Missing Link Daily

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill

Politics

Australian

Lauredhel gives a hand to an aptly named blog called Photoshop Disasters.

Paul Norton catches Michael Duffy trimming his sails on climate change.

Andrew Bartlett discusses hearing matters.

Audrey offers a few tips for blokes on how to get away with rape.

Gummo Trotsky breaks his Missing Link induced hiatus of a whole seven days with a post on defending family values from Professor Alastair Nicholson, former Chief Justice of the Family Court. 

Tim Dunlop, The Editor and Jeremy((That’s Jeremy’s token mention outside ‘Snark Strangeness and Charm’ out of the way for this week. Back to business as usual on Monday. ~GT)) slipper the Prime Minister over CSIRO funding.

Populism thy name is Liberal. So say Mark Bahnisch, Robert Merkel and Brendan Nelson Tragic The Editor((Currently in denial and needing a BNTA sponsor. ~GT)).

Jeremy wants to know why Tania Zaetta is in the news right now((That’s him sorted for the rest of May and the first week of June. ~GT)). Kev Gillet could clue him in; it’s in the news because the Department of Defence were the culprits behind the release and are now rightfully 1 being excoriated for it.

Darryl Mason reckons the Liberals are the Spinal Tap of Australian politics. Does that make the ALP the Rutles of Australian politics? ((Kevin looks a little like Gary Numan…~gilmae))

International

Apparently Hillary Clinton has compared the Democratic Partys failure to count the Florida and Michigan Democratic primary votes to the current election crisis in Zimbabwe.  Mary L. Dudziak agrees it might be a valid analogy, but not for the same reason as Clinton.  Dale points out that Obama would still win even if they did include the Florida and Michigan results.  Meanwhile a courageous YouTuber has run the gauntlet on Godwin’s law with Hillary.

Juan Cole gleefully draws the obvious Bush-condemns-appeasement link on Israel’s negotiations with Syria and a Lebanese deal with Hizbullah. At openDemocracy Robert G Rabil also looks at Hizbullah and Lebanon in a somewhat broader less “gotcha” framework.

Also at openDemocracy, Irfan Husain focuses on the tortuous post-election coalition politics in Pakistan, while Christoph Neidhart argues that the West is giving Russia unjustified indulgence and China a bum rap.

Douglas Muir examines Serbian election results which seem to give Milosevic’s old party a strong power broker position.

Mick Hartley sees an idoelogical divide in MSM columnists’ responses to the Burma relief dilemma.


Economics

Gun statistician John Ray, of AWH, finds an impressive chart demonstrating that tax revenue remains a fixed percentage of GDP. regardless of how heavily you tax the rich. Eugene backs him up with a chart of US GDP growth. David Ranson produced the chart, first published at the Wall Street Journal. Zubin Jelven of Portfolio.com completely debunked it.

Joshua Gans follows the money down a deep hole while considering the Medicare levy threshold changes. Joshua would also like the Government to do more than carbon copy the WA fuel scheme but to consider potential lessons learned; for example, why 24 hours?


Law

Peter Spiro continues his series on American citizenship (and to an extent the notion of citizenship more generally) and argues there ain’t as much to it as we may have thought (assuming we’ve thought about it at all).

Still in the US (where they have lots of very prolific law blogs) Phillip Carter examines a Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces decision affirming the conviction of an airman for consensual sodomy, arguing that it isn’t inconsistent with the (substantive due process/equal protection-based) constitutional protection of private sexual relations held by SCOTUS to exist in Lawrence.  


Jen making small talk

a big dog and a little cathedral

electric flowers

on the surface …

Issues analysis

Ronda Jambe is thinking of food security.

Harry Clarke believes in the use of the carrot to get what he wants.

Gary Sauer-Thompson has more to say on health insurance.


Arts

Tim Sterne pre-emptively pans the forthcoming Baz Lurhmann extravaganza Australia, with delightful sideswipe at Baz himself and our Nicole:

Baz Luhrmann is vile enough when he confines himself to ruining Shakespeare and making pretentious perfume ads; Baz in epic mode is just too much of an already bad thing.

Ed Champion is ever-so-slightly disappointed by the new Indiana Jones flick.

At Ballardian, Simon Sellars takes a look at Keith Seward’s new book Horror Panegyric which examines David Britton’s notorious Lord Horror novels.

The novels tell the story of Lord Horror, who, Seward writes, is based on a historical personage: Lord Haw-Haw, aka William Joyce, British fascist and radio announcer. The books are alternative histories of a fascist England, brutal, bloody, highly confrontational and shot through with a violent Surrealism.

It turns out that Horror Panegyric‘s designer, John Coulthart, is also a blogger of note. His latest post details the convoluted career of the experimental German band Cluster.

ook-but-don’t-touch sexual politics” of modern RnB and rap.

Photographer Bill Henson has an unfortunate knack for outraging prudes – he’s done it again with his latest ehibition. Kim and Gary Sauer-Thompson discuss the huffery-puffery.((Update – Heavy Kevy weighs in and reckons they’re crap and should be banned.  Judge for yourself.  Here’s the image gallery and here’s the main one causing controversy. Hang on, Roslyn Oxley Gallery seems to have caved under the pressure and removed the image gallery.  For what it’s worth, I agree with Kim that the pictures are not porn but valid artistic statements about innocence, awkwardness and dawning sexuality.  I severely doubt they’d excite a pedophile.  Looks like Rudd really IS a social conservative Howard clone.   ~ KP))

skepticlawyer notes the social criticism in the film clip for Aerials, by System of a Down. ((If I remember metal correctly, the alien is meant to represent the alienated, teenaged boy who is listening to the album and feels society treats him like a freak. To be fair though, that’s basically every metal song.~gilmae))

Boyd van Hoeij continues his Cannes Film Festival coverage exploring Matteo Gerone’s Syriani-like multi-narrative film Gomorra that explores the convoluted links and connections of the Neapolitan Mafia. 

Like the Godfather films, Gomorra looks at organised crime from the inside out, which leaves it up to the audience to decide whether to sympathise with people who are essentially criminals. (Except as extras, police are nowhere in sight and never seem to be on anyones mind either.) Certainly, it is possible to find recognisable human behaviour in the many people that populate Gomorras streets, whether it be their fears, their loyalty or their lust for money, power and revenge.  

Jana Petrovic reviews the Russian Moliere Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s The Scoundrel That You Need.

Bardassa and Alison Croggon both review a one-act opera based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (music by Alan John, libretto by Andrew Upton).  

Isobel Johnston at the Art Life previews Sydney’s 16th Biennale. 

Perry Middlemiss highlights a local media profile of erstwhile Troppo contributor and now bestselling novelist Wendy James.

Andrew Frost interviews some young artist named Deidre who withdrew from a GPS school art competition because it didn’t let gay kids bring their partners to the school formal. That’s one of hers at right.


Sport

Tony (sort of) agrees with Ian Chappell’s throughly unromantic view of the baggy green cap.

Shaun indulges in some NSW gloating before launching into previewing Round 11 of the NRL. ((Parramatta are 4-5-1.~gilmae))

“Captain” Watson concludes his mid-season review of AFL performances and prospects with the current heavy hitters Hawthorn and Geelong.

The Round Ball Analyst previews a forthcomings game between the Socceroos and the Black Stars of Ghana.((I wonder why you never see a sporting team called the White Stars of Alabama? ~ KP))


Snark, strangeness and charm

Old and Busted: Taxes. New Hotness: Libertarianism. ((Their mum says they’re cool.~gilmae))

JF Beck is feeling a little cocksure and, as usual, up himself.((I’ve given up on enforcing NPOV for this week ~ KP))

Brigid Gread discovers a struggling Melbourne artist.

Ilana Mercer highlights a ho hum predictable anti-blogging piece by conservative columnist Thomas Fleming.((with which she seems to agree – you’d have to wonder why she bothers to blog in the circumstances ~ KP))

TroppoSphere, in case Missing Link email subscribers haven’t noticed, is now available as a convenient gateway to a world of news and expert opinion and analysis for those with feed reader phobia. It contains feeds to most of the blogs and other sources whose best/selected content we most regularly feature in Missing Link, as well as general news feeds and those from selected online magazines like openDemocracy, Reason, Slate, Spiked, New Matilda, Australian Opinion Online and Online Opinion.
  1. gilmae[]

About Ken Parish

Ken Parish is a legal academic, with research areas in public law (constitutional and administrative law), civil procedure and teaching & learning theory and practice. He has been a legal academic for almost 20 years. Before that he ran a legal practice in Darwin for 15 years and was a Member of the NT Legislative Assembly for almost 4 years in the early 1990s.
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Mungo Amanda
15 years ago

The Ghana flag has a black star on it — hence the “Black Stars”. I will be there too, up the Ghana fan end, should be great.

Liam
Liam
15 years ago

Have tickets, will be attending, and hope to leave work early enough to catch the second half of the Australia vs. Canada women’s game.

Liam
Liam
15 years ago

My eyes. The end-paragraph tags do nothing.

Shaun
15 years ago

Believe me gilmae, I’m well aware of Parra’s record this year. I’m sure you can do better with the NRL club snark.

Liam
Liam
15 years ago

It’s not wordpress, Ken, it’s your use of tables to format non-tabular content. Left- and right-floats are better for you semantically.
If symptoms persist, see your Chester.

gilmae
15 years ago

Impotent and weak snark in the face of that defeat seemed the appropriate response :- )

Shaun
15 years ago

There something cultural I reckon. Fitzgerald needs to go as CEO. He has a tendency to piss off past players and they have little to do with the club. Bringing Price, Sterling etc back into the fold won’t win games by itself, but could help with the cultural issues. Also as CEO, he is aware of the issues facing leagues clubs but blind to thinking outside the box to resolve them.

Some fans are blaming Hagan claiming Newy supporters had warned this would happen. Not sure on this but the team is under performing. Tim Smith is a bigger loss than many would think. We have some great juniors and I think some hard decisions need to be made with the playing roster and take a punt on young talent. Hagan seems to have that Smith habit of overlooking better performing young players in favour of middling established stars. Overall, we have the players to be up with the top four. Just puzzling why they struggle.

No internal team dissension I know of. Players all seem to get along well. We have Brisbane next week. This game will make or break Parra’s season.

Geoff Honnor
Geoff Honnor
15 years ago

“Looks like Rudd really IS a social conservative Howard clone.”

There was some doubt?

tigtog
15 years ago

Ken, for text mark-up on any blog you visit might I suggest installing a browser extension rather than just a plugin that only works on one blog? For Firefox users there’s the very useful Text Formatting Toolbar Extension, which I just used to add in that hyperlink. It also allows text formatting (bold, italic, strikethrough, underline), blockquotes, adding an email link or a webpage link, and inserting an image.

Saves heaps of time on coding. (although I find that just inserting [img] tags works fine to add an image to comments in WordPress, as long as you don’t bother with obsolete and deprecated tables.

Liam
Liam
15 years ago

It’s a nice extension, tigtog, but it doesn’t allow for floats or for any kind of captioning of images, something as yet unsupported in any simple way by CSS.

david tiley
15 years ago

That Hilary YouTube is teh mostest!

skepticlawyer
15 years ago

gilmae: Woman listens to metal! Quel horreur!

gilmae
15 years ago

skepticlawyer: So? (Hetro) women read Playboy as well, but it sure as hell isn’t aimed at them.

skepticlawyer
15 years ago

If you think authors have any realistic control over their aim, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you…

gilmae
15 years ago

I bet Hemingway could.

Pavlov's Cat
15 years ago

Yes, and look what happened to him.

gilmae
15 years ago

Drunkard, depressed, paranoid and fucked up from electro convulsive therapy. There’s a lesson here for every man; just don’t get it in the bowl.