One of the joys of moving from Canberra to Melbourne many years ago is the access to art auction houses. A new one started up a few years ago which is much better run than the international houses of Southerby's and Christies (Imagine having a name like Christies and not being...
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If you want to know why Senator Barack Obama excites so many US Democrats, take a look at the video below. Speaking in late 2002 (when he was still an Illinois state senator), Obama lays out the major risks of an Iraq invasion, all the time looking both reasoned and tough on S...
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Euthanasia is back in the news, albeit in a fairly low key way. Last Sunday The Peaceful Pill Handbook , by longtime Darwin-based euthanasia campaigner Dr Phillip Nitschke and Dr Fiona Stewart, was banned by the Classification Review Board of the Australian Office of Film and...
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This diagram is in a presentation by Tony Blair about Britain. So who knows if the sources are chosen conveniently. But, providing the stats aren't shonky in some way it makes a telling point. Similar points could be made about job security and no doubt other social phenomena...
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Oh my gawd, itâs my first edition of Missing Link : Lighter, sillier and undoubtedly ridiculous. A bigger edition of Missing Link will appear later this week for your reading pleasure or otherwise. Thanks to Ms S Lawyer for her brilliant effort over the weekend. 'Oh I wish I w...
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The interesting piece by Paul Frijters on utilitarianism as a policy guide prompts me to draw attention to a recent piece I did for New Matilda and is now available on Policy Online. It tries to compare Howardâs Work Choices and welfare to work reforms with an alternative âsoc...
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The poster If anyone's been wondering why I've been AWOL from Club Troppo recently (notably from last week's Missing Link posts), well, apart from the usual pre-semester university administrative panic, I've also been moonlighting as a web designer, publicist and general dogsb...
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Iâve not made a habit of reading Hansard so these comments are necessarily those of a newcomer when it comes to parliamentary performance. Perhaps those of you who are old hands can disabuse me of the impression Iâve gained from the last four sessions and in particular todayâs...
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meika's book - well its cover anyway I have just been emailed by some time Troppodillian lurker, commenter and collaborator in BBO6 meika loofs samorzewski (he's pretty sparing with - but not totally against - capital letters). He finished his book a few months ago. I'm flat o...
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In situations of scarce tax resources and unlimited wants of its population, governments throughout the world have to decide whose wants are more worthy than those of others. They would ideally want to choose a more or less consistent yardstick to base those tough decisions on...
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Setting out my response to Don Arthur's great post below sent me scurrying to a book I read a few years ago. I thought someone had thrown it out but fortunately no. The book is The Silent Woman and it's about Sylvia Plath and the biographical writings she inspired. The author,...
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In the world of the Matrix , Richard Layard would side with the machines. After all, the machines are only doing what any good government should do -- keeping people as happy as possible. During the war between humans and machines, the earth was plunged into darkness. Knowing...
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Ken discovered that work kept him from fulfilling his Missing Link duties for this week, which upset him greatly but couldn't be helped. So that Darlene Taylor - next week's Missing Link custodian - isn't completely overwhelmed come Monday, I've compiled a weekend version. It'...
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It's fairly standard for it to take 30 days to get an invoice paid. Often this means that internal systems are geared to a 30 day cycle and if something slips, the period can stretch out to nearly 60 days quite often. In this day and age when payments can be made with a few mo...
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It was compelling telly . All the actors were there. A testament to how high profile the continuing detention of David Hicks has become. Col. Moe Davis of the prosecution: Representing the rights of politicians to make up laws and arbitrarily detain people for political reason...
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Paul Frijtersâ inaugural post last week raised several interlocking issues around the theme of growth fetish. Iâd like to revisit one of them, namely the contribution of income to happiness. The timing is good, because one of our honours students is doing a dissertation on the...
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We never quite got to any 'official' best blog comments in our recent Best Blogs exercise. And it wouldn't qualify because it wasn't Australian. But (and apologies to regular readers who saw it when first posted) I've just come across this marvellous intervention by commenter...
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A recently released report by Tim Ambler of the London Business School and Francis Chittenden of the Manchester Business School for the British Chambers of Commerce shows how the UK experience of regulation review is pretty much as Australia's has been - farcical. It is a litt...
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This week saw three curious events in Australian foreign policy. First, the Prime Minister's attack on a US Presidential candidate, the release of allegations against David Hicks, and a letter from the US Department of Defense stating that the F22 Raptor will not be made for e...
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Taking off on a dangerous ride at Wedding Cake Island off Coogee ... You'd expect right wing shills like Tim Blair and JF Beck to be gleefully stirring up fear and loathing over Peter Garrett's refusal to distance himself from federal ALP support for a proposed new US military...
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Peter Martinâs take: 'Where's the power, where's the passion?' In my fitful hours of semi-sleep, the Google Reader has become the Google Rider, a monstrous amusement park feature that looks like a jolly good challenge, but reduces you to a disoriented and quivering jelly. With...
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US military authorities have now published the new Particulars of Charge against David Hicks on the Internet. Contrary to my previous post , they make a quite damning and convincing case that Hicks was an Al Qaeda fighter not a Taliban one (assuming the Particulars can be prov...
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To rule is to look ahead, it has been said. Let us therefore cast our eyes at the virtually universal wish of nations and their population to achieve economic growth. Jared Diamond argues in his latest book âCatastropheâ that this âgrowth fetishâ (as Clive Hamilton calls it) m...
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Prof Paul emailed me earlier today asking if he could post occasionally at Troppo and naturally I said we'd be delighted. Paul is a very knowledgeable social scientist born in Holland. You can check out his background, publications and interests - and what he looks like - at t...
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I have been observing with interest the latest news that ASIC has commenced action against the directors of James Hardie Industries for breaches of the Corporations Act between 2001 and 2003 . Now you may recall that in a blaze of publicity over asbestos related illnesses and...
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Courtesy of Joe Cambria who observes - quite rightly - that I seem to like this kind of thing .
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I posted a big rave about VoIP a while back . It's a great thing. But you may want to consider which service provider you use. If anyone has any suggestions regarding which provider I move to from TPG I'd be grateful. We've had an 'outage' for several days disabling the VoIP p...
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Rough justice for roughnecks Blogging op-ed pundit and law academic Mirko 'The Torturer' Bagaric apparently subscribes to The Phantom's Theory of Justice ; rough justice for roughnecks. And David Hicks is one of those roughnecks, whose rights (if any) must be sacrificed to the...
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Iâve been musing lately about the connection between womenâs labour force participation and income inequality and Iâve been forced to the conclusion that, once again, itâs probably womenâs fault. Increasing inequality in market incomes, that is. My logic goes something like th...
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Those who saw the corresponding post last year, or who participated, may realise that it's around a year ago that something like forty of us subscribed to Crikey. If I can join as many people as that this year I'll probably sign up, but doubt I'll do so at the single rate. If...
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How John Quiggin sees the climate debate Soon this process will be automated. Someone will program the Google Reader to choose the best posts of the week and string them together with hilarious banter. But in the meantime I'll persevere with the manual method. News and politic...
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Flap Flap, Squawkety squawk. Itâs the sound of feathers flying, and wings beating with nervous Nelly intensity, as the Rodent transmogrifies in the space of a week to a chicken hawk thatâs more chicken than hawk. After spending the better part of last week trying to brush the...
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He's a funny old fellow ... ? I've never subscribed to my colleague Nicholas Gruen's high opinion of SMH journo and "blogger" Jack Marx . Marx's 2006 article on his dealings with actor Russell Crowe , which so impressed Nicholas, was in my view not only undisciplined writing t...
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J. M. Coetzee reviews The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer
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I received an e-mail a while back from a very enterprising TR Rose Associates a small New York public advocacy publishing house who have published a comic in aid of the cause for giving money to caregivers in the US. Parents and Grandparents. I don't know what the arrangements...
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Something to hate I had hoped that Helen would set a mediocre standard for the new crop of Missing Link debutants, but was severely disappointed. Hers will be a hard act to follow. News and politics stuff Howard haters were on the march this weekend. Hater-in-Chief Tim Dunlop...
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Openly discussing the possibility of a US air strike against Iran no longer courts banishment from polite company. To see why, we need look no further than a remark volunteered by the new Senate Majority Leader in the US, Harry Reid, just a few weeks ago: "Much has been made a...
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Deinococcus radiodurans is an amazing bacteria . It can happily live in the waste tanks of nuclear reactors. Bacteria is a brutally simple and resilient form of life. It can survive vacuum, cold, heat, radiation, pressure: you name it, a bacteria has evolved to solve that envi...
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All that hype about the internet - well some of it is coming true.
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Martyn Indyk put it like this: If the surge strategy is Plan A, we need to start thinking now about what the United States needs to do if it doesn't work. Indyk (who grew up in Australia) was United States Ambassador to Israel in 1995-97 and 2000-2001, and now directs the Saba...
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Ubiquitous blogosphere commenter Joe Cambria has posted a really interesting contribution on Rex Ringschott's coal thread , suggesting a variey of greenhouse gas reduction policies as an alternative to either carbon taxes or tradeable emissions permits. Joe's ideas deserve a t...
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All utopias begin in hope and end in despair. Marx's vision of a world where you could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner collapsed into Orwell's image of boot stamping on a human face. At the hands of its critics,...
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It looks like they have cracked the US market such they are becoming a regular exporter into it. The Chicago Motor Show debuted the VE Commodore as the Pontiac G8 . The photo below shows Bob Lutz introducing the car to the American motor press. The pre-show excitement was quit...
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Popper fans, acolytes and those less impressed might like to download the podcast of Melvin Bragg doing a show on the great man. This is on his ' In Our Time ' series on the BBC which I've found a bit disappointing. He gets three experts in and has a gasbag about some great ev...
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Well, in the couple of days since Wednesday, climate change and the Turnbull-Garrett debate moved to the forefront of Ozblogistan's concerns. Alas, the posts on the debate weren't as classy as some of the global warming pieces. This means I've forgone Missing Link's usual Sci-...
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In the last few years Australiaâs most lucrative export, coal, was dug up, and shovelled offshore,at a rate of 232 Million Metric Tonnes per year. Slightly more than half of that is used in steel making (metallurgical coal), and the remainder for burning as a fuel, mainly in p...
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Darwin's skyline before its latest development surge Darwin correspondent for The Australian Nicholas Rothwell had a fascinating long article in yesterday's edition, about what he argues is the crass over-development of our most northerly capital. As a resident of Australia's...
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Having read more about the Kafka Project - mentioned in an earlier post - I can say that it is really kicking some goals (pdf). For instance. The blind and visually impaired used to need a permit from the mayor of their municipality to use a white or yellow stick. In order to...
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Much as I hesitate to introduce yet another post with a plug for LNL, the interview with Chas Freeman last night obliges me to take the risk. Now retired, he was, as well as holding many other distinguished positions, US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. Te...
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The thesis for Chalmers Johnson's book, Nemesis , is that democracy and empire are incompatible. A nation must choose between one or other as the two cannot co-exist. He writes: Over any lengthy period of time, successful imperialism requires that a domestic republic or a dome...
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Blogdom's Lazarus with a triple bypass is back on deck! As Ken pointed out a few days ago, doing justice to Missing Link was one helluva big deal solo, so he had to let it drop. Rather than have the whole thing wither on the vine, though, he figured a collaborative effort migh...
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There hasnât been much discussion of the Iraq war on Club Troppo lately. But Iâm impatient to form an opinion about what the Coalition of the Willing should do in general, and what the Labor Party should advocate in particular. Since Australia is part of that Coalition, with a...
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Thanks to F X Holden who took the opportunity of a recent grogblogging to point me towards the recent report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health and Ageing entitled " The Blame Game: Report on the inquiry into health funding ". I've not checked it all...
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Did any of you catch Inga Clendinnen on the Best of Late Night Live about ten days ago? I chanced upon the repeat halfway through -- more accurately I woke up at some ungodly hour after falling asleep with the radio on -- and was at once entranced by this quirky, lucid, sensuo...
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Who said the Belgians didn't have a sense of humour? (Well Monty Python for one - one of whose sketches was to come up with a derogatory term for Belgians.) Be that as it may the Belgians' administrative simplification plan is called the Kafka plan.
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I'm afraid I haven't been able to find time to complete Missing Link lately, despite squandering huge amounts of tiem tagging promising posts. I had hoped that using a feed reader would make the task easier, but in fact the opposite is the case. There are at least 150 new post...
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Cesare Beccaria 's reasoned argument against torture in 1764: A cruelty consecrated among most nations by custom is the torture of the accused during his trial, on the pretext of compelling him to confess his crime, of clearing up contradictions in his statements, of discoveri...
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Thanks to Nicholas for drawing my attention to this 2006 paper from Dani Rodrik , Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government (at Harvard University) and one of the current high priests of development economics. The paper is a revie...
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German police prosecutors have finally taken action in the case of Khaled Masri . Masri was the German citizen who was kidnapped by CIA agents in January 2004 and flown to a base in Afghanistan where he was held, interrogated and beaten for five months. The agency had apparent...
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