Brexit And The UK Supreme Court
It was predicted, it was warned against, and it happened: Prime Minister Theresa May’s government cannot commence the official process for leaving the European Union without parliamentary approval. In upholding…
Dr Binoy Kampmark
The Revolt Of The Intelligence Community: Future Battles With President Donald Trump
Factionalism and fury are basic ingredients of the US Republic. Designed as a classic response to the lynch mob fantasy of direct democracy, and the weakness of unaccountable monarchy, those…
Sports And Security: Manchester United’s Counter-Terrorism Chief
It seemed an unnecessarily grand gesture, but the English Premier league discovered last week that Manchester United had appointed its own counterterrorism manager. The person is said to be a…
Ignored Ironies: Women, Protest And Donald Trump
The USA has Urinary Trump Infection. Protest sign, San Francisco Women’s Rally, Jan 21, 2017 San Francisco: The man, called Bruce, goes by the name of DJ Chocolate Starfish. He…
The Birth Of Trumpland: Notes On An Inauguration
San Francisco: With the country ridden by woe and revulsion; with the discontent so profound and vicious, the Trump presidency began. It did so by way of comparison – of the…
Scoundrels Of Patriotism: The Freeing Of Chelsea Manning
‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’ Samuel Johnson, Apr 7, 1775 in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. He might have had a sharp attack of conscience, but President Barack…
NATO And Obsolescence: Donald Trump And The History Of An Alliance
It should be a point of some delicious reflection for peace activists who have fought for decades against the nature of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. It brought the US…
Pathological Terror: Health Fears Ahead of Trump’s Inauguration
“Ain’t going to let no ego maniac turn me around, turn me around, keep on walking, keep on talking going to build ourselves a brand-new world.” Joan Baez, San Francisco,…
Dossiers, Make Believe And Fantasy: The CIA, Trump And Unverified News
London: Morning breakfast news on the BBC’s Radio Four on Friday was a delightful affair filled with discussions on Russia (when do we not talk about that busy, stirring Bear these…
Liquid Modernity: Zygmunt Bauman And The Rootless Condition
“It was the rational world of modern civilization that made the Holocaust unthinkable.”-Zygmunt Bauman Modernity, as the late Zygmunt Bauman noted in his magisterially provocative Modernity and the Holocaust (1989)…
Squeeze And Wiggle: Transport Chaos In London
London.: It has the air of being a well minted yet distinctly first world problem: inconvenienced commuters in one of the world’s first true megalopolises, gnashing their teeth as they…
Cities Of Sickness: Pollution, Dementia And The Modern Condition
London: The journey from Tooting to the British Library tends to be a crowded affair at the best of times. Humans mash in ungainly fashion on the London Underground, though not…
The War On Experts: Brexit, Populism And Sir Ivan Rogers’ Resignation
London: Populism has a much needed place in political arrangements, the necessary, disruptive gust that keeps the complacent from losing touch. For one, it often threatens to destroy those arrangements altogether,…
Aping Washington: Tony Abbott, Israel And Australian Foreign Policy
He is one of Australia’s truly singular politicians, relentlessly zealous, hewn from the granite of an older fanaticism. Despise him, loathe him, but consider him for one fundamental point: he…
False Unities: Brexit In The New Year
London: The pile of detritus in Tooting had been growing ahead of the New Year’s Eve gatherings. The pubs were initiating their usual trick of closure and charging for tickets in…
Carrie Fisher: Hollywood In-Breeding And The Velocity Of Being
There was always going to be a good deal of thick drama around Carrie Fisher, by her own confession, a product of Hollywood in-breeding. Her parents, Debbie Reynolds and the…
Cities Of Death: History, Pollution And China’s Smog
Cities are the monsters of civilization, the accrual of various factors of organisation that stress development and advancement. The latter two terms are often impossible to gauge except by comparison…
Road Blocks To Data Retention: Invalidating The Snoopers’ Charter
Deemed by the Home Office an exemplar of legislation balancing security and freedoms, the UK Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA), otherwise known as the Snoopers’ Charter, did not…
Scorning The Dead: The Berlin Truck Attack And The Refugee Question
The hard-nosed neo-cons were certainly showing little interest in linking arguments, examining evidence, or even considering elementary logic in the aftermath of the Berlin truck attack near the Gedächtniskirche. With…
Steve Biko At 70
“They had to kill him to prolong the life of apartheid.” Nelson Mandela Commemorating birthdays in the aftermath of a person’s death tends to be a false exercise. At best,…
The Hack Of All Hacks: Yahoo And Information Security
It took place in August 2013. It was a hack of unprecedented scale, impetuous, audacious, and, if we are to believe Yahoo, undetected at the time. The result of that…
Mainstream Assumptions: The CIA, Presidential Elections, And The Russian Connection
Intent and causation are important features in the course of history. The former envisages motive and hope, irrespective of outcome; the latter envisages consequence. Often, these get muddled in the…
Dumping On The F-35: Trump, Waste And The Military Industrial Complex
That particular fighter never had good press. Even before Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strategic Fighter attracted the ire of Donald Trump via his usual, belching medium, Twitter, the project was…
Monitoring The Miners: Rio Tinto, Drones And Surveillance
In of itself, technological development is benign. But behind every use is a human agent, and behind that agent is a motive, an inspiration, an agenda. Monitoring one’s employees has…
The Fall Of Italy’s Demolition Man
“Long live Trump, long live Putin, long live Le Pen and long live the League!” Matteo Salvini, Lega Nord leader Demagogic in parts, simply irreverent in others, the populist wave…
Fossil Fuel Corruption: The Problem With Adani
“Every day that we stop Adani digging that coal is a day this planet is free from its pollution.” Paul Sinclair, Times of India, Dec 5, 2016 The relationship between…
Troubled Waters: Trump, Taiwan And Beijing
There was much tittering in the US-China fraternity over the casual, yet infuriating engagement US President elect Donald Trump had with Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-wen. A reading of the reactions…
The Virtue Of Protest: Democracy, Refugees And Australia’s Parliament
There is no greater single human rights dilemma facing the Australian parliament at the moment: refugees, declining, mouldering, decaying in detention centres in carceral conditions, being shifted, carted, moved from…
Plucking The Foreign Goose: Australia’s Tax On Backpackers
“The old ladies at the bingo club wouldn’t carry on as much as the politicians have about this whole backpacker tax.” Fiona Hall, ABC News, Dec 2, 2016 The morning…
Fidel Castro: Initial Impressions
Reactions were generally predictable to the passing of Fidel Castro. Britain’s Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, spoke of Castro as that “huge figure of modern history, national independence and 20th century…
Flawed Alliances: Australia, The US And Trumpism
Politics can be a deliciously self-defeating field. For the US-Australian alliance, one born out of desperate insecurity on the part of Canberra, a dramatic change in the White House was…
The Reality Of Fake News
Fake news as reality; the inability to navigate the waters in which it swims; a weakness in succumbing to material best treated with a huge pinch of salt. That, we…
Movement At Marrakech: Climate Change In The Shadow Of Denial
While it was all but obscured in the course of the US presidential excitement, negotiators at the climate change conference in Marrakech were busy attempting to hammer out the means…
Bodies As Propaganda: The US-Australia Refugee Agreement
It all has a hurried sense to it. With the offshore detention system running into troubles, the Australian government has had to find ways to get rid of the human…
Bottling The Demon Of Free Trade: Trumpism And Protectionism
The election of Donald J. Trump on Tuesday, November 8 terrified many who consider themselves notionally progressive or traditional republicans. It also terrified free trade ideologues, and those who believe…
Fantasies Of Impeachment And Protest: Continued Misreadings Of Donald Trump
In an age where many pundits and pollsters ought to be put out to an ignoble pasture, predictions and astrology gazing on the US election continues. While he did have…
Janet Reno: Bill Clinton’s Attorney General
“Outspoken, outrageous and absolutely indifferent to others’ opinions, Janet Reno was truly one of a kind.” Paul Anderson She was the first woman to hold the job of US…
The Trump Effect: Protesting The Result
San Francisco: Donald Trump, even without raising a single pen, or signing a single legal document, has already had a profound affect on activism in the United States. Much of…
On The Eve Of The Vote: Trump Values, Islam And Militias
The chugging train of fear continues to drone away on the eve of what has been considered one of the most important elections in generations. Mind you, this was the…
The Panic Train: Fear Before The Elections In Trump’s America
San Francisco: Coming into San Francisco, and a note of spellbinding terror can be sensed. Donald Trump haunts the political landscape with a menace that has become a caricature of terror…
Brexit Stumbling: The High Court, British Parliament And Article 50
Parliamentary supremacy in British law and politics is akin to the fetish of the union in the United States. Challenge it at your peril; question it to your misfortune. The…
Pirate Parties and Transparent Politics: Iceland’s Experiment
“… [B]ecause Robin Hood was a pirate, we want to take the power from the powerful to give to the people.” Birgitta Jónsdóttir, New York Times, Oct 31, 2016 Getting…
Having A Flutter: The Melbourne Cup And The Australian Gambler
“In terms of prize money, the Melbourne Cup is worth more than the Grand National or any race in America, and it is far more popular in terms of national…
The Illusion Of Meritocracy: Thomas Piketty In Australia
No one likes being lectured, and when it comes in the form of Gallic smugness delivered from literally the left of centre, it can grate. The equally smug social engineers…
Nobel Confusion: Ramos-Horta, Trump And World Disorder
History should tell us that writing scolding, even scornful letters, to electorates as part of a conversation for persuasion do not work. They are even less effective when coming from…
Manipulating Uprisings: Hungary 1956
“Nobody foresaw it. Nobody was ready for it – neither in Budapest, Moscow, Washington or anywhere else.” - Ralph Walter, Radio Free Europe executive, RFE, Oct 22, 2006 Magic, and tragic…
Creepy Clowns And Clownish Creeps: A Global Craze
“We live in a country where the Hamburglar can freely walk down the street, but Ronald McDonald can’t.” Twitter post by ‘BH’, Oct 12, 2016. They were always perfect…
When Wasn’t It Rigged? Donald Trump And US Presidential Races
Hideousness is only one word that covers the third and last presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But prior to that, as a warm up of mischief, Trump…
Retaking Mosul: The Illusion Of Peace
Forging certainty in the dust of Middle Eastern plays of power is an impossibility its participants never wish to accept. The imminent defeat of Islamic State forces in Mosul –…
Nauru, Refugees And The Torture Complex
Two items of interest have tickled the airwaves and triggered some commentary over the last few days. The first was an ABC Four Corners program covering the fate of refugees…
Neither War Nor Peace: Shimon Peres, Israel And History
“[Shimon Peres] thought about history where Netanyahu thinks about the next election.” Itamar Rabinovic, New York Times, Sep 30, 2016 “We learned from the British,” explained the late Shimon Peres…
Demonising Wind Energy In Australia: The South Australian Blackout
From the time when energy became a state ambition and the central, almost paranoid platform of security, its messiness became apparent. Energy reserves needed to be controlled; corrupt regimes with…
Covering, And Exposing, Atrocity: Australian Commandos Come Forward
Kevin Frost, a special forces sergeant in the Australian Army, has done something unusual. He wishes, even demands, to be tried for his role behind the summary execution of an…
No-Fly Zone Madness: Catastrophe And Conflict In Aleppo
Tuesday’s House of Commons debate in Britain was filled with the hollow anguish of impotence, fresh with statements about Russian war criminality tossed about like freshly made blinis. Ever easy…
Normalising The Brutal: Trump, Clinton And Second Presidential Debate
There is no getting away from the degradation that is taking place, on colossal scale, in US presidential politics. The sense of two dysfunctional candidates beating each other over the…
The Despotism Of British Sterling
While British Prime Minister, Theresa May, keeps insisting that Brexit pathway will be a smooth, relatively painless process filled without dramatic compromise to lifestyle and outlook, the traders, stockbrokers and…
Janus Faced On Banking And Finance: Hillary Clinton’ Economic World View
“So we have two Hillary Clintons, which says we have a person who is a liar.” Rudy Giuliani, The Guardian, Oct 9, 2016 Again, WikiLeaks made its sniping foray into…
Droning Julian Assange: The Clinton Formula
“We believe in what we are doing… If you are pushed you push back.” Julian Assange The mutterings have become furious, and it is clear that the Democratic contender for…
The Curse Of The Honorary Doctorate: The John Howard Case
The honorary degree system at universities tends to be a rotten business, though Stephen Edward Epler, in his Honorary Degrees: A Survey of Their Use and Abuse (1943), regarded them…
Trump, Clinton And The Dictator Question
Righteousness is rarely endearing, and when concocted in a brew of hypocrisy, it becomes noxious. US political campaigning tends to overflow in it, a mixture of rights, noisily championed liberties…
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