Reading

Created
Mon, 08/01/2024 - 06:19
1 package (10 ounces) frozen leaf spinach or chopped broccoli2 pounds ground beef2 eggs¾ cup soft bread crumbs (about 1 slice bread)¼ cup catsup¼ cup milk½ teaspoon salt¼ teaspoon pepper¼ teaspoon dried oregano leaves1 teaspoon salt1 package (3 ounces) smoked sliced ham3 slices mozzarella cheese, each 3×3 inches, cut diagonally into halves (optional) Rinse frozen […]
Created
Mon, 08/01/2024 - 04:58
Few countries are offering ships and reportedly a significant number  want their support to remain secret!  The token Australian response has turned out to be not out of keeping with that of many similar countries. In  an earlier P & I article (The Red Sea: Think it through before jumping! December 22, 2023) I argued Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 08/01/2024 - 04:57
If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 08/01/2024 - 04:57
Orchestrated components are coming together to enable the US to recruit Australia in future wars of choice. Our media must begin to ask questions about the crude but successful ways the Australian people are being groomed to provide passive or enthusiastic consent. A version of the long awaited Defence Strategic Review for public consumption will Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 08/01/2024 - 04:56
Hamas was voted in by Palestinians in Gaza in a fair election (as agreed by international monitors). It was primarily a welfare organisation providing services and infrastructure for the general population. It primarily still has this role, with an attached small military wing. It reminds me of my time in Sri Lanka working for CARE Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 08/01/2024 - 04:55
The dismissal of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by Queen Elizabeth’s Vice-Regal representative, Sir John Kerr, was an extraordinary event. For almost fifty years a debate has raged about why the Governor-General took the unprecedented action he did on 11 November 1975. This five-part series puts a spotlight on the on the external events that Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 08/01/2024 - 04:31
Hong Kong tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying urged the US to use its “moral authority” to impose “very draconian” sanctions on mainland China, prosecutors told the court on Tuesday, as they played footage from the publisher’s past media interviews. Prosecutors at the West Kowloon Court played six interview clips that showed Lai expressing support for foreign Continue reading »
Created
Mon, 08/01/2024 - 04:00
Jamelle Bouie writes in his newsletter about the shock of 2016 and how it led to the media obsessing over “the Trump voter” and what they were thinking: One inadvertent consequence of this understandable bout of introspection was, I think, to validate Trump’s claim that he spoke for a silent majority of forgotten Americans. It was easy enough to look at the new president’s political coalition — disproportionately blue-collar and drawn almost entirely from the demographic majority of the country — and conclude that this was basically correct. And even if it wasn’t, the image of the blue-collar (although not necessarily working-class) white man or white woman has been, for as long as any of us have been alive, a synecdoche for the “ordinary American” or the “Middle American” or the “average American.” You may remember the constant discussion, while Trump was in office, over the effect his chaos and corruption might have on voters. Would they care? Where this “they” often meant the blue-collar voters associated with Trump’s victory.
Created
Mon, 08/01/2024 - 02:30
Trump did more than nothing ABC News has a this tantalizing Jan. 6 story this morning: Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has uncovered previously undisclosed details about former President Donald Trump’s refusal to help stop the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol three years ago as he sat watching TV inside the White House, according to sources familiar with what Smith’s team has learned during its Jan. 6 probe. Many of the exclusive details come from the questioning of Trump’s former deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, who first started working for Trump as a teenager three decades ago and is now a paid senior adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign. Scavino wouldn’t speak with the House select committee that conducted its own probe related to Jan. 6, but — after a judge overruled claims of executive privilege last year — he did speak with Smith’s team, and key portions of what he said were described to ABC News. […] Sources said Scavino told Smith’s investigators that as the violence began to escalate that day, Trump “was just not interested” in doing more to stop it.
Created
Mon, 08/01/2024 - 01:00
Scenes from a slow civil war on women Jeff Sharlet posted a long thread on Saturday reflecting on reporters’ initial reaction to his use of the the term “fascism” in “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.” One element dovetails with a post I’d already prepped from Jessica Valenti’s “Abortion, Every Day” substack. “The anti-abortion movement is launching a national campaign to trick women into carrying doomed pregnancies to term,” Vessica Valenti wrote in October in a post titled “Calculated Cruelty.” She summarized it in a followup post on Friday and cautions that the movement has moved upstream of abortion clinic protests to targeting prenatal testing that might reveal fatal fetal abnormalities: The short version, though, is that a coalition of the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country are working together to ban abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities, and to do away with the prenatal testing that provides those diagnoses.
Created
Sun, 07/01/2024 - 21:14
After being tasked with editing David Ricardo’s Collected Works in 1930, Piero Sraffa, with the assistance of Maurice Dobb, published them between 1951 and 1973. This work earned him the 1961 Söderström Gold Medal from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. For the edition, Sraffa wrote an interesting and thought-provoking introduction. Its purpose was to demonstrate […]
Created
Sun, 07/01/2024 - 19:58
Let’s Discuss Israel And Gaza Again

There will be no weekly roundup today or next Sunday. It should return on the 21st of January.

Hezbollah just hit Meron airbase hard, in retaliation for Israel assassinating a Hamas leader in Lebanon. This was a major intelligence center, commanding drones and connecting other radar centers.

They have recently withdrawn two brigades from Gaza and intend to pull back more. They don’t control even the land in Gaza they claim to control, and are being bled white by an insurgency they can’t come to grip with and which is outfighting them.

Created
Sun, 07/01/2024 - 14:49

This food timeline started as a way to explore the revolution in Australian food that has occurred during the baby-boomers’ lifetime, but has since expanded to include more about the previous decades (and century) as well. Also included are overseas events and trends that had an impact here. The entries are brief, but there are lots of links if you want more information.

Coronation Quiche - No. 1 in Google's Top Ten

Created
Sun, 07/01/2024 - 12:00
*Note: In light of (I am loathe to say, “in honor of”) the 3rd anniversary of the January 6th insurrection, I am re-posting this piece, originally published March 25th, 2023. In my 2008 review of Frost/Nixon, I wrote: There’s an old theatrical performer’s axiom that goes “Always leave ‘em wanting more.” In August of 1974, President Richard Nixon made his Watergate-weary exit from the American political stage with a nationally televised resignation soliloquy and left ‘em wanting more…answers. Any immediate hopes for an expository epilogue to this 5-year long usurpation of the Constitution and Shakespearean tragedy were abruptly dashed one month later when President Gerald Ford granted him a full pardon. Like King Lear, the mad leader slunk back to his castle by the sea and out of public view. […] [Actor Frank Langella] uncannily captures the essence of Nixon’s contradictions and complexities; the supreme intelligence, the grandiose pomposity and the congenital craftiness, all corroded by the insidious paranoia that eventually consumed his soul, and by turn, the soul of the nation.