Reading

I crashed the meeting of a lobbying front that ended the life-saving General License 2023 on Syria, and is now pushing to extend Washington’s economic war for another 8 years. Behind closed doors, the former State Department official leading the workshop revealed the group’s ultimate goal: partitioning Syria and creating a de facto Caliphate for a rebranded Al Qaeda offshoot. This July 30, I registered under an alias to join a workshop organized by the Syrian American Council (SAC), the […]

The post I crashed an anti-Syria lobby meeting where they pushed for a new Caliphate and more starvation sanctions first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post I crashed an anti-Syria lobby meeting where they pushed for a new Caliphate and more starvation sanctions appeared first on The Grayzone.

I am in the final stages of moving office and it has been a time consuming process. And one of my regular research colleague, Professor Scott Baum from Griffith University, who occassionally provides blog posts here, sent me some research which he had written up in blog post form and with time short today, here…

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Has there ever been a less self-aware person in the history of mankind? Those were posted right after each other. He’s an idiot.

The wife of Opposition leader Peter Dutton has denied that her husband is a monster who prowls the neighbourhood after dark feeding on small mammals, saying he is just a misunderstood knockabout bloke who loves making dad jokes with the... Read More ›

A beloved store owner in Lake Arrowhead was shot and killed during a dispute over a Pride flag, officials say. The shooting happened around 5 p.m. Friday at the Mag Pi clothing store on Hook Creek Road in Cedar Glen. When deputies arrived, they found 66-year-old Laura Ann Carleton with a gunshot wound. She was pronounced dead on the scene. According to the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department, the suspect, who has not been identified, “made several disparaging remarks about a rainbow flag that stood outside the store before shooting Carleton.” Deputies found the suspect near Torrey and Rause Rancho Roads, armed with a handgun. “When deputies attempted to contact the suspect, a lethal force encounter occurred and the suspect was pronounced deceased,” read an update from the sheriff’s department. No deputies were injured. The Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ spoke out about the shooting, saying though Carleton didn’t identify as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, she spent her time helping and advocating for everyone in the community.

For a book about the all-too-human “passions of war,” my 1997 work Blood Rites ended on a strangely inhuman note: I suggested that, whatever distinctly human qualities war calls upon — honor, courage, solidarity, cruelty, and so forth — it might be useful to stop thinking of war in exclusively human terms.  After all, certain species of ants wage war and computers can simulate “wars” that play themselves out on-screen without any human involvement. More generally, then, we should define war as a self-replicating pattern of activity that may or may not require human participation. In the human case, we know it is capable of spreading geographically and evolving rapidly over time — qualities that, as I suggested somewhat fancifully,... Read more

Source: War Without Humans appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

It’s what Hillary Clinton was (wrongly) accused of doing for her family’s global charity. GDS actually auctioned off his time to big money donors. He might as well have opened up an Only Fans account: Florida governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis was “personally involved” in “efforts to effectively auction off leisure time” to wealthy donors who were seeking to “influence” policies in the Sunshine State — and much of it was recorded in writing by DeSantis staffers, Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey reveal in Sunday‘s Washington Post. After “DeSantis took office in 2019, his political team made a list of the state’s top 40 lobbyists and about 100 of their ‘Suggested Clients to target’ for political contributions, according to a fundraising document reviewed by The Washington Post,” the correspondents write.

And so right on Rosalie Silberman Abella is the Samuel and Judith Pisar visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School and is a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. This op-ed is adapted from her speech upon receiving the 2023 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Medal of Honor from the World Jurist Association. The incandescent Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a jurist, a woman and a Jew. It was a defining combination that shaped her vision and her passions, transforming her from distinguished U.S. Supreme Court justice to iconic global metaphor. When she pursued justice on the Supreme Court, she was a judicial juggernaut who was catapulted into international orbit by two forces: enthusiastic gratitude for her ever-bolder judgments, but also, as time went on, by the vituperative reaction of an increasingly regressive climate in which those progressive judgments were anathema. Regrettably, that regressive climate is where we find ourselves today, especially about the judiciary. Critics call the good news of an independent judiciary the bad news of judicial autocracy.

Hard core supporters of Australia’s alliance with America – in Australia, the USA, and in the UK – were no doubt thrilled by Anthony Albanese’s full-throated defence of the AUKUS deal at the ALP’s national conference in Brisbane. It was as much playing to them that his speech was directed as it was to the Continue reading »

It is probably the kiss of political death to promote and celebrate the work of a Labor Government backbencher. After all promotion in the party might be partly due to competence but factional allegiance is more significant. Having too high a profile is probably not an advantage either. But nevertheless… Julian Hill is the Member Continue reading »

In both government and business circles the rising stars avoid working in Personnel. They consider it a dead end. Yet in my view it is the most important area in order to achieve human flourishing and marginal productivity. In Afghanistan, Human Resources staff are strong willed and resilient: what can their Australian counterparts learn from Continue reading »

There are some worrying signs in recent polling which raise the disturbing possibility that a third-party campaign by the Green Party may once again divert enough votes from the Democratic Party candidate, in this case almost certainly Joe Biden, to get Donald Trump over the line in some key states and thereby deliver another Trump Continue reading »

Internationally-acclaimed Indigenous artist Richard Bell’s latest ‘Pay the rent!’ installation at the Tate Modern in London goes to the heart of some of the intractable problems of Australian white settlement. The notion that rent is owed challenges the legitimacy of the claim by the British crown to own Australia, since no treaty was ever made Continue reading »