Shooting at Hurricane Irma: The Seriousness of Humour
It has all the ingredients of screwball stand up comedy, the necessary corrective to end-of-the-world scenarios. “And there she was, Irma, blowing herself through the room… And I shot her.”…
Dr Binoy Kampmark
Visions Of Europe: Macron In Athens
The myth can have a greater effect than an untruth, and those who are in the business of manufacturing and building them never go out of business. France’s President Emmanuel…
Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Prizes And The Rohingyas
Scratch the skin of a saint, claimed George Orwell, and you are bound to find a sinner with an extensive resume. Such resumes are evaluated in these modern times by…
Taking Aim: WikiLeaks, Congress And Hostile Agencies
Various scribbles have started to pepper the conversation started by the adventurous Mike Pompeo after he branded WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence agency before the Center for Strategic and International Studies. …
Beggars for War: The US, North Korea And Bankruptcy
The statement before members of the United Nations Security Council was both brash and high strung. The US ambassador had clearly decided that firm words were needed to understand the…
Lacking Transparency: Israeli Drones And Australian Defence
“Give us the chance to compete, to see our capabilities, to compare, to see the benefit we can bring with our [drone] system.” Shaul Shahar, Israel Aerospace Industries Vice-President, March…
Unnerving The Donald: North Korea’s Sixth Nuclear Test
We are now into reckless territory with the latest North Korean nuclear test – in all probability a genuine hydrogen weapon – sending the ever reckless US President Donald Trump…
The Flawed Institution: Australian Marriage And The Same-Sex Debate
It’s a pretty curious thing to see: marriage being defended at all. Like slavery, and not necessarily inconsistent with it, marriage is an institution. It embraces codes. It imparts obligations,…
Durable Conspiracies: Twenty Years After Princess Diana’s Death
It has been two decades, and a stocktake of the conspiracy theories over the circumstances of Princess Diana’s death in the Pont de l’Alma road Tunnel will reveal the same…
Resting Sea Shepherd: A Pause In The Whale War Saga
What a colourful run this outfit has had. Branded in 2013 by Judge Alex Kozinski of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit as pirates, the Sea Shepherd…
Disaster In The Sea Lanes: Bruising The US Navy
“That gives us great cause for concern that there’s something out there that we’re not getting at.” Admiral John Richardson, New York Times, Aug 21, 2017 The large question for…
Loving The Bollard: Turnbull’s Anti-Terror Tool Kit
It has been a week of bollards. And defence barriers. And hedges and vegetation. No, not the radio garden hour, or the herbaceous borders special featured on prime time television,…
The Departure Of The Ideologues: Sebastian Gorka Leaves The White House
Troubling times, indeed, if we are noting the ecstasy of Wall Street traders at the departure of a White House official. What troubles the financiers and banksters would surely delight…
Lying About Citizenship: Australian Politicians Before The High Court
It was nothing short of fabulous. Before the public, the political lie is deemed an imperative, instinctively cultured to repel anything that might appear, let alone resemble, truth. Never, whatever…
The Rise of the Killer Robot
“As companies building the technologies in artificial intelligence and robotics that may be repurposed to develop autonomous weapons, we feel especially responsible in raising this alarm.” Open Letter to the…
The Long, Long Story: “Principled Realism”, Trump And Afghanistan
The story continues with dispiriting relentlessness. The remark by Samuel Beckett in The Unnamable comes to mind: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” With the sense of incapacity about…
Statues In Defeat: The Confederacy, Treason And History
Statues of historical weight tend to represent heroism – of sorts. It might be of the doomed variety, and often is. Rebellious causes assume the visage of a stony form,…
The Burka Comes To Parliament: Pauline Hanson’s Panto
In few environments could this work. A member of Parliament (barely breathing, but still a parliament) running within a Muslim minority country (a small minority, at that) with mocking intent,…
Bullying Venezuela: Trump’s Unvarnished Threat
Whether he holds good on it is beside the point. President Donald J. Trump’s great value to US foreign policy is its lack of artifice and sophistication, a bullying force…
Breaking The Seal: Child Abuse And The Confessional
The only surprise was that it did not come sooner. Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has gotten on with the gruesome task of making 85…
A Plague on Parliament: Australia’s Citizenship Crisis
“You know, when you nominate for Parliament, there is actually a question, you’ve got to address that section 44 question.” Australian Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce It is proving to…
Money Laundering in Chief: Scandal at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia
The Australian banker is a smug species, arguably more than his international peers. Caught off guard by the financial disasters of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Australian banking…
Backward Steps: The Australian Recycling Sham
The green conscience received a setback last week with revelations that the Australian recycling industry is not what it seems. The middle class sensibility here is simple and dismissive: bin…
Avenging the King of Iran: The Fate of Hamed Shamshiripour
“The only responsible and humane thing for our government to do is immediately evacuate every single man on Manus, every single family and child on Nauru to safety on Australia.”…
Dismantling Tent City
It all began as a series of daring accretions starting last December. Now, Tent City in Sydney’s Martin Place has become something of an institution, albeit of the fleeting sort. …
Promises Of Incineration: The Nuclear Playground Gets Busy
“I don’t know what he’s saying and I’ve long ago given up trying to interpret what he says.” Senator John McCain on President Donald J. Trump, Aug 8, 2017 Moral…
Gay Plebiscites: Australia’s Crisis on Same-Sex Marriage
What a fabulous mess. And a churning one it is for the Australian government, now mired in yet another farce of weak leadership and bullying factions. A mess for those…
Suitable Company: Trump, Turnbull And Refugees
“I think it is a horrible deal, a disgusting deal that I would never have made. It is an embarrassment to the United States of America and you can say…
Fanciful Terrors: Bomb Plots And Australian Airport Security
In the classroom of international security, Australia remains an infant wanting attention before the older hands. During the Paris Peace talks, Prime Minister William Morris (“Billy”) Hughes screamed and hollered…
The Pine Gap Anniversary Party
It all happened without much fuss, since fuss was bound to be the enemy. Dignitaries, guests and various partners lined up for a gathering at Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern…
The Cardinal, The Church And Legal Theatre
“The world is watching.” Cathy Kezelman, Blue Knot Foundation president, The Washington Post, Jul 25, 2017 The show on Wednesday was grim, busy, crowded. Cardinal George Pell, the highest…
Refugee Conundrums: Resettlement, The UN And The US-Australia Deal
Having poured scorn and not an indecent amount of bile upon the refugee deal between the Obama administration and Canberra last year, US President Donald Trump was never going to…
Slaying In Minneapolis: Justine Damond, Shooting Cultures And Race
It plays out as a horror story of law enforcement. A distress call to the Minneapolis police about activity taking place behind the house on Washburn Avenue, possibly a sound…
From Spicy To The Mooch: A Farewell To Sean Spicer
What will entertainers do in his absence? White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was more than grist to the mill of celluloid delights, becoming, by the admission of the US…
Curbing Participation: The US Congress and Yemen
In recent times, there hasn’t been much cheery in the power circles of Washington. The US is gradually finding itself unmoored and floating from international agreements at a dizzying rate.…
Uhlmann’s Trump Problem
It’s all well and good to huff at the current President of the United States, who has managed to get under more irritated skin than an army of dedicated leaches. …
Militarising Civilian Life: Australia, Policing And Terrorism
It is far from unusual in recent times: a spate of terrorist activity, followed by police seemingly agog, then the call for cavalry, usually in the form of military forces…
A Question of Accountability: Cardinal Pell, The Vatican And Child Abuse
The Catholic Church, much in the manner of a modern corporation, is a sprawling edifice of operations and functions. To hold part of it accountable for abuses – against human,…
Exaggerated Victories: The Mosul Effect
The need to tick off the tactical and strategic boxes in the interminable war against Islamic State is so pressing it acquires the quality of ham acting, where generals and…
Tensions in Hamburg: The G20 Fractures
“I think it’s very clear that we could not reach consensus, but the differences were not papered over, they were clearly stated.” Angela Merkel, BBC News, Jul 8, 2017…
Dangerous Pantomime: Trump And North Korea’s Missile Program
It’s all fine while it remains on the stage, a matter of contained, almost camp displays of grunting and strutting. The diplomats can still have some say; the foreign ministries…
Hillsborough: Holding The Police To Account
“It is also a story of deceit and lies, of institutional defensiveness defeating truth and justice. It is evidence of a culture of denial within South Yorkshire Police.” Anne Burkett,…
The European Commission, Google and Anti-Competition
“Google’s practices have deprived millions of European consumers of the full benefits of competition, genuine choice and innovation.” Margrethe Vestager, June 28, 2017 Google, for some time, has been the…
In The Twitter Building: Tech Incubators And Altering Perceptions
San Francisco: The Twitter Building on Market Street, San Francisco, sounds like an aviary bustling with activity. With its bright open spaces and chirping entrepreneurs hatching the next project, it might…
Escalations In Syria
To become enmeshed in a war of incalculable variables; to be at bloody bruised loggerheads – this is the Syrian nightmare, where there are more punters than odds. Savagely, Syria…
Barclays In Hot Water: The Qatar Connection
Qatar has been making waves for some weeks now, and in the deluge, it has also strung along a few companions. One is the UK bank Barclays, which prided itself…
Puppet of History: Panama’s Manuel Noriega
“Bush appeared on television to praise the invading troops and to say his cowardly vision – all that a wimp with an inferiority complex could be capable of.” Manuel Noriega…
Teasing Theresa: The EU, Brexit And The British Elections
It took little time for political leaders in the European Union to start dangling the carrot in front of a wounded British Prime Minister. Theresa May’s defeated victory in the…
James Comey’s Testimony
The entertainment reality show got another instalment on Thursday with the testimony of former FBI director James Comey before members of the Senate intelligence committee. The various birds of prey…
Jeremy Corbyn’s Surge
The pollsters only got it partly wrong this time, though the most spectacular prediction cock-up was that on what would happen to British Labour prior to the exit polls. Scotland…
Punishing Qatar
Are we in need of distractions? The political masters obviously think so. There have been hackings, cuttings, slayings and crushing events. As battles continue raging in Syria and northern Iraq,…
Terror As Opportunity: Exploiting The London Attacks
The hallmark of any administration worth its corruptly curing salt is making hay while the sun shines its searing rays. Not long after the slashing and running down was taking…
Predictable Exits: Trump And The Paris Agreement
The distress caused by US President Donald Trump in over the last week continues the theme of exit: old alliances and agreements need revision; compacts need unpacking. Thursday saw Trump…
The U-Turn Queen: Theresa May in Action
Authoritarian styles can come at cost. The manner with which the British Prime Minister has reacted to the concept of debate has been one such point. While the joys of…
John McCain in Australia
There is no getting away from the fact that a visit to that known outpost of American Empire, Australia, softens the mind and leads to a more vigorous wagging of…
Forrest Donations And False Charity
It is easy to sneer, and availing oneself of this chance, let’s. The celebratory guff floating on the media glow of mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest for giving away $400…
Barging Through NATO: Donald Trump In Europe
From his big white bird did the President descend upon his dreading European hosts, looking much like natives waiting to be slaughtered or ravished. As Donald Trump pushed his way…
The Merry Life of Dragnet Surveillance
In the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, a grudging acceptance was made by the Obama administration that something had to be done about a roguish surveillance complex unhinged…
Twenty-Seven Hours: Donald Trump in Israel
It was time to do the Zionist boogie within a mere period of 27 hours, and anyone wishing to see two muggers of history enjoying each other’s company found themselves…
Back to Realpolitik: Trump in Saudi Arabia
“You are a unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible.” President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to President Donald Trump, New York Times, May 21, 2017 The business of…
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