This is an excellent piece by Barry Jones in The Australian in which he highlights the extraordinarily dangerous attitude currently being promoted as the “new normal” by politicians and their lackeys in the western world, in which objectivity, rationality and informed debate are completely subsumed by “faith”, expedience and knee-jerk reactivity:
We live in an era [...]

Bazooka Circus is what the whole world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.
- Hunter S Thompson

You might have seen this: the US military ‘lost’ five or six live nuclear warheads and ended up mistakenly flying them across the country. The mistake was not discovered for three and a half hours, when the B-52 in question landed at Barksdale Air Force Base.
The initial questions asked in the media were, of [...]

Britain’s Lord Justice Sedley has caused quite a fuss by suggesting that all Britons (and any visitors to the Isles) should be added to the British criminal DNA database (alternative article).
Unsurprisingly the suggestion has caused all kinds of hysteria which seems to rather miss his Lordship’s point: it’s fundamentally inequitable to have some people in [...]

Crikey yesterday described the APEC security arrangements thus:
For the cops, APEC is a vision of the world as it should be. Expanded powers, new equipment, media support, and maybe a chance to try out new toys like the water cannon.
If the allegations in this article are even close to true, then that sounds pretty accurate:

cutlery [...]