Ever since the six-day war of 1967, when Israel occupied the whole of Jerusalem, a triumphant march of conquest, called ‘Jerusalem Day March’ takes over the Holy City. How would you feel if this was your home, your neighbourhood and you and your family were faced with hoards of religious fanatics, waving the Israeli flag, chanting ‘Death to all Arabs’ and ‘Your Second Nakba Is Coming’. Last year a new curse was added, “May Your Village Burn” and, of course, the usual cry repeated over and over, “Kill Them All”.
As Israel celebrates the 75th anniversary of its founding, and nearly a century and a half after the first Zionists came to Palestine from Europe, the core tension behind the country’s establishment – whether a Jewish state could be a democratic state, whether Zionism could accommodate pluralism – is more obvious than ever.
Source: On its 75th birthday, Israel still can’t Agree on What it means to be a Jewish State and a Democracy
If the Biden administration wants to stop the mass displacement that is leading enormous numbers of Cuban and Venezuelan migrants to the US-Mexico border, it should end the sanctions that have made life in those countries all but impossible for average people.
Source: US Sanctions Are Driving Displacement and Migration From Cuba and Venezuela
There are now only two countries, Monaco and Switzerland, where it takes more wealth to be considered part of the 1 per cent.
Source: Wealth Report 2023: How much money do you need to be in Australia’s wealthiest 1 per cent
Murdoch’s incalcuable damage to Australia and Victoria
Rupert Murdoch has done incalculable harm to the democratic experiment throughout the AUKUS nations and beyond. In Victoria, his propaganda campaigns have made him the magnate who cried wolf. The state’s integrity infrastructure is in perilous condition but Newscorp’s constant invective against Labor governments, and Premier Dan Andrew’s government in particular, has made it more difficult to fix.
Source: Dan Andrews and Murdoch crying wolf – Pearls and Irritations
These Christians are Happy Scammers scamming the non-believers us
His plan to leave Parliament without coming back, even to deliver a valedictory speech, was condemned by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who said he should not be claiming a $200,000 salary to miss Parliament. Mr Robert seems set to go in a blaze of controversy whatever happens.
Source: Even after resigning Stuart Robert makes his mark, near or far
Far too often, government departments and its agencies deny Freedom of Information requests without good reason. It leads to unnecessary delays, costs, and the withholding of information that the public deserves to know. What’s the scam?
Source: Playing chicken to the detriment of democracy and cost to the taxpayer – Michael West
There’s a 98% chance of a record hot year by 2028, and a 66% chance of exceeding the 1.5°C threshold for at least that year, according to the latest World Meteorological Organization update.
Source: Global warming to bring record hot year by 2028 – probably our first above 1.5°C limit
The “free market” was never free and the pirates cry foul! This is the definition of unproductive labor when vultures largely steal from each other
It is argued here that short selling is fraudulent by its very nature—it is a fraud on the legitimate stock owners—and should be banned across the board. But first a closer look at the issues and some recent developments.
Source: Ellen Brown: Squeezed by the Shorts: Time to Ban Short Selling? – scheerpost.com
A photo Beijing released on March 6th of Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a seismic shock in Washington. There was the Secretary-General of the Chinese Communist Party standing between Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, and Saudi National Security Adviser Musaad bin Mohammed al-Aiban.
They never doing what they say. Trump is the American way
Nearly two years after the U.S. killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children, in a drone strike that prompted a rare apology from the Pentagon, the U.S. government has yet to make good on a pledge to compensate surviving relatives.
Source: The U.S. Still Owes Money to Survivors of Drone Strike in Kabul
World military spending has reached a new record high of $2.24 trillion in 2022, according to new data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). That’s up 3.7% since the previous year, including the steepest increase among European nations since the end of the Cold War over 30 years ago.
Source: The US Still Spends More on Its Military Than 144 Nations Combined – CounterPunch.org
In what world does it make sense to claim a politician or a political party is owed the people’s loyalty?
It is the people who are owed. The people are owed good governance. We are owed more than sound bites that diminish us. We are owed a leadership that inspires us. And it is up to Anthony Albanese and his government to provide that – behind or in front of the line.
Source: Labor pains – The Shot
What owning your own home has come to in Australia. This is a partnership offer to drive up the cost of housing, or a 3rd party acting in combination like a Muslim bank who can’t charge interest because they are unlicensed. Are they investment partners really and/or landlords who charge rent instead? Something current banks aren’t prepared to do. What they are saying is go find a surrogate parent or angel, it’s not our problem.
Would-be homebuyers teaming up with private investors to stump up a deposit has been floated as a possible model to ease Australia’s housing crisis.
Source: Co-purchasing homes flagged as fix for housing woes – Michael West
It’s a scare campaign aimed at voters anxious about the housing market: where will all these people live? But given the Coalition’s record, Dutton’s divisive tactics are hypocritical and cynical. If Labor is going down the path to a Big Australia, then so was the previous government.
CORRUPTION with a big ” L”
The NSW ICAC has launched a major probe into allegations that key NSW Liberal Party figures were involved in branch stacking across the state. Anthony Klan reports.
Source: NSW ICAC finds disturbing details of Liberal Party’s far-Right faction
The Turkish government detained a team of Spanish elected officials and civil society leaders on hand to monitor election day activity in a Kurdish city.
Source: Erdogan Arrested and Expelled International Officials Observing Turkish Election – The Intercept
By Salih Yasun, Indiana University | – Turkey is heading toward a presidential runoff election on May 28, 2023, after no candidate won more than half the votes in the first round – the barrier needed to be declared an outright winner. Incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has ruled the country for two decades, defied polls by coming closest. He will now face off against opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in a second-round vote. The Conversation asked Salih Yasun, an expert on Turkish politics at Indiana University, to talk us through the first-round results, and what will come next.
Source: Turkey’s presidential Election – how Erdoğan defied the Polls to head into Runoff as Favorite
A girl holds a key symbolizing the homes left by Palestinians in 1948, during a rally along the border east of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on May 1, 2023, marking the 75th anniversary of the Nakba. (Said Khatib / AFP via Getty Images)
If you’re driving across the length of our bruised geography, you will drive past women and men who will choose, time and time again, death over indignity. If you slow down to listen to their orations, you will realize, even if for a brief moment, that you would do the same.
Source: Reflections on the 75th Anniversary of a Nakba That Never Ended – scheerpost.com
This sounds like Trump’s description and cry for MAGA
America is not a bulletproof republic. It is the dying salesman of its own tragedy. It may have passed the point of no return. It is angrily adrift abroad in a seething multipolar world. It is beset at home by accelerating crises of climate, infrastructure, economy, society, culture, and, frankly, common decency.
what of the peoples of secondary status on the periphery of the empire? Like Australia. While the unhappiness of America reveals itself to the world, this outer reach of the empire could choose its own way, like some middle powers not suborned to America. But the haunting question remains: Is Australia as a nation-state capable of responding in a coherent and long-term fashion to disarm the vengeance of an unhappy American empire?
Source: The crooked timber of an unhappy, dangerous American Empire – Pearls and Irritations
The Royal Commission on the media called for by Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull and now by Senator Hanson Young is long overdue.
The ‘experts’ in our white man’s media say nothing of course about the 800 US military bases around the world, including many that directly threaten China, or that in AUKUS we are cooperating with the US to make China more vulnerable to a US nuclear first strike.
In similar vein the US destroys the NordStream gas pipeline but scarcely a mention by our media except to run the thread bare US denial.
In our media there is the assumption, never spelled out, that China will behave as aggressively and violently as the US has done for centuries in endless foreign wars. But China is not behaving that way. It does not militarily threaten the US and its allies. However, it refuses to accept the world hegemony that the US insists for itself.
The current anti-China hysteria is that China could establish navy bases in the South Pacific…
Does any of this stand up?
Source: White Man’s Media: Anti-China media beat ups continue… – Pearls and Irritations
Taxpayers stump up for “man shot in buttocks” journalism as Google Australia pays a pittance in tax again thanks to “world first media reforms”. Michael West reports on a joke.
Source: Google Australia pays pittance in tax, pays media moguls instead – Michael West
TV networks famously don’t disclose what their talent is paid, though details sometime leak when stars change networks.
Source: Pay packets of Nine’s highest-profile stars revealed. ( The New Daily )
LNP reality allowed for wholesale unabated privatized corruption
Criminal syndicates are pouring fake students into Australia to work in their illegal operations – including the sex industry – by exploiting the nation’s weak education visa and migration systems.
Source: Australia’s student visa system exploited by criminal using fake schools and fake students
Peter Dutton who joked about Pacific Islanders getting their feet wet doesn’t like being the butt of what he calls jokes, about himself, when they aren’t.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says reports that a secret inquiry has uncovered major loopholes being exploited by criminal gangs in the immigration system he oversaw for three years are laughable.
Source: Dutton gave Australia ‘an underclass – his greatest legacy’
Why aren’t these statements published in our mainstream media?
The Australian Jewish Democratic Society (AJDS) stands firmly against the extra-judicial killings of militants by Israel and the high number of civilian casualties- including children – in Gaza. This adds to what the AJDS has been saying for many years with respect to Israel’s disastrous relationship with the people and government of Gaza. AJDS Statement on Gaza, 11 May 2023.
Source: The Australian Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, should speak out – Pearls and Irritations
Israel is deepening its system of apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories by using artificial intelligence-powered biometric facial recognition technology to track and restrict the movements of Palestinian people. Facial recognition technology identifies and categorizes people on the basis of their physical features, including race, ethnicity, gender, age and disability status.
Facial recognition technology was introduced into Israeli apartheid in 1999.
But a new report from Amnesty International has examined the use of a novel facial recognition technology system known as Red Wolf, which has been deployed at military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron since 2022. It scans the faces of Palestinians, often denies them entry and adds them to massive Israeli government databases without their consent.
Source: Israel Using Biometric Cameras to Terrorize Palestinians
In 1948, the Jewish underground terrorist groups – the Hagannah, Stern Gang and Irgun ethnically cleansed more than 850,000 Palestinians from their homeland (70 percent of the Palestinian population) through terror and tens of massacres. They were dispossessed because they were not Jews in order to turn the non-Jewish majority in Palestine into a minority and the newly arrived European Jewish minority into a majority.
Source: The Palestinian catastrophe (Al-Nakba) and Australia’s responsibility – Pearls and Irritations
But the Israeli state’s strategy to create new memories of violence among Palestinians and thus ensure that the Nakba remains a constant presence seems to contradict its official policy of denying it ever occurred.
Israeli officials and pro-Israel activists have repeatedly rejected the term, calling it an “Arab lie” and a “justification for terrorism”. The Israeli authorities have also sought to eradicate any public references to the Nakba.
In 2009, the Israeli Education Ministry banned the use of this word in textbooks for Palestinian children.
Source: Israel Denies the Nakba While Perpetuating It – CounterPunch.org
Former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani is being sued for $10 million by a former associate, and she has the receipts in the form of recordings and emails. Noelle Dunphy is suing the former NYC mayor for sexual assault and harassment, wage theft, and other misconduct, alleging that he made “sexual demands” and went on “alcohol-drenched rants that included sexist, racist, and antisemitic remarks.” The details are disturbing.
Source: Giuliani Sued For Sexual Assault, Made Employee Work Naked | Crooks and Liars
If poor justice moves like a speeding bullet. If a billionaire it can take a life time.
Former President Donald Trump’s tangled web of legal woes has grown more sticky in 2023. From the slowly building criminal inquiries in D.C. and Georgia to the mountain of fraud charges he already faces in New York — a sprawl of investigations have trailed Trump since his departure from the White House. Now, it seems, the lawsuits are finally catching up to the not-so-Teflon Don.
Source: A short guide to Donald Trump’s many legal woes | Salon.com
Friends, we do not have the luxury of waiting 18 months until the 2024 election. The danger is now.
Source: The Danger Is Now. We Must Stop Trumpian Fascism. | The Smirking Chimp
Complaints that the Government was competing with housing saw them let go of the reins and prove that privatization was the best option. As with all cases we have seen the opposite to be the case. Now again the government is at fault and not privatisation. Why is that? Remember the days of one family one house one income and savings? Our children no longer do.
In the era of economic privatisation, government wasn’t meant to compete with the private sector, the claim being it was seen to be ‘crowding out’ the private sector, which leads us to where we are now.
Source: 30 pieces of social conscience – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Talk about being sold a fantasy
“Workers have enjoyed larger sums of 4%”! What a load of bullshit they have “suffered” by not keeping up with inflation and reducing what little savings they may have had doing precarious jobs. Meanwhile, business has enjoyed double-digit profits and paid less tax than the average middle-class family. Michael West seems to be selling a very colored story. One you generally see peddled by our mainstream Murdoch and Costello media. The truth of the matter is workers and their families are paying for the inflated profits of our biggest businesses.
While workers have enjoyed larger sums landing in their bank accounts, extremely high inflation has robbed Australians of a real wage rise.
Source: Wages and jobs data to take centre stage – Michael West
This is a social fact and not “wokeism”
It’s clear, even to harbourside mansion dwellers, that there’s an accommodation crisis right around Australia. Not a shortfall, not a “blip”, a bloody crisis!
Source: Creative ways to solve Australia’s homelessness crisis
Panic at PwC:
Source: National Times – Panic at PwC: How a tax scandal played out behind… | Facebook
The fact is very few Australians know who Andrew Bolt is let alone read or listen to this puppet rants. He is simply a worker a talking head who climbed the News Corp seniority ladder as a dutiful ass-licker. A cog in Murdoch’s Corporate media empire that’s been poisoning Australia’s political and social discourse since the 70s when Rupert had his vision. That news or facts no longer mattered and he wasn’t in the business of providing it. He was in the business of controlling it, creating it for profit in the service of those that could pay. Ratings are his priority and selling them. Unfortunately in Australia that meant factless, and partisan social and political discourse for money.
Having constructive debates, rather than resorting to name-calling, is the way forward for a healthy political and social climate, writes Patrick Lukins.
An Israeli writer asks a fundamental question: 75 years after its creation, has the Jewish state fulfilled its founder’s dreams?
Source: ‘Impossible Takes Longer’ Review: Israel Looks in the Mirror – WSJ
The escalation was initiated by Israel but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to see no way out of the mess of his own creation.
Netanyahu is unable to meet both the demands of his extreme-right public security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, on the one hand, and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, on the other.
The resistance group is demanding an end to the renewed policy of assassinating resistance leaders – revived by Netanyahu in capitulation to Ben-Gvir in order to preserve his fragile ruling coalition.
Islamic Jihad’s conditions for a ceasefire also include the transfer of the body of Khader Adnan, the Palestinian political prisoner who died earlier this month after a lengthy hunger strike, and the cancelation of Israel’s annual ultra-nationalist “Flag March” in Jerusalem next week.
Gaza attack has done nothing to strengthen Tel Aviv’s hand against the resistance.
Source: Israel stares failure in the face, again | The Electronic Intifada
The way mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army have been waging a significant part of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has been well covered in the American media, not least of all because his firm, the Wagner Group, draws most of its men from Russia’s prison system. Wagner offers “freedom” from Putin’s labor camps only to send those released convicts to the front lines of the conflict, often on brutal suicide missions.
Source: The Army we don’t see: The private soldiers who fight in America’s name – Pearls and Irritations
Billionaires, Grifters, are vehicles for ratings Trump learned that years ago when doing his TV show. Attention matters and refusing it is the death of corporate media. Like Barnum like Madhoff Trump is still a master of the art of attention control.
A great start will be the mainstream media refusing to give Trump platforms such as last Wednesday’s CNN event. Of course, this is a forlorn hope, as the soaring ratings totally vindicated CNN’s decision.
The banner is still aloft over what used to be the home of the brave. It will recover its starry spangle when Trump and his White supremacist movement of anger, hatred and malice are gone forever.
Multiple events in the USA this month have dismayed, disturbed and disgusted the watching world, as Alan Austin reports.
Facts
Shane Drumgold SC told the ACT Inquiry into the police cover-up attempt of the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins that he believes 11 of the 12 jurors would have found Bruce Lehrmann guilty of raping Brittany Higgins, as per the below video, and the one he believes would not was the same juror who caused the trial being aborted.
olddogthoughts 
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