Australian Greens Senator and defence spokesman, Senator David Shoebridge, also picked up on the grotesque twist the latest stifling of aid to the beleaguered residents of Gaza entailed. “The one temporary pause [Senator Wong] has been able to achieve is not the bombing or killing, or even weapons exports, it’s providing aid to [Palestinians].”
From the other side of the legal aisle, the South African foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, wished that the ICJ had grasped the nettle to order a halt in military operations. But, with some deft reasoning, she was satisfied that the only way Israel could implement the provisional measures would be through a ceasefire. Much the same view was expressed by the Associated Press: “The court’s half-dozen orders will be difficult to achieve without some sort of cease-fire or pause in the fighting.” That logic is clear enough, but the actions, given the various statements from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his officials alleging slander and a blood libel against their country, are unlikely to follow.
For decades, administrations in Washington have fantasised about castles in the skies, the outlandish notion that Palestinians and Israelis might exist in cosy accord upon lands stolen and manured by brutal death. Washington, playing the Hegemonic Father, could then perch above the fray, gaze paternally upon the scrapping disputants, and suggest what was best for both. But the two-state solution was always encumbered and heavily conditioned to take place on Israeli terms, leaving all mediation and interventions by outsiders flitting gestures lacking substance.
Now, no one can claim otherwise that Palestinian statehood is anything other than spectral, fantastic, and doomed – at least under the current warring regime. Netanyahu’s own political survival, profanely linked to Israel’s own existence, depends on not just stifling pregnancies in Gaza but preventing the birth of a nationally recognised Palestinian state.
What a cowardly act it was. A national broadcaster, dedicated to what should be fearless reporting, cowed by the intemperate bellyaching of a lobby concerned about coverage of the Israel-Gaza war. The investigation by The Age newspaper was revealing in showing that the dismissal of broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf last December 20 was the nasty fruit of a campaign waged against the corporation’s management. This included its chair, Ita Buttrose, and managing director David
“Accuracy and impartiality are core to the service we offer audiences,” Justin Stevens explained to staff. “We must stay independent and not ‘take sides’.”
This pointless assertion can only ever be a threat because it acts as an injunction on staff and a judgment against sources that do not favour the accepted line, however credible they might be. What proves acceptable, a condition that seems to have paralysed the ABC, is to never say that Israel massacres, commits war crimes, and brings about conditions approximating to genocide. Little wonder that coverage on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice does not get top billing on in the ABC news headlines.
Palestinians and Palestinian militias, on the other hand, can always be written about as brute savages, rapists and baby slayers. Throw in fanaticism and Islam, and you have the complete package ready for transmission. Coverage in the mainstays of most Western liberal democracies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as the late Robert Fisk pointed out with pungency, repeatedly asserts these divisions.
American Media claims Australia was there to assist. Was that Murdoch?
Striking the Houthis would seem, on virtually all counts, to be a signal failure. Benjamin H. Friedman of Defense Priorities sees error piled upon error: “The strikes on the Houthis will not work. They are very unlikely to stop Houthi attacks on shipping. The strikes’ probable failure will invite escalation to more violent means that may also fail.” The result: policymakers will be left “looking feckless and thus tempted to up the ante to more pointless war to solve a problem better left to diplomatic means.” Best forget any assuring notions of taking the sting out of the expanding hostilities. All roads to a widening war continue to lead to Israel.
Palestinians will never, given current conditions, be permitted sovereignty and anything remotely resembling a thriving, viable state. Israel, whose very existence is based on predation, dispossession and war, will never permit a Palestinian entity to be given equal standing at the diplomatic or security table. The US, in the tatty drag of an independent broker, will go along with the pantomime, promoting, as Blinken is, a sham, counterfeit form of autonomy, one forever subject to conditions, demarcations and restraints. And one thing is almost certain about any future rump Palestinian entity: it will be deprived of any right to defend itself.
One needs to ask where is the justice system that holds the people at the top accountable” None it seems when we read the Epstein List, or the sudden “convenient disappearance of documents”. Pedophilia is allowed to flourish except if you’re indigenous and accused. Intervention is ignored if you’re indigenous you’re guilty as charged. And in the case of the Epstein List the only person jailed was a woman.
And as for anything to do with revealing the Australian decision-making process about the decision to invade, despoil and ruin yet another Middle Eastern state in 2003, one is better off consulting records from the White House and the US State Department.
Malaysia also announced, in addition to barring ships using the Israeli flag from docking in the country, the banning of “any ship on its way to Israel from loading cargo in Malaysian ports.”
Blockade, barring, embargo, constriction – all these measures are familiar to the Israeli security establishment as it seeks to strangle and pulverize the Gaza Strip. While closing ports to Israeli shipping is modest in comparison to starving and strafing an entire population, it is fittingly reciprocal and warranted. The Israel campaign against Gaza, and Palestinians more generally, is no longer a local, contained affair.
Source: The Economic Incentive: Blocking Israel’s Supply Chain – » The Australian Independent Media Network
While confidence curdled, as with much else with tech assets, leading to the company stock falling by as much as 87% of value. The language ignores what Palantir really does.
As Gaza is being flattened and gradually exterminated by Israeli arms, Palantir remains loyal, even stubbornly so. “We are one of the few companies in the world to stand and announce our support for Israel, which remains steadfast,” the company stated in a letter to shareholders. With a record now well washed in blood, the company deserves a global protest movement that blocks its appeal and encourages a shareholder exodus.
A “temporary security zone on the perimeter of Gaza and an inspection mechanism on the border between Gaza and Egypt” will be established in accordance with “Israel’s security needs”. The zone will also serve to prevent “smuggling of weapons into the territory”, which sounds much like the original blockade, lasting 14 years, that was meant to achieve the same purpose.
The Israeli PM is, however, promising that the destruction of Hamas will take place “in full compliance with international law”, begging the question what sort of international law he is consulting. Given various official statements from Netanyahu’s cabinet and the Israeli Defence Forces, it must be either a law of jungle provenance or one applicable to animal kind. That same standard of legal analysis has permitted the generously expansive massacre of over 20,000 Palestinians, a staggering number of them children, the ongoing flattening of Gaza, and the utter destruction of critical infrastructure.
Given that Israeli law, alongside military and administrative policy, does nothing other than encourage the radicalisation of Palestinians and the fertilising of the Jihadist soil, this is charmingly delusionary.The current war will simply prove to be the same as previous ones, protean, adjustable, and shape changing. Conflict will simply continue by other means, a continued growth of flowering hatreds, leaving Israel a butcher’s bill of shekels and casualties it is only now chewing over.
Source: A Growing Butcher’s Bill: Israel’s War Spending – » The Australian Independent Media Network
“If they are serious about proposing a nuclear solution for Australia, the simplistic bumper stickers and populist echo chamber has to come to an end. Show the Australian people your verified nuclear costings and your detailed plans about where the nuclear power plants will go.”
Source: Flirting With Nuclear Energy Down Under – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Rather than seeing the inside of a prison or being bothered to the gallows by overly fussy lawyers, Kissinger spent ample time at high level receptions receiving huge wads of cash for offering his inner expertise. He was admired, adulated and pampered; the critics kept at bay.
Source: Henry Kissinger: Snake Oil Salesman of Gangster Realism – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Having left the Australian Public Service Code in tatters, Pezzullo will undoubtedly find himself on the board of a defence or security company and take his place in the military-industrial complex. He might finally get a chance to join a thinktank. His sacking, however, was the culmination of a culture long in the making. Over the decades, the major parties have made political appointments a matter of course, subordinating expertise and fearless advice to party loyalties. Perversely enough, Pezzullo was a perfect exponent of that tendency: a political civil servant. The result: Canberra is awash and sinking with officialdom terrified to take a different stance to the political agenda of the day. Agree with those in government, or risk languishing, demotion or worse.
Source: Rot in the Civil Service: Farewelling Mike Pezzullo – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Israel proves to be no Hollywood despite the years of experience of Jews in the film fiction industry. Incompetence seems more their skill set in everything but killing. Even that, it seems, has its blunders when done wholesale.
In this bleak mess, it is worth stressing that even if the hospital proved to be a military facility, humanitarian protections would not mysteriously cease for those patients and staff within it. “Anything that the attacking force can do to allow the humanitarian functions of that hospital to continue,” reasons Adil Haq of Rutgers Law School, “they’re obligated to do, even if there’s some office somewhere in the building where there is a fighter holed up.” But the strategy against Al-Shifa was never humanitarian to begin with, starting with depriving Gaza access to fuel, food and water. The rest is Pallywood.
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, was left unsatisfied by the proposals. As a proud, demagogic hater of civil liberties, he feels that prolonged punishment is the preferred formula. How this will be done constitutionally is not something that bothers his minute, vengeful imagination. But he proved enough of a fantasist to link the release of the detainees to the threat of rising antisemitism in Australia, a cavalier effort verging on the imbecilic.
Source: The Politics of Indefinite Detention in Australia – » The Australian Independent Media Network
This is certainly the case in Australia, where education is less a pursuit of knowledge as the acquiring of a commodity, laid out spam for so much return. On that vast island continent, the university, dominated by a largely semi-literate and utterly unaccountable management, is a place where secrets are buried, concealed with a gleeful dedication verging on mania.
Source: The militarised university: Where secrecy goes to thrive
To make a distinction between combatant and non-combatant, the molten fired freedom fighter and the mindful parent, is one of those fictional games that entertains the classroom of undergraduate fantasy but proves impossible to apply in battle. The agenda here is unmistakable: Israel, with the assistance and encouragement of the United States, is intent on burying any toothy, sprightly, worthy Palestinian resistance for the next generation. Should they succeed, they will only do so for a few years, if that.
Source: Viciousness Regnant: Humanitarianism as a Weasel Word – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Israel’s ludicrous and failed PR exercise reveals their level of desperation and lack of Intelligence.
As for the matter of making sure the attacks of October 7 are never repeated, the point is all too obvious. It will keep happening again with dreary, bloody predictability. If not next year, then the next decade. Or generation. Eliminating Hamas will simply be a bloody pruning exercise verging on genocide, allowing fresh vegetation to thrive. The forest of vengeance will continue to grow; the thousands of children who survive will never forgive the IDF for what they have done and continue to do. Each dead family brings with it a family of converts for the Palestinian cause. Israel’s publicity relations wonks would be best advised to pay Johnson and Morrison and wish them on their merry way.
Source: Showboating for War: Johnson and Morrison in Israel – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Since the 2000s, Australia has run a system of spectacular cruelty demonising those seeking asylum by sea. With nauseating consistency, the Australian body politic continues to keep concentration camp outposts for imminent asylum arrivals in Nauru and Manus Island. The government may have changed in May 2022, but the demonology had not. The Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil, continues to use such expressions as “breaking the market model” and deterring people smugglers.
Despite this negligible number, the Daily Telegraph was keen to treat the attempt by eleven desperate individuals seeking Australian shores as a horrendous attempt at penetrating the country’s own vaunted borders. This was blamed on the account keeping types in the Labor government. “There has been a 14 per cent reduction compared to the previous year in the time when planes are out patrolling the borders and a further 6 per cent reduction in the days when there are ships out patrolling.” Be wary of those flotillas, threatening Australia.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton was beside himself with joy at the revelation, as was the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, Senator James Patterson. In the Coalition, a lacerating sadism continues to fascinate.
Source: Taking the Refugee Hysteria off Ice – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Biden can’t afford to antagonize Israel where else could he put his secret air base but in the 4th most armed state in the world.
With such a gulf between rhetoric and reality, the world’s most powerful cue card reader also made sure he would partake in the finest traditions of the IDF public relations effort, disputing the casualty lists released by the Hamas-run health ministry. “I have no notion that Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.” At a tag of over 7,000 dead and rising, that’s a considerable amount of expended innocence.
Source: Biden’s Bungles over Gaza – » The Australian Independent Media Network
To execute what will be an operation of sheer pulverisation, euphemised as a mission to “degrade” and “dismantle” terrorist infrastructure, the Israeli Defence Force has now massed on the border with Gaza and is already making what are stated as “incursions”. Journalists from a whole stable of Western news outlets are reporting such this state of affairs as cathartic. There is even a charging frisson, a sense of masochistic delight at the handiwork that awaits the fourth most powerful military in the world.
To that end, the coverage is almost cartoonish: the savage Indians circling the caravans have struck the innocent settlers, and now must be punished with the full modern might of the “settling” power that really wants peace, but whose hand was forced. But the facts remain that the “people’s army,” as the IDF is often called, was hoodwinked, its intelligence community caught unawares. The murderous rage now following is only informed by vengeance born from impotence. The diplomatic corps has gone into hibernation, but in time, political realities will have to be acknowledged, though this is likely to be done over a mountain range of corpses.
While Australian politicians complained and sniffed, Israel has imposed another blockade of Gaza, with news reporters limply avoiding the point that the enclave of two million inhabitants was already blockaded. Such a political entity was barely breathing to begin with, but the promise now is to cut off water (97% of the water in Gaza is already contaminated), food, fuel and access to electricity (this was already subject to regular outages) is seen as a logical, natural barbarism. Searching for the appropriate word, the Israeli forces had dubbed this latest measure a “siege”.
During a visit to the Israeli Air Force’s underground command centre, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant summed up the attitude to this approach of even deeper deprivation against an already exhausted civilian population. “We are fighting animals and are acting accordingly.”
It has been a few days of slaughter-filled accounts. Starting on October 7 on the Jewish day of Simchat Torah, the State of Israel has faced assaults from hundreds of Hamas militants. Directed from southwards in the country, the mayhem has rattled the security and intelligence establishment smugly convinced in their reading of Palestinian motivations…
Source: Blue Light, Green Blood: Edifice Politics for Israel – » The Australian Independent Media Network
This isn’t a religious war but one of colonial oppression and the right of resistance. Collective Punishment is a war crime and more than half of Gaza are children the rest elderly being bombed and starved of food water and medical supplies,
The reality, as Raz Segal punchily declared, has been etched “into the landscape of the occupied Palestinian territories,” a policy of colonisation manifested “through walls, fences, other barriers, and roads intended only for Jews or only for Palestinians.” Writing in 2002, former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair merely confirmed that, “We established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories.”
When allegations of apartheid are made, along with accusations that Israel’s policy towards Palestinians conforms to a long tradition of colonial oppression and displacement by the dominant power, defenders arc up in defiance, seeing antisemitism everywhere. On February 8, 2022, Deborah Lipstadt, in testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in confirmation hearings for the role as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, did just that. She rejected any claims of apartheid, notably by Amnesty International, as “unhistorical,” a crass act of delegitimising a proud democratic country.
And what of the comments from those engaged in planning the assaults of October 7? Mohammad Deif, leader of Hamas’s military wing, claimed that the operation was launched as a direct response to Israeli provocations towards the sanctity of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, notably by Jewish nationalist settlers. “They [Israeli forces] consistently assault our women, the elderly, children and [the] youth; and prevent our people from praying in the Aqsa Mosque while allowing groups of Jews to desecrate the mosque with daily incursions.”
The UK Tory Government is acting under the advice of Tony Abbott trying to follow the “Australian Model” to gain political advantage, not do what is regarded as morally or ethically correct. Let’s also remind ourselves the UK like Australia, China, Russia, and Nth Korea has no Universal Bill of Human Rights in it’s Constitution only laws which it now wants to change. Like the Australian LNP, which wanted to rid itself of UNHRC or its Racial Discrimination Acts. Had a Bill of Rights been written both nations’ Constitutions Abbott would have had no impact.
Lord Justice Underhill underlined the lower court’s own admission that the Rwandan government was “intolerant of dissent; that there are restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech; and that political opponents have been detained in unofficial detention centres and have been subjected to torture and Article 3 ill-treatment short of torture.”
As a result, Braverman finds herself at sea, struggling to find a port, or centre, to park her own, brittle dogmas. In July, she told the House of Commons that she disagreed “fundamentally” with the view of the court “that Rwanda is not a safe place for refugees.” She went on to say that her government took their “international obligations very seriously and we are satisfied that the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill comply with the refugee convention. The fundamental principle remains, however, that those in need of protection should claim asylum at the earliest opportunity and in the first safe country they reach.”
Source: Cruel Prerogatives: Braverman on Refugees at the AEI – » The Australian Independent Media Network
While Rupert Murdoch has announced his stepping down as the head of News Corp, his empire still continues to be a blight on journalism, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.
Source: The ‘anger-tainer’ steps down: Rupert Murdoch’s non-retirement
Whatever the changes, A.J. Bauer is surely right in quashing any assumptions that Fox News “would suddenly become a bastion of journalistic integrity.” The rot, its dank and enervating properties, has well and truly set in, blighting journalism in toto and subordinating political classes too afraid to admit otherwise.
Australia remains a Colony
Five decades on, some parliamentarians have called for a formal acknowledgement of Canberra’s role in the destruction of a democracy that led to the death and torture of tens of thousands by a brutal military junta. The Greens spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and Peace, Senator Jordon Steele-John, stated his party’s position: “50 years on we know Australia was involved, as it worked to support the US national interest. To this day, Australia’s secretive and unaccountable national security apparatus has blocked the release of information and has denied closure for thousands of Chilean-Australians.”
In calling for an apology to the Chilean people, the Greens are also demanding the declassification of any relevant ASIS and ASIO documents that would show support for Pinochet, including implementing “oversight and reform to our intelligence agencies to ensure that this can never happen again.”
Source: Overthrowing Allende: Australia’s special role in destroying a democracy – Pearls and Irritations
The pendulum, it would seem, is again swinging away from the left. The shadow cast by the legacy of the military junta has grown thicker. As it does so, the Pinochet defenders, beneficiaries of economic policies that were prosecuted alongside murderous ones against critics, remain noisy and grotesquely at large.
Source: Brief for Murder: Pinochet’s Apologists Five Decades On – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The poor of India always suffer when any International Circus arrives in town. Modi is no exception in criminalizing the poor at the expense of an International image
As it happens, the G20 Delhi summit was, as so many of these occasions are, much ado about nothing. The absence of China and Russia turned the occasion into a G18 gathering, removing a good deal of flavour that would otherwise have been present. At the very least it provided Modi an excellent excuse to rough up the slum dwellers, using beautification as a strategy to criminalise the poor.
Source: G20 Aesthetics: Modi’s Brutal Delhi Facelift – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The moral here from the US military-industrial complex is: stay the course. The returns are worth it. And in such a calculus, concepts such as freedom and democracy can be commodified and budgeted. As for Ukrainian suffering? Well, let it continue.
Ambrose Bierce, whose cynicism supplies a hygienic cold wash, suggested that politics was always a matter of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. It involved conducting public affairs for private advantage. How right he was. One way of justifying such an effort is through using such words as the “national interest” or “public interest” in justifying government policies, from the erroneous to the criminal. They become weasel-like terms, soiling and spoiling language.
There is nothing to suggest that more flights will automatically reduce prices per se. As Karl Marx documents with expansive brilliance, markets tend towards concentration. In time, companies, much in the manner of hoodlums carving up neighbourhoods for their drugs trade, will divvy up their share and keep prices lucratively high. Miserable customers make for happy shareholders.
I…., governments gravitate in low fashion for the cheapest alternative. The payment of peanuts results in a monkey return.
The Australian and Canadian examples serve as salient lessons to those in government who forget their duties to the public. If you get into the bed of a sociopathic, petulant founder who could only conceive of dating girls through digital networks, using such skin-crawling argot as “the poke”, you are asking for trouble. Even more to the point, you are asking for some share of the blame in forfeiting your duties. Surely it would be more prudent for governments to establish their own information channels in times of crisis, invest in public broadcasters and improve their services to areas of a country, however remote?
The biggest blunder in recent history and who do we apologise to and for what? It remains unclear today why we didn’t tell America to fuck off back then.
The Vietnam War tormented and tore the societies who saw fit to participate in it. It defined a generation culturally and politically in terms creative and fractious. And it showed up the rulers to be ignorant rather than bright; blundering fools rather than sages secure in their preaching. Five decades on, the political classes in the United States and Australia are still seeking to find reasons for intervening in a country they scant understood, with a fanatic’s persuasion, and ideologue’s conviction, a moralist’s certainty. Old errors die hard.
Source: Whitewashing Down Under: The Vietnam War Fifty Years On – » The Australian Independent Media Network
In Australia, where the spirit of roguish exploitation remains strong, companies such as the national carrier Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank are rolling in cash. Supermarket outlets such as Coles have also announced huge returns. To them can be added such energy companies as AGL. While households are counting the dollars and cents for the weekly shopping and the fortnightly rental, corporate entities of a certain heft are thriving.
Source: The Profiteering Motive – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Australia’s funding priorities have been utterly muddled of late. At the Commonwealth level, there is cash to be found in every conceivable place to support every absurd military venture, as long as it targets those hideous authoritarians in Beijing. It seemed utterly absurd that, even as the Australian federal government announced its purchase of over 200 tomahawk cruise missiles – because that is exactly what the country needs – there are moves afoot to prune and cut projects conducted by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD).
OBSESSION WRIT LARGE BY THE GOP TO PROVE A POINT TO- FUCK AMERICA FIRST
While those in the US worried “about such things as inflation and the war in Ukraine, the top concerns of congressional Republicans can be ranked roughly as follows: 1) Hunter Biden; 2) Hunter Biden; 3) Hunter Biden; 4) Hunter Biden.”
Source: Inglorious Politics: The Hunter Biden Problem – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The Australian Government failed to challenge U.S. officials on the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the recent AUSMIN defence conference, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.
Source: Labor Government shuns Assange to placate U.S. sovereigns
While Australians pride themselves, for the most part, in having stricter gun laws than most and not being warlike in disposition, their governing officials have increasingly thought otherwise. War drums are beating. The chatter about acquiring and building armaments is getting more frenzied. As a client state of the US imperium, firmly enmeshed in the security arrangements of the AUKUS agreement, Canberra is becoming increasingly interested in militarising the population and turning the country into a garrison state.
Source: Kits for killing: AUKUS goes to school – Pearls and Irritations
As a terrible omen for the Australians, four defence personnel seem to have perished in waters near Hamilton Island through an accident with their MRH-90 Taipan helicopter as part of the Talisman Sabre war games. The US overlords were paternal and benevolent; their Australian counterparts were grateful for the interest. Blinken soppily suggested how the sacrifice was appreciated. “They have been on our minds throughout today; they remain very much on our minds right now.” But the message was clear: Australia, you are now less a state than a protectorate, territory to exploit, a resource basket to appropriate. Why not just make it official?
Source: AUSMIN and Assange: The Great Vassal Smackdown – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The absurd nature of the whole doll business reached a highwater mark on Australia’s ABC network in Gruen, a program dedicated to demystifying the world of advertising. On the panel, hardboiled advertising veterans dissect the entrails of their industry, including its ruthless manipulations. For one of the panellists, Russel Howcroft, Barbie was something of a modern Joan of Arc, a figure who really ought to think deeply about who she will eventually marry. “She’s just a toy, Russel!” came the mocking response from a fellow panellist.
Source: Barbie Pathologies: It’s All About a Doll – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Yes, Philip Morris is the world’s biggest Quit campaigner and BP is the world’s biggest anti-fossil fuel campaigner, and the world is expected to drink this Kool-Aid and join the theatre of the absurd?
Safran identifies an absurdist language at play, a vulgar negation of meaning. Philip Morris, for instance, envisages a future without cigarettes and intends to “unsmoke” the world.
Not everyone is on board with the terms of the AUKUS arrangement, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.Not everyone is on board with the terms of the AUKUS arrangement, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.
ANY SECURITY arrangement with too many variables and multiple contingencies, risks stuttering and keeling over.
We were told Iraq wasn’t about oil. Now will we be said about Lithium?
A traditional, potentially violent rivalry over the resources of yet another country, is in the offing. Only this time, the narrative will be slightly different: the competitors, notably the United States, habitually prone to cant and hustling, will argue that the mission to secure such minerals will be less a case of manifest destiny than environmental duty. The cry will be: Save the Planet; Invade Afghanistan.
Source: The Afghanistan Lithium Great Game – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Controversy surrounds the fate of wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, with some so-called experts claiming its release to be safe. Dr Binoy Kampmark reports.
The pretense of Real Democracy in India has gone. Modi and the Hindutva have come out into the world where various forms of Nationalism are currently flourishing. The face of religious nationalism has been revealed publicly in America, Israel, Turkey, Hungary, and other places. Is Australia Center left or right today? The ALP is certainly paying its respect to Religious and other fascist leaders. If Trump wins in 2024 Albo will greet him as he does Netanyahu.
In 2023, Modi had little reason to fear either rebuke from the Biden administration, or censure from Congress. India is now seen as more useful than ever, and its canny leader does not need lecturing about his own band of dangerous religious authoritarianism. Best, then, to drop the democratic values act, a show that is becoming increasingly absurd.
Source: Hindutva Goes to Washington: Narendra Modi’s US Visit – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The story made its debut in that king of rags, The Sun. The howls followed. As an article headline read: “Top BBC star who ‘paid child for sex pictures’ could be charged by cops and face years in prison, expert says.”
Source: The BBC Falls for Murdoch’s Bait – » The Australian Independent Media Network
If ever there was an instance of such a hideous failing in government policy and its cowardly implementation by the public service, Australia’s cruel, inept and vicious Robodebt program would have to be one of them.
Source: The Robodebt Rogues Gallery – » The Australian Independent Media Network
“Johnson will be remembered by history as the most immoral, dishonest and morally squalid of all British premiers.”
This is going a bit far; it was a certain Tony Blair who, playing the role of sidekick to US President George W. Bush, embarked upon an illegal war that led to the destruction of Iraq and a good portion of the Middle East. His conduct, both directly or otherwise, in the confection, and intentional misreading of intelligence material elevating Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to the level of globally dangerous despot, must surely be seen as squalid as any. Along the way, he corrupted public life and politicised institutions. And yet he moves and speaks, to this day, with impunity – the one who got away.
Dear future students wishing to come to Australia and study: don’t. The gurgling, decaying system is, on a regular basis, being exposed for what it is. If it is not students being exploited, it’s academics being manipulated to the point of ruinous ill-health. True, not all universities are equally rotten in the constellation of corporate manipulation, but each one is rotten in a slightly different way.
His terrorism had been principled, rational, his Weltanschauung outlined in his manifesto. To suggest medical illness and disturbance was to give into the pathologizing agenda, something that would render him mad and therefore illegitimate as a thinker.
Far from being mad, the dystopia of Kaczynski’s industrial society has found solid roots. And the forces behind it, be they the myriad of social networks, data hungry platforms and the increasingly agitated discussion about Artificial Intelligence and its generative properties, implicates us all.
Kaczynski defied the authorities and the technological state he so despised, eluding capture for almost two decades. Being incapable of summoning the forces to destroy technology, he eschewed it, becoming a rustic version of the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the man who “ate civilization”, and in so doing ate his own wickedness.
He lived in a cabin near Lincoln, Montana, a place in every sense off the grid: no electricity, no television, no telephone. He moved about with a bicycle. He took an interest in regeneration in nature. He even foraged. This was his way of romancing the notion of the “pre-industrial city”, as he termed it, where the “19th century frontiersman” could create “change himself, by his own choice.” Change for the “modern man”, in contrast, was “imposed”.
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