Blogs

I had realized so many of the oil fields were on the left bank of the Euphrates. There's no way in hell the regime will let the Kurds cross south of the Khabur. The question is whether the regime is willing to accept the Kurds taking the three oil fields to the north of it. Kurdish forces are only a few kilometers away from the closest one, so the regime would need to cross the Euphrates as soon as possible in order to secure them. This also makes it considerably less likely that they'll cross at Mayadeen, since it would take too long to secure the town.

The Kurds and the Assad regime have both reached Deir az-Zor. The general working arrangement between the two has been that the Kurds get one side of the Euphrates and the regime gets the other. However, the regime is preparing to deploy pontoon bridges across the river, which would cross a stated red line by the US.

I'm irritated about the marriage equality survey, not just because it is going to cost the community 120 million dollars, because the Liberal/National Party couldn’t make up its mind about marriage equality but for much more important reasons. One of the most powerful sentences uttered in human history is the Eureka Oath. The oath was taken by Ballarat miners on the 29th November 1854; “We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties”.

Sometimes it's asked why the good citizens of the world didn't do more to stop the Holocaust; because - so the answer goes - the world did not know the Holocaust was happening.

But we know that this is false. Good people spoke up, but those with power did not want to listen.

In 1938, William Cooper of the Yorta Yorta people led a march on Australia's Parliament House to protest the Night of Broken Glass massacre against German Jews.

'The Hummus Wars' of Israel-Palestine dish up the most trivial but informative, bizarre but common-sense cross-section of the land’s politics.

Since its independence in 1948, Israeli cuisine has been widely exported from Jerusalem’s street markets to Western shopping malls. They sell ‘Israeli food’; hummus, falafel, pita, shwarma.

Indigenous peoples across the planet have carried, and continue to carry, the burden of colonisation. The single most important lesson learnt by indigenous peoples from the colonisers is how to die. First nations people around the world suffer from the same side effects of colonisation. Poor health, high infant mortality rates, alcoholism and drug abuse, poor educational and employment outcomes. Whether you look at the lives of the Inuit people of Greenland or Australian Aborigines in central Australia, colonisation’s legacy is largely negative.

Public housing is not just the business of the 63,000 tenants who currently utilise public housing in Victoria. It is not just the business of the 43,000 Victorians on the public housing waiting list who will never access public housing. Public housing isn’t just the business of the homeless. It is everyone’s business.

‘Ely the Nazi’, as he is known to his foot soldiers, was the ringleader of Tel Aviv’s Nazi gang ‘Patrol 36’.

His real name is Erik Bonite and his story is a classic example of the clusterfuck political experiment that is Israel’s immigration policy.

Ely the Nazi explains who he is in simple terms that everyone can understand: "my grandfather was a half-Jewboy. I will not have children so that this trash will not be born with even a tiny per cent of Jewboy blood."

I wonder how many Australians realise their future is determined by unaccountable hedge funds and currency trade speculators who ultimately determine the value of many of the world’s currencies? Currently they have stopped betting on the US dollar because there are few signs the US Federal Reserve will significantly lift interests rates in the near future as a consequence of the United States’ legislative paralysis that has occurred since the Groper became President. Their attention is now focused on the European Central Bank and the Australian Federal Reserve.

One of the key parts of any functioning, modern government is the institutions that serve the needs of citizens. The government, therefore, generally relies on the good-faith participation of those at the helm, under the assumption that the polity isn't going to elect anyone so crooked, so clueless, so violently ignorant that they simply refuse to do their [bleep]ing job.

Ladies and Gentlemen of Isocracy, I give you: Donald Trump, and the incipient calamity of Hurricane Harvey, with all relevant government institutions headless, clueless, and practically penniless.