Question: Given that history repeats, what year is this? Fifteen months ago, when Donald Trump’s rag-tag militias stormed the Capitol building in Washington D.C., I thought for a moment we might be living in 1923, witnessing the rebirth of western fascism. Such were the simila...

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It's here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months . It is also on Kindle . It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries and rich countries. They include our children, the...

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I visited Afghanistan only once, on a brief visit in 2014. I fell off a donkey to great hilarity of the local villagers, slept in a compound with the armed owner keeping watch the whole night, heard stories of how life was in Soviet times, and got a glimpse of why the Afghan p...

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I am co-writing a book on the Great Panic to explain what happened and what can be done to avoid a repeat. In the course of our research for that book, me and co-authors are scouring websites in the rest of the world to find out how others in the Covistance have experienced th...

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The essential governance problem in March 2020 in Western countries was the overwhelming demand of the vast majority of the population to do something dramatic in response to their fear. There was a clamour to be ‘led to safety’ by populations scared to death by images in the...

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With a recent publication in Nature that reported lockdowns have no effect on covid-cases or covid-deaths, there are now over 30 studies that fail to find any covid-reducing benefits of lockdowns. Worse, across countries and time, more severe lockdowns are just leading to more...

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The mass hysteria of the corona crisis is raging, with the resulting self-isolation of whole economies and populations. The loss seems greater with every new forecast on the economic collapse than I initially though t, and the benefit of imprisoning and terrorizing the populat...

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The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is supposed to make the threat look a bit bigger than it is in order to get negoti...

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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...

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I visited Turkey in April last year, traveling through the country, witnessing the troubles of the leadership of the ruling AKP party: it had just lost a general election that left it without a workable majority in parliament and only 40% of the popular vote; it was sucked int...

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How will Paul Samuelson be remembered? This is the positive side of the story, the glowing record of the Nobel Laureate and author of the most widely read textbook in modern times. History may be kind to Samuelson. He had the good fortune to surf three waves that carried all b...

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Balmain is not just the city of basket weavers it is also a place to find thinking drinkers and binge thinkers. Put this in your list of favorites. Shaken and Stirred , the brainchild of Parnell McGuinness and Leonie Phillips, is a space for the free exchange of opinions witho...

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Club 1: Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Mali, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka. Club 2: Bolivia, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, Guatemala, In...

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It seems incredible, hard to believe, but we've got ten double passes to give away to Highly Suss , which looks like fun. I'd go myself if I wasn't going to be overseas. If you're planning to be in Melbourne for the 4th of April, then let us know and we can send you a ticket t...

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On this analysis two major factors in the train wreck were the regulations that pushed lenders to water down prudent criteria for lending and the flight of speculators from the housing market when prices ceased to rise. A nuance in this analysis is to point out that it was not...

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It seemed like a reasonable enough idea. Responding to fears of a terrorist attack by ' dirty bomb ' or nuclear weapon , US Customs and Border Protection installed hundreds of radiation portal monitors at seaports, land border ports of entry and crossings across the United Sta...

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Hopefully Troppodillians will forgive me for tackling another Pearson piece only two weeks after my last effort. I'll try not to make a habit of it, I promise. With your indulgence, then, let's proceed. Is it relativism to hold our liberal democratic traditions to a higher sta...

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A sense of gloom settled in as I ploughed through The Weekend Australian yesterday. It felt like February 2003 again, only worse. Then, an optimist could at least excuse the thumping of the drums of war as the triumph of hope over experience. In the light of the last four year...

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This brief article by Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Washington Post provides a useful contrast to Albrechtsen's opinion piece. Here are the opening few lines to give you the flavour: The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation...

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Much as I hesitate to introduce yet another post with a plug for LNL, the interview with Chas Freeman last night obliges me to take the risk. Now retired, he was, as well as holding many other distinguished positions, US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. Te...

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Last week, Eygptian blogger Wael Abbas (NB he writes in Arabic!) was credited by French newspaper Le Figaro with striking a major blow against oppression, thanks to three of the ubiquitous incidents of material progress a mobile phone with integrated videocamera, the multimedi...

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Back in 2002, then aspiring US presidential candidate John Kerry began arguing that "the war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation". To my ear back then, this sounded like one of Kerry's more thoughtfu...

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Back in late 2005, a brilliant young US moderate-left commentator named Matthew Yglesias and his colleague Sam Rosenfeld penned a prescient essay for The American Prospect called " The Incompetence Dodge" . They began by noting how many policy figures were coming to the conclu...

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George Bush's announcement of extra troops for Iraq is significant not for its announcements of actions, but for its official admission that Iraq is a horrible mess. See the official US government PDF for details. The scariest bit is the official admission that the Coalition c...

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[photopress:Rollins.jpg,full,pp_empty] Calls to the government's National Security hotline are confidential aren't they? Well... maybe not . Performer Henry Rollins says that he's been reported to the hotline for reading a suspicious book . But if the service is confidential t...

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