scomo... 

Arriving in Melbourne at a dinner for the faithful it seems, ScoMo was upbeat. He had slayed the French Napoleon in a submarine Waterloo op, he’d made a pledge that “global warming is a major problem for humanity”, that COAL was good for the economy, that going "all the way with the damn Yankee” was the Australian way of the future and that electric cars were the salvation of the weekends. Life was beaut — pity he had to wait till next year to declare an election as time had run out in this fast disappearing calendar year.

TVkabul

More than ever, Australia is a suitable piece of real estate for the US espionage and war-gaming. A detailed analysis by Richard Tanter.

Commitment to the maintenance of the American alliance has consistently overwhelmed any other measure of Australian national or strategic interest. Two material elements of the wider impact of the US alliance on Australian defence and foreign policy are the habit of participation in US wars and silent acceptance of more ‘’joint’’ bases.

shredder

Seventy-four counties in Georgia have failed to produce original images of more than 17,000 ballots from the November 2020 election, according to VoterGA, a not-for-profit election monitoring organisation. Last year Joe Biden won the state by a razor-thin margin of 0.23 percent or 11,779 votes.

date 

The first Anzacs challenged the reasons for war, so the federal education minister’s insistence that Anzac Day cannot be ‘contested’ at school is political pantomime.

On Remembrance Day we will pause and offer some act of respect. And then we may think critically about war. We may ask how and why we get into war, and what exactly we fight for?

But not Alan Tudge, federal Minister for Education. He has been fuming at curriculum planners who have listed Anzac Day among historical subjects that can be “contested” in the classroom. Tudge has insisted that Anzac Day is “not contested”.

toothpicks

Former prime minister Paul Keating thinks Australia has lost its way in the region and is foolish to seek a new submarine deal to contain China’s military efforts.

In a scathing critique of Australia’s foreign and defence policy, the former Labor leader said the decision to work with the United States and United Kingdom on nuclear-powered submarines was “like throwing a handful of toothpicks at a mountain”.

He likened the deal – which came under the auspices of the new AUKUS pact – to “buying an old 747”, saying the most obvious choice would have been a French boat which used more modern technology.

fishing

Analyst: As Steele Dossier Source Charged With Lying, All Roads Lead to Hillary Clinton Campaign

By Ekaterina Blinova

Igor Danchenko, a key source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele, was arrested on 4 November in Northern Virginia on an indictment by Special Counsel John Durham, who is looking into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. Why did Durham pick Danchenko as his next target and who's next?

Danchenko is charged with making false statements to the FBI, just like Michael Sussmann, former counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, who was indicted by a grand jury on 16 September.

oily

Several top oil-producing countries stacked their delegations to the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow with oil and gas industry executives and officials from their oil ministries. In some cases, oil personnel represented significant portions of their overall country delegation, according to a DeSmog analysis.

The UK organizers of the COP26 climate conference very publicly declined to offer international oil companies any slots in the conference or any formal role in the event, and oil companies without credible climate programs were also barred from sponsoring events at the high-stakes international talks currently underway.

wolves

As someone who worked for the American Democratic Party and drank all the Kool-Aid – even giving it to others – I can tell you definitively that they do not need the Republicans to make them lose; the art of self-destruction seems embedded in the ethos of the party. 

The basic lack of collective self-reflection is obvious in the media duck-and-cover after every crushing election loss. 

By Tara Reade

election-mode

It was almost as if the last election campaign had never happened. Here was Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his colleagues enthusiastically spruiking next-generation technology vehicles:  hybrid, bio-fuelled, hydrogen and, yes, electric cars.

Katie Allen, first-term Liberal MP and outspoken advocate for climate action, introduced her boss fresh off the plane from the Glasgow climate summit at Toyota’s Altona plant in Melbourne’s western suburbs.

“I know my constituents will be enthusiastically embracing electric vehicles,” the inner-city MP for the seat of Higgins said. “I myself have bought an electric vehicle. We need practical solutions to do the right thing for the planet.”

ev...

Electric vehicle groups have lashed out at the federal government’s long-awaited future fuels policy, labelling the proposal a “fizzer”.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison will unveil the government’s electric vehicle strategy later on Tuesday, which will aim to put 1.7 million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2030.

The abrupt backflip comes after the Prime Minister derided electric vehicles in the lead-up to the last federal election as “ending the weekend”.

As part of the $500 million Future Fuels strategy, the government anticipates $250 million will be used to build charging stations and commercial fleets.

endoftimes

I have never had much interest in faith versus science debates. They simply did not resonate with me. I believe God created the world, but I never felt the need to nail down the details or method of creation. I went to a fairly conservative evangelical seminary (founded by Billy Graham himself), and even there, I was taught that Genesis 1 was more like a hymn or a poem than a science textbook. I have long been influenced by early church theologians like Augustine of Hippo, who understood the biblical creation account as primarily making theological claims instead of offering a precise explanation of cosmological origins.

By Tish Harrison Warren

ithaka

After Julian Assange was arrested at London's Ecuadorian embassy in 2019, his Victoria-based father stepped into the legal, political and media fray. Joined by Julian's fiancée, Stella Moris, 76-year-old Shipton lays out the situation to journalists, often sounding eerily like his detained son.

rambo

A new list of the strongest armies in the world was published recently, based on the Global Fire Power 2021 index, in which the first three countries remained unchanged – the USA, Russia and China. Let us recall that the Global Firepower ranking uses more than 50 factors to determine the PowerIndex (PwrIndx) of foreign armies with reference to the categories ranging from military power and finance to logistics and geography. Global Firepower carefully monitors the annual defense expenditure budgets of each country on this list, which are essential to maintain a country’s defense capability. Experts have been compiling the Global Firepower rating since 2006, and it covers 140 countries of the world.

mo... 

The suburbs of Darlinghurst, Woolloomooloo and Kings Cross in Sydney, Australia, in the late 1920s and early 1930s was a world in turmoil with vicious ‘razor’ gangs battling for control of the criminal underworld.  They were called razor gangs because of the cut throat razor (a straight shaving blade) that was the weapon of choice, especially after the Pistol Licensing Act of 1927 meant automatic gaol time for anyone caught carrying an unlicensed firearm.

The razor gangs at the heart of these wars were led by Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh. The upsurge in organised crime in the late 1920s is usually attributed to several factors:

steptoe and son

Public burning has understandably had a bad rap throughout history, from Savonarola’s late 15th century bonfires of the vanities and his own eventual death by fire, to the Nazi student book burnings of 1933; there is usually something ominous about fire in public places, the flicker of mob rule. Then again, the burning of effigies can represent an act of political solidarity.