Latest articles

War tax resisters are taking to the streets to call for an end to genocide and endless war. They are divesting from the taxes that fund war and investing in people, planet, and justice.

The US supports Israel with over $3 billion in military aid each year and has provided more military aid to Israel than any other country since the end of World War II. Since the beginning of 2022, the US has dedicated over $46 billion of military aid for war in Ukraine. Most of these funds will be used by the Department of Defense to replenish the military …

You’d think Western leaders dealing with foreign affairs would make sure they had a working knowledge of international law and a healthy respect for its importance. It’s based on common sense and is easy enough for politicians of average intelligence to understand. But they don’t seem to.

So it was refreshing to hear Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s representative at the United Nations, ticking off the US and Israel for trying to duck their legal responsibilities after the Security Council adopted Resolution 2728. This deals with Israel’s attempt to destroy Gaza and its people and “demands an immediate ceasefire …

The occasional burst of candour from US diplomats provides a striking, air clearing difference to their Australian and British counterparts.  Official statements about the AUKUS security pact between Washington, London and Canberra, rarely mention the target in so many words, except on the gossiping fringes.  Commentators and think tankers are essentially given free rein to speculate, masticating over such streaky and light terms as “new strategic environment”, “great power competition”, “rules-based order”.

On the occasion of his April 3 visit to Washington’s Center for a New American Security (CNAS), US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell was refreshingly frank.  His …

???? China blasts Israel at the UN:

"This is a grave violation of the UN Charter and international law and a breach of the sovereignty of both Syria and Iran. This attack is of an extremely vicious nature… 25 years ago, China's embassy in Yugoslavia was bombed by a US-led… pic.twitter.com/ipZTgzfKOj

— Megatron (@Megatron_ron) April 2, 2024

It crackles like a Geiger counter in a uranium mine: in 2023, Emmanuel Macron announced plans for six additional EPR [European Pressurized Reactor] nuclear power plants. Hang on, no, perhaps fourteen in the long term.

In reviving nuclear in the name of the struggle against global warming, the European Union has followed suit. Japan is promising new developments on the nuclear front. The US is experimenting with miniature reactors. China is building with gusto … All these ‘ionizing’ projects seem to indicate that fission-based nuclear power is in full swing.

In fact, it is to the contrary. A report of experts published …

The World Meteorological Organization (Geneva, Switzerland) State of Climate 2023 Report by Celste Saulo, secretary general, was issued on March 19th, 2024.

“As secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, I am now sounding the Red Alert about the state of the climate.”

The WMO has issued an annual State of the Climate Report for more than 30 years. Accordingly, Dr. Celste Saulo’s release of the Flagship Report: “The year 2023 set new records for every single climate indicator. This annual report shows that the climate crisis is the defining challenge that humanity faces, closely intertwined with the inequality crisis as witnessed …

One of the first things totalitarians do when they set about transforming a democratic society into whatever type of strictly-regulated, utterly soul-deadening totalitarian dystopia they are trying to transform it into is radically overhaul and remake its culture. You can’t impose your new official ideology on a formerly democratic society with a bunch of artists running around loose, making fun of you and your propaganda. No, you need to get the culture business under control, and dictate what is and isn’t “art,” and what types of art are “harmful to society,” …

The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was distraught and testy.  It seemed that, on this occasion, Israel had gone too far.  Not too far in killing over 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a staggering percentage of them being children.  Not too far in terms of using starvation as a weapon of war.  Not too far in bringing attention to the International Court of Justice that its actions are potentially genocidal.

Israel had overstepped in doing something it has done previously to other nationals: kill humanitarian workers in targeted strikes.  The difference for Albanese on this occasion was that one of the individuals …

The importance of “peace” in the rhetoric of the West lies not in the sincerity with which it is preached. Rather “peace”, like the DIE dogma emerging from the recent Awakening Crusade (Wokism) is a term of invidious distraction. The intensity and frequency of its use is determined by the underlying concept of domination. As opposed to actual peace, i.e. the absence of hostilities, “peace” is a political and psychological warfare device deployed for what could be called “terminological” or “linguistic” denial.

Just as the US Forces, operating behind the United Nations …

The government wants to play god.

It wants the power to decide who lives or dies and whose rights are worthy of protection.

Abortion may still be front and center in the power struggle between the Left and the Right over who has the right to decide—the government or the individual—when it comes to bodily autonomy, the right to privacy, sexual freedom, the rights of the unborn, and property interests in one’s body, but there’s so much more at play.

In the 50-plus years since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade, the government has come to …

Eulogies should rarely be taken at face value.  Plaster saints take the place of complex individuals; faults transmute into golden virtues.  But there was little in the way of fault regarding Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom’s messianic purpose, whose tireless work for the charity, World Central Kitchen (WCK) in northern Gaza had not gone unnoticed.  Sadly, the Australian national, along with six other members of WCK, were noticed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) around midnight of April 1 and 2 and targeted in a strike that killed all of them.

Other members of the slain crew included Polish citizen Damian Sobol, three …

Even though the land could not yet absorb sixteen million, nor even eight, enough could return… to prove that the enterprise was one that blessed him that gave as well as him that took by forming for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”

— Ronald Storrs, Military Governor of Jerusalem 1917-20, commenting in 1937 on the rationale of the 1917 Balfour Declaration

Zionism is the continual attempt to fit a square into a circle….

(Full article …)

The human mind is often incapable of tolerating the limitless nature of a universe, the absence of a divine architect, or appreciate that intended designs may be absent when it comes to events awful, ghastly and catastrophic.  A disaster with some human agency is bound to have arisen because of a constructed plan, a template to harm, a scheme to injure.

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was another event to befuddle those searching for the plan.  The Singaporean-flagged MV Dali container ship lost power on March 26 and collided with the bridge in the early morning, …

In my first couple of years of progressive activism in the late 60’s, many of those I worked with who were also young took a pretty dismissive view of elder activists. And it wasn’t just elders. “Don’t trust anyone over 30”– that was a widespread point of view.

As I experienced it, I think a large part of the reason for this belief was the reality of an “old left” that was not just small but top-down and bureaucratic in its ways of functioning. In addition, McCarthyism and attacks on members of the Communist Party, the major national group on the …

Cancer is a stomping bugger of a disease.  It seeks the worm-ridden end, a thief finding its way into your body unasked and willingly helping itself.  This cellular mass army will, in a most tribal way, make off with your remains chance permitting. So, it’s understandable that people speak about it.  Blog, discuss, worry, grieve and gather in the digital house square.  But not all grief and its content are ever the same.

The recent obsession with Catherine, the Princess of Wales, who many still see as Kate Middleton, is a fitful reminder that no one’s business is seemingly everybody’s, especially …