blinken...

It must be a sure handicap to be saddled with such a name when piloting a large government department, but US Secretary of State Antony Blinken shows no sign of that bothering him.  It has, however, become a hallmark of a policy babble that is markedly devoid of foresight and heavily marked by stammering confusion.

On his trip to Australia, Blinken showed us, again, how morality and forced ethics in the international scene can be the stuff of particularly bad pantomime.  He sounded, all too often, as an individual sighing about the threats to US power while inflating those of its adversaries.  Russia and China were, as they tend to be these days, at the front of the queue of paranoid agitation.

jew

The federal government will list the entirety of Palestinian group Hamas as a terrorist organisation, including its political wing.

voters

Scott Morrison is running out of time and plausible ideas to save his floundering government, with new polling confirming his worst fears.

Those fears led him to approach the 60 Minutes program late last year to help him launch a makeover of his image among many as an incompetent, dishonest bully who has a problem with women.

The Nine Network’s flagship current affairs program obliged, assigning a crew to go into the inner sanctum of the Morrison family and meet the Prime Minister’s “secret weapon”, his wife Jenny.

Desperate times demand desperate measures.

crapp...

It's a rare thing for the boss of ASIO to publicly push back at the government's political line of attack. It's rarer still for the spy chief to intervene twice in the space of 48 hours. Yet this is where we've arrived, leaving the Prime Minister's "reds under the beds" scare campaign against his opponent look, well, desperate. 

At the end of last week's internal shambles over religious discrimination, Peter Dutton flicked the switch to what he clearly believed to be more comfortable ground: national security. The Chinese Communist Party, he warned parliament, had "made a decision about who they're going to back in the next federal election. That's open. That is obvious. And they have picked this bloke, the Leader of the Opposition, as their candidate."

cia...

The Associated Press (AP) published an article on Tuesday citing unnamed “US intelligence officials” who accused libertarian financial blog ZeroHedge – which has repeatedly criticized US President Joe Biden – of “amplifying Russian propaganda.”

Nomaan Merchant, AP’s intelligence and national security reporter, wrotethat the unnamed officials accused ZeroHedge of publishing articles “created by Moscow-controlled media that were then shared by outlets and people unaware of their nexus to Russian intelligence.”

heat

During the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) (56 Mya), the planet warmed by 5 to 8 °C, deep-sea organisms went extinct, and the oceans rapidly acidified. Geochemical records from fossil shells of a group of plankton called foraminifera record how much ocean pH decreased during the PETM. Here, we apply a geochemical indicator, the B/Ca content of foraminifera, to reconstruct the amount and makeup of the carbon added to the ocean. Our reconstruction invokes volcanic emissions as a driver of PETM warming and suggests that the buffering capacity of the ocean increased, which helped to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, our estimates confirm that modern CO2 release is occurring much faster than PETM carbon release.

unpossible

A Russian attack on Ukraine is "still very much a possibility", but the human cost would be "immense", US President Joe Biden has said.

In remarks televised nationally, he said the US was ready to respond decisively to such a move.

nazi

Partisans the world over prefer to see no evil on their own side. Yet even by the rock-bottom standards of modern politics, it’s appalling to watch the trans-Atlantic liberals elide, excuse, and obfuscate the presence of neo-Nazis and other ideological ghastlies among their champs in places like Ukraine and Hungary.

Start with embattled Ukraine. On Monday, print and broadcast media across the Anglosphere led with a 79-year-old Ukrainian great grandmother, Valentyna Konstantynovska, receiving small-arms training in the eastern city of Mariupol in preparation for a potential Russian invasion. The event was seemingly readymade for the media: The silver-haired, wrinkly granny vowed, “I will defend my home, my city, my children.”

psaki

In 2005, President George W. Bush allegedly addressed a meeting of Republicans discussing whether to renew the Patriot Act due to its possible unconstitutionality by angrily blurting out that the Constitution was “just a goddamned piece of paper!” If the story is true, it partly explains the numerous crimes committed by Bush and his associates, including the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq based on hyped and even fabricated intelligence.

boxing

Like in a boxing match, the judges are biased on the Ukraine issue. I am not afraid of calling this first round to Russia. But The New York Times is more nuanced with complexed bullshit:

As their standoff over Ukraine continues, Moscow and Washington are playing an increasingly high-stakes, increasingly complex game of signaling to try to secure their aims without firing a shot.

fraud

In 2017, Professor J. Alex Halderman demonstrated to the Senate Intelligence Committee that it was very easy to rig Dominion voting machines. The corporation had then overhauled its machines in order to guarantee the integrity of the ballots.

During the 2020 US presidential election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (Republican) encouraged residents of his state to vote by mail and provided Dominion machines for those who were determined to vote in person.

President Donald Trump had contacted Secretary Brad Raffensperger by phone. Their conversation was recorded and cherry-picked excerpts were used against him; Mr. Raffensperger insisted that President Trump had pressured him to modify the Georgia results.

fraud

In 2017, Professor J. Alex Halderman demonstrated to the Senate Intelligence Committee that it was very easy to rig Dominion voting machines. The corporation had then overhauled its machines in order to guarantee the integrity of the ballots.

During the 2020 US presidential election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (Republican) encouraged residents of his state to vote by mail and provided Dominion machines for those who were determined to vote in person.

President Donald Trump had contacted Secretary Brad Raffensperger by phone. Their conversation was recorded and cherry-picked excerpts were used against him; Mr. Raffensperger insisted that President Trump had pressured him to modify the Georgia results.

clown

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has admitted he needs more “focus” in the looming federal election campaign but has assured government MPs he can lead them to victory if they showed more discipline after the events of last week.

“You haven’t seen me as focused as I can be, yet, and you will see it,” Mr Morrison told Liberal and Nationals colleagues on Tuesday in one of their last meetings in Canberra before the campaign.

“I know where we’re going and we’re going to get there.”

gray

OffGuardian has gone off. Gone off the planet… 

It has been demonising sciences without any understanding and no care for proper information for far too long. OffGuardian is sick. Off...

Gus already complained to OffGuardian boffins a while back in regard to an OffG article:

Here is a link: https://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33148

wef

The World Economic Forum, the exclusive talk shop that meets yearly in Davos, is at it again, this time looking to drive a wedge between the races. This begs the question: Why are capitalists so gung-ho about ‘Marxist’ ideology?

Once upon a time, in some mythical ‘golden age’, the only thing common folk had to fear whenever the robber barons met for a weekend of cocktails at some remote resort was that a further deterioration of living standards would quickly ensue. Those happily predictable days are over.