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“The reason why we have made this decision is because we have a very strong view: if you’ve left this country to join a terrorist army in the Middle East, we don’t want you.”  These were Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s words in response to the Cabinet dissent that has characterised the debate about stripping Australian citizenship from those believed (though not necessarily known) to be terrorists.

The proposal was always going to be riddled with problems. For one, it flies in the face of citizenship conventions internationally.  To strip citizenship is to eviscerate a legal being, casting the individual into …

George Osborne’s, Britain’s Chancellor of the exchequer, plan to enshrine permanent budget surpluses in law will chime favourably with many people. The reason is simple; most of us look at financial matters in terms of our family finances. The argument that as a family: “wouldn’t you want to pay your debts and live within your means” is a very appealing proposition. However, there is a fundamental difference between running a household budget and a government budget.

I intend to rely on my engineering and science knowledge to show the difference. In science if you want to study the behaviour …

Sometimes scrolling through your Facebook Newsfeed feels tedious — until you come across a status update that makes your breath catch, that reminds you the world isn’t as it should be. Recently, I lingered over the random dog video, and fashion dos and don’ts, before forgetting everything else when reading the following status update:

Had a roofer over to check out a leak in the roof over Alex’s bedroom. You are never going to believe what is causing the problem…A BULLET HOLE!!!!! Over my son’s room!! I won’t lie, I’m freaked out!

In the comments that followed, my friend, Suzi, detailed …

The latest, astute Media Lens alert examines the astounding regurgitation – entirely unfiltered – by the Sunday Times and the BBC of British state propaganda against Edward Snowden.

The misinformation campaign – alleging, without a shred of evidence, that the Russians and Chinese have cracked Snowden’s encrypted files, placing secret agents in harm’s way – was designed both to discredit Snowden and smooth the way for Britain to subject us to new, even more draconian surveillance.

In Britain, the only major media organisation to come out of this affair smelling of roses is the Guardian, which questioned the credibility of the allegations. …

Over the last few years the killing of unarmed African Americans including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott and Freddie Gray by agents of the state have generated massive protests against a political system that almost never punishes police violence. Activist groups like Black Lives Matter have emerged as voices on the front lines from Ferguson to Baltimore. Their message is simple: American society and the political system it has created do not value black lives the same as white lives. They draw powerful connections between the state-sanctioned use of force, a discriminatory criminal justice system, mass …

Governments and the illiberal cherish Magna Carta not despite its lack of legal significance, but because of it.

— David Allen Green, Foreign Policy, June 15, 2015

Idolatry is the natural consequence of abuse and disregard.  Forget something, and revere it. Edification entails that no regard need be had to substance.  When human rights conventions make it into the political argot, cited by the very individuals who are controlled by them, we know that a degree of amnesia and calculation has set in. They are the last ones who are interested in what those documents enshrine.

Magna Carta has suffered more than most. …

Two recent reports suggest that Israel could face catastrophic consequences if it fails to end the mistreatment of Palestinians under its rule, whether in the occupied territories or in Israel itself.

The Rand Corporation’s research shows that Israel could lose $250 billion over the next decade if it fails to make peace with the Palestinians and violence escalates. Ending the occupation, on the other hand, could bring a dividend of more than $120 billion to the nation’s coffers.

Meanwhile, the Israeli finance ministry predicts an even more dismal future unless Israel reinvents itself. It is likely to be bankrupt within …

On Monday June 15, 2015, Rachel Dolezal stepped down as President of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. Ms. Dolezal is the focus of media attention with the revelation that although she represents herself as an African American, she is actually a lily-white white woman of German and Czech descent who uses a modern makeup blackface to disguise herself.

Dolezal’s misrepresentation of herself as an African American is indicative of the status of both black and white Americans in the early twenty-first century. By playing at being black, Rachel Dolezal pretends to live her life …

Greece has been in the headlines of the world’s financial press for the past five months, as a newly elected leftist party, ‘Syriza’, which ostensibly opposes so-called ‘austerity measures’, faces off against the “Troika” (International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and European Central Bank).

Early on, the Syriza leadership, headed by Alexis Tsipras, adopted several strategic positions with fatal consequences – in terms of implementing their electoral promises to raise living standards, end vassalage to the ‘Troika’ and pursue an independent foreign policy.

…

Kalief Browder committed suicide when he hanged himself with an air conditioner power cord on June 6. Actually Kalief Browder’s death at age 22 is a state killing with uncounted accomplices among police officers, prosecutors, judges, prison guards, prison officials, legislators, mayors, governors, and all the rest of the state justice apparatus that was utterly incapable of providing anything close to decent, just procedures in dealing with a wrongly-accused, innocent, 16-year-old black man.

Anyone who pays the slightest attention soon learns that the “justice system” is an oxymoron. It is a system that colludes with the rich, powerful, and guilty as …

Fukushima’s still radiating, self-perpetuating, immeasurable, and limitless, like a horrible incorrigible Doctor Who monster encounter in deep space.

Fukushima will likely go down in history as the biggest cover-up of the 21st Century. Governments and corporations are not leveling with citizens about the risks and dangers; similarly, truth itself, as an ethical standard, is at risk of going to shambles as the glue that holds together the trust and belief in society’s institutions. Ultimately, this is an example of how societies fail.

Tens of thousands of Fukushima residents remain in temporary housing more than four years after the horrific disaster of March …

Monday, June 15, 2015, is the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. In his book, Magna Carta, J.C. Holt, professor of medieval history, University of Cambridge, notes that three of the chapters of this ancient document still stand on the English Stature Book and that so much of what survives of the Great Charter is “concerned with individual liberty,” which “is a reflexion of the quality of the original act of 1215.”

In the 17th century Sir Edward Coke used the Great Charter of the Liberties to establish the supremacy of Parliament, the representative of the people, as the origin of law.

A …

News headlines report drug raids in towns across the country. Drug sales take place in high school parking lots every day. Are we in danger of losing an entire generation to the drug culture? The problem has received wide media coverage, but there is another war on drugs that is under the radar.

From Maine to California reports are coming in describing the plight of those who suffer from chronic pain. Florida is reporting a large number of chronically ill and disabled who now are being denied access to their pain relieving pharmaceuticals. Have some state legislatures created a more serious problem …

It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

— Attributed to Henry Ford

In March 2014, the Bank of England let the cat out of the bag: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it. So wrote David Graeber in The Guardian the same month, referring to a BOE paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy.” The paper stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong. …

The journalist interviewed an ancient miner, a man who was used as a tool in the depths of the darkness of mines his entire life. The color of his skin, the sound of his breath, the sadness in his eyes — these human characteristics were the characteristics of the mine itself, as if the inhumanity of the mine had overcome the humanity of the person.

They sat, the journalist and the miner, at a simple wooden table in simple wooden chairs. The soft light of the evening sun showed through the glass of the kitchen window onto his hands, battered hands …