The Economist today, March 25 2024 It gets boring I know. Sometimes I bore myself but I can’t overstate the importance of taking it to heart that on matters crucial to the oligarchs who beneath a chimera of democracy rule … Read More »
After two Russia posts in a row, on media coverage of Vladimir Putin’s election victory and on Russia’s return to great power status, I’d thought to write a third on that subset of Russia’s critics – including but not confined … Read More »
The universe is messaging me; I know this for sure. Yesterday I bumped into a dog-walking pal in the park. We fell to speaking of the need to triangulate information in an age where one of precious few certainties is … Read More »
Guardian, March 18, 2024. Click image to access story CNN, March 18, 2024. Click image to access story In 2023 Michael Hudson published The Collapse of Antiquity, its thesis that in the early Sumer civilisation a new king cancelled debt. … Read More »
A case can be made for saying Jennifer Warnes, the man’s backing vocalist from the beginning, almost singlehandedly revived the flagging career of a rock-poet already – in 1987 – in his 50s but whose greatest work lay still ahead. … Read More »
Touched on in my post of March 2 – Gaza to Rochdale – was a sensational New York Times “scoop” on rape, allegedly weaponised by Hamas on October 7. This image opened the NYT story – “Screams without words”: How Hamas … Read More »
In a footnote to yesterday’s post, Yanis Varoufakis on China-US tensions, I wrote: My approval of Yanis is guarded and circumscribed but I was still dismayed to see him play to the gallery at Canberra with allusions – as if … Read More »
Samuel Barber’s adagio for strings featured in Oliver Stone’s 1986 film, Platoon, set in what Westerners refer to as the Vietnam War, and Vietnamese of my age and above call – with no quarrel from me – America’s War of … Read More »
Two posts ago I placed the departure of Victoria Nuland as acting Undersecretary of State in the context of a decades old rift in Washington, between Russia hawks and China hawks. I said her going signalled the strategic defeat of … Read More »
Mull a moment, if you will, on the above. Generation-Z, aka zoomers, were born between late ’90s and early 2010s. As such the Western subset – the one for which, when all is said and done, the term was coined … Read More »