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Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on children, a war on their childhood and a war on their future. Children are dying at an alarming rate from malnutrition and dehydration and doctors are no longer seeing normal-sized babies. On the first Friday in Ramadan this year 36 members of the Tabatbi family were killed Continue reading »
The recent ASEAN-Australia Summit in Melbourne was widely well received. Leaders of all member countries, except Myanmar, attended. Some—President Marcos of the Philippines and Prime Minister Anwar of Malaysia—also carried out quite extensive individual programs. Speeches and comments reflected general agreement, and there was an impressive list of follow-up practical actions, many of them with Continue reading »
“Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate” – historian Alfred W. McCoy. On March 14, The New York Times published an article by Ivan Nechupurenko entitled “Shunned By West, Russia Pivots South For Trade: Skirting Continue reading »
Australians frozen out of the housing market cannot expect that government is going to do anything that effectively closes the gap between current house prices and what most of the unhoused could afford as a deposit. Modern politicians of all stripes are all agreed that their political survival depends on doing the maximum to sustain Continue reading »
David Marr’s recent book, Killing for Country, confronts the reality of the dispossession of Aboriginal lands in Queensland by the Native Police Force. It is a recounting of wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter of “natives” in order to settle the land that never was Terra Nullius. Most confronting for Marr is the realization that it was Continue reading »
Faith leaders should stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and should call on the Australian government to condemn all violence that threatens a just future for the people of Palestine, Israel and the Middle East. This call comes from Pax Christi, an ecumenical Christian organisation. Pax Christi Australia has sent the following appeal to all Continue reading »
On the eve of the Russian election, Vladimir Putin exudes confidence, discounts nuclear war, but warns West on the dangers of escalation. Meanwhile the mainstream western media obfuscates and misleads as usual. There is no better purveyor of unobtrusive, misleading propaganda than Reuters. With most mainstream Western media outlets the agenda is obvious even when Continue reading »
The US has created the conditions for the decline of its own society. TikTok being banned in the USA is not the issue. The fact is, this is a ban on any current or future successful technology owned by a potential adversary and, let’s not make any mistake about it, China, where the ownership of Continue reading »
The stock market stopped trading during that press conference. Here’s what I wrote that day: President Trump’s Oval Office speech last week was a massive dud and the stock market took a huge dive last Thursday. So Trump decided to take the bull by the horns and held a press conference in the Rose Garden with a group of CEOs just before closing time the next day. The market made a sharp upward turn as he spoke and the president was extremely pleased with himself. Numerous reports about the deliberations within the dysfunctional White House over the past week, however, have made it clear that was the only thing that pleased him. According to the New York Times, it’s been an extremely chaotic time with infighting among the various task force members, Jared Kushner stepping all over everyone’s toes and incompetent leadership from the top. In other words, it’s been business as usual in the Trump administration. Unfortunately, this time this bumbling White House is confronting its first real crisis and one of the most serious global challenges in decades.
I get it. Pickleball ruined your neighborhood. Tennis courts are completely booked, people you once called friends now go “dinking,” and that incessant popping sound from a plastic ball echoes off suburban walls like circling birds of prey waiting to close in on your sanity. But look, pal, you’ve got it easy. You think pickleball is bad? Try living next to an eighteenth-century warship.
It was like it happened overnight. One day, we’re all living in a regular neighborhood, participating in usual landlocked recreational hobbies, and then, boom—a massive wooden barge is anchored outside our cul-de-sac. Now, all anyone wants to do on the weekends is sail the high seas and join a press gang. Can’t we just stick to charcuterie and Bunco?
I’m not one to typically tell people what they can or can’t do. You want to man the oars during doldrums while chanting along to rhythmic sea shanties? Be my guest. But when your newfound nautical interest resuscitates a modern scurvy epidemic, now we’ve got a problem—a vitamin-deficient, gums-bleeding-out problem.
As the Ukrainian war enters its third year, there has been renewed, if rather limp, talk of a ceasefire followed by negotiations. The premise is that since neither side can ‘win’, it makes sense to start making peace. Few now remember that the war almost ended before it got going. On 24 February 2022, Russia … Continue reading The Lost Peace (Short Version)
Back in 2000 when Donald Trump first tested the waters of a presidential campaign , giving a series of speeches as a possible Reform Party candidate, he famously told Forbes Magazine, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” He was speaking at the time about a weird deal he had going with motivational speaker Anthony Robbins in which he timed his political appearances around paid seminars that Robbins paid him a million bucks to give. By the time he decided to run for real in 2015 he didn’t publicly suggest that he could make money campaigning but he did make the case that he was incorruptible saying, “I don’t need anybody’s money.” (He’d obviously figured out that that real graft was to made once he was in the White House.) He pledged to spend a hundred million of his own money on his run but ended up only giving about $66 million out of $398 million so Trump didn’t “self-fund” by a long shot. In 2020 he didn’t use any of his own money at all instead raising $774 million for the campaign with the RNC and his Super PACs raising much more.
When Mr. Sauce, Esq. goes out of town, two things inevitably happen when I am left to my own devices: I undertake home improvement projects like cleaning the hall closet and installing shelves; or affixing LED rope lights under the kitchen cabinets. I make the more unappetizing DiS cards so I do not subject himContinue reading 145. Ring of Gold
My new book is out this week (in the UK at least – but those elsewhere can read it right now online). I very much hope it will stimulate debate and discussion. Something that’s really struck me over recent years is that whereas a really rich literature exists on the global justice dimensions of the […]
What’s so witty about Trump, mockery, and “Birdbrain”? Michael Kruse examines how Donald “91 Counts” Trump uses humor “to maintain the useful reputation as a politically incorrect outsider despite his obvious insider status as the leader of the GOP.” “Hilarious, “super funny,” some say. Kruse isn’t joking. He has quotes. Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, “had the same twisted sense of humor,” says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen.” It’s a part of Trump’s bonding with his audience. “It’s such a huge part of his movement,” Alexander Reid Ross, the author of Against the Fascist Creep and a member of the executive committee of the Far Right Analysis Network, told me. “It is a way of inverting and reversing assumptions in a carnivalesque kind of way. It’s a way of upending morality,” he said.