piggies

How to justify making grants not recommended by the relevant department? Easy – just say you do.

That’s what is disclosed by Freedom of Information requests into the wealth of federal government not-recommended-but-given grants.

And when National Party ministers get their hands on a pork barrel, public servants’ analysis of projects’ suitability and priority seems to matter particularly little.

targetsMedicare cuts prove the Coalition is bad for our health

 

By Michelle Pini | 21 October 2021, 7:00am |  37 comments |  951 | 

(Cartoon by Mark David / @MDavidCartoons)

 

diet

'Who the Hell Shrunk Mike and Why?' Twitter Explodes Over Pompeo's Dramatic Weight Loss...

 

Two months ago, Pompeo joined Sean Hannity on Fox News to rip into the Joe Biden administration over its "panicked" tactics in Afghanistan. However, all Twitter was obsessed with was his slimmer looks.Ex-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has left the public curious following his appearance on Fox News this week, as many social media users noticed he'd lost a staggering amount of weight.

 

will...

As the Taliban rapidly crushed US-backed Afghan forces, many politicians, pundits, and military leaders expressed surprise at having overestimated an ally’s will to fight and underestimated the enemy’s. Similarly in 2014, after the Islamic State (ISIS) routed US-backed Iraqi forces, President Obama endorsed the intelligence assessment that “predicting the will to fight…is an imponderable.” 

 

That attitude reflects political and military leaders’ continual discounting of research, supported and known by many of those leaders, on the importance of sacred values and spiritual strength to the will to fight. It may remain “imponderable”—and attendant security challenges seemingly intractable—so long as it continues to be viewed through a narrow lens of instrumental, utilitarian rationality.

 

 

psaki

Earlier this week, the New York Post reported that at least 2,000 migrant children and teens might have been taken to suburban New York since 8 August. 

Netizens have trolled White House press secretary Jen Psaki after she appeared to have tried to make a joke when responding to a reporter's question on migrants.

The journalist said he wondered why the Biden administration is reportedly flying "thousands of migrants from the border" to Florida and suburban New York "in the middle of the night".

game...

Russia previously announced the suspension of operations of its permanent mission in NATO, as well as the activities of the alliance's military liaison mission and NATO information office in Moscow. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has stated that it was NATO, who "buried" the idea of consultations with Moscow. He added that the Kremlin and the western alliance hadn't had exchanges for a long time ahead of Russia deciding to pull the plug on bilateral communications on 18 October.

 

yesMCampaigners are reportedly keen to offer 'education workshops' to Newcastle fans who were spotted wearing headdresses and tea towels on their heads at the Premier League club's first match after their takeover by new Saudi owners. 

Exuberant fans of the underperforming top-flight team, which is now owned by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) following a protracted takeover, were filmed dancing outside St James' Park while waving the Saudi national flag before the 3-2 defeat to Tottenham on Sunday.

bolt...

Just one day after News Corp made headlines for announcing a shocking climate change campaign, Sky News host Andrew Bolt has called the move “rubbish”.

“Millions of Australian readers would have got a shock this morning when they picked up their Murdoch newspapers around the country,” Bolt told his audience on Sky News’ The Bolt Report, effectively biting the climate change-denying hand that feeds him.

 

“Prime Minister Scott Morrison will actually be delighted because he can now have the Malcolm Turnbull-type policy that he wants – net zero emissions – and take it to the next big global warming conference in Glasgow in November, knowing that he has the backing of the Murdoch media.”

 

AGs

Australia’s bugging of Timor-Leste’s Cabinet rooms and subsequent hounding of Bernard Collaery and a former intelligence officer was a display of mendacity, duplicity, fraud, criminal trespass and contempt of international law.

 

The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste came into existence on May 20, 2002. The Timor Sea, lying between Australia’s north and Timor itself, covers various oil and gas fields, all of which are on the Timorese side of the median line. For most of the next 15 years the Australian government did its best to persuade the world, and the Timorese in particular, that Australia should retain control and authority over these oil and gas fields.

 donations...

A look at Australia's billion-dollar political lobbying industry, Christiaan Van Vuuren's unlikely journey shows us why we should care, and how we can safeguard our democracy from being sold to the highest bidder.

Premiered Tuesday 19 October at 8.30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV

 assange

Urge NGOs to Act

ACTION: URGE NGOS TO TAKE A PUBLIC, FORMAL STAND ON WIKILEAKS AND ASSANGE

Reasoning for this action: NGOs are caught in a tension. They are faced with pressures of, on the one hand, the public and their memberships’ expectations that they will take a position on a given issue that matters to the public and the membership; and on the other hand, their funding sources.

pee pee...Former MI6 man Christopher Steele is the subject of an obscenely vapid ABC documentary, with a contemptible interview by George Stephanopoulos that’s so deferential it’s like watching a first date that should be an interrogation.  

Just as MI6 super spy James Bond is back in theatres with No Time to Die, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele is back in the spotlight with the story that refuses to die, in an ABC ‘documentary’ titled Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier, now streaming on Hulu. 

printing

What’s happening to inflation? We know, of course, what the current numbers say: Inflation is high right now, although not 1970s high. But is this a blip or the beginning of a longer-term problem? Economists are deeply divided. I’m basically for the former, on what has come to be known as Team Transitory, but I might be wrong — and the data are sufficiently ambiguous that both sides can claim that the evidence supports their take.

 

By Paul Krugman

powell

Colin Powell, Who Shaped U.S. National Security, Dies at 84

A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, secretary of state and national security adviser, Mr. Powell died of complications of Covid-19, his family said.

 

Colin L. Powell, who in four decades of public life served as the nation’s top soldier, diplomat and national security adviser, and whose speech at the United Nations in 2003 helped pave the way for the United States to go to war in Iraq, died on Monday. He was 84.

The cause was complications of Covid-19, his family said in a statement, adding that he had been vaccinated and was being treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Bethesda, Md., when he died there.

flag

From time to time (all the time) we should explore various points of view. Today we look at Jeffrey A. Tucker — the Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. Tucker is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.