Renae Barker is Lecturer in the University of Western Australia School of Law and Honorary Research Fellow and the Centre for Muslim States and Societies.

Often referred to as "the rise of the nones" the increasing percentage of the population who self-identify as having no religion has hit national headlines again with the release of the 2016 census data.

With 30.1% of the population self-identifying as having "no religion" they now make up the largest "religious" group in Australia, outnumbering Catholics.

Predictably there have already been calls for an end to Christian privilege and "a more dedicated secular shift in Australian public policy."

However, focusing on this number without further investigating the story it, along with the rest of the census data, tells is overly simplistic. It misses the rich and complex relationship we as Australians have with religion and non-belief.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/07/05/4696888.htm

Simplistically, religion, especially Christian religion is in retreat. "Complexically", religion cannot compete with scientific information, though many religious entities and persons do try to muddle the scientific message. Religion does not make any sense, though it helps soothe our angst about departing this world and disappearing into nothingness. Our consciousness does not belong to our "soul" which does not exist, but to our memory. Our memory is a construct of matter in change — which include observation, retention, adaptation and reaction in uncertainty of the next.

See: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31244

War Machine, the new Netflix original movie starring Brad Pitt playing a disturbingly over-confident General based on Stanley McChrystal, is controversial for all the wrong reasons.

First there was the kerfuffle at Cannes, where Netflix was booed for breaking tradition by submitting films that would be released on laptops instead of theaters. Then there was the casting of Brad Pitt, which some categorized as a colossal misstep. Variety said that the almost surreal comic role should “have gone to John Goodman, or some comparably gifted character actor.” And then there’s the focus of the film itself. Is it an “irrelevant and brash” alpha-male misfire? Or an “assured and nervy black satire” that tries to have it both ways by mocking the war even as it sympathizes too heavily with the officers who wage it?

What gets ignored in all of these various reactions is the reality of the ongoing war itself and how this film relates to it. Sure, it’s novel and interesting that online streaming companies are producing original films. And of course the wisdom of casting a Peter Pan hunk like Brad Pitt as an American general is up for debate. But isn’t the real scandal that there’s an ongoing occupation to critique at all? If the film comes off as brash, it’s because it conveys an irreverent confidence that almost seems to anticipate the media missing the forest for the trees. A major theme of the film is, after all, how mass media fails us on a moral level, always transforming events that require somber moral reflection into superficial sleaze. And so I can’t help but wonder if reviews of War Machine have been so uniformly unfavorable because of the disconnect between the ongoing war and popular culture, and how the film implicates the media in sustaining that rift.

War Machine is based on the book The Operators by the late journalist Michael Hastings. Hastings was the gritty, hard-nosed type of reporter that’s an endangered species in our slop-saturated media environment, who rose to professional prominence in large part for his Newsweek reporting on the Iraq war. After his then-fiancee, also a journalist, was killed by insurgents in Iraq, Hastings wrote the touching and deeply searching memoir I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story. But he made his biggest splash with his Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal, then-commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. The piece, which detailed McChrystal and his staff’s contempt for civilian government officials (and most importantly, President Obama), eventually led to McChrystal getting sacked and a Polk Award for Hastings. It also led to Hasting’s book The Operators, and, eventually, the film War Machine, both of which elaborate on the Rolling Stone profile and explore McChrystal’s time in command.

It should be said that both the book and especially the movie are very funny. As the narrating character Sean Cullen, based on Hastings, (only semi-accurately) says, “Wars aren’t fought by nations or armies. Wars are fought by men.”

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-the-media-really-hat...

President Trump has decided to end the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.

The program was a central plank of a policy begun by the Obama administration in 2013 to put pressure on Assad to step aside, but even its backers have questioned its efficacy since Russia deployed forces in Syria two years later.

Officials said the phasing out of the secret program reflects Trump’s interest in finding ways to work with Russia, which saw the anti-Assad program as an assault on its interests. The shuttering of the program is also an acknowledgment of Washington’s limited leverage and desire to remove Assad from power.

Just three months ago, after the United States accused Assad of using chemical weapons, Trump launched retaliatory airstrikes against a Syrian air base. At the time, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, said that “in no way do we see peace in that area with Assad at the head of the Syrian government.”

Read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-ends-covert...

This could be the most important news of the month...

“Illiberal hegemony” is the worst of both worlds. It combines the many costs of pursuing hegemony with higher costs of a damaged reputation and the trashing of commitments previously made in good faith. Illiberal hegemony still generates the same resentments and hostility as its liberal version, but it also stokes more distrust and loathing among our allies. It keeps getting the U.S. involved in wars it doesn’t need to fight, and it shows even more blatant disregard for the lives of foreign civilians than before. The definition of our interests remains just as expansive and all-encompassing as ever, and there is even less respect for the requirements of international law.

None of this has anything in common with restraint. As Posen says at one point, Trump’s foreign policy is “decidedly unrestrained.” Trump doesn’t do the things needed to encourage burden-sharing. On the contrary, he inundates our military with funds and gives other governments no incentive to do more for their own security. Trump is always claiming that other countries take advantage of the U.S. and the U.S. wastes its resources overseas, but when it comes to the most expensive and consequential commitments–foreign wars and security commitments–Trump is happy to be the biggest sucker of all. Instead of demanding more from allies and clients as his supporters might have expected him to do, Trump is far more indulgent of their worst habits so long as they flatter him and endorse his policies. Because he is a militarist and hegemonist, he can’t imagine reducing the size of the military or eliminating any of its missions, and instead supports more and more commitments abroad. Rather than letting regional allies take the lead in handling their own security problems, he wants the U.S. to dictate the terms of the solution. 

All of this is the opposite of what restraint requires, and it proves that Trump really is the anti-restraint president with an anti-restraint foreign policy.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/trump-the-illiberal-hegem...

From the Vietnam War, the Kosovo adventure to destroy Yougoslavia, Nicaragua, Libya, Ukraine, Syria et al, ALL the US presidents have been building the empire — with the help of a mendicant miserable mediocre mass media de mierda that spread the glorious fibs of the Empire (except during the Vietnam War which thus made the US empire place the media on a leash).

The various techniques of empire, whether "Illiberal hegemony" or "Liberal hegemony" have not a single element of good faith. It's about conquest, like killing pawns on a chess board. The USA hate socialism far more than terrorism. Terrorism is loony but only episodically dangerous in a manner that helps tighten the butts of the populace around the capital-dollar.

Socialism in a philosophical idea in which the structuralist state maintains the social order and prevents abuse of wealth. It is the real ENEMY of the USA, ever so stated since the Declaration of Independence. Truly sharing wealth has never been a winner in the capitalist system which needs people in servitude and slavery at the base to feed the upper echelons.

The illusion of sharing wealth is thus maintained by the mendicant miserable mediocre mass media de mierda, whether it's Soros or Murdoch or most Independent "News"... The media displays the carrot at the end of a stick, including the royal hierarchy, which encourage the entire capitalist society to plunder the goods of nature beyond sustainability and the wealth of other nations beyond international rights. There is no restraint in either form of hegemony (Liberal or Illiberal), except the Illiberal hegemony is less of a hypocrite for being less hidden... though both are still crap...

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