bighead

In an election year pledges are made to be broken; promises are made to seduce, not convince. When the subject matter involves fictional submarines, even greater care should be taken.

The prolonged, costly nightmare of Australia’s submarine policy took another turn on March 6. The Defence Minister Peter Dutton could barely contain his excitement with the announcement that the Morrison government would soon be unveiling which nuclear-powered submarines it would acquire. “We will have an announcement within the next couple of months about which boat we are going with, what we can do in the interim.”

quixomo

“Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Frydenberg and Poato Dutton, my friends, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth.”

"What giants?" Asked Poato Dutton.

"The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long.”

pomp

On his visit to Taipei, Mike Pompeo,  advocated on 28 February 2022 that the US government should “immediately take necessary and long-overdue steps to do the right and obvious thing, that is to offer the Republic of China America’s diplomatic recognition as a free and sovereign country.” .

The situation in Russia and Ukraine has spooked the world. The stability of Sino-US relations, the two largest powers and economies, is more important than ever for the cause of world peace. One issue that can make things very much worse is provocative action relating to Taiwan.

butterfly

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.....

dance

Zelenskyy is the new darling of the Western media because he had been "dancing with the stars" in front of a appreciative audience (he won the contest), while "dancing with NATO" behind their backs to become Statesman-like. And here the crunch of this story which has pained Putin so much. Did Vladimir have any choice but become a tyrant which he is not?

Nothing can excuse Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its bombing of residential suburbs and social infrastructure. It is nothing short of a war crime. But how did it come to this?

An article by Blake Fleetwood a former staff reporter on The New York Times argues that actions by the West (especially the USA) helped create the monster we now have. See:

paul

President Biden’s “maskless” State of the Union signifies the near-end of the COVID tyranny we have lived under for the past two years. Fortunately for Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve, the Ukraine-Russia conflict is replacing COVID as a ready-made excuse for their failures and a justification for expanding their power.

futbol

And they’re back! It’s like one of those 1960s Hammer Film Productions horror-movie series with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee … Return of the Putin-Nazis! Revenge of the Putin-Nazis! Return of the Revenge of the Bride of the Putin-Nazis!

And this time they are not horsing around with stealing elections from Hillary Clinton with anti-masturbation Facebook ads. They are going straight for “Democracy’s” jugular!

sub

When is this government going to learn that you don’t put defence facilities in areas with major populations (“Three east coast sites on nuclear subs shortlist”, March 7)? Newcastle, Port Kembla and Brisbane are not suitable. The Australian coastline has plenty of suitable sites away from built-up areas: Jervis Bay for instance. This government is playing election politics again. Terry Cook, Ermington

jetstream

Here's the latest shot at 11 am, 08/03/2022, of the Jet Stream over Australia.

You don't have to be an expert to know it's pathetic. We cannot speculate really if the pissy Jet Stream of the last few days is the cause or is the effect of the silly weather we are having here in Sydney. My guess would be that because the Jet Stream is so weak, it cannot push away the "normal" alternate of high and low pressure system over the continent, usually changing the system every three days.

irishtoon

Broadly speaking, it’s no surprise that society’s elites hold their noses when they approach the topic of mass democracy. When have the wealthy and powerful ever thought it was a good idea to put decision-making in the hands of the poor and ignorant? The answer, ironically enough, is in Gladstone’s era, the century roughly beginning in 1850. That century is perhaps unique in all of human history in how much insistence there was on the importance of redistributing power from the elites to the masses.

sam...

 It's a trap...

The aim of the game is to destroy Russia.

The USA administration, an expert on deceit, is winning the “info war”, which in the olden days would have been called propaganda.

The question is does Putin cares about this at this stage? The info war has been basically set up as to entertain the Ukrainian population with “Dancing With The Stars” (a crass American kultur) while the US has been planning to place nukes on the Russian borders (for the final hard conquest).

As usual the USA set a trap. This time for the Russian bear. 

blessed

This is a story about America, an America that, even today, exists largely beyond the serious attention of mainstream politics and news media. Rather, these institutions ignore or marginalize the story's deeper significance, at a great cost to the country. In other words, the story is not about the usual things that are said to have caused the crisis in American democracy: policy gridlock, electoral fraud, political corruption, even insurrection. Nor is it about the competition between the ideologies of capitalism and socialism, nor the various threats to democracy, such as autocracy, plutocracy and kleptocracy.

America's deepest and most dangerous divide isn't between Democrats and Republicans

policy

Many Western journalists I meet tell me there are not many Nazis in Ukraine. At least no more than in a Western country such as Australia. I don’t argue. I have no proofs of the numbers and THEY have no proofs of the numbers either. But we can run an estimate. Eric Campbell mentioned that at the last elections in Ukraine the Nazis extreme right only got 3 per cent of the votes, This represents about 1.4 million people for the Nazi party.

Does our own extreme right party gets about the same proportion? who knows, but our breed of extreme right is different. They don’t carry guns. They just talk. So there. End of story.

barnaby

Barnaby Joyce has been called in to quell a revolt in a north-west New South Wales branch of the National party over the planned route of Australian Rail Track Corporation’s multi-billion-dollar inland rail project.

In an extraordinary move, the National party’s Narrabri branch voted last month to withdraw support for the government’s preferred route after hearing from long-term local irrigation and hydrology expert Jim Purcell.

grip 

THE NEWS YOU SEE:

A Ukrainian official says a second attempt to evacuate civilians from the under-siege city of Mariupol has failed due to continued Russian shelling.

Key points:

Evacuations from Mariupol were scheduled to begin at noon local time

But civilians were forced back into shelters as the bombardment continued

Russia said the military campaign in Ukraine was going "according to plan" and would not end until Kyiv stopped fighting

Most people in the port city are sleeping in bomb shelters to escape more than six days of near-constant bombardment by encircling Russian forces that has cut off food, water, power and heating supplies, according to the Ukrainian authorities.