The Morrison government's election campaign is a disaster, but the real story is still the state of the press

At the halfway point of the election, inside one of the most pockmarked government terms in modern history, Anthony Albanese comes back from a week incapacitated with COVID. Live in Perth, at an important time in the nation’s history, he stands before the media to take questions. After weeks of gotchas at the expense of genuine questions on policy… “where’s Tanya?”, they ask.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed.”

What does this mean at a democratic level? 

It could mean (and it does) that the government of the people by the people is a surface distraction.

THIS IS WHAT we EXPOSED in the cartoon about the devious inauguration speech by George H W Bush (https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43837):

On Saturday, the Chinese Embassy in Washington asked the Biden administration to halt the supply of weapons to Taiwan, warning that the People’s Republic reserves the right to respond to such provocative behaviour. Beijing considers Taiwan an integral part of China destined for eventual peaceful reunification with the mainland.

Taiwanese authorities are searching for a stopgap alternative to US-sourced M109A6 self-propelled howitzers amid delays to the latter’s delivery, the island’s Ministry of National Defence announced Monday.

Israel Summons Russia’s Ambassador, Demands Apology Over Lavrov’s Remarks About Hitler, Zelensky

In an interview with an Italian TV channel on Sunday, the Russian foreign minister suggested that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s oft-made claim that Ukraine does not suffer from problems with Nazism because Zelensky himself is Jewish was severely flawed.

Israel summoned Russian Ambassador to Israel Anatoly Viktorov on Monday over Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s comments about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Adolf Hitler.

Let us honor those workers who stood up to Amazon, especially Chris Smalls, described by Amazon’s chief counsel as “not smart, or articulate,” who led a walkout at the Amazon warehouse at Staten Island JFK8 at the beginning of the pandemic two years ago to protest unsafe working conditions. He was immediately fired. Amazon’s high-priced lawyers, however, were in for a surprise. Smalls unionized the first Amazon warehouse in the country. He, along with his co-founder Derrick Palmer, built their union worker by worker with little outside support and no affiliation with a national labor group, raising $120,000 on GoFundMe. Amazon spent more than $4.3 million on anti-union consultants last year alone, according to federal filings.

Health Minister Greg Hunt wrote and signed a glowing letter of commendation for a politically connected healthcare company while it was in the midst of negotiations with his department for lucrative multimillion-dollar PPE deals.

It looks a lot like a return to the past. Founded in 1949 to defend against the “Soviet threat,” the NATO alliance is facing a return to mechanized warfare, a huge increase in defense spending, and potentially a new Iron Curtain falling across Europe. After struggling to find a new post-Cold War role, countering terrorism following the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001 and a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, NATO is back encroaching on its original nemesis.[1]

Ukraine is winning the battle on Twitter, but in the real world Kiev is losing the fight for the Donbass

Claims that Ukraine is set for victory on the ground are Kiev and Washington’s wishful thinking at best

Western media coverage of the Ukraine conflict has been so hysterically one-sided, and divorced from reality, that it's probably only a matter of time before Iraq's erstwhile 'Comical Ali' is brought out of retirement to insist that there are no Russians advancing towards the Ukrainian army's front lines. Meanwhile, the actual fighting continues to result in a string of defeats for Kiev's battered forces, who have already lost control of two major cities, despite unprecedented support from the US and its allies.  

The perversity of not knowing what we don’t want to know… This is any philosopher’s lament.

Slavoj Zizek is sometimes off the ball and dreams of a unified humanity. One of the major problem is the notion of standards of culture. Does one want to be “homogenised”? We have been presented since childhood with the "Tower of Babel" being sort of a thing of the devil — of humans trying to reach godly heights. Guess what? Being of different cultures with different languages is a good part of humanity. Our Tower of Babel is us. We cannot escape it despite having tried various conquests to teach the planet the word of a silly illusionary god who died on a cross 2022 years ago. And we still try... Oh boy....

A comedic actor who rose to the country’s highest office in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky was virtually unknown to the average American, except perhaps as a bit player in former U.S. President Donald Trump’s impeachment theater.

We, old people, are not allowed up ladders. At night, when we need to go to the bathroom every two hours, we have to hang on to things… It’s not uncommon that, by morning, old people are found lying on the floor of their nursing home bedroom, after a bad fall on the hard concrete surface at 2:00 AM. The annoying layout of the bedroom is such that the bathroom door is at the end of eternity. In the middle of the night, there is nothing in between to help stand up. Old legs at night are precarious and half asleep.

Noam Chomsky: “We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history”

The US professor, now 93, on the climate catastrophe and the threat of nuclear war.

If I was not voting for the UAP in these next federal elections, I would be voting for the Socialist Party… It’s a no-brainer. The UAP of Clive Palmer represents excellence in bullshit, porkies, deceit, promises of lower intellect for all, and tax powderisation because I suppose Clive will eventually pay the money he owes to this nation and the government coffers would fill up so much, you will be free. This is Freedom, FREEDOM as per the adverts. Even your home loan repayment will be 3 per cent of something lower than the Bottom of the Harbour scheme of the 1980s. And of course should Craig Kelly win the PMship, your wages will go up, inflation will go down, and the ducks in Centennial Park(lands) will do loop-de-loops on their way to bomb Russia with poop.

Another turd polisher for the Empire is Marcus Stanley…  By this I mean that the US Empire poops (I was going to restrict this to “nearly” but this was going to be a falsehood) EVERYWHERE. Thus the Empire needs cleaning staff….

There are a lot of “opinion holders” in the Western sphere who have a variety of views, but they never show the nefarious intent of the Empire, and constrain themselves to only clean up the poop. By this I mean that they will say the Empire has been a naughty dog BUT THEY STILL LOVE THE EMPIRE, after having cleaned up the mess.

The world order created after the Second World War and the Cold War isn’t working anymore, so the West needs “a global NATO” to pursue geopolitics anew, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss argued, in a major foreign policy speech on Wednesday. Truss also urged the US-led bloc to send more “heavy weapons, tanks” and airplanes to Ukraine, and said China would face the same treatment as Russia if it doesn’t “play by the rules.”