Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard has visited on Australia the whole spectre of terrorism, through his craven and ill-judged support of the United States and its invasion of Iraq. Now we live perpetually with the spectre of terrorism and racial strife, visited upon us by his prejudices and lack of judgment. This statement was Continue reading »
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When Election Day ended in Taiwan the local and foreign media, pundits, and others almost in unison reported Vice President Lai and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party won handily, democracy had prevailed, and China (which opposed Lai and interfered in the campaign) lost, and the scene might escalate into conflict and even war. But the Continue reading »
“I hope to get a Chinese passport and become a Chinese citizen,” a Taiwanese student of mine once told me. “Only by being Chinese can we have confidence and become the most powerful country in the world. If we remain only Taiwanese, we are but a mere vassal of the United States,” he said with Continue reading »
The foundation for effective climate change adaptation must be the preservation of ecological life support systems for humans and all other species. We must prioritise the protection and expansion of water, biodiversity and ecological services to provide food security for future generations instead of environmentally damaging industries, especially fossil fuels. The devastating consequences of increased Continue reading »
On Friday, 5 January 2024, Iraq’s Prime Minister Shia al-Sudani said he wanted all remaining US Coalition troops out of Iraq. He was speaking on the fourth anniversary of the US drone assassination of Iraqi and Iranian generals Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad Airport in January 2020. What added a determined edge Continue reading »
We can all be glad that judges constituting the ACT Court of Appeal in the Bernard Collaery case had a more liberal view of the need for open justice than the judge who had been set to hear the case. This was before the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, stepped in to drop the prosecution altogether. But Continue reading »
Yesterday, I wrote that the Jevons Paradox is a good explanation for the problems of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Today, I look at another theory – Goodhart’s Law – to explain what is wrong with Australia’s $3 Billion a year employment services sector. The recent Workforce Australia review labelled the system a failure. Continue reading »
The genocidal violence unleashed by Israel in Occupied Palestine since October 7 has produced unspeakable tragedy and suffering for the Palestinian people. Such barbaric behaviour places the State of Israel outside the bounds of a civilized world. Israel has become a pariah state, and must be treated as such by the international community. Sadly, the Continue reading »
This is an excellent explainer of Trump’s 2024 agenda and it’s on TikTok, which makes me happy to see. This stuff has to blanket every corner of social media, repeatedly, if it’s going to penetrate. This from the BBC might be more appropriate for your cynical/apathetic grown-ups: They see us… When I asked the European ambassador to talk to me about America’s deepening partisan divide, I expected a polite brushoff at best. Foreign diplomats are usually loath to discuss domestic U.S. politics. Instead, the ambassador unloaded for an hour, warning that America’s poisonous politics are hurting its security, its economy, its friends and its standing as a pillar of democracy and global stability. The U.S. is a “fat buffalo trying to take a nap” as hungry wolves approach, the envoy mused. “I can hear those Champagne bottle corks popping in Moscow — like it’s Christmas every fucking day.” As voters cast ballots in the Iowa caucuses Monday, many in the United States see this year’s presidential election as a test of American democracy.
Before WWI, strategically, machine guns were offensive weapons. They were used to expand the European empires against opponents who didn’t have them.
Come WWI, it turned out that they were defensive weapons which made offensive operations very hard if both sides had them.
Armor and air made fast offensive operations possible in WWII, and aircraft carriers made air the queen of the ocean and the king of force projection against nations without large air forces.
Over the past twenty years two major things have changed in military technology. I’ve written about both in the past.
You might be tempted to think that the US and UK would learn from their mistakes in the Middle East. This would, however, be an error. The attack on Yemen shows exactly how much they keep repeating the same mistakes in the increasingly forlorn hope that this time the action will succeed. Yemen has suffered […]
And embracing the darkness Greg Sargent: Pundits: Trump voters support him because they’ve lost faith in meritocracy/our institutions Trump voters: Actually, we agree with him that immigrants are poisoning our blood and we like his promise to prosecute our enemies without cause Pundits: It’s the meritocracy, right? Yes, there’s more. Trump’s prepared to budget enough gold leaf to cover the White House and the Capitol. His followers long for a dictator. Trump wants to normalize the unthinkable, says Ruth Ben Ghiat, and not be held accountable for it. And that’s okay by his followers. Laws are for other people. Update: Found a gag reel, and not in the humor sense.
Less than a century after it began, the popular lexicon of the Holocaust has become threadbare. It is so reduced to a few suggestive and…
Without needing recognition Heather Cox Richardson offers a reflection on heroes for Martin Luther King Day: You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left. When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them. It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself, in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did. It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
Robert Fico rode to electoral victory for the third time on a wave of strongman populism, media capture and pro-Russia rhetoric. But are the cracks beginning to appear?
- by Aeon Video
- by Nathaniel Scharping
- by James McElvenny
DiEM25 was born in 2016 to counter the oligarchies that control and influence the lives of European citizens. How has the situation changed in recent years? Our mission has failed. Instead of being democratised, power within the EU has become even more concentrated and opaque. As we had predicted, because it was not democratised, the […]
The post On the state of Europe (its Economy, Treaties, Migration, Italy&Greece) – interviewed by FOTOSINTHESI appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Privatisation and austerity don’t cut costs: they just pass them on to us. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 12th January 2024 The weather was worse than forecast. By the time I reached Bristol, at 5pm, all trains to the south-west had been cancelled, because of rising flood waters. It was no one’s fault […]
In Liverpool last October, the Labour Leader’s Office issued an edict saying that no one at conference could say anything on Palestine other than to echo Keir Starmer’s words condemning Hamas and proclaiming Israel’s right to self-defence. Reading the script provided by Israeli embassies around the world, the UK, US and many other Western governments […]
The best method is always the one that yields the most convincing and relevant answers in the context at hand. We all have our preferred methods that we think are underused. My own personal favorites are cross-tabulations and graphs that stay close to the data; the hard work lies in deciding what to put into […]
This is an election year in the UK and unless something dramatically changes, the Labour Party will be in power for the next term of Parliament and will have to manage a poly crisis that they will inherit from 40 or more years of neoliberalism. Note, I don’t confine the antecedents to the Tory period…