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The sanctimonious Aussie boys on this site may also consider this: What's with the sanctimony, Mr Waugh Osman Samiuddin Bless our stars, Steve Waugh has weighed in. From his pedestal, perched atop a great moral altitude, he spoke down to us. "Like many, I'm deeply troubled by the events in Cape Town this last week, and acknowledge the thousands of messages I have received, mostly from heartbroken cricket followers worldwide. "The Australian Cricket team has always believed it could win in any situation against any opposition, by playing combative, skillful and fair cricket, driven by our pride in the fabled Baggy Green. "I have no doubt the current Australian team continues to believe in this mantra, however some have now failed our culture, making a serious error of judgement in the Cape Town Test match." You'll have picked up by now that this was not going to be what it should have been: a mea culpa. "Sorry folks, Cape Town - my bad." One can hope for the tone, but one can't ever imagine such economy with the words. Waugh's statement was a bid to recalibrate the Australian cricket's team moral compass, and you know, it would have been nice if he acknowledged his role in setting it awry in the first place. Because there can't be any doubt that a clean, straight line runs from the explosion-implosion of Cape Town back to that "culture" that Waugh created for his team, the one cricket gets so reverential about. First, though, a little pre-reading prep, or YouTube wormholing, just to establish the moral frame within which we are operating. Start with this early in Waugh's international career - claiming a catch at point he clearly dropped off Kris Srikkanth. This was the 1985-86 season and he was young and the umpire spotted it and refused to give it out. So go here. This was ten years later, also at point, and he dropped Brian Lara, though he made as if he juggled and caught it. The umpire duped, Lara gone. Steve Waugh: sanctimonious or statesman-like? Depends on which side of the "line" you stand on Getty Images A man is not merely the sum of his incidents, and neither does he go through life unchanged. Waugh must have gone on to evolve, right? He became captain of Australia and soon it became clear that he had - all together now, in Morgan Freeman's voice - A Vision. There was a way he wanted his team to play the game. He spelt it out in 2003, though all it was was a modification of the MCC's existing Spirit of Cricket doctrine. There were commitments to upholding player behaviour, and to how they treated the opposition and umpires, whose decisions they vowed to accept "as a mark of respect for our opponents, the umpires, ourselves and the game". They would "value honesty and accept that every member of the team has a role to play in shaping and abiding by our shared standards and expectations". Sledging or abuse would not be condoned. It wasn't enough that Australia played this way - Waugh expected others to do so as well. Here's Nasser Hussain, straight-talking in his memoir on the 2002-03 Ashes in Australia: "I just think that about this time, he [Waugh] had lost touch with reality a bit he gave me the impression that he had forgotten what playing cricket was like for everyone other than Australia. He became a bit of a preacher. A bit righteous. It was like he expected everyone to do it the Aussie way because their way was the only way." It was also duplicitous because the Aussie way Waugh was preaching was rarely practised on field by him or his team. So if Hussain refused to walk in the Boxing Day Test in 2002 after Jason Gillespie claimed a catch - with unanimous support from his team - well, you could hardly blame him, right, given Waugh was captain? YouTube wasn't around then, but not much got past Hussain on the field and the chances of those two "catches" having done so are low. "Waugh created a case for Australian exceptionalism that has become every bit as distasteful, nauseating and divisive as that of American foreign policy" As for the sledging that Waugh and his men agreed to not condone, revisit Graeme Smith's comments from the first time he played Australia, in 2001-02, with Waugh as captain. There's no need to republish it here but you can read about it (and keep kids away from the screen). It's not clever. No, Waugh's sides didn't really show that much respect to opponents, unless their version of respect was Glenn McGrath asking Ramnaresh Sarwan - who was getting on top of Australia - what a specific part of Brian Lara's anatomy (no prizes for guessing which one) tasted like. That incident, in Antigua, is especially instructive today because David Warner v Quinton de Kock is an exact replica. Sarwan's response, referencing McGrath's wife, was reprehensible, just as de Kock's was. But there was zilch recognition from either Warner or McGrath that they had initiated, or gotten involved in, something that could lead to such a comeback, or that their definition of "personal" was, frankly, too fluid and ill-defined for anyone's else's liking. Waugh wasn't the ODI captain at the time of Darren Lehmann's racist outburst against Sri Lanka. Lehmann's captain, however, was Ricky Ponting, Waugh protege and torchbearer of values (and co-creator of the modified Spirit document), and so, historically, this was very much the Waugh era. As an aside, Lehmann's punishment was a five-ODI ban, imposed on him eventually by the ICC; no further sanctions from CA. It's clear now that this modified code was the Australians drawing their "line", except the contents of the paper were - and continued to be - rendered irrelevant by their actions. The mere existence of it, in Australia's heads, has been enough. You've got to marvel at the conceit of them taking a universal code and unilaterally modifying it primarily for themselves, not in discussion with, you know, the many other non-Australian stakeholders in cricket - who might view the spirit of the game differently, if at all they give any importance to it - and expecting them to adhere to it. They won trophies, but not hearts Getty Images It's why Warner and McGrath not only could not take it being dished back, but that they saw something intrinsically wrong in receiving it and not dishing it out. It's why it was fine to sledge Sourav Ganguly on rumours about his private life, but Ganguly turning up to the toss late was, in Waugh's words, "disrespectful" - to the game, of course, not him. Waugh created a case for Australian exceptionalism, which has become every bit as distasteful, nauseating and divisive as the exceptionalism of all grand empires. Look at the varnish of formality in dousing the true implication of "mental disintegration"; does "illegal combatants" ring a bell? What took hold after Waugh was not what he preached but what he practised. One of my favourite examples is this lesser-remembered moment involving Justin Langer, a Waugh acolyte through and through, and his surreptitious knocking-off of a bail in Sri Lanka. Whatever he was trying to do, it wasn't valuing honesty as Waugh's code wanted. Naturally the mind is drawn to the bigger, more infamous occasions, such as the behaviour of Ponting and his side that prompted a brave and stirring calling out by Peter Roebuck. That was two years before Ponting's virtual bullying of Aleem Dar after a decision went against Australia in the Ashes. It sure was a funny way to accept the umpire's decision. Ponting loved pushing another virtuous ploy that could so easily have been a Waugh tenet: of entering into gentlemen's agreements with opposing captains and taking the fielder's word for a disputed catch. Not many opposition captains did, which was telling of the virtuousness sides ascribed to Australia. That this happened a decade or so ago should, if nothing else, confirm that Cape Town isn't just about the culture within this side - this is a legacy, passed on from the High Priest of Righteousness, Steve Waugh, to Ponting to Michael Clarke to Steve Smith, leaders of a long list of Australian sides that may have been good, bad and great but have been consistently unloved. It's fair to be sceptical of real change. The severity of CA's sanctions - in response to public outrage and not the misdemeanour itself - amount to another bit of righteous oneupmanship. We remove captains for ball-tampering, what do you do? We, the rest of the world, let the ICC deal with them as per the global code for such things, and in that time the sky didn't fall. Now, on the back of CA's actions, David Richardson wants tougher punishments, thus continuing the ICC's strategy of policy-making based solely on incidents from series involving the Big Three. Waugh was a great batsman. He was the captain of a great side. The only fact to add to this is that he played the game with great sanctimony. That helps explains why Australia now are wh

The Ethans of the world might find this of interest: Bucket tipped on Aussie sledgers By Trevor Marshallsea May 29 2002 The image of Australia's world champion cricket team has again been tarnished, this time by a uncommonly detailed account on sledging by South African rookie Graeme Smith. With Australian cricket officials already in damage control over Adam Gilchrist's labelling of Sri Lankan bowler Muttiah Muralitharan as a chucker, a new sledging controversy has emerged after Smith broke the traditional reluctance of elite players to bring on-field sledging incidents into the public domain. Smith, 20, emerged from his first two Tests and four one-dayers at home in February-March complaining of "below the belt" verbal assaults from his rivals but vowing: "I cannot repeat what the Aussies said." Now he has - in explicit detail - in the South African edition of Sports Illustrated, with an account unlikely to be well-received in the offices of the Australian Cricket Board at a time when its emphasis on image has never been higher. As the ACB mulls over what to do with renowned cleanskin Adam Gilchrist for his honest admission at an AFL lunch on Sunday that he believed Muralitharan's bowling action was illegal, Smith's claims may surprise many, if not for their content then for some of the characters he names. He said Australian Test opener Matthew Hayden, not renowned for on-field antics, had greeted him at the crease before his second Test innings in Cape Town with a two-minute tirade. He claimed fast bowler Brett Lee had threatened to "f---ing kill me" after a mid-pitch collision, and described Glenn McGrath as "a grumpy old man" after a prolonged verbal campaign, even when the pace spearhead was fielding near the boundary. Smith said Hayden had followed him to the crease in his second innings and "stood on the crease for about two minutes telling me that I wasn't f---ing good enough". Smith told the magazine: "'You know, you're not f---ing good enough,' he told me. 'How the f--- are you going to handle Shane Warne when he's bowling in the rough? What the f--- are you going to do?'. "And I hadn't even taken guard yet. He stood there right in my face, repeating it over and over. All I could manage was a shocked, nervous smile. I'd taken a bit of banter before but this was something else. Hayden had obviously been told that his job was to attack me." Smith said he was then subjected to more of the same from a ring of close-in fieldsmen - Justin Langer, Ricky Ponting, Gilchrist, Mark Waugh and Shane Warne. While sledging, or "mental disintegration" as Steve Waugh calls it, is accepted as an unsettling tactic, Smith's claims suggest some Australians may not be as imaginative as they once were. "All Warne does is call you a c--- all day," said Smith, who tangled with the leg-spinner early on after one edged single. "When he walked past me he said: 'You f---ing c---, what are you doing here?' And I remember looking at [umpire] Rudi Koertzen and he just shrugged his shoulders as if to say, 'I know it's rough, kid, but that's the way it is'." Smith also clashed with Lee after they collided on the pitch, which led to a pack of Australians allegedly hounding the young Protea. "On the way back I apologised, but he said nothing. Then I hooked him for four and then a one and then it was drinks. As he walked past me he told me that he would f---ing kill me right there if I ever touched him again," Smith said. Of McGrath, Smith said: "He's like a grumpy old man. He doesn't stop cursing you. He called me a f---ing c--- and told me go away, that I didn't belong there. "He starts off quietly, but the minute you hit him for a boundary he loses the plot and it never stops." Smith eventually chirped back at McGrath during a one-dayer, asking if he was "constantly on his period". "It caused a massive fallout. After that he never stopped hurling abuse even when he was fielding at third man." Smith's verdict was that there was "never anything funny about the sledging. It was all just harsh". He didn't want to see sledging banned but "maybe certain things need to be monitored". ACB chief executive James Sutherland last night said that while the Board "does not condone sledging or verbal abuse", monitoring provisions contained in the International Cricket Council's player code of conduct were adequate to police the practice. "If Australian players are breaking the code of conduct, I'm sure the officials at the match would take appropriate action," he said. The ICC code, while acknowledging verbal exchanges between players will always take place, includes fines for players for "using language that is obscene, offensive or of a seriously insulting nature to another player, umpire, referee, team official or spectator."

We won't talk about the cosmetic surgery and the implants...

Do you think they ran out of lettuce? Also, if you've followed this on cricket sites I think you'll find it's not just Australian pressure. The whole cricket world has had enough of these bozos. They've said, Nuff is NUff, if you don't mind, Mr Warner.

That's one way of looking at it. I do ask though, how many 'message; or warnings does Warner need? Also, there must have been a ground swell of resentment and anger and embarrassment at the antics of a team Warner controlled by proxy. And if he didn't control it, then why did neither Smith nor Lehmann pull his big head in? LIke I say, this is a penalty despatched by Australia. There must have been good bloody reason for them to read the riot act.

What you blokes who believe the punishment is 'excessive' seem to want to ignore is that this was the final straw for the Australian Cricket Board. That it's the Australian Cricket Board who imposed the penalty, that the culprits mentioned above were sanctioned by the International Cricket Council Now I may be right, I may be wrong - but ask my wife, this has never been known to happen - the ball tamper was the straw that broke the camel's back. In other words Cricket Australia have simply had enough of the arrogant, imprudent, foul-mouthed, abusive, disrespectful bogan behaviour of so-called leaders like Warner, a man who seemingly had Smith under his thumb. It would seem to me that Warner has had an undue influence on this team and the long-suffering Board simply had to do something about it. I feel sorry for Smith and Bancroft because they seem to be contrite. The real villain has been Warner and I hope he does not play for Australia again. Also, I accept Ian Chappell's view that the behaviour of the Australian Cricket team has deteriorated dramatically under Lehmann's Boofhead , head butting coaching style. He was a bad choice because he allowed Warner to believe he was invincible. We should also keep in mind, that Warner's batting average since the whitewash of the Poms is 24.38. In other words, he's forgotten his bat needs to do the talking, not his contemptible foul mouth

God almoighty, as though Australia doesn't doctor pitches.

Just allowed myself to watch the replay. Garlett, Melksham, Jetta, Lever, Wagner and Neal-Bullen were simply caught out by circumstances not of their own making. Oscar was seriously good. My questions are about Maynard, Hannan, Harmes and the game plan. We was found wanting.

So if your opening batsman is averaging 37 his runs are irrelevant? Okay... But I agree CA is a mess...

Re Motor Mouth/Champion Pugilist, Aussie Vice captain ( great moral leader ), Davie Warner, his bat needs to do the talking. He averaged 63 in the Test Series against England, his average since - including T20's, One dayers and the series against South Africa has fallen to 37.9. He's averaging 37 in the test series against the Proteas. Shut up and make runs, you Bogan.

Jeff Crowe is a Kiwi as well...He's the one who let Mr BoganvilliaWarner - who has forgotten that he's in the team to make runs not verbal war - off for behaving like a drunk looking for a fight during the tea break.

Real he man stuff. You're better than that, Uncle...

He took about 4 pack marks that day, kicked them from anywhere. The full back was a Hawthorn player....

I saw him kick 6 goals in the first half against the Box Hill hawks last year. The boy has got it...

He's just a swell dude, our Donald. Upholder of democracy for the underprivileged, the great swamp drainer, the man with the vision to make America great again. Wow. And he has such a beautiful and intelligent daughter. You ask him, he'll tell you. In fact, he'll tell ya, if she wasn't his daughter he'd be dating her. True dinks, that's what he's said.

As Randy Newman sang, 'Ain't that America...'

I ask the doubters, how long did it take for Hawkins, the current Don Daniher, Josh kennedy, Darcy Moore to come good???

Gary Leupp, American journalis, publihed today in Counter Punch: Donald Trump seems unconcerned with such matters. Following the May 2017 sword dance in Riyadh he has cozied up with the Saudi king and crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who just visited Washington. The pair celebrated the $ 200 billion arms deal last year and more sales to come. Trump noted that the Saudis are “a very wealthy nation, and they’re going to give the United States some of that wealth.” The prince’s visit drew out Codepink and other protestors targeting Saudi repression and the vicious Saudi assault on Yemen, which has killed at least 10,000 civilians an is currently experiencing what the UN terms the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. The U.S. abets this assault with military intelligence and refueling. It justifies the Saudi effort to crush the Houthis and restore the former (unelected) president as a necessary move to counter Iranian influence in the region. Even though there is little evidence for Iranian support for the Houthis. The evidence is rather that the Saudi leaders fear and hate Shiism, and tend to depict any Shiites (in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen etc.) as Iranian pawns.

What part of Fantasyland to you live in, bro? The Saudis have been arming ISIS and commit atrocities on a daily basis in Yemen. Mainstream media doesn't tell you this , it looks the other way.

If you're Italian you need a mirror anyway. Unions have been known to do very stupid things. My father always used to say it's because we inherited the British Trade Relations model where it's all about confrontation instead of co-operation. Go Dees. I mention Doug because I used to work with him at Tisdall in the early 80's. Doug is a keen Demon man...

All you need is a mirror. They must have them in Echuca. Do you know Doug Goldsworthy?

We already know that...

So you are just masquerading as a Bogan???/

you are truly a bogan... Anyway, his real name was post modern: ken handsell.

No, leave it, no retraction just this for your impartial consideration. Chomsky, The Guardian: ''In retrospect The two most crucial questions about the missile crisis are how it began, and how it ended. It began with Kennedy's terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962. It ended with the president's rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a rational person, but were unthinkable because they would undermine the fundamental principle that the US has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere, aimed at China or Russia or anyone else, and right on their borders; and the accompanying principle that Cuba had no right to have missiles for defense against what appeared to be an imminent US invasion. To establish these principles firmly, it was entirely proper to face a high risk of war of unimaginable destruction, and to reject simple, and admittedly fair, ways to end the threat. Garthoff observes that "in the United States, there was almost universal approbation for President Kennedy's handling of the crisis." Dobbs writes that "the relentlessly upbeat tone was established by the court historian, Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, who wrote that Kennedy had 'dazzled the world' through a 'combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated'." Rather more soberly, Stern partially agrees, noting that Kennedy repeatedly rejected the militant advice of his advisers and associates who called for military force and dismissal of peaceful options. The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy's finest hour. Graham Allison joins many others in presenting them as "a guide for how to defuse conflicts, manage great-power relationships, and make sound decisions about foreign policy in general". In a very narrow sense, that judgment seems reasonable. The ExComm tapes reveal that the president stood apart from others, sometimes almost all others, in rejecting premature violence. There is, however, a further question: how should JFK's relative moderation in management of the crisis be evaluated against the background of the broader considerations just reviewed? But that question does not arise in a disciplined intellectual and moral culture, which accepts without question the basic principle that the US effectively owns the world by right, and is, by definition, a force for good despite occasional errors and misunderstandings, so that it is plainly entirely proper for the US to deploy massive offensive force all over the world, while it is an outrage for others (allies and clients apart) to make even the slightest gesture in that direction, or even to think of deterring the threatened use of violence by the benign global hegemon. That doctrine is the primary official charge against Iran today: it might pose a deterrent to US and Israeli force. It was a consideration during the missile crisis as well. In internal discussion, the Kennedy brothers expressed their fears that Cuban missiles might deter a US invasion of Venezuela then under consideration. So "the Bay of Pigs was really right," JFK concluded. The principles still contribute to the constant risk of nuclear war. There has been no shortage of severe dangers since the missile crisis. Ten years later, during the 1973 Israel-Arab war, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert (Defcon 3) to warn the Russians to keep hands off while he was secretly authorizing Israel to violate the ceasefire imposed by the US and Russia. When Reagan came into office a few years later, the US launched operations probing Russian defenses and simulating air and naval attacks, while placing Pershing missiles in Germany with a five-minute flight time to Russian targets, providing what the CIA called a "super-sudden first strike" capability. Naturally, this caused great alarm in Russia, which, unlike the US, has repeatedly been invaded and virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare in 1983. There have been hundreds of cases when human intervention aborted a first strike minutes before launch, after automated systems gave false alarms. We don't have Russian records, but there's no doubt that their systems are far more accident-prone. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the sources of the conflict remain. Both have refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty, along with Israel, and have received US support for development of their nuclear weapons programs – until today, in the case of India, now a US ally. War threats in the Middle East, which might become reality very soon, once again escalate the dangers. In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev's willingness to accept Kennedy's hegemonic demands. But we can hardly count on such sanity forever. It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided. There is more reason than ever to attend to the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, almost 60 years ago, that we must face a choice that is "stark and dreadful and inescapable": Topics