Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Big News: News Wins Big

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Winners and winner-groupies were hugging themselves with delight and gay abandonment today, at the unbelievable news, that Australia’s most famous news packaging and dissemination service, News Corporation, was first with the news, that News had been extremely successful at the annual News Awards, that celebrate News’ finest newhounds and news-like  moments.

Leaving the other contenders eating dust, News Corporation’s finest had good reason to celebrate their extraordinary victory.   Because,   for the second year running, in this now traditional and time honoured celebration,   News Corporation has… get this… cleaned up in ….every …..single …..category ….on …offer!

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New Troppo segment: Comment of the week!

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I spotted a comment in the last week that I thought would be a good starter for our weekend open thread.   If I do so again in the future, there’ll be another commenter of the week.   The comment was from Cam in the thread on history education – which was itself a pretty high quality discussion (as these things go!).

Anyway feel free to take Cam’s comments further, disagree or post your own comments on the state of the world.

It also looks like the federal and state oppositions have completely collapsed. it should be state oppositions that are raising this issue. Since incumbents seem to have massive advantage in dictating the issues and media exposure, the political opposition to the states is now the federal government, not the state opposition parties. Same for the federal government, their main opposition is the states.

I think the fact that the federal government is Liberal and the states Labor coincidental. Political opposition appears to be structural rather that ideological.

Warren Buffet takes the plunge

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I was wired at birth to allocate capital and was lucky enough to have people around me early on – my parents and teachers and Susie – who helped me to make the most of that.

Warren Buffett

It’s presumably in the papers and I’ve missed it, or it’s a hoax but courtesy of slashdot – this is what Wikipedia says.

Buffett announced in June that he will give away 85% of his more than $40 billion fortune to five foundations in annual gifts of stock starting in July 2006. The largest contribution will go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

[It's true and written up at greater detail in Fortune Magazine. NG]

I was completely smitten by Warren Buffett when I read a book on him a year or so ago and learned about his investment philosophy and practice – which is like a Norman Rockwell painting. He lives in a half million dollar house in Omaha and his entire operation is run by around 20 odd people.

I think of him as an embodiment of Adam Smith’s ideas about the promise of capitalism – of the importance of purpose, perseverence, talent and integrity in building a prosperous, co-operative and happy world.

In 1979 he was worth $140 million and lived entirely off his salary of $50,000. So living out Carnegie’s great line ‘a man who dies rich dies disgraced’ makes perfect sense.

I had lunch with an investment manager a couple of months ago who argued that Buffett was a good guy, but he hadn’t given much to charity like some of his heroes.

Well, now he has.

I remember thinking in my dismal way that if he was going to give money away, the best favour he could do the beneficiaries was to look after the money till he was near gone, as he could turn it into more money at a remarkable rate. Turns out he had the same thought.

I always had the idea that philanthropy was important today, but would be equally important in one year, ten years, 20 years, and the future generally.

And someone who was compounding money at a high rate, I thought, was the better party to be taking care of the philanthropy that was to be done 20 years out, while the people compounding at a lower rate should logically take care of the current philanthropy.

Read the full interview – it’s typical, marvellous Buffett.

Dancing with customary law

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Customary Law is in the news again, but the Greek Gods aren’t. Maybe they should be, perhaps their old dramas and poems would allow us all to see in dreaming a non-kissing cousin in the dance we have no choice but to partner. Remember a good dancer has good balance and that nobody wants to be a wallflower.

The Classical scholar Bruno Snell in The Discovery of the Mind, in Greek Philosophy and Literature attempts to show how the Greek origins of our modern ideas of body and soul developed from a pre-Homeric culture when there was no emphasis on individual agency, where guilt and a perpertrator’s moral culpability mattered not a whit in the application of the Law. In pre- Homeric Greece there were three terms used which could be translated into our ‘body’. But they are in no way direct equivalents, and assume a world completely at odds with our own. For body there are ‘limbs’, an aggregate of these, which might have an overall shape (demas) or limit (chros) (think of those muscley well-defined bodies on those ancient Greek urns) but no unity in itself. At this time the later Classical Greek for ‘body’, soma, only referred to corpses, lumpy piles of flesh of no movement or breath. For ‘intellect’ and ‘soul’ there are similar deficits from our modern point of view. For Homer the word psyche is the force which keeps us alive, and not a corpse (soma) from which the breath of life has gone. The other words used at the time were thymnos and noos. Thymnos is the organ of e/motion, it determines physical movement and the emotional life. Noos is the mind as a recipient of clear images, clear ideas.

But none of these organs the terms refer to are given any unifying responsibility for an individual’s ultimate cause or attitude, even if thymnos could be seen as ‘will’ or ‘character’. The ‘limbs’, moving as they may according to a particular thymnos, while receiving clear images of where to go in its noos.

The first writer to mention such a unity in terms of ‘body and soul’, was Heraclitus, in Homer’s time there was no such thing. Snell says Homer would not even have the language in order to predicate one on the other.

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Soak the rich and ban TV

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I don’t often get time these days  for a  leisurely  browse around the blogosphere.   But I found a few spare minutes today, and happened to stumble across an unbelievably trivial but nasty spat between the  lefties at Larva Rodeo and  compulsive attention-seeking legal academic James McConvill.    Don’t any of these people have better things to do with their time?

I’d like to  say something positive about McConvill, if only because no-one else ever seems to do so and because  he’s one of the few other  Australian  legal academics who blog (apart from his partner-in-crime Mirko “The Torturer” Bagaric and Kim Weatherall and Simon Evans from Melbourne Uni).   Accordingly  I was interested  when  McConvill mentioned  that his doctoral thesis was about happiness research, a subject in which I’m also rather more  idly interested.      So I searched the legal bibliographic database Agisplus and discovered a recent article about happiness  by McConvill and Bagaric in the Deakin Law Review.   Sadly it seems to confirm Andrew Norton’s theory about McConvill’s intellectual output:

To get the most attention, the essay should be wrong. Logical essays are read and understood. But an illogical or wrong essay will prompt dozens of other authors to rise and respond, thus giving the author mounds of publicity.

McConvill and Bagaric’s happiness article is based predominantly on a 15 year old book by Christian psychologist David Myers.   It cites a couple of other happiness studies by psychologists (mostly quite old ones), but makes almost no mention of the increasing number of recent economic analyses of happiness research.  

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Judging the Archibald finalists

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Actor Gary McDonald, whose portrait by Paul Jackson was another Archibald finalist (and my personal favourite)

While I’m on the Archibald Prize, the Art Gallery of NSW now has images of all the finalists available on its website here.   The winner was Marcus Wills’ work    The Paul Juraszek Monolith (after Marcus Gheeraerts), which I don’t like at all (although the reproduction on the AGNSW website is so muddy you can’t get a real impresson of it).

The Archibald is hardly the epitome of great Australian art, but it’s certainly our highest profile art prize.   Let’s conduct our very own Club Troppo open  judging panel.   Which one of the finalists would you  give the Archibald?