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 in their ninth and 10th grades is simply not on. Last month, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), a purportedly autonomous government…
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 large butcher’s bill, are inevitable suggestions from such a figure. The scenes are also clear: well-paid suits dazed by theories of the next war; policy…
Some of you will undoubtedly be familiar with the film “The Life Of Brian” where Reg (John Cleese) rhetorically asks what have Romans ever done for us, only to have one of his followers pipe up with: “The aqueduct”. A minutes later: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order,…
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 is coming out showing the way he was spied upon while staying at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Of late, the Spanish daily El País…
The federal government’s budget is due to be released on 9 May. Since assuming power in May 2022, the government released a budget in October that removed a lot of the excess and pandering to special interest groups that was inherent in the aptly abbreviated ATM (Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison) Coalition Government’s budgets of the previous…
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 Australia, the entire military and security establishment is outsourced to Washington’s former mandarins, many of them earning a pile in consultancy fees. This, perhaps, is…
By Denis Bright Is the perceived strategic danger from China comparable to the threat of fear itself and the possibilities of global recession arising from these fears? A global recession or serious economic slowdown would certainly change the orientation of container sea traffic by switching from long-standing and profitable business partnerships with China to the…
Over eighty years ago Prime Minister John Curtin prepared a New Year’s Eve message for the Australian people. It was written three weeks into the war with Japan. It was published in the Melbourne Herald on 27 December, 1941: ‘Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America,…
Ok, just to be clear here, I’m not writing about the lack of action on unemployment benefits. I’m saving any comments on that until after the Budget because, well, I can sort of guess how that’s going to play out. Either Labor will do nothing to raise the rate and be widely criticised for it,…
Australia’s Liberal politicians – and their media friends – need to be very careful. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has helped created such a crisis of trust in America that there is no way to contest the unreality in which its audience so stubbornly believes. Weaponised unreality is a term devised to capture the idea that…