Herewith this week's column which tries to sum up my own view of John Howard's economic stewardship. Obviously the piece has to have focus and leaves lots out. My editor said he thought I was a hard marker, but that it was an interesting view. Left out is the fact that Howard'...
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The Bush administration has returned to the covert propaganda tactics of the Cold War, says Matt Welch . And In the process they've "forgotten one of their most potent weapons: the truth." In a recent essay for Reason Welch writes: ...the CIA served as what the foreign policy...
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From the Financial Review, 28th Feb, 2006 Every few months the head of the Prime Minister's department, Peter Shergold, denies that the Commonwealth public service is politicised. It is Shergold's duty to counter the assertion, frequently made by former public servants, that t...
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Shaun Cronin post on The Biggest Loser raises issues that I've been thinking about for some time, and found difficult to get very far with. Sean raises the issue of the way in which the program, which is a 'reality' slimming program for those who don't know raises the issue of...
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A weekly wrap of what's been happening across the Top End news-wise, which might be handy for former residents who really miss reading about this sort of thing. May contain cane toads and/or crocodiles. DING DONG Darwin military police are hunting for a serial flasher who is t...
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We think it's the best system in the world quite frankly (Then) AWB CEO Andrew Lindberg in 2001 on the set up the AWB had as a private company with a government endorsed monopoly. A column on the AWB was inevitable n'est pas? As I worked on this column it occured to me that at...
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The SMH reports that Macquarie Bank and Linfox are very keen to help the disabled. They're very concerned that the disabled must often wait for twenty minutes for a cab. So they're stepping into the breach with a veritable fleet of wheelchair enabled taxis. Their angle? Taxis...
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[photopress:Rollins_bomb.jpg,full,pp_empty] Henry Rollins says he was reported to the Australian government's National Security hotline for reading a book about jihad. Is this for real? On Thursday the Daily Telegraph reported that "US rocker and writer Henry Rollins was repor...
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Should op-ed writers be forced to tell readers if they're taking money in return for supporting a cause or interest? The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Iain Murray says no. In an article for the American Spectator , Iain Murray argues that readers should focus on the quali...
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Writers should keep it short and get to the point, says Julia Baird. Text messaging shows that the Sesame Street generation and generation Y get this . That's the gist of Julia Baird's latest Good Weekend column -- 'Brief Encounters'. What a pity there was so much space on the...
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The Sydney Morning Herald has an odd story about a woman with a worm in her eye . Doctors at a clinic in Kragujevac, central Serbia, have removed an 11 centimetre-long intestinal worm from a woman's eye socket. According to preliminary results, the worm taken from the 37-year-...
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The drive on Troppo, LP and Catallaxy brought forth 28 requests for subscriptions - to accompany my own. If you sent me an email or posted your email address in suitably robot proof fashion your details have been sent to Crikey which should be in touch shortly. If you didn't b...
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A while back I made a note to do a brief review of Bill Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth after finishing reading it. I've not got round to it, but here goes. It's quite a good book but it's also fairly quirky and peculiar. It's nicely arranged into major parts each with...
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Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy orders Wal-Mart to stock morning after pills Last year the Washington Post reported that "pharmacists across the country are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control and morning-after pills, saying that dispensing the medications violate...
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I am running a surrepticious campaign to introduce the open source ways of the internet to the ABC. Being stacked with salaried people, the ABC is poorly in touch with the resources of the voluntary sector - the sector that produces Club Troppo and comments on it day in day ou...
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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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I've been looking at a recently published paper by Allen Consulting on tax reform. Tax reform has become the New Thing To Do. The paper was commissioned by the Victorian Government and, given that I don't know what the brief was, I'm not being critical of the consultants. The...
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A weekly wrap of what's been happening across the Top End news-wise, which might be handy for former residents who really miss reading about this sort of thing. May contain cane toads and/or crocodiles. SUPER TOAD Cane toads on the rampage across the Top End are evolving rapid...
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I wonder which supporters of George W Bush have the shame to read this New York Times editorial on its merits. We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial proce...
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It's not just western cartoons causing protests abroad. In India Hindu activists are protesting against Valentine's Day. According to Asian News International Valentine's Day has become increasingly popular in India in recent years with retailers doing a brisk trade in heart-s...
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The Catholic Church say 'give me a child until he is seven'. Adam Smith thought the age was around eight. Xavier Herbert said to a lecture theatre full of first years in my first year at uni that by the time you're thirty five you're an 'old bastard' and won't change no matter...
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Stephen Bounds who helped us our hugely in setting up the new site has a business to run and can't help us in day to day tasks. If anyone has the skill to help us out - in doing things like installing plugins and so on we'd be very grateful if they would let us know. Please em...
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"There are none so blind as those who will not see." So said Goldie Hawn in the 1972 film, "Butterflies are Free." That sentiment can describe those federal ministers claiming they had no reason to investigate corruption by the Australian Wheat Board. John Howard defended th...
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[photopress:Ricki lee_1.jpg,thumb,pp_empty] I realise this is not core Troppo business, and perhaps better put as a question to Dr Troppo, but I was running along the Port Melbourne beach, as is my wont when I saw some filming going on. I jogged around the line of vision so I...
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[photopress:Dr_Tropp___SuperId.jpg,full,pp_empty] Every Sunday evening I take time out of my busy schedule to help readers with their problems . As this is the internet, many of my most troubled readers are sock puppets and characters from fiction . This week a character from...
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'FUD' is the computer world's cute term for incumbent's habit of seeking to plant 'fear, uncertainty and doubt" into the heads of their customers mere thoughts of going with competitors. "Noone ever got sacked for buying IBM" was the catch-cry until sometime in the 1980s. Micr...
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That's right. These prices are just C-R-A-Z-Y. Following initiatives here , at LP and Catallaxy , we look certain to get at least ten subscriptions, cutting the subscription price by 50% to $50. I'll try to get this sorted out in the middle of next week. So here's your L-A-S-T...
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An e-mail from Mark Bahnisch reminded me a few days ago that this week is the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Keynes' General Theory of Employment Interest and Money. Keynes is a magnetic character perhaps as much to read about as to know personally. That's becaus...
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I have the right to fart in a crowded lift, or cultivate halitosis by failing to brush my teeth regularly. And, even if my neighbour is a Hindu, I would be entitled (health regulations permitting) to slaughter and barbecue a cow down by her back fence just to give her the shit...
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Deakin Law School's self-promoting funster double-act James McConvill and Mirko Bagaric is at it again. Following up on his previous effort advocating the legalising of torture, Bagaric has posted an article at Online Opinion in which he advocates a reversion to the pre-1975 c...
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Like Steve Jobs says "you can't connect the dots of your life looking forward "you can only connect them looking backwards." So after I'd got myself obsessed with Australian policy supporting the manufacture of cars, I realised that when I was an adolescent I had cut cars out...
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[photopress:Dr_Troppo_3.jpg,full,pp_empty] Mr Joker is a character in a Bob Dylan song . He has contacted me because he is unhappy with the circumstances of his existence: "Can you please tell Bob to rewrite my life?" he pleads, "It sucks". No whimpering Mr Joker. It's time to...
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We've been musing for some time about introducing a regular "open forum" post where readers can discuss whatever they like (subject to usual legal and basic civility constraints). It's hardly an original idea, but we've decided to try a slight innovation that we hope might bec...
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Along with its habit of sucking remorselessly on the federal fiscal teat, Darwin may soon have another sin to answer for if my wors fears are confirmed. The Wallabies' new coach John "Knuckles" Connolly began his coaching career just across the creek from where I'm writing thi...
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[photopress:Ask_Dr_Troppo_2.jpg,full,pp_empty] Good evening. After another hectic Sunday experimenting on my rats and persuading undergraduates to deliver painful electric shocks to each other I checked my virtual waiting room and found it full of Troppo readers with fascinati...
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A couple of weeks after my Christmas column appeared I received an email from Germany and I reproduce the contents of the exchance that ensued. 1. Subject: Regarding Erwin Fabian, the artist Hello Dr. Nicholas Gruen, I've found an article of yours on the web, mentioning Erwin...
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Like a good humanist and liberal I have always been opposed to censorship, however in the 1980s I stirred up a debate in the Humanist literature, pointing out that there was a newer wave of pornography about and it was very different from the kind of harmless stuff that prompt...
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It's fun having a few people read what you write because you can get a few irritations off your chest from time to time. Here is an article about criminal Mark Chopper Reid's forthcoming art exhibition. He's gone naive. I'm not a fan of Chopper's past or present deeds, and wou...
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[photopress:Graffiti.jpg,full,pp_empty] A civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate each other... Avishai Margalit The Centre for Independent Studies is arguing for incivility. In a recent paper Nicole Billante and Peter Saunders say: Excessive civility threatens...
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[photopress:Dr_Troppo.jpg,full,pp_empty] Hello. I am Dr Troppo. It has come to my attention that many of you have problems that you haven't managed to solve by reading magazines or watching Dr Phil on TV. Well, you're in luck. I can help you deal with these problems in person,...
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[photopress:St_Evil.jpg,full,pp_empty] " Help! Help! I'm being repressed !" squealed LP commenter Evil Pundit . That was September last year. Before long Evil found himself banned from the purple blog . Appealing the ban one commenter said : Maybe we should do a democracy thin...
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[photopress:Tocqueville.jpg,full,pp_empty] "I would like to leave behind a legacy or a think-tank", says President Bush , "a place for people to talk about freedom and liberty, and the de Tocqueville model -- what de Tocqueville saw in America." For once I agree with the Presi...
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With our usual flair for lobbing grenades back and forth between well dug trenches, lots of energy in the greenhouse debate goes into grenade lobbing between supporters of Kyoto and greenhouse denialism of various kinds. I'm pretty cynical about Kyoto, and particularly cynical...
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Well, Massachusetts seems to be still going for mandated open standards despite the hicough of a month or so ago . Courtesy of Slashdot, this source reports that the CIO for Massachusetts who left or was sacked in the aftermath of the announcement of the policy is being replac...
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[photopress:Crikey logo.jpg,full,pp_empty] Crikey is a wonderful Australian institution - not least because it nominated Troppo as their blog of 2005 ! A sucker for good quality, independent media and flattery like that to boot I was just filling out the on line form inviting...
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I'm not mucy of an afficionado of sports journalism, but Brian Bahnisch sent me this write up of the big match and David Williamson had a quite nice piece speculating on why Roger cried.
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[photopress:Matt_Welch.jpg,full,pp_empty] I ain't gonna piss in no jar. Them evil peckerheads they done gone too far (Mojo Nixon) It was early 1987 when I touched down in LA. Evidence of the Reagan administration's war on drugs was everywhere -- on the walls, on billboards and...
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