Mahler's Prodigal Son

Can anyone really want to vote for this low-life?    Leave aside, for the moment, whether Trump is a "crook" as Michael Bloomberg described him the other day when speaking at the DNC, but to stoop as low as Trump did, as detailed below in a report in The New York Times (reprinted in The Age newspaper) shows Trump to be what really is - a loud-mouth sleazeball. "Donald Trump has suggested that the Muslim mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq had let her husband do all the talking at the Democratic National Convention because she was not "allowed" to speak. Trump's comments, in an interview with ABC News that will air on Sunday, local time, were his most extensive remarks since Khizr Khan delivered one of the most powerful speeches on Thursday at the convention in Philadelphia.   In the speech, Khan spoke about how his 27-year-old son, Humayun Khan, an army captain, sacrificed his life in a car bombing in 2004 in Iraq as he tried to save other troops. K...

The title of this post may intrigue, but the stat revealed in the piece, below, is startling... "The global cost of physical inactivity for 2013 has been calculated at $US67.5 billion ($A90 billion), in a world-first study by the University of Sydney. Key points: The findings, published in the journal Lancet, include the cost burden of lifestyle diseases on health budgets as well as the cost of premature death relating to physical inactivity. The burden in developing countries was calculated differently because the consequences of lifestyle diseases is often premature death. Sydney University senior research fellow Melody Ding said the cost included the healthcare expenses linked to chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. "These are the diseases associated with physical inactivity," Dr Ding said. "It also includes the cost of productivity losses when people die prematurely because of physical inactivity." The study included data from 14...

Dylan Voller is hooded and strapped to a restraining chair in the footage aired on Four Corners With praise due to it, Australia's ABC program "Four Corners" on Monday night aired revelations of children (yes, children, as young as 10) being abused, tortured, held in solitary confinement in a particular correction facility in Australia's Northern Territory. This piece in The Sydney Morning Herald provides the background . The outrcry has been huge.   The Federal Government has announced a Royal Commission.    There cannot be any doubt that this is a scandal of monumental proportions.    No better than Gitmo or what was revealed as happening at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

Food!   We all need it to nourish our bodies.    But then again to put it bluntly, we waste a hell of a lot of it..... "Americans say they feel bad about the 130 billion pounds of food (PDF) the nation wastes every year. But not badly enough to do anything about it. More than half the respondents in a new national survey said they are aware of the scale of this $160 billion (PDF) problem. Almost 80 percent said they feel guilty when throwing food away, but 51 percent said it would be difficult to reduce household food waste. And 42 percent said they don’t have enough time to worry about it. The study, published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, found that responses from wealthier Americans showed them less willing to be inconvenienced, said Dana Gunders, a food-waste expert at the National Resources Defense Council who wrote the first major report about food waste in 2012. Gunders wasn't involved with the study released on Thursday. “I’ve always thoug...

Whilst the EU and the USA have courted Turkey as an ally - for many reasons, not least the use of military bases in the country and the strategic geographic position of Turkey in the Middle East - its President has shown little regard for democratic principles. With the recent coup, the crackdown on any dissenters, and others, by Erdogan has gathered momentum.    The latest target, and not for the first time, has been journalists . The International New York Times reports..... "One journalist, who was on vacation, had his home raided in the early morning by the police. Others were called in to their bosses’ offices last week and fired, with little explanation. Dozens of reporters have had their press credentials revoked. A pro-government newspaper, meanwhile, published a list of names and photographs of journalists suspected of treachery. The witch-hunt environment that has enveloped Turkey in the wake of a failed military coup extended to the news media on Monday, as th...

Let it not be said that Mike Moore holds back on his blog in describing Trump, now candidate for president of the USA.... "Friends: I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.” Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now. I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for ...

With a poll released today revealing that Trump and Clinton are tied in their race to the White House and WikiLeaks, also today, having released a raft of documents which show the party machine having plotted against Bernie Sanders - and what the fallout from that might be can only be be a matter of speculation - a piece " Donald Trump’s Convention Speech Rings Terrifying Historical Alarm Bells " on The Intercept reflects on Trump and his victory speech at the just concluded GOP Convention.     The thought of such a shallow, ignorant and inexperienced person taking office in the White House ought to scare Americans as much as the rest of the world. " DONALD TRUMP’S SPEECH accepting the Republican nomination for president will probably go down as one of the most frightening pieces of political rhetoric in U.S. history. Even for people who believe the danger of genuine authoritarianism on the U.S. right is often exaggerated, it’s impossible not to hear in Trump’s spe...

Sadly, as the world's media is consumed by reporting on Trump's ascension to become the GOP's presidential candidate and a myriad of other horror events around the world, the finding , below, by a tribunal in The Hague has slipped under the radar from being reported.     "A non-binding international tribunal at The Hague has found Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States were complicit in facilitating the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia. An estimated half a million people perished in what was one of the worst massacres of the 20th Century. The killings were triggered by a failed coup that led to the deaths of six army generals, followed by the mass targeting of communists. The International People's Tribunal at The Hague has now ruled that Indonesia committed crimes against humanity, but the finding is non-binding and carries no legal weight. The judges found allegations of "cruel and unspeakable murders" and the "unjustifiable impriso...

I t's bad enough to see how things are playing out in Turkey - both before the attempted coup, and since - but The New Yorker raises a very important and critical question.    What about all those NATO nuclear-weapons stored on an American base in Turkey? "The Incirlik Airbase, in southeast Turkey, houses nato’s largest nuclear-weapons storage facility. On Saturday morning, the American Embassy in Ankara issued an “Emergency Message for U.S. Citizens,” warning that power had been cut to Incirlik and that “local authorities are denying movements on to and off of” the base. Incirlik was forced to rely on backup generators; U.S. Air Force planes stationed there were prohibited from taking off or landing; and the security-threat level was raised to fpcon Delta, the highest state of alert, declared when a terrorist attack has occurred or may be imminent. On Sunday, the base commander, General Bekir Ercan Van, and nine other Turkish officers at Incirlik were detained for all...

If you want at least one person excoriating Donald Trump, the ghost-writer of Trump's book has done a great job doing so.      Read on.....in this piece in The New York Times . "Donald J. Trump has regularly boasted about “The Art of the Deal,” his best-selling autobiography, as a business bible that demonstrates the sharp negotiating prowess he would bring to the presidency. The book, released in 1987, details his rise to the top of New York’s real estate world; it helped spawn his career as a reality television star and cemented his image as a winner with a golden touch. But Tony Schwartz, the book’s ghostwriter, who spent 18 months in the 1980s interviewing and shadowing Mr. Trump, says that it is really a work of fiction. In an interview with The New Yorker magazine for its July 25 issue, Mr. Schwartz explained publicly, and for the first time, what he learned from living in Mr. Trump’s world. Here are some highlights. The Art of Regret Mr. Schwartz, a f...

“It may well be that democracy has triumphed in Turkey only to be strangled at a slower pace,” Jonathan Eyal, the international director at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, told me. There can be little doubt the expressions of support for Erdogan from Western capitals came through gritted teeth." Roger Cohen, in an op-ed piece " Turkey's Coup That Wasn't " in The New York Times , analyses the events of the last days in Turkey and what it all means - or more likely, will likely lead to.

Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies. He is also former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. He writes in " The US won't pivot away from the Middle East - Neither realist arguments nor ethical considerations will lead to a US disengagement from the Middle East" on AlJazeera on why America remains so engaged in the Middle East despite the Obama Administration suggesting it is pivoting toward greater engagement in Asia. "A few years ago, US President Barack Obama made much of an American pivot to East Asia, a recognition of China's emergence and regional assertiveness, and the related claim that the American role in the Asia-Pacific should be treated as a prime strategic interest that China needed to be made to respect. The shift also involved the recognition by Obama that the United States had become overly engaged in Middle Eastern...

The brickbats and accusations against Trump could not be more blunt.   Paul McGeogh, writing on The Age website in " Donald Trump cuts out middlemen to become the Uber of right-wing politics from the USA " gathers together the withering and excoriating criticisms directed against Trump and the GOP. "The moment is imminent – tension rising, fear palpable. Judges are supposed to be restrained, decorous. But the diminutive, 83-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg​, a justice of the US Supreme Court, has gone off the reservation, denouncing Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump as "a faker [with] an ego". Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg calls presumptive US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump 'a fake'. It's the job of historians to judge presidencies with hindsight. But this go-round they can't wait – David McCullough, the doyen of American historians, is casting judgment on the mere prospect. In a Facebook video, McCullough declares:...

There are few journalists or commentators better equipped -and able to draw on a wealth of experience in the Middle East - than Robert Fisk to reflect on the abortive coup in Turkey.    In his latest piece " Turkey's coup may have failed – but history shows that it won’t be long before another one succeeds " in The Independent he addresses the whole situation both in Turkey and the response by the West to the events of the last 24 hours. "Recep Tayyip Erdogan had it coming. The Turkish army was never going to remain compliant while the man who would recreate the Ottoman Empire turned his neighbours into enemies and his country into a mockery of itself. But it would be a grave mistake to assume two things: that the putting down of a military coup is a momentary matter after which the Turkish army will remain obedient to its sultan; and to regard at least 161 deaths and more than 2,839 detained in isolation from the collapse of the nation-states of the Middle East...

Trump's selected candidate for VP fits the bill perfectly  - for Trump!       As a piece on CommonDreams says: "Presumptive Republican nominee for president Donald Trump announced Friday that he has chosen Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate. Gov. Pence is famously—or infamously—right-wing, and a particular darling of far-right Evangelical voters. Pundits surmised that Trump is attempting to sway the conservative Christian portion of the Republican party, which had previously rallied behind Ted Cruz. Progressives decried the decision. Leftists pointed out Pence's plethora of policy stances and decisions that have threatened civil rights, women's health, the environment, and the welfare of the most vulnerable since he was elected to Congress in 2000 and then as Indiana's governor in 2012." Continue reading, here - and not be surprised where this Pence-fellow stands on many critical issues.

The consequences of Donald Trump's speeches on the election trail are manifesting themselves in the most ugly ways.    Bigotry and prejudice is being seen in all manner of ways across the US landscape - as this piece in The New York Times details. "The chant erupts in a college auditorium in Washington, as admirers of a conservative internet personality shout down a black protester. It echoes around the gym of a central Iowa high school, as white students taunt the Hispanic fans and players of a rival team. It is hollered by a lone motorcyclist, as he tears out of a Kansas gas station after an argument with a Hispanic man and his Muslim friend. Trump Trump Trump In countless collisions of color and creed, Donald J. Trump’s name evokes an easily understood message of racial hostility. Defying modern conventions of political civility and language, Mr. Trump has breached the boundaries that have long constrained Americans’ public discussion of race. Mr. Trump has attacke...

A piece " Headphones Everywhere " in The New Yorker queries what is happening to people who seem to be ever-increasingly wearing headphones as they go about their daily business. "Anyone who has recently spent time in a public space—traversing the aisle of an airplane, say, lurching toward your seat adjacent to the toilet, trying to shift your backpack without thwapping a fellow traveller on the forehead—has likely noticed the sudden and extraordinary ubiquity of headphones. “Do people really like music this much?” I have wondered, incredulously, while tallying endless white earplugs. The outside world, once a shared auditory environment, has been effectively fractured. We now lilt about in our own bubbles of self-programmed sound." **** "Certainly, headphones are an obvious method of exercising autonomy, control—choosing what you’ll hear and when, rather than gamely enduring whatever the environment might inflict upon you. In that way, they are defensiv...

FAIR more than rightly queries what the New York Times was doing, in effect, giving some sort of endorsement - or at the very least, some airspace - to a CEO earning $27 million a year extolling his corporation for giving a raise to his company's employees......which actually creates income inequality. "They must have been high-fiving themselves at JPMorgan Chase’s PR offices this morning. Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, was given prime space on the New York Times‘ op-ed page today (7/12/16) to declare that his bank was doing something about “wage stagnation” and “income inequality” by “giving thousands of employees a raise”: Our minimum salary for American employees today is $10.15 an hour…almost $3 above the current national minimum wage. Over the next three years, we will raise the minimum pay for 18,000 employees to between $12 and $16.50 an hour for full-time, part-time and new employees, depending on geographic and market factors. “A pay increase is the right thing to d...

Credited to Mike Luckovich

Most commentary on the Chilcot Inquiry Report of and associated with the Iraq War, has been "lifted" from the Executive Summary.   The Intercept has actually gone and dug into the Report, with these revelations : "THE CHILCOT REPORT, the U.K.’s official inquiry into its participation in the Iraq War, has finally been released after seven years of investigation. Its executive summary certainly makes former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the British push for war, look terrible. According to the report, Blair made statements about Iraq’s nonexistent chemical, biological, and nuclear programs based on “what Mr. Blair believed” rather than the intelligence he had been given. The U.K. went to war despite the fact that “diplomatic options had not been exhausted.” Blair was warned by British intelligence that terrorism would “increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-US/anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the ...