The US prides itself on having the greatest warriors backed by the mightiest assembly of military power in history. So why do they keep losing the endless wars they have been involved in since WWII?
Scott Atran, emeritus director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research puts it down to misunderstanding the will to fight by its opponents.
There are moments when only the word gobsmacked is appropriate. One of them is reading Professor Judith Sloan’s recent Spectator piece about JobKeeper.
Sloan is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economics and Social Research at the University of Melbourne; Spectator columnist; Murdoch media columnist; and, normally reliable culture warrior ready to excoriate the ALP and progressives.
It is generally assumed that Scott Morrison will commit to a 2050 net zero target to bring himself into line with Boris Johnson’s position and get an invitation to the forthcoming Glasgow climate change conference.
Not that he’ll do anything to meet the goal but rather it will join the long list of hollow promises he has made over his Prime Ministerial career.
The Grattan Institute’s Stephen Duckett has described (The Conversation 26/8) what Scott Morrison is not telling us about when he says he has a plan to allow us to get on with our lives.
Duckett says that “In identifying the vaccination coverage target for the transition to Phase B, Doherty’s experts assumed that testing, tracing, isolation, and quarantine (TTIQ), would be central to maintaining lower case numbers.”
Scott Morrison has a plan – as he keeps telling us. And the plan means that after Australia reaches 70% we can start to get on with our lives and live with the virus.
Now anybody would be entitled to think that a Morrison plan is more likely to be a sound bite than an actual plan but in this case you can subject his plan, if it is actually a plan, to a real world comparator – the United Kingdom – to see how realistic it is now the Delta strain is with us.
It is a frightening thought that that our current global warming situation could have been much worse.
It is doubly frightening when we consider that’s only the case because of an international agreement which Australia back then, unlike its current attitude to climate change agreements, embraced.
It is a few months more than 179 years since 4,500 British and ‘Native’ troops and 12,000 camp followers were forced to leave Kabul.
The Afghan rebel Akbar Khan had struck a pistol in the mouth of the British political advisor, Sir William Hay Macnaughten, and shot him dead. Shortly after the British Commander-in-Chief Sir William Elphinstone surrendered Kabul and begun the retreat to Jalalabad.
It is commonly believed if you are going to consistently tell lies you need either a good memory or a hide like a rhinoceros. These days neither seems to be necessary.
Scott Morrison fails the first qualification, comfortably fits into the second while, fittingly for a fundamentalist God-botherer simply believes what he says or thinks it serves a higher purpose.
It is now known that one person in the Prime Minister’s office drew up the spreadsheets for both the sports and car park rorts.
While this is unsurprising, given the nature and standard operating practice of the Morrison Government, it raises questions about the way the role of advisors has developed.
Two recent surveys and a critique of an international ‘Trust Barometer’ give vastly different views of who and what Australians trust.
One is relentlessly upbeat, one is highly critical and one gives an interesting sidelight on the issue.
In 2020 an Australian communications company, Senate SHJ, surveyed what communication elements contribute to social cohesion in the community and the degree to which the public trusts communication from various sources – measuring whether Australians listen to and trust information from the sources and then combining the elements in a Togetherness Index.