olympricks

Australia will not send officials or politicians to China for the Winter Olympics in a rebuke of Beijing over its human rights record, with a final decision on whether to launch a full diplomatic boycott to be made within days.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is weighing up whether to follow United States President Joe Biden’s administration in announcing a full diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics, which China labelled “a pretentious act” and warned of “countermeasures”.

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vote

 Culture wars are not as new a phenomena as our politicians, academics and commentariat would have us believe – there have always been points in history where it appeared that two tribes were going to war.

chair

Biden Expected to Offer Warnings and Alternatives in Call With Putin

The conflict in Ukraine will be a major topic during a high-stakes video call between President Biden and Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday.

President Biden is expected to encourage diplomatic de-escalation over the conflict in Ukraine when he speaks to Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in a video meeting on Tuesday. But Mr. Biden will warn Mr. Putin that if he orders the Russian forces poised at the border to invade Ukraine, Western allies may move to cut Russia off from the international financial system and seek direct sanctions on Mr. Putin’s closest associates, administration officials said.

angleton

As early as the 1960s, James Jesus Angleton insinuated that numerous Western leaders were KGB agents. The most famous allegations concerned the British Harold Wilson, the Swede Olof Palme, the Canadians Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, and the German Willy Brandt.

stench

If Scott Morrison and Alan Tudge thought the scandal of rorting hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money had been left behind, they had a rude awakening this week. And their efforts to escape the perception of corruption were laboured at best.

Scott Morrison and Alan Tudge might have been hoping that they would have left the year's biggest corruption scandal -- car park rorts -- behind them in the winter break, but then press gallery began doing its job -- something that the government seemed entirely unprepared for.

sausage

Coalition backbencher George Christensen has urged viewers of a far-right American conspiracy theorist’s online show, which has been banned by Facebook and YouTube, to hold rallies outside Australian embassies to protest over coronavirus restrictions.

The Liberal National Party MP, who will step down at the next election, last week appeared on Infowars founder Alex Jones’ web program, describing the conspiracy theorist as a “beacon”. This was despite Jones’ history of spreading false claims, including about Australia’s coronavirus response.

cloud

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has backed ex-NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian to make a tilt at federal politics, saying her instinct for freedom and resistance of “virus panic” made it important she remained in public life.

Close confidantes of Ms Berejiklian have also privately urged her to run for Mr Abbott’s old seat of Warringah despite being under the cloud of a corruption inquiry, with one advising it was better to run sooner than later and “the best form of redemption is to fight and win Warringah”.

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/she-has-an-instinct-for-freedom-abbott-backs-berejiklian-federal-tilt-20211206-p59f7g.html

war...

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday that there would be "serious consequences" for any  Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Meeting on the sidelines of an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe foreign ministers meeting in Stockholm, Blinken said he told his Russian counterpart that "the best way to avert crisis is through diplomacy."

However, if Moscow were to make a military incursion in Ukrainian territory, Blinken promised swift action such as hard-hitting economic sanctions. The US top diplomat stressed that the Ukraine poses no threat to Russia, and it is now on Russia to de-escalate the situation.

solomon 

Rod Dreher regals us with more idiotic misunderstandings than a dead AA battery inside the brain of a squashed cockroach. 

Yes Rod, the "woke thing" is a bit out of hand, but this isn’t why the US military is losing wars, even if the “woke thing” has infiltrated all the echelon of the US military. The truth of the matter is that wars are an awful way to deal with the problems of the human species. Future wars will be lost by everybody, whether neanderthal religious brainiacs or intellectual black “woke” lesbians. 

And that’s about it. 

zemmour

French far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour has launched his presidential campaign in front of thousands of cheering supporters at a Paris event marred by fighting during his speech.

Zemmour, a 63-year-old author and veteran television commentator, announced on Tuesday that he would run in next April’s election, joining the field of challengers seeking to unseat centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

He held his first event at an exhibition centre in a suburb of Paris where thousands cheered every mention of reducing immigration and booed every reference to Macron loudly.

“The stakes are huge: if I win it will be the start of winning back the most beautiful country in the world,” Zemmour told the crowd.

nothing

Go home, 46th Parliament. You're drunk.

Like the office bore at a Christmas party, the Australian Parliament spent its last fortnight bellowing on about itself, achieving nothing of note and generating eye-rolls from all and sundry.

Is this a problem? After all, the Prime Minister has made it clear that he prefers "can-do capitalism" over "don't-do governments". 

Perhaps a parliament that doesn't have a legislative response to climate change, that dodges the people's clamour for integrity measures, that commissions a damning review of the way it treats women, hears it, then shrugs and keeps doing it anyway, is the speed he's looking for.

war...

The management of the war memorial's controversial plans to drastically reshape the national institution will be put under a microscope over the coming year.

The Auditor-General Grant Hehir has proposed it look into the Australian War Memorial's processes and planning behind the $500 million project among its list of potential performance audits for the 2021-22 period.

pauline

Pauline Hanson cited UK COVID-19 death statistics at a recent 'freedom rally'. But her use of the data is misleading

CoronaCheck is RMIT ABC Fact Check's weekly email newsletter dedicated to fighting the misinformation infodemic surrounding the coronavirus outbreak.

You can read the latest edition below, and subscribe to have the next newsletter delivered straight to your inbox.

why...

It's been a year of bad behaviour and short-lived policies — so, why aren't more people predicting a Coalition election loss?

Political journalists are often accused — sometimes quite correctly — of being too obsessed with how the political game is played, rather than with what the political system is delivering.

And we are accused of spending too much time on "race calling" — reporting on policies purely in terms of how they might affect the political prospects of the major parties.

There is an argument to be made that those rules have been upended this year, as has so much in an era of pandemic, but not because journalists have necessarily mended their ways.

oil...

After Congress lifted a ban on crude exports in late 2015, oil and gas production in the Permian Basin soared while domestic consumption remained flat—leading to a massive build-out of pipelines and other infrastructure that culminated in the U.S. “flooding global markets” with fossil fuels at the expense of humanity, in general, and vulnerable Gulf Coast communities already overburdened by pollution, in particular.