Ukraine was conned
Volodymyr Zelenskyy was brought up in the grunt town of Kryvyi Rih, a Soviet-looking industrial city in the southeast of…
Dishonesty, the new transparency?
Labor Leader Anthony Albanese wouldn’t answer (three times, like Peter the Apostle’s denial of knowing Jesus) whether a Labor government…
Putin’s Playbook is playing Americans for suckers
Perhaps the biggest mistake of the American intelligence world is to have imagined that Russians think like Americans. ‘They don’t,’…
Capitulation complete for Ukraine-Russia conflict
It cannot be any clearer: 141 countries have condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine as illegitimate in a vote…
Kyiv falls: then what?
Taking control of Kyiv is one thing. Taking control of the entire country is quite another. But even if Putin…
Thugs ‘R’ Us
The meeting in Moscow was kept secret. The Soviet leadership had agreed to a low key exchange of views with…
Why would the West want to invade Russia?
A June 2016 Levada poll found that 68 per cent of Russians think NATO troops in the Baltic States and…
Australia desperately needs a Criminal Cases Review Commission
Talk about missing the point… All those clamouring for a federal corruption commission to be an election issue have so…
‘Whoopsi’ Goldberg’s learning curve
‘I stand corrected,’ said Whoopi Goldberg, the day after she was advised that the Holocaust was indeed a racist slaughter.…
Nerds, nannies and dictators
Young nerds in Silicon Valley are now the rule-makers of culture across the western world. Culture, identity, and the conflict…
A different take on the Jesus story
My favourite Christmas story … stop me if you’ve heard it. According to the late Sydney theologian Dr Barbara Thiering’s…
High courts and misdemeanours
Sometimes the truth is chased out of our legal system
The Dan Andrews protests v polls conundrum
Ever since the Newspoll results on Saturday, I’ve been wracking (and wrecking) my brain trying to find a logical answer…
Here are some real justice issues for the climate warriors
What a tragic shame that so much energy, time, resources and opportunities to really improve the lives of millions is…
Will we all have to take the knee?
If test cricketers such as Quinton de Kok can be compelled to ‘take the knee’ by their employer in order…
Remembering the Hungarian Uprising, 65 years on
The world gasped 65 years ago this week as Hungarian protesters were mowed down by the secret police, starting a revolution that…
Climate and Covid: the fact checks we had to have
There is no relationship between lockdowns and virus control (eg, 35 studies reported in December 2020, in American Institute for Economic…
Road to damnation 2050
I know how Net Zero 2050 ends. I’ve read the book. In Chris Brook’s excellent if devastating Road to Damnation*,…
COP this, climate sumiteers
Man does not live by bread alone, an early revolutionary once advised his followers. As Glasgow’s COP26 closes in on a discombobulated world, the…
Is Facebook really on the ropes?
It may be counter-intuitive, but American investigative and Pulitzer winning journalist Glenn Greenwald makes a strong argument that paints Facebook…
Big Tech has placed its bet – on the Genghis Khan of our time
The nineteenth-century Russian writer Alexander Herzen’s greatest fear when thinking about the future has come true. He said “What I’m…
The new provocateurs of Covid
The extraordinary 1988 John Hillcoat/Nick Cave film Ghosts … of the Civil Dead is set in a slightly futuristic high-tech…
Beware Stumbling Joe’s mumbling, Scotty
When they were talking the other day in Washington the other day, did Joe Biden tell Scott Morrison his recipe…
Aussie Life
As a child in Budapest, I heard my grandfather tell the family around the Sunday lunch table to beware the…
Australia, we’ve got you cowered
If you didn’t already think so, the news that police have received thousands of calls from Aussies dobbing in other…
