a more equal society for all. I was proud to be joining a community built up by fellows like Nelson Mandela, who stood up against injustice […]
It’s a real contest but if I had to choose Donald Trump’s most fatuous claim it would have to be that until he became president “nobody could say Merry Christmas anymore.” He said it again just the other day and his ecstatic followers practically went into a collective fugue state and began speaking in tongues they were so thrilled. This war on Christmas has been a theme on the right for many, many years but Trump is the first politician to say that he “won” it. It was smart. After all, the war didn’t exist in the first place so every time anyone says “Merry Christmas” he gets the credit. Boom! I have no doubt that his right wing evangelical fans are thrilled by all this. This is one of Christianity’s most important holidays after all. On the other hand, most of them are also fine with Trump evoking Adolph Hitler’s rhetoric so their alleged reverence for Christmas as a religious holiday may be beside the point.
Trump caught in another recording Motown’s Berry Gordy might have set the recording to music but Detroit News got there first: Then-President Donald Trump personally pressured two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to sign the certification of the 2020 presidential election, according to recordings reviewed by The Detroit News and revealed publicly for the first time. On a Nov. 17, 2020, phone call, which also involved Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, Trump told Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, the two GOP Wayne County canvassers, they’d look “terrible” if they signed the documents after they first voted in opposition and then later in the same meeting voted to approve certification of the county’s election results, according to the recordings. “We’ve got to fight for our country,” said Trump on the recordings, made by a person who was present for the call with Palmer and Hartmann. “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.” Trump didn’t insist they “find 11,780 votes,” but you get the idea.
Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa talks TARDIS (and why Beyoncé needs to be in it) - plus, we have new Christmas Special footage & images.
Until [2008], when the banking industry came crashing down and depression loomed for the first time in my lifetime, I had never thought to read The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, despite my interest in economics … I had heard that it was a very difficult book and that the book had been […]
Churchill just got the color wrong What better reason to invoke the famous Churchill quote: “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.” Happy Hollandaise!
Former Defense Minister Ben Wallace wrote about the Hamas charter without mentioning its revision in 2017. We need the people in charge to understand the facts.
The post A Top U.K. Official Displayed the Terrifying Ignorance of the World’s Leaders on Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.
Grocery List
- - -
Bucket List
- - -
The Not Naughty but Not Quite Nice List
- - -
The Aughty List
- - -
Playlist
- - -
Craigslist
- - -
Existentialists
The miracle of birth is so incredibly beautiful to behold. Do you know the only thing that could make it better? Percussion. Nothing calms one’s stress and eases the pain of delivering a baby than a little boy standing nearby absolutely shredding on his drum. That’s why it’s so lucky that I just so happened to be passing by this barn, where I discovered a woman having a baby. What better audience?
Now, to be fair, I did ask permission before I started drumming. And she nodded—at least I thought it was a nod; she could have just been recoiling or looking down to make sure the donkeys weren’t in the baby’s landing zone. Nonetheless, I took that as a go-ahead to play my drum throughout the labor and delivery. Newborns love loud banging, right?
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: John Schneider/President Biden, Interview with the Vampire, Doctor Who, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and more!
Acceptance that the UK’s housing system is in crisis, if not a state of outright emergency, is increasingly widespread. Rents have spiralled out of control, with private tenants now paying on average a third of their earnings to a landlord, with around a third of renters paying more than half their income in rent. Insecurity is […]
- by Psyche Film
- by Isabel Jacobs
Underpaid, overworked, and struggling to hold up a health service in collapse, junior doctors have had enough. Since 2008, they have faced a 26 percent cut in real terms to their pay packet. Junior doctors have told Tribune about having nightmares about work, how patients are dying in under-resourced hospitals and how every bone in […]
Developing a stronger sense of Englishness cannot merely be looked at through a political lens – our identities are personal and multiple, conflicting and shifting, writes Hardeep Matharu