Setting aside the question of evidence, there’s a serious problem with the contention that Syria carried out the recent chemical attack in Douma. It requires us to accept not only that the Syrian government is evil but also that it’s comically stupid. It was on the point of li...
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In this marvellous essay , Jesse McCarthy puzzles over why there is "a bloody knot in the social fabric that is as vivid in Ferguson, Missouri today as it was in Baldwin's Harlem half a century ago." He starts with "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a Letter from Harlem", James Baldwin's...
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Following David's excellent post on the NBN, a somewhat related aside. Malcolm Turnbull was interviewed on AM yesterday about the NBN review, followed by a brief minuet around some current political dramas. What a contrast. By comparison, his colleagues still seem be strugglin...
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Putin currently graces the cover of Time , Newsweek , Der Spiegel and The Economist, together with a host of lesser publications. Always unfavourably of course, with the possible exception of Time where the headline is "Cold War II" and the subhead "The West is losing Putin's...
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The noise and drama surrounding Putin, Russia and the Ukraine obscure crucial foreign policy principles. In "Lord Salisbury's Lessons for Great Powers" , Robert Merry takes a closer look at what they might be. First, avoid promiscuous jingoism of the kind that Salisbury despis...
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Remarkable article about how our social experience and the way we come to frame our lives influences gene-expression. I would’ve bet my eyeteeth that we’d get a lot of noisy results that are inconsistent from one realm to another. And at the level of individual genes that’s ki...
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MEMORANDUM FOR: General Martin Dempsey, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity [1] SUBJECT: Syria and Our Oath to Defend the Constitution Dear Gen. Dempsey: Summary: We refer to your acknowledgment, in your letter of July 19 to Sen....
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Simply bombing Damascus or Aleppo to assuage the conscience of the West that they 'did something' seems like the worst form of symbolic politics. It's not the only sensible thing Matthew Fitzpatrick had to say in an article at The Drum today. He also argued the appropriate for...
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Investigative journalism and the secret state are natural enemies. Even with an enlightened government and relatively untroubled times, their relationship will be uneasy at best. Today, they're in a state of undeclared war. Surveillance states and most of their fellow travelle...
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That power must reside elsewhere, with the best and brightest, with those who have surveyed the perils of the world and know what it takes to meet them. Those deep within the security apparatus, within the charmed circle, must therefore make the decision, on America's behalf,...
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Remarkable letter written from, and about, Germany by DH Lawrence in 1928. For all the beauty of his descriptions, it feels like divination rather than reportage. Immediately you are over the Rhine, the spirit of place has changed. There is no more attempt at the bluff of geni...
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Don’t worry, I’m not after a date or anything. I won’t be stalking you round the hills of New England. It’s more the sort of crush I had on James Stewart after I saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or Yves Montand whenever he played a resistance fighter. It’s a political kin...
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Like many, I was puzzled by the transformation in Gillard's public persona post-2010. The warmth, humour and sparkle she'd often displayed in parliament and elsewhere vanished. What remained was wooden, distant, usually dull and often irritating. Judith Brett recently made som...
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Luddites have been with us from the start and always been proven wrong. New types of jobs invariably emerged to make up for those lost through technology, and our standard of living climbed ever higher. No surprise, really. Markets, providing they're relatively unhindered, are...
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Can't remember who first pointed me to ' Becks in Paris '. Whoever it was, I'm grateful. [The] blog imagines Beckham’s internal monologue as he collides with the Parisian intellectual tradition – the glittering surface of a footballing icon cracked open by existentialism. Gold...
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Hugh White on Rudd and foreign policy : All this should make Rudd overwhelmingly the better choice as Prime Minister as far as foreign policy is concerned. But with Rudd nothing is ever that simple. Back in 2007 he came to office with lots of fresh ideas about how to position...
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Behind the contrived fluoro-jacketed appearances at workplaces, behind the simplistic sloganeering, is someone with a far more considered view of the world than his critics suppose. Abbott is comprehensible, but only on his own terms. You don’t have to like those terms, but it...
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Fallout from the Snowden saga continues to spread. Take Hong Kong's press release on Sunday: Mr Edward Snowden left Hong Kong today (June 23) on his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel. The US Government earlier on made a request to the HKSAR Gov...
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Martin Wolf has usually managed to moderate his inner interventionist. No longer, it seems. In his most recent column , he casts caution aside: "The time has come to employ this nuclear option [the printing press] on a grand scale." Not doing so, he says, would ensure a renewe...
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Based on a good thread over at LP, I watched the Kerry O'Brien interview with Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Bob Katter. Remarkable. I can't remember the last time I so enjoyed watching politicians. Perhaps never. Intelligence, humour, apparent integrity and, more than anythi...
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I don't doubt Krugman's right to suggest we're in the early stages of a Third Depression . The last few years have been a first instalment in what will prove to be a drawnout, volatile and painful downturn. I also agree it's "primarily [about] a failure of policy". Where we di...
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In comparative terms, Australia has only been mildly affected by the economic crisis. Whatever's enabled us to sidestep the worst of it so far, it's still fair to wonder whether this good fortune can last. A recent research update by two University of Chicago professors (hat-t...
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Krugman wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine last week entitled "How Did Economists Get It so Wrong?". This is unlikely to be news to anyone interested in economics. As usual with any of his efforts, it's received a lot of attention, most of it favourable. He's always...
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In the July Monthly , Noel Pearson zeroes in on one of the key structural issues underlying the recent crisis; why did so many corporations (especially financial ones) act in a manner so disastrously contrary to their own self-interest? His short answer? "The cause of Greenspa...
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Steve Keen recently produced an interesting (and sobering) look at the Australian real estate market entitled " Lies, Damned Lies and Housing Statistics ". In it, he takes issue with a number of fairly widely held perceptions, among them that housing affordability is now back...
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At last, a brief article on the financial crisis that goes behind the facade to look at some of the deeper structural issues. The author is Satyajit Das and the article ("Built to Fail ") was published in the latest Monthly . He sees the principle cause as excessive debt: The...
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The above is the title of an op-ed piece by Roger Cohen in today's New York Times . In it, he examines a bipartisan statement containing recommendations for settling the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. It's been presented to President Obama and the signatories are not only well-k...
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A few weeks ago, Joseph Stiglitz wrote an article ("A Bank Bailout That Works") for The Nation . He was highly critical of the policy decisions taken to date by both administrations. Even though he didn't at the time have the details of Geithner's latest plan, its core princip...
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Geraldine Doogue had an interesting interview yesterday with Walter Russell Mead ( a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations). He's recently written an essay for the Foreign Affairs journal entitled: "Change They Can Believe In: To Make Israel Safe, Give Palestinians Their...
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[caption id="attachment_7102" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Palestine-Israel Journal"] [/caption] I grew up in a household that was quietly but staunchly pro-Israel. This was of course (and still generally is) the default position in the west. Most Australians would h...
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[caption id="attachment_6120" align="alignleft" width="330" caption="Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan leaves the Treasury Building. Courtesy Bloomberg"] [/caption] It doesn't get any easier to give this administration the benefit of the doubt. For a fleeting moment in recent days, it...
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It's long seemed obvious to me that without large injections of fresh capital, all the other efforts to deal with the ever unfolding financial crisis would prove inadequate. Or even counterproductive . The official debate has finally swung in this direction but the question of...
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[caption id="attachment_6021" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Clearwater, Fla (6th October)"] [/caption] Conservative commentators* piled on after the vice presidential debate last week. Greg Sheridan made no attempt to hide his pleasure: "Sarah Palin, the pitbull in li...
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In a recent post , Rafe quoted Frank Shostak as one of the dissenters who are critical of the bailout proposal, not only in its particulars, but in principle. Shostak sees all interventions of this kind as economically damaging as well as adding to the already existing mountai...
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The atmosphere in Washington is all too redolent of 2001. Swept up in the turbulent aftermath of 9/11, legislators were easily stampeded into passing the Patriot Act. F ew, as it turned out, had even read it, much less thought carefully about its implications. [caption id="att...
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"The rich beauty of Dr. James Orbinskis writing contrasts with the stark poverty and suffering of the people he has served. . . . This book exposes truths most of us would rather not know. Do not put it down. . . . See who you become after reading it. Canadian Medical Associat...
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This started out as a comment on Don's recent post on Hamilton (for which I second or third -- the praise). Totting up the word count when I finally lifted my head, I realised it was an absurdly long piece to tack onto a comments thread. In any case, the points I wanted to tak...
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I found this brief excerpt (courtesy 3 Quarks Daily ) hard to resist: If you want to go where people are reading Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper, Nafisi has admonished, go to Iran. Go to Iran, I would add, if you want to discover where people are reading Jürgen Habermas, Isaiah...
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Im going to look a right idiot if I was first steered to 3 Quarks Daily by someone here on Club Troppo. Still, its good enough to take the risk. The site describes its mission as . . . . present[ing] interesting items from around the web on a daily basis, in the areas of scien...
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Paul Kellys piece in last months Australian Literary Review was in its way quite well done. Many of his general arguments were not only sensible, but were expressed with clarity and, at times, considerable force. Nevertheless, as did Raimond Gaita in his response this month, I...
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Hopefully Troppodillians will forgive me for tackling another Pearson piece only two weeks after my last effort. I'll try not to make a habit of it, I promise. With your indulgence, then, let's proceed. Is it relativism to hold our liberal democratic traditions to a higher sta...
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A sense of gloom settled in as I ploughed through The Weekend Australian yesterday. It felt like February 2003 again, only worse. Then, an optimist could at least excuse the thumping of the drums of war as the triumph of hope over experience. In the light of the last four year...
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If you like an occasional straight shot of social criticism, withering satire and fine, hard, funny writing, you could do worse than dip into James Kunstler's weekly diatribes . Best known for his conviction that America's love affair with the automobile, suburbia and cheap en...
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This brief article by Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Washington Post provides a useful contrast to Albrechtsen's opinion piece. Here are the opening few lines to give you the flavour: The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation...
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If we are to credit her latest effort , Janet Albrechtsen believes Islamic terrorism is an enemy almost as deadly as the 20th-century totalitarians, if a little less conventional. On this premise she assembles an argument of sorts that liberalism, with its concern for legal n...
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Not my words, but all the more amusing for that. They were the description -- by the friend of a friend -- of the two participants in Thursday's extended LNL interview . A sufficiently decent interval has now passed, I think, for me to once again risk such a promo. Phillip spe...
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A few weeks ago, Ken wrote an excellent post on the hue and cry over what many viewed as Peter Garrett's craven about face on US bases. It produced a long and lively discussion on hypocrisy, on cabinet solidarity, on what room there is within the party political system for pub...
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By way of background, a few words on how I view the relevant players. I lost what regard I'd had for Howard during the Tampa standoff and the children overboard affair. His readiness to ruthlessly exploit vital issues for party political ends finished him for me. I could still...
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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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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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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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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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