Assange Be Wary: The Dangers of a US Plea Deal
At every stage of its proceedings against Julian Assange, the US Imperium has shown little by way of tempering its vengeful impulses. The WikiLeaks publisher, in uncovering the sordid, operational…
Dr Binoy Kampmark
Peter Pan Man: Elon Musk’s Rebranding of Twitter
“X” marks the spot. For the modern advertiser, this is problematic. It breathes pornographic escape, self-denial, elusive treasure, irresistible capture, compelling lasciviousness. And now Elon Musk has decided to impose…
Water Wars: Cooling the Data Centres
Water. Data centres. The continuous, pressing need to cool the latter, which houses servers to store and process data, with the former, which is becoming ever more precious in the…
Building for War: The US Imperium’s Top End Spend
The AUSMIN 2023 talks held between the US Secretaries of State and Defense and their Australian counterparts, confirmed the increasing, unaccountable militarisation of the Australian north and its preparation for…
The Day Australian Sovereignty Died
If a date might be found when Australian sovereignty was extinguished by the emissaries of the US imperium, July 29, 2023 will be as good as any. Not that they…
AUSMIN and Assange: The Great Vassal Smackdown
It was there for all to see. Embarrassing, cloying, and bound make you cough up the remnants of your summit lunch, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary…
Barbie Pathologies: It’s All About a Doll
As the ancient Greeks reminded us, bone cold definitions as starting points are essential in any discussion. One current discussion, insignificant to posterity but amusing for advertisers and the presently…
The Taylor Swift Exploitation Machine
She doesn’t love you, she doesn’t care for you, and she doesn’t know you. But does her team pretend to, confecting an image of faux empathy and interest, sorting out…
Congressional Concerns: Stalling Nuclear Submarines for Australia
Any security arrangement with too many variables and multiple contingencies, risks stuttering and keeling over. Critical delays might be suffered, attributable to a number of factors beyond the parties concerned. …
The Afghanistan Lithium Great Game
While the United States, along with its allies, left Afghanistan in August 2021 in spectacularly humiliating circumstances, the departure was never entirely complete, nor bound to be permanent. Since then,…
Deserved Cancellations: Victoria Rejects the Commonwealth Games
Hosting sporting events has always been a government’s formula to distract their seducible subjects. It’s the secular version of smells and bells, the warbling of the church choir turned into…
Hindutva Goes to Washington: Narendra Modi’s US Visit
Again, he was at it, that charming show on two legs, playful and coy. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been burning the charismatic fuel of late, making the necessary…
Dumping Doubts: Releasing Fukushima’s Waste Water
Nothing said from the nuclear industry can or should be taken for face value. Be it in terms of safety, or correcting defects or righting mistakes; be it in terms…
An Accident Waiting to Happen: NATO Looks to Asia
Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has distinctly strayed from its original purpose. It has become, almost shamelessly, the vessel and handmaiden of US…
A Bankrupt Calculus: Sending Cluster Munitions to Ukraine
There is a certain desperation in the logic of those who argue that a depraved solution has merit because it’s only slightly less depraved than that of the opponent. Torture…
The Fossil Fuel Proliferation Threat
Climate change negotiations and debates are characterised by some curious features. For one, there are interminable stretches of discussion that never seem to feature the agents of cause. Chatter about…
Graceless at Lord’s: The Class Goons Strike Back
What are the English other than their excruciatingly worn class, kitted out with a code of manners revocable at an instant? A streak of traditional Englishness, as A. A. Gill…
Cruel Arrangements: The UK-Rwanda Refugee Deal Falters
Since 2022, Rwanda has been very much on the mind of British policy makers, a dark option of retreat from the irritating intrusions of international refugee law. The English Channel…
The Saudi Football Seizure
Sports stars are making a heated rush for it, cresting on the money wave, and finding sanctuary in Mammon’s big breasted glory. And that wave is coming, oddly enough, from…
Nauru’s Refugee Stain: Australia’s Continued Offshore Processing Regime
The last refugee, for now, has left the small, guano-producing state of Nauru. For a decade, the Pacific Island state served as one of Australia’s offshore prisons for refugees and…
Babbling about Prigozhin
A lot of nonsense is being spouted by a bevy of spontaneous “Russian experts” in light of the Prigozhin spray, a mutiny (no one quite knows what to call it),…
Deaths at Sea: From the Titan to the Mediterranean
Mortality at sea is becoming a theme of late. The nature of how that mortality has been represented, however, has varied. The death of a billionaire on a quest to…
Daniel Ellsberg: The Establishment’s Whistleblower
In 1972 Stanley K. Sheinbaum, chairman of the Pentagon Papers Fund, wrote with a hot pertinence that remains striking (at this time Julian Assange is facing grave prospects of being…
Forget the University: Gift Cards, Professionalism and the Australian Academy
Dear future students wishing to come to Australia and study: don’t. The gurgling, decaying system is, on a regular basis, being exposed for what it is. If it is not…
The Revenge of Partygate: Boris Johnson Resigns
The agent of chaos is at it again. Boris Johnson, frontman of the Brexit disaster show, prime minister responsible for breaking regulations, rules and laws, and overall self-serving gross figure…
Uneasy Locations: The Russian Embassy Site in Canberra
They think we are mugs – and it’s insulting. It’s all fine for politicians to be swimming, swerving and tossing about in the goo of paranoia that is surveillance, chatting…
Never More Relevant: Ted Kaczynski, Technology and Trauma
Henry A. Murray has much to answer for. Between 1959 and 1961, the Harvard psychology academic, as the leader of a team of equally unprincipled academics, was responsible for conducting…
Novak Djokovic: Always More than Tennis
The victory of Novak Djokovic in the latest French Open had the usual mixed reception in Australia. While Australians pretend to like radicals, larrikins and the occasional deviant, the contrary…
Deserving Each Other: The PGA Tour-LIV Golf Merger
Described as acrimonious, divisive and disruptive to golf, the LIV Golf Tournament, launched with the aid of former world number one Greg Norman and an enormous well of capital fronted…
Diluted Sovereignty: A Very Australian Example
Australian concepts of sovereignty have always been qualified. First came the British settlers and invaders in 1788. They are pregnant with the sovereignty of the British Crown, bringing convicts, the…
Ben Roberts-Smith: The Breaking of a Plaster Saint
It was an ugly case lasting five years with a host of ugly revelations. But what could be surprising about the murderous antics of a special arm of the military,…
AUKUS, Congress and Cold Feet
The undertakings made by Australia regarding the AUKUS security pact promise to be monumental. Much of this is negative: increased militarisation on the home front; the co-opting of the university…
Meta and Privacy: The Economy of Data Transgressions
Meta, to put it rather inelegantly, has a data non-compliance problem. That problem began in the original conception of Facebook, a social network conceived by that most anti-social of types,…
HAK Birthdays: Henry Kissinger Turns 100
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.” Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour (2002) If a heavy resume of…
Modi in Australia: Down Under Bliss for Hindutva
There is an interesting thread that links the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, the owner of the gargantuan conglomerate that bears his name, Gautam Adani, and Australia. There is cricket;…
Visits of Justice: Stella Assange’s Plea to Australia
It certainly got the tongues wagging, the keyboards pressed, and the intellectually dead aroused – at least for a time. Given how many of those in the Australian press and…
Demented Policing: Tasering the Elderly
Australia is a country addictively hostile to the elderly. Despite being a continent that speaks to immemorial origins, respect for those who age is uncommon. In The Lucky Country, that…
Fears of Abandonment: Australia, Biden and Cancelling the Quad Visit
Much needless fuss has been generated by President Joe Biden’s cancellation of his visit to Australia for the Quad meeting, a now regular gathering of leaders from the US, Japan,…
Geoffrey Hinton, AI, and Google’s Ethics Problem
Talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence, actual or imagined, has become feverish, much of it induced by the growing world of generative chat bots. When scrutinising the critics, attention…
Aqueous Matters: Europe’s Water Crisis
Europe is joining a number of other regions on the planet in suffering a prolonged water crisis; and it is one that shows little sign of abating. To this can…
A Certain Form of Thieving: The US Banksters Strike Again
It looks like 2008 all over again. Economic and financial mismanagement feature in scorching, consuming brilliance. The culpable, bungling banksters, have returned with their customary, venal incompetence. In the customary…
King Charles III: Policing the Republican Protests
In Britain, pageantry has always been a palliative and plaster for the dark and dismal. Be it in times of crisis, the chance to put on an extravagant show, usually…
Scott Morrison and Australia’s Lobby Complex
The former Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has been somewhat of an absentee in the Federal seat of Cook. Since losing the May 2022 election, he has been aggressively chasing…
Hypocritical Commemorations: World Press Freedom Day
Selected days for commemoration serve one fundamental purpose. Centrally, they acknowledge the forgotten or neglected, while proposing to do nothing about it. It’s the priest’s confession, the chance for absolution…
Rerunning Biden’s Blunderland
President Joseph Biden has done what many from his own party dreaded but dare not say. Last month, via a painful video, the aged Democrat declared his candidacy for a…
Scrapping Charles Darwin: Hindutva’s Anti-Scientific Maladies
Welcome the canons of pseudoscience. Open your arms to the dribbling, sponsored charlatans. According to a growing number of India’s top officialdom, teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to children…
Preparing for War: The Global Military Budget
US$2.24 trillion is a mighty amount. It’s also a sickening figure when considering the object of this exercise. The flickering tease of war, the promise of bloodshed and an increasingly…
Foiled Escape: UC Global, the CIA and Julian Assange
However described, the shabby treatment of Julian Assange never ceases to startle. While he continues to suffer in Belmarsh prison awaiting the torments of an interminable legal process, more material…
Australia: Outsourced to the US Military Establishment
It’s a very funny thing. In the US, the provision of services in such industries as security and intelligence is outsourced in a sprawling complex of contractors and subcontractors. In…
Politicians and the Anzac Tradition: A Story of Manipulation and Mythology
While the mass slaughtering of, and slaughter by, soldiers, is always a touchy subject of commemoration, a tension has existed between those who did the fighting, and those who ordered…
Blood, Golf and Saudi Arabia: The LIV Tournament in Adelaide
The recently concluded LIV Tournament in Adelaide was a matter of bread, circuses and golf. It was something of a triumph for the chief sponsor: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,…
Libelled by the Bot: Reputation, Defamation and AI
Cometh the new platform, cometh new actions in law, the fragile litigant ever ready to dash off a writ to those with (preferably) deep pockets. And so, it transpires that…
Penny Wong’s World View: AUKUS All The Way
If anyone was expecting a new tilt, a shine of novelty, a flash of independence from Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s address to the National Press Club on April 17,…
A Road Paved with Irritations: Macron’s Strategic Third Way
Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to China did not quite go according to plan, though much depends on what was planned to begin with. In one sense, the French President was…
The Leaking Republic: The Pentagon’s Take on Information Security
For years, US intelligence officials could hold their allies, notably the British, in contempt for leaking like sinking vessels and harbouring such espionage luminaries as the Cambridge Five. The whirligig…
EO: Three Hooves up in High Heaven
Films featuring animals as screen filled protagonists, often in an imperfect, callous human world, have been made before. There was Robert Bresson’s 1966 Au Hasard Balthazar, which introduced audiences to…
Calculated Misrepresentations: The US Withdrawal from Afghanistan
Succeeding administrations have a chronic habit of blaming their predecessors. The Biden administration has been most particular on the issue, taking every chance to attack former President Donald Trump for…
Turning Tides: The US Congress and Julian Assange
“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” I.F. Stone The US Congress and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, have what can only be…
Sparing the Athletes: Revising the Russia-Belarus Sporting Ban
Collateral damage? Deserving and worthy of their punishment? The exclusion and banishment of Russian and Belarusian athletes has become the acceptable prejudice of many governments and a slew of sporting…
Inglorious Inertia: The Albanese Government and Julian Assange
The sham that is the Assange affair, a scandal of monumental proportions connived in by the AUKUS powers, shows no signs of abating. Prior to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese assuming…
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