We’re now in week seven of the Newspoll drought, but that does not come as a surprise this week as the budget will be brought down tomorrow, and a poll will assuredly follow in its wake. We did have from The Australian on Friday results from an SEC Newgate Research on Friday which found the federal government’s overall performance rated as excellent by 3%, very good by 9%, good by 26%, fair by 35%, poor by 16% and very poor by 10%. This marked a nine-point drop in the combined excellent, very good and good result since the question was last asked in August. However, the party’s lead over the Coalition as best to manage cost-of-living was little changed over the same period, from 38-24 to 40-24. Ratings for state governments were down across the board, which likely reflects an unwinding of strong results for governments across the board during the pandemic. Some of the results from the poll, but not those above, can be found on the organisation’s website. It was conducted from October 5 to 10 from a sample of 1200.
Food for thought:
• Constitutional law expert George Williams calls for the voting age to be lowered to 16 in a column for The Australian.
• Joo-Cheong Tham of the University of Melbourne law school argues for the franchise to be extended to permanent residents and long-term visa holders.
• Digital Rights Watch calls for the removal of exemptions for political party voter databases from privacy laws in light of the recent Optus hack.
• The Centre for Public Integrity calls for campaign spending caps, after its submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters inquiry into the federal election analysed the increase in spending over the past decade.
Socrates @ Monday, October 24, 2022 at 11:36 am:
“I realise it is probably just a bluff to frighten the west out of supporting Ukraine any further. Nevertheless I find the whole idea of Ukraine using a “dirty bomb” near the dam or anywhere else in Kherson to be absurd in so many ways.
…
But Russia wanting to use a dirty bomb makes equally little sense.
…
As threats go, its pretty silly. That is to say, I find it hard to believe.“
———————————-
Yes! Which invites the question: why is Russia’s defence minister blowing this transparently ludicrous smoke around at his counterparts in several Western countries? Just more futile arm-waving at the West, as if Russia thinks it is merely a matter of driving them away like annoying flies? A pathetic attempt to buy a few more days/weeks of procrastination from Ukraine’s Western supporters? Just more shit for domestic consumption? I think I’m leaning towards the latter, but really, who knows with these psychopaths?
The Russians are getting their butt kicked.
The Russian’s have blown the dam up before.
Killing a large portion of their retreating army.
The question is, will Putin go full Stalin.
https://www.rferl.org/a/european-remembrance-day-ukraine-little-known-ww2-tragedy/25083847.html
Same with an atomic bomb, how isolated does Putin want Russia to be.
Lang’s granddaughter’s thoughts on Auntie Gina:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGL3ANW31Mw
MacArthur
“ Maybe this latest instance of the long-standing Russian SOP of spreading vicious lies about its victims aims merely to cause hesitance in Western efforts to bolster Ukraine’s strength to resist the invasion. The West cannot let Putin succeed in this.”
—————————————————————————————-
IMO it is highly unusual for combatants to communicate their tactical intentions. More commonly, like the Ukrainians did, combatants seek to deceive their opponents of their true intentions. I would be surprised if the West in any way believes that Putin is truly warning them. If he was going to use nukes he’s had sufficient time to do so utilising the critical elements of surprise and shock. Nothing has changed existentially to alter Putin’s position (which has been poor since the early weeks) to suggest he would need to do so and nor would the West nor Ukraine truly give him reason to do so by actually attacking Russia. I still see the use of nukes as unlikely (though never impossible).
frednk
There were various Aussie crew of the Dam Busters planes. Many, if not most, of the people drowned were, I believe, Russian (including presumably Ukrainian) POWs.
They were heavily decorated, suffered vrey high casualties and are still regarded as heroes.
A variation on the theme:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inundation_of_Walcheren
Very true – the same can be said for Coking Coal where investment has fallen off a cliff.
“There is a massive disconnect between the way copper is being priced and traded today and forecasts of a giant hole in the longer-term relationship between copper supply and demand in a net-zero carbon emissions world.
The copper price has slumped 30 per cent since March, despite what global trading house Trafigura said last week were tumbling inventories of refined copper.
Trafigura’s co-head of metals and minerals trading, Kostas Bintas, told the Financial Times’ mining summit that inventories of copper today covered only 4.9 days of global consumption and were expected to end the year at 2.7 days. In more normal circumstances there would be weeks of copper stocks relative to consumption.
There are reasons why the price could be falling even as inventories of the metal were shrinking to negligible levels.
The looming global recession, the implosion of China’s copper-intensive property construction market and the war and energy crisis in Europe that has seen a diversion from its drive into renewable energy and a reversion to fossil fuels and placed a question mark over the future of Russia’s production – about five per cent of world supply – are the most obvious.
‘And’
“Under its base case – average global warming of between 2.2 degrees celsius and 2.4 degrees by mid-century, there would be a 6.5 million tonne shortfall in supply.
To meet accelerated zero-carbon targets (limiting the rise in temperatures to 1.5 degrees) Wood Mackenzie says 9.7 million tonnes of mine supply would be needed over the next decade from projects that have yet to be sanctioned; an increase in supply never previously achieved.
Low-carbon copper demand over the next 20 years, it said, would be equivalent to more than 60 per cent of the current size of the copper market and the extra production required from new projects for emissions-reducing technologies would be equivalent to nearly a third of current refined copper consumption.”
That would require about $US23 billion ($36.1 billion) of investment a year in new projects, or 64 per cent more than the average annual spend over the past 30 years and would underpin a rise in the copper price to more than $US11,000 a tonne within five years, the consultancy said. The copper price today is about $US7500 a tonne.
The prospect of those sorts of price rises would normally induce increased supply and the scramble to do so is already on, with a particular but not exclusive focus on exploration in South America.
Rising capital and operating costs for new copper projects, the scarcity of new world-class deposits, the time and cost it takes to approve new projects in developed economies and the political and economic risks of developing new mines in developing economies, however, make an increase in supply of the magnitude Wood Mackenzie believes will be required challenging, to say the least.
Declining grades and rising costs in existing large-scale mines exacerbate the size of that challenge, as do increasing environmental obstacles, costs and delays for new mines or expansions of existing projects.”
https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/the-world-has-a-big-problem-in-the-drive-to-net-zero-20221024-p5bs8w.html
Another variation on the theme.
https://www.liberationroute.com/pois/524/bombing-the-dike
This time it is China v Japan….
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26013859
Dutch v the germans, including strategic flooding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_invasion_of_the_Netherlands#Dutch_defensive_strategy
This one is a bit murky. But then, that is war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_bombing_of_Vietnam%27s_dikes
Cronus @ Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:01 pm:
“it is highly unusual for combatants to communicate their tactical intentions.”
——————————-
Yes. Makes me even more inclined to view this messaging out of Moscow as being designed for domestic consumption. Maybe an old-school dehumanisation of Ukrainians by demonising them? The Kremlin is probably solely focused upon power preservation at home now. My concern is over how many Ukrainians have to suffer and die while this egomaniacal game plays out in Moscow.
Equally reasonably, some committed Christians may recoil at being forced to celebrate homosexual pride.”
There’s nothing reasonable about bigotry. Nothing. Claimed religious affiliation does not exempt anyone. Religious affiliations are just nonsense. Really, the religious are saying they should be permitted to privilege their bigotries on the basis of their superstitions. Really, their attachments to false presumptions – to superstitions – serve only to discredit them.
The pleasures of make-believe are easy to comprehend and, among children and actors, all very well. Religion is scripted make-believe. At its core, religious make-believe is not serious. It is infantile. It is dressing-up. It is play-acting. It is the continuation of the child-like by the adult. And it absolutely cannot be used to justify bigotry.
Really, we need protection from the fantasists, not the protection of them.
UpN
Bougainville must be sitting on half a degree’s worth.
Boerwar @ Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:12 pm:
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_bombing_of_Vietnam%27s_dikes
“In 1966, John McNaughton, Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, proposed the destruction of the Red River Valley dams and dikes in order to flood rice paddies, disrupt the North Vietnamese food supply, and leverage Hanoi during negotiations; then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, however, rejected the idea.”
————————————-
At least McNamara saw sense on that occasion.
Upnorth,
One estimate I’ve seen is that we will require all the copper we’ve ever extracted again by 2050.
Go long on copper.
C@T
“ But if you try and attack Israel (I bet she had a lot to say about Penny Wong’s decision to keep the Aus Embassy in Tel Aviv), then she goes full Woke Warrior Princess because her cause (Israel)is just. ”
——————————————————————————————-
I can only imagine though I’m certain she’s all over half of the story while ignoring the other half entirely. As a warrior, she doesn’t do nuance, she just supports one side of any argument without regard to the other, it’s so much simpler that way, no need for logic, in fact cognitive dissonance becomes sound reasoning.
U, DM
I assume that recycled copper from the 65 million empty units in China would help?
Perhaps J Planet prefers Xi’s way of managing talkative sport stars?
Late Riser:
International money laundering, particularly in respect of kleptocrats as opposed to private criminals. London is now the largest IML node (aka “safe space for kleptocrats”) after US and EU cracked down on CH last decade. The Brexiteers needed to get the UK out of EU before significant additional enforcement of financial regulation came in in 2020, and made it out just in time. The UK laws look OK on the surface, but it’s the enforcement that counts (or in this case the lack thereof).
Macarthur
McNamara and ‘seeing sense’ rarely went together during the Vietnam War. Deliberate flooding often cuts both ways but in this case it may have provided a substantial boost to the US negotiating position.
We don’t know.
Boerwar, re attacks on dams etc. You and I might see eye-to-eye on something: that there are some attacks which would definitely be war crimes if perpetrated by an aggressor, which might not be if done out of self-defence. I incline towards putting Allied bombing of German and Japanese targets in WW2 in this category, but obviously not vice-versa.
Boerwar says:
Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:16 pm
UpN
Bougainville must be sitting on half a degree’s worth.
中华人民共和国
Yes cobber and a heap of Gold (which electronics will need). The other untapped source is Madagascar. Not only copper there but also probably the second best untapped chromite (needed for stainless steel) resource in the world. The best is in the protected Arctic area of Canada so I pray it is never developed. South African supplies of chromite will start to slip soon.
Its easy to get on a platform and yell we have to move to renewables – its harder to deliver the tangibles that are going to be needed to meet that demand.
As we have seen repeatedly on this forum, it’s easy to demand Australia stop exports of energy, but the perpertrators have no response when challenged for replacements (to manufacture renewables) and the economic impact on our nation ($US283 billion – 83% of exports).
Simple slogans will not win this battle I am afraid. That is the Boris Johnson solution.
Boerwar @ Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:24 pm:
“McNamara and ‘seeing sense’ rarely went together during the Vietnam War. ”
——————————
Indeed. Hence my qualification: “on that occasion.”
A second rate offshore money-laundering island, a circus short of a ringmaster, a dog returning to his vomit, and a sullen populace getting ready to freeze through winter…
…I feel a stint on the Guardian coming up!
Cronus @ #117 Monday, October 24th, 2022 – 12:20 pm
That’s exactly right. The fact that she gets to decide what is ‘woke’ and what is not, is discriminatory in the extreme and simply the function of her perspective. Whereas, on the other hand, I think that someone like her who champions the RW Israeli pov, plus a raft of other, to me, objectionable perspectives, is, to me, being ‘woke’, ie wide awake, about the things I disagree with wholeheartedly. In exactly the same way that she thinks the things I believe in but which she doesn’t, are ‘woke’.
So I think we should reclaim the word ‘woke’ and start applying it to the causes the RW champions and use it in the generic sense in order to shine a light on their hypocrisy. And until they realise that we’re not going to take their framing around the word, ‘woke’ any more.
‘Macarthur says:
Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:30 pm
Boerwar @ Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:24 pm:
“McNamara and ‘seeing sense’ rarely went together during the Vietnam War. ”
——————————
Indeed. Hence my qualification: “on that occasion.”’
====================================
You assert that he saw ‘sense’. We don’t know because it was not tried. Would the North Vietnamese have negotiated in a different fashion?
Dandy Murray says:
Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:18 pm
Upnorth,
One estimate I’ve seen is that we will require all the copper we’ve ever extracted again by 2050.
Go long on copper.
中华人民共和国
100% DM. The problem the resource industry will face (and thus the globe) is that Banks will not lend against mining because of the pressures of environmental activists in the west. The fuits of their victory may well turn out to be ashes in the mouth of humanity.
‘Macarthur says:
Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:26 pm
Boerwar, re attacks on dams etc. You and I might see eye-to-eye on something: that there are some attacks which would definitely be war crimes if perpetrated by an aggressor, which might not be if done out of self-defence. I incline towards putting Allied bombing of German and Japanese targets in WW2 in this category, but obviously not vice-versa.’
=======================================
As far as I know there is absolutely no legal distinction between an aggressor and a defender when it comes to defining a war crime. Murdering unarmed prisoners is a war crime. End of story.
Boerwar @ Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:31 pm:
“You assert that he saw ‘sense’. We don’t know because it was not tried. Would the North Vietnamese have negotiated in a different fashion?”
——————————
As you seem to recognise in the second sentence of your comment, the counterfactual is a ‘known unknown’. So, the only answer to your rhetorical question is “it cannot be known”. So, it seems to me that rationality would suggest approaching a decision like this primarily from the things we can know about it. In this instance, that would be limited to the directly foreseeable consequences of bombing versus the directly observable consequences of not. That is, massive suffering and death of invaded civilians along with no solid projection of war duration, versus that specific suffering and death avoided along with equally little solid projection of war duration.
Boerwar says:
Murdering unarmed prisoners is a war crime. End of story.
_______
This from the guy that celebrates the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Whenever Andrews goes, he’ll leave a legacy of massive infrastructure reform.
Boerwar says:
Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:20 pm
U, DM
I assume that recycled copper from the 65 million empty units in China would help?
中华人民共和国
Only partially BW. Most of these units are empty concrete shells. Little or no copper. Chinese keep units empty until they are ready to move in. Unlike the west where a project is finished to live in. Therefore you can go to some very high end (and expensive) apartments in first tier cities like Shanghai and Beijing. The apartment you visit is exquisitly fitted (with Chinese Characteristics) but next door is literally and empty concrete shell.
The apartments that will be knocked down are in lesser tiered Cities. Very few will have any copper. There will be some steel that can be recycled as scrap however. Scrap steel always has a loss factor and contamination makes some of the recycled product dangerous for construction.
Macarthur
I am not all that keen on using alternative history to try to prove a point.
We don’t know what would have happened had Goldwater’s ‘solution’ been deployed either.
Macarthur @ #90 Monday, October 24th, 2022 – 11:34 am
Because why put obviously Russian trucks filled with explosives on the dam wall for all to see? If you were not bluffing you would arrange for the trucks to be placed there at a moment’s notice. Also, putting the trucks there it becomes impossible to shift the blame to the Ukrainians.
UpN
Ah. Thank you. One of my theories is that Australia should be (and should have been) taking advantage of the commodities boom to get ready for when the commodities boom tails off.
Apart from squabbling about the division of the spoils, we seem to have done the reverse.
Paying the various pipers is not going to come naturally to the Unlucky Country citizenry.
Tories sound like a happy bunch of campers.
“Tory party members must be allowed to vote by telephone, the chairman of a grassroots Conservative group has said as he accuses party bosses of treating activists with “contempt”.
For the first time in the party’s history, members will choose the next Prime Minister exclusively in an online ballot, as long as more than one candidate is put forward by MPs by Monday.
But between 10 and 15 per cent of party members do not have a computer or mobile phone meaning they are at risk of getting excluded from the voting in the leadership contest, according to John Strafford, chairman of the Campaign for Conservative Democracy.
“I understand, certainly in the past, there has been a telephone voting system where you were given a code number and then you can telephone your vote,” he said, adding that he would be in favour of such an approach this time to ensure no one is disenfranchised.
Register an email address
Party officials reportedly spent the weekend frantically trying to phone members without an email address to urge them to register an email address so they could vote in the contest.
If the battle to replace Liz Truss goes down to a final two the vote is expected to open on Monday evening and will be live for four days, closing at 11am on Friday.
Mr Strafford, who campaigns for greater representation of Tory grassroots members within the party, said he has “never known such anger among party members as I’ve known over the past few weeks”.
He told The Daily Telegraph: “The members are seething. The parliamentary party is wholly and totally out of touch with the members of the party.
“They treat the members with total contempt. The WhatsApp groups have gone absolutely crazy with anger against the parliamentary party and the MPs.
“The ordinary members are convinced the MPs only think of themselves, have no principles and do whatever suits them. It’s a very sad state of play.”
He claimed that the new rules for this leadership contest – which give MPs an indicative vote on the final two candidates before it goes out to the members – amount to a “manipulation” of the process by party bosses.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/10/23/tory-members-fury-telephone-votes-ditched-digital-15-have/
With the talk of copper I had a quick google and found something very surprising about the big producers. 9 of the world’s 10 biggest copper producing mines are in Peru and Chile. I wonder how much tax the countries get from the companies running them considering the owners of the mines, Glencore, Freeport ,Anglo-American, BHP,
https://www.mining-technology.com/marketdata/ten-largest-coppers-mines-2021/
Boerwar @ Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:34 pm:
“As far as I know there is absolutely no legal distinction between an aggressor and a defender when it comes to defining a war crime. Murdering unarmed prisoners is a war crime. End of story.”
————————————
I agree with your example. But I did qualify my thought, about how “some” acts if done by an aggressor “might” not be if performed by a victim. For example, an attacked nation evacuating its own civilians from a threatened area still under its control to another less-threatened area does not fall under the definition of a war crime, as far as I understand it. However, what Russia is currently doing to civilians in Kherson is a war crime. This is so, because the former is an instance of a nation acting to defend its own citizens from a hostile enemy, whereas the latter is not.
As stated previously, I would have dropped the first atom bomb on the enemy military HQ – a legitimate military target. I would have timed it for when Hirohito was at home.
frednk at 11.58 am
Interesting footage, but there are two separate dams. The one destroyed in 1941 was at Zaporizhzhia, upstream from the dam at Nova Kakhovka. See:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-curbs-power-usage-after-russian-attacks-destroy-some-energy-plants-2022-10-19/
That story from two days ago cites a witness saying fighting is occurring in Kherson city.
Support for Putin correlates with amnesia about Stalin’s crimes but the Putin mode of war is more bungled than Stalin’s was. Kargarlitsky comments on the current war:
“A notable feature of this conflict (at least on the Russian side) is that military, strategic, and foreign policy considerations enjoy much less influence on the decisions made than do domestic political and propaganda ones.”
https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/autumn-escalation
Macarthur
Clearing civilians from combat zones is a grey area, IMO. If you don’t clear them you can be accused of using them as human shields, for example.
I think we can agree that clearing Ukrainian civilians from non combat zones and forcibly relocating them to distant parts of Russia in order to assimilate them into the Russian population is a war crime. My view is that the latter is genocidal in the broad sense of the term.
Trump is already preparing to challenge 2022 midterm election results, report claims
Donald Trump and his allies are reportedly preparing challenges to 2022 midterm elections, raising baseless claims of voter fraud that fuelled his failed attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The former president has reportedly convened a series of in-person meetings and conference calls with allies and officials in battleground states to prepare for legal challenges to upcoming elections that could determine the balance of power in Congress ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Election officials and voting rights organisations have warned that false claims of fraud and election-related misinformation deliberately casting doubt on the nation’s electoral process risk undermining confidence in elections and could pose a grave threat to American democracy.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/politics/trump-is-already-preparing-to-challenge-2022-midterm-election-results-report-claims/ar-AA13i9hf?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=1f691aab72274547998bec5f579ab9f9
As far as I know there is absolutely no legal distinction between an aggressor and a defender when it comes to defining a war crime. Murdering unarmed prisoners is a war crime. End of story.
Absolutely but there is a distinction between war crimes committed by victors and those committed by losers
Boerwar says:
Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:45 pm
UpN
Ah. Thank you. One of my theories is that Australia should be (and should have been) taking advantage of the commodities boom to get ready for when the commodities boom tails off.
Apart from squabbling about the division of the spoils, we seem to have done the reverse.
Paying the various pipers is not going to come naturally to the Unlucky Country citizenry.
中华人民共和国
This is very true BW. It’s why the Coal industry (and the Courier Mail) squawked so loudly when Queensland introduced higher Royalties on higher priced Coal.
Due to lack of investment in resources I think we will see elevated prices for the next 5 years. My gut feeling is Xi will run a campaign on domestic consumption early next year (perhaps after the March meeting) to get the Chinese economy growing. That will help support resource prices as parts of the globe slip into recession.
Russia is the big unknown. If Ukraine continues to sour for Putin and there is Civil or Military unrest in Russia then we may see a further reduction on the supply side. Time as always will tell.
Dr D
IMO, the germans forced Stalin to prioritize. (Given that his pre-war massacre of the generals minimized the need to look after one competing priority.)
The Ukrainians are never going to conquer Moscow, for example. So Putin has more latitude to cock things up by shifting and confusing his priorities as Putin’s War evolves.
C@T
“ So I think we should reclaim the word ‘woke’ and start applying it to the causes the RW champions and use it in the generic sense in order to shine a light on their hypocrisy. And until they realise that we’re not going to take their framing around the word, ‘woke’ any more.”
———————————————————————————————-
Agreed, how about Woke = Decency.
Railing against decency would be very difficult to maintain.
‘Oakeshott Country says:
Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:53 pm
As far as I know there is absolutely no legal distinction between an aggressor and a defender when it comes to defining a war crime. Murdering unarmed prisoners is a war crime. End of story.
Absolutely but there is a distinction between war crimes committed by victors and those committed by losers’
==========================
Indeed… as per my reference to Bomber Harris yestereve.
Boerwar @ Monday, October 24, 2022 at 12:52 pm:
“Clearing civilians from combat zones is a grey area, IMO. If you don’t clear them you can be accused of using them as human shields, for example.
I think we can agree that clearing Ukrainian civilians from non combat zones and forcibly relocating them to distant parts of Russia in order to assimilate them into the Russian population is a war crime. My view is that the latter is genocidal in the broad sense of the term.”
—————————————
Yes, we do agree on that! I also recognise your point about an army’s obligation to not use civilians in a combat zone as human shields. However, since it is always open to an army to let civilians flee in whichever direction they choose, the decision to restrict those civilians to only fleeing in a direction congenial to the attacker is a genocidal one, and so ought to be opposed IMHO.
New Adrian Beaumont post on the UK situation and what have you:
https://www.pollbludger.net/2022/10/24/britains-next-pm-and-brazilian-runoff-israeli-and-us-midterm-elections-minus-six-to-16-days/