Huge thanks to the long suffering Jacques for all his work on Troppo over the decades. And thanks now to Antonios who's managed to transfer Troppo to a new internet host and massively improve the speed of the site and the functionality of our plugins. Troppo has now officially...
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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...
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For discussion: one of the far right's greatest achievements in the past decade has been to show post-modernists how wrong they were. Let me explain. In a famous 2004 article on the Iraq War, the New York Times journalist Ron Suskind quotes an aide to George W. Bush (possibly...
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A) Hey, you know what today is? Invasion Day! B) What? A) Invasion Day. B) Invasion Day? A) Yeah, 'cause it's the day they invaded us Kooris. B) Oh, InVASion Day A) So all those people wearing Australian flags are celebrating Invasion Day. 'cept the ones that feel sorry for us...
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The Sydney Morning Herald has been trumpeting a study they supported by on the future of Sydney's public transport and urban structure. Beneath the being overly pleased with themselves, with we're above petty politics harrumphing there is a genuine effort to talk about the pol...
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Google removes Aboriginal flag from winning Doodle 4 Google entry Last year 11 year old Jessie Du won Google's Doodle 4 Google competition with her entry 'Australia Forever'. Displayed on Google's homepage for Australia Day, the doodle features Australian animals formed into t...
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In the first post of this series I described recent work in empirical institutional economics and why I thought the work pursued a virtuous end but was compromised by the use of poor institutional measures. Today I will introduce a specific paper of this type that had drawn my...
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"I expected it to taste greasy and salty;" writes Clay Risen , "instead it was dry and smoky, with a hint of meat." Across America cocktail bars are serving up bourbon cocktails flavoured with bacon . In the Atlantic Risen explains the process: First, you fry up several thick...
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"Eat our weiners and gorge", says the sign on this Los Angeles fast food joint. Every time I look at this photo I wonder what that means. Is it an invitation to overeat? Is gorge the name of some American fast food delicacy? I took this photo in early 1987. From memory, it was...
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After you've checked them out and tried to work out whose side you'd rather be on, click the diagrams to see how these guys got into these positions and what they did with them. Amazing games.
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Richard Green is an honours graduate from Newcastle who is also an interesting and thoughtful fellow. He is eager for an audience for his work. So I've upped his permissions from 'subscriber' to 'author' so expect some posts from him in the early new year.
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"The concept of utility in economics refers to the pleasure, or relief of pain, associated with the consumption of goods and services" writes economist John Quiggin . Another economist, Robert Frank, suggests that it is closer to the idea of satisfaction. In Luxury Fever he wr...
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How will Paul Samuelson be remembered? This is the positive side of the story, the glowing record of the Nobel Laureate and author of the most widely read textbook in modern times. History may be kind to Samuelson. He had the good fortune to surf three waves that carried all b...
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It seemed like a simple enough question. What do economists mean by 'utility'? But after scouring the literature I'm more confused than when I began. The Penguin Dictionary of Economics defines it as: "The pleasure or satisfaction derived by an individual from being in a parti...
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Kopenhagen is currently witnessing two comic relief shows. One is regularly seen in the amusement area known as Tivoli, and the other is the climate change conference. The core element of pure humour in the second circus is that the actions of many governments are diametricall...
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Suppose you believed the world was getting warmer due to humanity's greenhouse gas emissions and you worried about it but you cant get yourself to believe that the 200-odd countries in the world are ever going to agree to drastically reduce their emissions via some joint schem...
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Some things seem to need no explanation, but are not obvious at all on reflection and, if you wonder about them, suggest something of interest about the economic system. Consider the question of why the informal economy is so small, leading to the question of how much more pro...
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Interesting development! Last week a UK High Court gave the green light for a green activist to sue his employer, who had sacked him for refusing to do an errand because it conflicted with his green beliefs. For intellectual ballast, the judge quoted no less or, should I say,...
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George Soros picked up the idea of the open society from Karl Popper at the London School of Economics and he spent a great deal of money promoting the idea through Open Society Institutes in Eastern Europe. Lately he has moved on to target market fundamantalism as the great t...
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In case anyone's interested, here's an interview I did on the Government 2.0 front. Just checking out the 'embedded' media player. Let me know if it all works.
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For a bit of commentary, explanation and another very different closeup of the crystalline surface, click here .
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Last year I wrote on this blog Meet Nikita McBride. Shes the daughter of friends of mine Ken McBryde and Stephanie Smith who are the co-founders of the wonderful architecture firm Innovarchi . Nikita has recently been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes type 1. In January 2009 sh...
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Tomorrow evening, as I've done on this date for the last two years, I'll put this sign on the front door: Trick-or-treaters: If you've come in a scary costume, please ring the bell. Otherwise, try again next year! It worked last year and the year before. In the preceding years...
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One of the problems of mechanisms of 'regulation review' - for instance the requirement for new regulations to be accompanied by regulation impact analysis, is that this constraint is itself regulation - it's regulation of the regulators. An infinite regress beckons. I'm not a...
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Another one of those articles I'd like to read. I will in this case, but would be interested in others' thoughts on the contents either when I've read it or before. Looks interesting. Public Sector Employees: Risk Averse and Altruistic? Date: 2009-09 By: Buurman, Margaretha (E...
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The people on the Dunera were a clever lot. I keep finding new and clever things they got up to. Anyway in the latest Dunera newsletter (now powered at least as much by the second as the first generation) I saw this design. It was (I presume) a cover design for the Dunera Stat...
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Peter Martin tweets a reference to this blog post outlining Dan Pink's well documented argument that bonuses might be good for productivity for simple tasks, and that they're at best a double edged sword for complex tasks, where intrinsic motivation is more important, and bonu...
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As Michael Nielsen says the ultimate productivity blog is "Surprisingly good".
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White to play I Rogers vs T Tao 19. ? See game for solution. I thought I would display this game because it was won by the best Australian player of his generation - the recently retired Ian Rogers.
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As someone once said (was it TS Elliot?) human beings cant stand very much reality. Every now and again communities, and sometimes whole nations go potty - psychotic. Jonestown is perhaps one of the best examples, although it was a kind of concentrated community a cult which a...
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Another one bites the dust
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From Economics Journal Watch a nice story (pdf) of someone who wrote a well considered, and expressed paper which was rejected, only to massively complicate it with otiose mathematics - whereupon it was published by the first journal it was submitted to. Some highlights below...
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The Universe Today held a competition to ecapsulate the big bang, and/or the history of the universe in a tweet - which is limited to 140 characters. The top ten are here . My fave is below the fold. #sci140 starburst, molecule, amino acid, protein, cell development, cell divi...
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I saw The Boy in the Striped PJs on an international flight to the US. I thought it was a good film. It had a deliberate and rather insoucient simplicity and naivete. The resulting occasionally fantastical quality helped the story move along without worrying too much about bas...
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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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As regulars to this site know, part of Troppo's mission (at least while I'm here) is to bring you a slow but steady stream of 'immortal games' defined as games in which amazing things happen culminating in an attach in which the ultimate victor sacrifices all the pieces they h...
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Even if it's a bit long. Here .
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A couple of interesting pieces, courtesy of Michael Warby, a tireless provider of hot links . This is an interview with a Somali pirate , feel free to take it with a pinch of pirate salt! How are the pirates organized? (Are there pirate leaders, financiers, and specialists?) T...
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At John P. Boerschig Ranches , they 'do have an organized Black Buck hunting package. This hunt is available at our Brackettville Ranch, which has excellent accommodations with all the comforts of home.' Is it ethical to hunt feral pigs for fun? James Valentine thinks so. He d...
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To the right are a couple of graphs of nominal share prices on the American stock market. What is odd about them? The fact that there is such a strong nominal anchor for share prices. Though the price of goods and services tends to keep going up reflecting inflation or down re...
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Technically speaking it was a tricked up cover band knocking out a few old Beatles numbers for a bunch of grey haireds on a nostalgia kick. But for those of us actually living the nostagia kick in Hamer Hall this evening, we were living the dream. It was the Beatles' White Alb...
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I attended the third and final session in the public forum series Getting to Grips with the Economy , organised by the Whitlam Institute at the Riverside Theatre in glorious Parramatta. This one featured John Quiggin , Steve Keen and the confessed non-blogger Guy Debelle from...
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A late call on the departure of the distinguished scholar Leszek Kolakowski. A short obituary . Starting off as an orthodox Marxist in postwar Poland, Kolakowski became progressively disenchanted and his calls for a more democratic version of socialism led him into conflicts w...
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From Three Quarks : Here's the speech Nixon had ready in case things didn't go according to plan. "Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there...
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The Joy of Sachs By PAUL KRUGMAN The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits and its preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the c...
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Satisfaction 2.0. HT Craig Thomler .
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This book sounds like a lot of fun. A history of science with a touch of humour and a good flavour of the characters involved. Reviewed here . In order to structure his big, sweeping book about such issues, Mr. Holmes uses two exploratory voyages as bookends. The first, a trip...
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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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Hi all, Apologies for not having posted here for a while. I've been flat out , but already have some posts I want to write - now to get the time . . . Meanwhile I would greatly welcome Troppodillian's views on which design(s) are best for the Government 2.0 taskforce - both in...
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Frank Devine passed away on Friday morning. He enriched the lives of many people, whether or not they agreed with his views on politics, religion or anything else. An early tribute can be found in The Australian, from Bernard Lane . The Weekend Australian tomorrow will carry s...
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This plane is a very fast plane. It has flown from New York to London in 1 hour 54 minutes 56.4 seconds , which is more than I can say I have done. All of which reminds me to ask Troppodillians why, when the big supersonic passenger planes failed, there weren't a few supersoni...
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I read Disgrace before seeing the film; thanks to that, once again , the film didn't have much impact in its own right. It was well made, as expected, and faithful to the novel. So the principal interest was in judging its merits as an adaptation, discovering small points of d...
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Not everyone enjoyed my recent post about PoMas -- post-materialist consumers who live modestly but spend up big. Some readers were particularly irritated by the comment about food intolerances. For example, Galaca says : I can’t help feeling this is yet another article sneeri...
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Why does Toyota's humble hybrid drive some people into a rage? Around 2005-2006, journalists started writing about " Prius rage ", " Prius envy " and "hybrid hatred". According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette , it started in California where the state allowed solo Prius drivers...
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Are you appalled by McMansions, $4000 barbeques and luxury four wheel drives that never leave the bitumen? Does Clive Hamilton's book Affluenza strike a chord with you? Do you dream of downshifting to simpler lifestyle but feel you can't afford it? If so, you could be a PoMa -...
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"Australia has very few anarcho-capitalist bloggers like Paul Staines of Guido Falkes [sic] fame, reformed raver libertarians with an eye for scandal (and another on the latest market moves)" writes Christian Kerr . Instead of breaking stories, he says Australia's political bl...
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HT: Kieran Healy's Weblog
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In New Matilda Ben Eltham asks "Yesterday's GDP figures show the Government's fiscal strategy has worked, writes Ben Eltham. So why isn't Labor saying so?" Well yes, they do show that they worked (like some of us commonsensically suggested they would) and Labor is saying so. WTF?
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Well that's an overstatement, but there's been a long standing idea - going back to before Adam Smith that there's something 'good' about "making things" to use some words that have suddenly become very popular. In reaction against this the economic establishment is of course...
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I have a credit card with a limit of just $500 for internet purchases and other risky transactions from the CBA. It is often in arrears and I don't bother paying it because I'd rather pay the usurious interest rate when the amount outstanding is $100 or whatever. So they somet...
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The speakers were taking questions, and a member of the audience asked whether mandatory superannuation contributions had helped to insulate Australia from the GFC, by promoting saving and reducing borrowing. The keynote speaker, one David Gruen from the Treasury, replied that...
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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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Penélope Cruz? You decide. I saw Elegy last night. It's been around for a while but hadn't caught my attention, mainly because I haven't been paying much. These comments will be of interest only to readers who have seen the film, and might spoil it for someone who still intend...
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The definitive experiment, February 2008 Here's the picture to accompany my comment on Nicholas's post about big things. My point is just that, as a design dictum, 'bigger is better' does not supplant 'all things in proportion'. Malcolm Oliver, no doubt the undisputed authorit...
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Andrew Leigh asks : "are smokers more likely to vote for parties of the right (because they believe in individual liberty) or parties of the left (because they tend to be poorer than non-smokers)?" The answer in the United States is that smokers are more likely to vote Democra...
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Strength through joy wasn't such a big hit in the end, but fun through stupidity - now that's an inexhaustible well. Michael Neilson links to ten videos of chairs being used in various silly 'extreme' sports. Except for the very first office do, virtually everyone is a young m...
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Paul Collier has finally 'nailed it' as they say on Australian Idol. Climate change is, in fact, infested with ethical baggage, much of it unhelpful. Lets get rid of some of it now. First, climate change has been hijacked by the environmentalist hatred of industrialized modern...
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Every cycle of monetary policy seems to bring forward some piece of confused thinking that somehow turns up centre stage. It's not as if monetary policy is easy - given the inevitable level of ignorance and the long and variable lags in the effect of monetary policy. But centr...
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I've had a few requests for more of these - so I'll pop them up when they're especially classy. Click on the link to the game Breyer vs J Esser to see the answer. And of course any day you want a fix, just go to Chessgames.com White to play Breyer vs J Esser 17. ? See game for...
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Australia's economy may be officially in recession, but Lateral Economics at least is doing its bit to reduce the effects. In addition to the research assistant Nicholas advertised for earlier this week, we also need someone with some web design and Wordpress backend experienc...
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And fair enough too. If someone is brain damaged perhaps they shouldn't be punished for bludgeoning their mother to death, after that is he had stabbed her, dug his hands into her face and on one occasion tried to choke her. But then you wonder why they're being convicted and...
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What Martin Wolf thinks of Britain's national debt, I think of our foreign debt . I have no idea whether the government can both get away with this optimism and postpone the moment of truth at least until after the general election. Markets have been forgiving. The difficulty...
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HT Brad Delong: In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use : The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods u...
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There's been a lot written about this subject lately, but this two pager (pdf) from Paul Ormerod seems pretty good to me.
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[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Steven Hawking"] [/caption] [caption id="" align="alignright" width="246" caption="Richard Pratt"] [/caption] If 'gravely ill' is a euphamism for 'dying' spare a thought for the two souls pictured.
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Andrew Norton wonders how the term 'neoliberalism' came to Australia . After searching the literature, he thinks it "probably started in Latin America, and came to Australia via US academia". Andrew's probably right. There's some evidence that, during the 1960s, free market su...
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A question that seems obvious once it's been asked. Find out the answer in this revealing video. The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest
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The police have been dusting for prints. There are dark smudges on the laundry door around the handle and locks. The forensics officer suggested I wipe it off with a dry cloth. It turns black if gets wet, she said. The powder is surprisingly difficult to remove and seems to ha...
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I'm in a London pub thinking of all the Troppodillians back home and of course I'm thinking of intellectual property. Today's column in the Fin outlines a very stupid situation we have gotten outselves into. (This was a direct washup of our previous Prime Minister's leadership...
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I dont know whether youve noticed, but theres a bit of an obsession with crime thats built up the last few years. I put it down to the Underbelly effect. The writhing naked bodies and the brazen offhand, almost pedestrian depiction of violent and murderous crime, has been migh...
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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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Well it may not impress many of you, but I've just been heading North from London to Edinburgh and the train has wifi (though like most things in the UK it doesn't work very well). In any event, on line I found Ken Parish burning the midnight oil and have been gasbagging to hi...
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New Page 1 I finally got around to seeing The Reader , and for once I'd read the book first (it helps that it's short). The film was well made. The acting was impressive, especially by young David Kross -- I was confirmed in my hypothesis that Kate Winslett deserved her Oscar...
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"The hallmark of economics," writes Geoffrey Luck , "is not its ability to forecast the future but to explain things." So when economists or others offer advice about the future of the housing market, is it best to ignore them? In 1995 economists Steven Bourassa and Patric Hen...
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I've always thought that autism is the doozy of mental illnesses. Many others come in 'episodes', and disabilities don't get in the way of human bonding. But autism, being related precisely to human bonding, does. And parents of autistic children (so it seems to me) must despa...
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Andrew Norton has asked me to post a link to a survey he's running on the policy views of those willing to identify with political labels such as classical liberal, conservative, social democrat. Looks interesting.
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Brad Delong's (re)pos t provides a nice example of how capriciously the media create by analysing the 'spin' they keep telling us it's their job to cut through. In this no-man's land primeval biases can run wild. One such bias is that the right are 'sound', that it would be so...
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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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I'm in Bejing at present - ironic when I read of the British Government's latest plans . The Government has announced plans to monitor people's communications on social-networking sites. The new proposals will see sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo compelled to retain in...
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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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Peter Klein at Organizations and Markets offers some calming thoughts on the AIG bonus debate . 1. The main lesson is that AIG should never, ever have been bailed out with taxpayer dollars. I said that at the beginning, and I stand by it even more today. AIG should have declar...
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Theres a laminated sign that sits over the sink in the office kitchen. It says : There is NO magical kitchen fairy please clean up your dishes yourself. I hadnt really paid attention to it before, but noticing it for the first time the other day floored me. It was after all a...
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Mark Crosby explains - I couldn't agree more. The RBA released minutes of their most recent meeting yesterday. Debate in the press today about the merits of the RBA keeping their powder dry, or whether they should have cut further. The minutes end with The question for policy...
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The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa by Nathan Nunn, Leonard Wantchekon NBER Abstract: We investigate the historical origins of mistrust within Africa. Combining contemporary household survey data with historic data on slave shipments, we show that individuals...
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I've been sent two free tickets to an advance screening of the film Elergy, but unfortunately it turns out I can't make it. So please email me on nicholas AT gruen DOT com DOT au and if you can pop round to my Port Melbourne house to pick up the tickets, you can have them. The...
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Andrew Leigh links argues that social policy makers should use an evidence hierarchy to sift through policy relevant research. The idea of a hierarchy of evidence (or ' levels of evidence ') comes from the evidence based medicine movement. As Andrew explains, there are thousan...
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An amusing post by Greg Ransom on Taking Hayek Seriously. Based on the story of Hayek's visit to Australia in 1976 as told by Ron Kitching with some more background on Catallaxy . In brief, Ron Kitching and the late Roger Randerson organised financial backing for a month-long...
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Yesterday Nicholas Gruen asked : What single book is the best introduction to your field your field for lay people? In the field of welfare reform I'd recommend Thomas Fowle's 1898 book The Poor Law . Progress comes slowly in social policy. Much of what passes for innovation i...
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Across Latin America, governments are turning to conditional cash transfers to overcome poverty and inequality. In a recent post, Andrew Leigh asks whether we should trial the approach in Australia. Conditional cash transfer programs attack poverty in two ways. Like income sup...
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The monthly RePec rankings for Australia are in again. Always an exiting moment for the professional economists in Australia to see whether their latest publications have already been spotted by the automatic search routines, whether they have been cited as often as they deser...
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By yearend, investors of all stripes were bloodied and confused, much as if they were small birds that had strayed into a badminton game. -- Warren Buffett
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From Crikey! McGauchie loves Sol, shareholders not so much Adam Schwab writes: It was certainly fun while it lasted. This morning, Telstra confirmed the worst-kept secret in corporate Australia, announcing that CEO Sol Trujillo was resigning his role and returning to the Unite...
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I had to laugh. Tips from Wall Street. Very funny. At just $16.47 it's a steal - no pun intended. We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky have also purchased Expect to Win: Prov...
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Apologies to Nicholas, who I've just discovered has already reviewed this film . But I know he'll be consoled by the knowledge that readers will appreciate his wisdom and sobriety all the more when contrasted with my naive gushings. ----------------------------------- I saw An...
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Here's today's column in the Fin. They say you should choose your parents wisely. Right now that makes me think of our car makers. Its so easy to put off upgrading your car, that just the anticipation of hard times can devastate new car sales. And this time its serious because...
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Richard Parker writes HT Mark Thoma . It's easier to unwind. Dear Mr. President, In a future two-volume work, I intend to deal with the relation of a President to economists. I will naturally urge that he listen to them attentively, and indeed with a certain respect and awe. B...
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If at least one agency in the Victorian Government wasn't too flash at helping Victorians when the fire was raging , some true believers in there are making amends, using an embeddable panel, complete with a Google Map to notify the public of Bushfire Events as per below. The...
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So the economy has problems. Spare a thought for the citizens of New York where the bedbug plague is reaching crisis proportions with a 34% increase in official complaints last year. There are lots and lots of people who are having a devastating experience with bedbugs," said...
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The "Austrian" is Gerard Jackson who puts out weekly bulletins of opinion and commentary. This is his rejoinder to The Weekly article by the PM. He accuses Hayek of treating the market as a "game" "specifically a game of 'catallaxy'". Thereby dishonestly giving the impression...
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Economic conservatives never really trusted Richard Nixon. Faced with rising inflation the president resorted to price and income controls declaring: " I am now a Keynesian in economics ". Almost everyone agrees that his timing was terrible. As Keynesians struggled to make sen...
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It's pretty easy to touch a nerve with bloggers, says cartoonist Gary Trudeau . Since most of them are not getting paid, he says that narcissism is the only explanation for what they do. Trudeau is the creator of Doonesbury , a popular syndicated comic strip. And last year his...
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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="262" caption="Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos displays the Kindle 2 e-book reader at an event Monday."] [/caption]" They don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law " Paul Aiken, ex...
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A really first class post from John Quiggin.
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Brad has a category 'utter stupidity' on his blog. If any of us were as smart as Brad, we might chance one ourselves on Troppo.
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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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Fiscal policy has become the subject of an intense ideological warfare among economists. Over the long term - i.e. over the business cycle as a whole - economists do not agree on whether the structural budget should aim for a surplus or a deficit. This is understandable as sev...
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One of Nicholas Gruen's favorite people, William Easterly has joined the blogosphere to keep the Aid bastards honest. Today, I foist a new blog called Aid Watch on the blogosphere. The objective is to be brutally honest when aid is not helping the poor, but also praising it wh...
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A feed on US road accidents summer vs winter etc . A feed from Organizations and Markets. Does the inclement weather have you worried about sliding off the road to an icy death? If so, Ive got some good news for you. On a per-mile driven basis (or per-trip or per-minute travel...
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By reaching out to neoconservatives Obama could "fracture the opposition's idea machine and help turn the Republicans back into the stupid party for years to come", writes Gabriel Schoenfeld . This isn't as far fetched as it sounds. The first wave of neoconservatives were disi...
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According to my lights this post is of no significance. All the hoopla surrounding Obama's inauguration irritated me. All the reading of the tea leaves of what he would say, as if the words were more important than the deeds. All the pomp and circumstance - just like a British...
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When Barack Obama chose pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration it sent ripples of disapproval through liberal ranks. Salon's Joan Walsh , for example, attacked Warren as "a poster boy for kinder, gentler 21st century bigotry". An evangelical Christian...
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From today's Business Spectator I experienced a rather unforgettable shock literally and figuratively when I was just five years old. Prior to that time I had always made what I thought was a reasonable assumption: a fence is a fence. But on a traumatic day in the 1970s I disc...
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I was talking to someone yesterday and mentioned apropos of nothing, that I thought that I had one of the big markers of gender determined behaviour. When I talk to people on the phone for more than a minute or two, I just love - leerrvve - to wander around. In and out of room...
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Quadrant's editor Keith Windschuttle has been held up to ridicule . Despite efforts to defend himself, the Sharon Gould hoax has damaged his reputation. But, strangely, some people seem to think the hoaxer's reputation has suffered too. Like the authors of the Ern Malley hoax...
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Thousands of birds collide with aircraft every year but in most cases there is little or no damage to the plane. However in a small proportion of cases aircraft have been destroyed as result of bird strike. In 1988, 35 people died when an Ethiopian Airlines 737 crash landed an...
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Due to the motion of Mercury , my horoscope advises me to "run any really audacious ideas through a sanity filter." So I ran the idea of consulting astrologers through the filter and straight away I had a problem. I decided to turn the filter off before typing " Ayn Rand " int...
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In a recent ranking of the world's top think tanks , only two Australian institutions make the cut. The Lowy Institute for International Policy is ranked fourteen in a list of the top think tanks in Asia while the Centre for Independent Studies ties with seven other organisati...
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I've drawn attention to the very teriffic Michael Bérubé previously . Anyway, below the fold is a terrific review of his on a book that's suddenly particularly relevant given the recent activities of Weathergirl . It also raises a bunch of issues which have been stirred up by...
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Below the fold is Ivan Krsti's explanation of a short squeeze, a maneuvre which allowed Porshe to filch around 6-12 billion from hedge funds that were shorting VW stock that Porshe was buying. Adolf Merckle, one of the worlds richest men, committed suicide yesterday by throwin...
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The global conservative movement is not a conspiracy, argues Mark Davis . Instead it is loose-knit and decentralised. "Ultimately what unites radical conservatives", he writes, "is the power of belief and the pursuit of common objectives, not the conspiratorial activities of s...
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A rather amusing ranking of jobs in the US . The rationale is explained, if you really want to know, with a mix of remuneration and working conditions. To quantify the many facets of the 200 jobs included in our report, we determined and reviewed various critical aspects of al...
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Keith Windschuttle has been hoaxed. In a post for Quadrant Online he writes: "An author calling herself 'Sharon Gould' has tricked Quadrant into publishing in its January-February edition an article about popular scares on biotechnology issues ." As Crikey's Margaret Simons pu...
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HT 3 Quarks In The Know: Do You Remember Life Before The Segway?
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IPART is the independent economic regulator for NSW. It oversees regulation and conducts pricing reviews in industries such as electricity, gas, water,taxis and public transport. IPART recently completed a review of pricing for RailCorps rail pricing provided under the CityRai...
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In affluent societies, consumption is about creating identity rather than meeting human needs, argues Clive Hamilton. And to reinforce the point, he invites us to " consider the semiotics of the potato today ". According to Hamilton, today's shoppers can choose from 15 varieti...
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Paul Krugman points to a discussion on the prospects of the kind of financial meltdown (pdf) we've just had at Jackson Hole in which, most of the economists were in fawning agreement with Saint Alan Greenspan. As Krugman says "Larry Summers, Im sorry to say, comes off particul...
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HT Kathy G. Charles Bingley is renting a house in Hertfordshire! Mrs. Bennet became a fan of Charles Bingley . Kitty Bennet can't stop coughing!!! Charles Bingley is now friends with Mr. Bennet and Sir William Lucas . 11 of your friends are attending Assembly at Meryton . Fitz...
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Nice to see some ideas I proposed a good while ago getting a bit more of an airing , namely governments running open market operations in assets other than their own bonds (pdf) in the process of managing the economy. I suggested that governments should purchase equities on a...
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The IMF states the obvious (pdf) - even if we've not yet fully taken it on board. First, and quite simply, governments should make sure that existing programs are not cut for lack of resources. In particular, central governments or sub-national governments that are facing bala...
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Although people endlessly ask for predictions, they rarely really want the answers. It was only late too late in life that I realised that when people said, We really want you to challenge our ideas, they mostly did not. They wanted instead to be congratulated on their wisdom....
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Time for a bit of economic navel gazing. What does the global financial crisis mean for the state of economics in the early part of the twenty first century? Pass? Conceded Pass? Fail? Well at the end of 2008, for all the talk of the search for stability from economists we sti...
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Nostalgia. It just gets better with age .
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Well, even reading against the grain of MSM reporting , the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to be throwing caution and Godwin's Law to the winds auditioning for the role of turkey this Christmas. Dr Rowan Williams risks causing a new controversy by inviting a comparison between...
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I've previously written - at least a couple of times - so I was interested to see this post from Greg Mankiw who sent a request from a reader seeking advice on good international development charities to development economist Michael Kremer. The strongest candidate in his lett...
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From 3Quarksdaily for which I think Ingolf for telling us about, a great article on Obama which in one way is far from starry eyed about him and his political methods, but ends in what can only be called a fantasy on the theme that the presidency is just a stepping stone to bi...
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In the days before the Americans turned him into a cuddly economic stimulus package, Santa led a much more exciting life. Today he lets even the naughtiest children sit on his lap and demand Nintendos, ipods and mobile phones. He listens politely and promises to do what he can...
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No real surprises here! (pdf) Abstract: Cross-culturally, male economic power is directly related to reproductive success. Displays of wealth and social status are an important part of human male mating effort. The degree of male financial consumption may be related to varianc...
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Guest postlet by Troppodillian Paul Hobson. This week news of the death of an Australian serving with the British forces in Afghanistan came as Kevin Rudd visited Australian troops. As Britain prepares to withdraw its troops from Iraq, Simon Jenkins asked in the Guardian why a...
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When this was written for ABC Unleashed in June] the ALP ruled in Canberra and in all the states and territories, not necessarily wisely and well, but in some cases by wide margins. The situation in mid 1965 was very different. Menzies had been the PM for as long as many peopl...
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A wry look at the arguments that are mounted to defend the bailout of the US car industry. Strictly speaking, a part of the US car industry that is failing, not the robust part that is doing OK. "Too big, too important to lose". The same could have been said of the US piano in...
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HT: Slate, via Paul Krugman
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One of the things George Akerlof was thinking about as he wrote his famous paper on the market for lemons was the market for low skilled labour. The idea that lemons avoidance is a big part of the story of poor demand for low skilled workers has always struck me as very powerf...
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Well, kind of. I'm on his list of people who receive his Christmas e-mail complete with his speech to the Australian Business Economists Annual Forecasting Conference in Sydney on December 9, 2008. It's below the fold. AUSTRALIA S OUTLOOK FOR POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT IN 2009 Ac...
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Sara Macliver ....the best Pinchgut ever! I didn't really expect it to be. Though I admired their courage in picking such an obscure and, at first blush unsuitable, work, it seemd inconceivable that it would be as rapturously beautiful as, say, L'Orfeo or The Fairy Queen . But...
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I offer no guarantees as to the accuracy of this article by Bill Ayres the 'unrepentant terrorist' whom Obama was supposed to be 'palling around with' , but I thought it was interesting and others might like to check it out.
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Some interesting pieces in The Australian Literary Review , 3 Dec, the insert that comes in the paper on the first Wednesday of the month. Richard Lansdowne wrote on the courage of Alexander Solzhenitsyn which he suggests made him the greatest writer of the 20th century. I am...
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This diagram is a scatter plot of lagging PE ratios against subsequent market performance. Amongst other things it demonstrates the wisdom in hindsight of Alan Greenspan's first warning about 'irrational exhuberance' which his subsequent utterances seemed to repudiate. Real re...
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Ben Bernanke and Paul Kruman have written on the dangers of deflation and the implicit importance of some level of inflation. Generally this has been in the context of dealing with a liquidity trap. Ken Rogoff has a different angle suggesting that "a sudden burst of moderate i...
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In a fit of what some Troppodillians will now know to be rather typical hot headed enthusiasm, I recently pontificated about the best blog post I'd seen in the year . Well it has a sequel , which is also worth reading. And I laughed out loud when I got to this part of the argu...
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The question arose on Organizations and Markets , which industries will be next to hold out their hands for bailout money? Will the massage and sexual favours industry be there in line? A column in Slate shed some light on this topic . It seems that the high end of the industr...
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Peter Boettke makes a point about the role of tariff protection in the US leading the transition from the Great Crash to the Great Depression. In the context of the Great Depression, one has to remember that after the stock market crash in 1929 market corrections were set in m...
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The Bishop of Harare, Rt Rev Dr Sebastian Bakare, will be in Australia from 20 November to 5 December with a circuit in NSW including Sydney, Nowra, Goulburn, Wagga Wagga, , Dubbo, Tamworth, Coffs Harbour, and Gosford. These matters are not on my normal beat but it seems that...
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These are difficult times for liberals. The mood around the world is turning against them. Politicians find it easier to blame crazy economists and greedy managers for financial turmoil than to understand and fix their own mistakes. Free-marketers still have the evidence of ec...
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Those in Canberra on the appropriate day might like to come to a free seminar being run by the Queensland University of Technology which is, like the State in which it resides a national leader on access to public sector information. Extracts from the official invite sent roun...
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With intended irony, I christen Paul Krugman the maestro of the column. Here's his latest one. I've only read the first two paragraphs but they illustrate his virtuosity of the form. I'll post the rest of the column below the fold. Kevin, are you listening. Say 'deficit' three...
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"People who talk about a bubble are blowing smoke,'' said real estate economist Michael Carney. It was February 2005 and Carney was confident that house prices in California wouldn't fall. But by the end of the year the market turned. And between August 2007 and August 2008, C...
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Interesting to see that the ACT party , led by Rodney Hyde, has a slice of the action in New Zealand. The party is described as the most free market party to have seats in Parliament anywhere in the world. When I ran into Rodney Hide at the Mont Pelerin conference in Christchu...
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Here's a graph of the swing to and against Democrats and Republicans. Arizona stands out - McCain's home state. But the real source of amazement for me is Loisiana - including from the looks of it New Orleans. Perhaps it reflects the fact that they had a big clean-out of the r...
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I've recently finished reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's first book Fooled by randomness . It's not long or difficult, but it's episodic and easily pick upable and put downable. And so I've put it down a lot - and picked it up again a lot - for a few months. Anyway when I came a...
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The spirit of 1974: Man on Wire This is the most enjoyable documentary I ever watched. Andrew Denton's program on Philippe Petit contained quite a bit of the footage, but even if you saw that, you should still see the film. (And, whether or not you've seen or intend seeing the...
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This interview from The Daily Show is a few days old, and probably nothing new to Troppo's tuned-in readers. But it's too delightful to let anyone miss. John Stewart: Are you concerned, in some respects, that you may go in the voting booth, and your white half will suddenly de...
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Jacques Barzun is arguably the leading commentator on education and cultural studies in the 20th century but he has a low profile since his kind of deep but ideologically disinterested scholarship went out of fashion. Born in 1907, he turns 101 in November. His reputation achi...
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In light of the massive interventionism that is being practiced by governments to handle the financial crisis, a warning needs to be repeated regarding two very different kinds of government action. The warning can be found in Chapter 17 of The Open Society and its Enemies , s...
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There are important lessons to be learned from the Great Depression but I have the impression that the left emerged with the view that the New Deal was required to save the US from rampant capitalism. There is an alternative account . For an MP3 version of the story . The New...
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"Goodbye and f.... you!" A hemp-inspired comment maybe? This came out of the farewell letter from Andrew Lahde, manager of a small California hedge fund, Lahde Capital, which recentlyreturned 866 percent betting against the subprime collapse. He has retired to live the good li...
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The Australian Skeptics Prize for Critical Thinking has been won this year by Peter Ellerton, a Queensland teacher who established a network promoting critical thinking in schools. The prize is worth $10,000. For a decade up to 2006 it was awarded as a part of the Australian M...
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Though it's late the day, I want to recommend Opera Australia's production of Billy Budd . There are only two performances left -- tonight (Monday 13 October) and Thursday. This is indeed short notice for tonight but, for the spontaneous among you, tickets are only $60 if you...
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Regular readers of this blog may remember Neil, the guy who runs a great taxi 'ring' - a group of drivers who cooperate in providing a superior service to the crap you have to put up with from the branded networks of taxis. I really hate their policy of not offering you any id...
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Getting back to the basic things that really matter. If the Manly Seaeagles are to fulfull their promise as the favorites for this event, and defeat the reigning champions, the Melbourne Storm, the Manly pivot Jamie Lyon holds the key due to his responsibilities in both defenc...
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For people who have the time or the need to get into the details of the proposed bailout package, this link provides a section by section summary of the bill. Given the size of the bill, something like this is the only way that most people will ever get a glimpse of the mechan...
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Paul Krugman, the op ed maestro has another great column for us all. But I must say the first commenter on the column stole the show. Joe Idaho says... I like McCain. I think he has a strong understanding of the issues, and that he is a strong leader who will lead us towards p...
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Here is Pundit Grattan thinking aloud about government spending. Meanwhile, it is a bit rash, with revenue uncertain, to be talking up expectations on spending, as Rudd did this week when he said it was time to "bite the bullet" on a paid maternity scheme, "and we intend to do...
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The recent post on architectural delights reminded me that during the Beaconsfield mining disaster I googled Beaconsfield and turned up some pictures of the Batman Bridge nearby. That led to some more pictures of Tasmanian bridges and one of them led to some other bridges in V...
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The way the proposed bailout is being talked up, you get the impression that the whole world depends on the Bush administration and the Fed coming to the party with the best part of a trillion dollars. The US economy depends on it, our economy depends on it, the capacity of th...
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Courtesy of Dani Rodrik's blog . Our Center for International Development launched its new Empowerment Lab with a conference yesterday, and one of the most interesting new social entrepreneurship initiatives I learned about is something called MyC4.com . This is a web-based pl...
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In view of the current financial crisis it may be interesting to revisit the work of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) . His first major work in 1912 was on money and credit. A sleeping giant of the 20th century, for many decades he was the spine of the Austrian school of economics...
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We've always had a pretty laissez faire attitude towards commenting at Club Troppo. Contrary to the impressions of some, we have only ever banned two or three persistent trolls, and only ever delete comments that are persistently abusive or defamatory. However, there have been...
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After the Menzies administration was voted out during World War 2 and the Curtin-led ALP took over there was a suggestion to have a Government of National Unity so the best talent on both sides of the house could be applied directly to the desperate issues at hand. Curtin reje...
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The travails of the financial markets have triggered a degree of jubilation among the usual left-leaning suspects, as though this episode reflects badly on "neoliberalism", deregulation and the free market order. This view is not sustainable because the problems can be traced...
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Lingua Franca is often a fun show and t omorrow they have someone talking about "the new quotatives" The words like and go when classed as 'new quotatives' have linguistic functions way beyond their traditional meanings. And this phenomenon is not confined to English; it can b...
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Hugh Stretton has been a persuasive advocate for the competition-enhancing role of government agencies in the private sector. His example was the South Australian Housing Trust which apparently operated on a commercial basis to provide alternative accommodation in the marketpl...
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Tyler Cowen challenges the idea that the finance markets have failed due to lack of regulation. Not a lack of government intervention , too much, done badly. THERE is a misconception that President Bushs years in office have been characterized by a hands-off approach to regula...
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This is one for Don Arthur, maybe you can help to work out where John Gray is coming from these days and what happened since the time he was a fan of Thatcherism and the New Right. Somewhere along the road he decided that he could no longer support liberalism because it provid...
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This is the latest feed from Eddie Cross , a white MP in the MDC party that is now sharing power with Mugabe. Eddie explains how the power-sharing arrangement has a strong resemblance to the traditional governance of the Shona tribe.
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Nicholas disapproved of Charlie Gibson's 'trick question' to Sarah Palin about the Bush Doctrine. He was especially struck that the question 'was asked by an interviewer who then went on to demonstrate that he didnt know what it was'. The question was only a trick insofar as i...
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The whole of Sept 08 Quadrant . And you have to be a subscriber to look at a limited number of back numbers. Not long ago only selected items were on line in the current edition and there was open access to back numbers extended as far as 2002 or further. WTF? Check out John S...
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I suppose it isn't surprising that sentiment among media professionals about the future of newspapers is so negative. Fairfax's recent culling of several hundred journos in the face of a collapsing revenue bottom line has brought the whole issue into sharp focus, as have simil...
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Shopping for Christmas? New books from artist and author Kilmeny Niland. Other artworks from the same source - portraits, miniatures, haiga , wildlife, cards. A prolific source of links on every topic under the sun. Australiana , war , the US , queer issues , etc. Peter Klein...
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Congratulations to Andrew Leigh who has scraped onto the list of the top 50 economics blogs. This came as a feed from The Austrian Economists where one of the five bloggers was excited to come in at 38. Marginal Revolution was on the top, followed by Econbrowser and then Paul...
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I find little evidence of any RBA remorse or regret for what it has done to our economy. Although contributing to a very low GDP growth, a shocking malaise in the housing, retail and low-leverage business credit and rises in unemployment, the RBA remains almost complacent. Nor...
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Bob Gould on the evolution of revolutionary thought since 1905. Proving that old lefties don't die, they just write a lot. Bob Gould is the sixty-something proprietor of a series of alternative bookshops, starting in Goulburn St (Sydney) and now located in King St, Newtown. He...
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It was just how Don Watson said it should be -- an act of seduction. "A good speech is a lover's embrace," he wrote. "You want to sit on the metaphorical mountain and with an arm sneaking round their shoulder speak of things you have in common -- your love of trees or cows, th...
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Good news everyone! Refreshed by a spell on the bench I have decided to line up with the Troppo team, or at least alongside the team. The major mission is to keep people up to date with developments in classical liberalism, critical rationalism and Austrian social studies. Jus...
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George Osborne gave a surprising speech earlier this month. The Shadow Chancellor spoke about the egalitarian philosopher John Rawls and called for greater equality of opportunity. He praised Swedish educational reforms and argued that parents should be able to choose a school...
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Labor-leaning Sunday Territorian columnist Scott Stirling wrote last week about the challenges facing the CLP Opposition. However, they pale by comparison with the situation faced by the Henderson government. Some are purely political problems in the wake of Labors recent clos...
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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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I am calling on all Troppodillians to nominate a worse research paper than this . From a very quick squiz the people who wrote the paper are against rape. After an introductory poem the paper begins thus: Women who are raped or who suffer domestic violence are somehow thought...
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It was an innocent age where the major threats to freedom were mustachioed men with hydrogen bombs and the monopolistic tendencies of big business. In the paradoxical world of Clive Hamilton , the free market liberals of the 1950s never realised that the most serious threat to...
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When Margaret Thatcher said that there was no such thing as society , her enemies were delighted . Here, in a single phrase, was her heartless philosophy of individualism -- a philosophy which abandoned vulnerable people to the competitive violence of the marketplace and celeb...
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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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Is the New York Philharmonic just a cover band? After all, rather than writing and performing their own material, aren't they just rehashing old tunes by Mozart, Stravinsky and Beethoven ? One of the conceits of underground music scenes, is that the performers are genuine crea...
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Matthew Bonson and the long-tongued Len Kiely in happier times on elevation to the Ministry in November last year The day before Saturdays unexpectedly knife-edge NT election, Chief Minister Paul Henderson gave a politically prudent and factually correct assessment of Labors c...
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Nothing seems to excite conservatives as much as the spectre of moral relativism. For conservatives, relativism is one of the great errors of the postmodernist left. If it is allowed to spread through the classrooms, lecture theatres and legal system, Western civilization will...
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When the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer threw his neighbour down a flight of stairs he said it was because she was making too much noise. He couldn't stand noise and once wrote that "when a great mind is interrupted, disturbed and distracted it is capable of no more than a co...
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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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This article by Stephen Bartos first appeared in the Public Sector Informant magazine, published with the Canberra Times today. This version has been slightly edited, primarily to include links. Government Information It was two steps forward, one back for access to government...
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The High Court's decision earlier today in the Blue Mud Bay case sets the cat among the pigeons (or maybe the shark among the barramundi) a little over a week out from the Northern Territory election. The Court has dismissed the NT Labor government's appeal from a decision of...
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Am I the only newspaper reader who expects an opinion column to develop a coherent thread of argumentation, as distinct from a series of provocative comments stuck together precariously with specious howevers and therefores? The editors who approve these pieces evidently think...
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Everyone knows that egalitarians believe in equality . But what does that mean? If the core egalitarian idea is that all human beings have equal moral worth, then even Friedrich Hayek is an egalitarian . But if, as Rafe Champion insists , egalitarianism means "equal material r...
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Why are left-wingers less happy than right-wingers? According to psychologists Jaime Napier and John Jost , it's because of the way they interpret inequality. American right-wingers are more likely to believe that hard work leads to success. As a result, they find inequality l...
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Support for the welfare state is often based more on chauvinism than a desire for justice, says Will Wilkinson. He argues that if first-worlders really care about improving the lot of the poor we should open up our economies to trade and allow more poor foreigners to cross our...
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Catherine Carby, Rachelle Durkin and Gábor Bretz If one wants uniformity to be the basic rule for an opera, it is easy to see that a more perfect subject ... than 'Don Giovanni' is simply not to be contemplated. (Source) Was Kierkegaard right about this opera being the greates...
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Gummo is sick, Amanda doesn't have computer access at the moment, Jen is under the hammer to finish assignments for her Masters, and I'm not sure where Stephen Hill and Tim Sterne are (flat out looking for a job in Tim's case, I suspect). Gilmae is going on a holiday soon and...
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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 Nationals bitch slap ALP and LP in Gippsland . Ralph Buttigieg finds good news for Bren...
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While some members of the Missing Link team have subscribed their selections and others have done so partially, others (where are you arts people?) haven't done so at all. They're no doubt as flat out as I am with work commitments. In my case it's finishing exam and essay mark...
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Barry Jones is a human search engine. Crawling over thousands of pages of words and numbers, he commits the data to memory and indexes it for regurgitation on demand. "When Mozart's name is mentioned", he says "a detailed entry appears in the screen in my head, Mozart, Wolfgan...
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The Herald's transport correspondent Linton Besser reinforces standard confused thinking about motorway tolls in yesterday's edition. He reports that the NSW Government's 'Cashback' scheme, whereby private motorists can claim reimbursement for the tolls they pay on the M4 and...
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Thursday's Missing Link over the fold. 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 Andrew Norton bids farewell to the Australian De...
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There's a dark side to the internet, says David Burchell , an eerie parallel universe that spreads across the web "like green moss on a neglected lawn." And here you are, right in the middle of it. The parallel universe Burchell is writing about is "the world of the political...
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Wednesday's Missing Link over the fold. 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 A Committee in the Coalition-dominated Senate g...
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Tuesday's Missing Link over the fold. 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 Daily life in Afghanistan Gary Sauer-Thompson , L...
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Monday's Missing Link is over the fold. 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 Ralph Buttigieg, believing Brendan Nelson's day...
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Well-being isn't just about our relationship with things, it's also about our relationships with each other. Poverty hurts, not just because it can leave you feeling hungry, cold and sick, but because it can also leave you feeling ignored, excluded and ashamed. In The Theory o...
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Friday's edition over the fold. 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 I think the second one is LBJ but who's the third? Jim...
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Thursday's edition over the fold. 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 John Quiggin and Gary Sauer-Thompson look at the stat...
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Wednesday's edition over the fold. 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 Tim Dunlop notes the AMA's bailing out of backing/pa...
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If you're interested in social policy and have a strong commitment to social justice then here's a job you might be interested in. Catholic Social Services Australia is looking for a new policy officer . CSSA is looking for an appropriately qualified and experienced person to:...
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Tuesday's edition over the fold. 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 The Missing Link team feels that we should complete th...
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Monday's edition over the fold. 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 (From Worst of Perth ) Can this gallery expect a visit...
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At the local Rapid Creek Market this morning I gave Kevin Rudd two tomatoes. I have never given tomatoes to anyone, ever before - such is the seductive power of fame. My grandfather used to give us homegrown tomatoes - by the barrel at certain times of year. These ones were 'l...
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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 Phillip Toledanos new book Phone Sex (July 2008, Twin Palms) takes us into the boudoirs...
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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 The hero. The leader. The god by Alexandre Kosolapov (via the Stumblng Tumblr ) Gary Sa...
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QUT researcher Axel Bruns (presumably along with usual colleagues Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders) has just published some new quantitative research about blogs which contains some interesting results. He/they undertook a textual analysis of 3 prominent blogs with somewhat div...
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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 We should be thankful for the small mercy that Tim Blair at least doesn't seem to belie...
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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 Should we be worried? (via Boing Boing ) Lauredhel and Fiona Reynolds discuss the absur...
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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 Luvvies, but not Albert Finney playing Hamlet ( via Laura ) The inaugural downunder fem...
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The YouTube service for slides has just been launched . I'm not entirely sure of the point of it, since one can post a powerpoint slide show on a web in ppt and it will be indexed by Google for the words (and for all I know the images) in it. So it can be found and viewed - in...
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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 Terry Sedgwick notes the loaded language in this headline announcing the predictable le...
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The Elite Diner in Urbana, Illinois just before it closed down ( via Flickr ) Some readers might have noticed that I occasionally add sidenotes to Missing Link querying why elitism seems to be such a dirty word for Australians (and probably Americans as well). I haven't to dat...
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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 One for nostalgic codgers like me (KP) - Paul McCartney performing "A Day in the Life"...
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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 via Larvatus Prodeo Tim Blair has been doing some sleuthing on the rumours that Kevin R...
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In a post I wish I'd written, Robin Hanson lists a series of unjustified presumptions readers of political opinion pieces (especially blog posts) often make. In my fairly long experience of attempting to discuss issues in the blogosphere and trying to make my meaning as clear...
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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 Apathetic Sarah imagines John Macarthur as a supporter of Camden's charming Kate McCull...
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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 Liberal politician Sophie Mirabella and demon spawn imagined (and explained) by Apathet...
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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 Worst of Perth wonders about the values of all the bogan talkback ranters harassing Hen...
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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 Suggest a caption (via Terry Sedgwick ). Thank God for those activist judges on the Sup...
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'One of my closest friends is Turkish, and she won't have anything to do with Muslims, OK?' Camden Council has finally voted on the Quranic Society's development application, and has unanimously voted against it . We now have to wait and see whether the applicants will appeal,...
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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 Random photo from Flickr - page 1 of 72,701 hits for "teenager". Is this more or less "...
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I've just spent two hours finding stuff for Missing Link because other team members (except the arts ones) didn't have time. However I've now discovered that the arts section, while full of great material, is also full of extraneous formatting code that will need to be strippe...
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My ten year old son is in trouble. Last week his sports teacher, Mr Bryan said to his class "stand up if you've been a bad sport". Alex returned home having stood up. He then confided to his mother that he hadn't been a bad sport, but he thought he had better stand up to be su...
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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 Exclusive Club Troppo investigation reveals another Henson peddling kiddie porn. Where...
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cycad tree ferns rude senile royal turd obsequious Tory blogger
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In a speech on May 19th, Tim Flannery reportedly proposed, as a last-ditch solution, the mass depositing of sulphur into our atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the earth, thus counter-acting the greenhouse effect of increased amounts of CO2 in the air. The spe...
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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...
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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 Paul Norton looks at the current cult of global cooling and lessons unlearnt from South...
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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 Threats from certain Missing Link colleagues have resulted in a penis photo theme in to...
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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 Robert Rauschenberg's Skyway (1964)(he died this time last week, but better late than n...
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Below the fold is Crikey's ruminations on Bob Brown's story that he was offered $1 mil in coverage if he would support a particular media proprietor get stuff through the Senate. The thing that bugged me about Brown's story was that he said that he didn't disclose it at the ti...
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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 Reason 's Jesse Walker on the fate of the Spaghetti Monster (originally a comment on th...
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Three quarters of America's wealth is invested in its people, writes Gary Becker . He argues that while physical capital is still matters, human capital now matters more. Where once a nation's wealth lay in the fertility of its soil, today it lies in the knowledge, skills and...
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I've added a new Australian sports blogs category to TroppoSphere , with lots of great feeds kindly identified by Guido (whose new blog is one of those featured). I've also split the arts blogs category into two - "theatre, film, TV and visual arts" and "books, music and gener...
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Many thanks to the readers who responded to our joint Burma campaign with John Quiggin by donating to aid agencies assisting the victims of Cyclone Nargis. They include: Dylan Nicholson (100), John Warburton (100), Kim Weatherall (150), Stephen Luntz (350), Robert Merkel (100)...
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A friend of mine's partner and her son are setting up a cafe/bakery in an old Church in Perth, Tasmania . So, in the true style of financial markets of the eighteenth century (my chosen favourite century to be part of - so long as I got one of the good parts) I've invested wit...
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How's this for commentary as news? The opening sentence of the lead story in The Age today . OPPOSITION Leader Brendan Nelson has sought to revive his ailing leadership with pledges to cut petrol excise and block a 70% tax hike on pre-mixed alcoholic drinks. How absolutely dis...
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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 The California State Constitution protects gay marriage! See today's ML "law" section ....
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The Archibald Prize Exhibition at the NSW Art Gallery winds up on Sunday. That doesn't leave much time, but, having seen it myself now, I strongly endorse Nicholas's advice from two months ago -- see it if you can. And if you have children between seven and twenty, take them....
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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 A t-shirt every blogger should have, courtesy Will Wilkinson who argues (compellingly)...
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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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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 The Budget It's Wayne Swan's first but it's Andrew Bartlett's eleventh . Robert Merkel...
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Several readers have sent money to Burma's monks, via Avaaz . This is a progress report on Club Troppo's joint campain with John Quiggin to inspire reader donations to organisations assisting the victims of Cyclone Nargis in Burma. As John announced in an update yesterday, 'do...
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You may not know it but around 20% of the home loan market has just collapsed - the securitisation market. The banks are moving into the space and and, as a result, rationing credit elsewhere. Below the fold is an op ed in the Age about it. It introduces a theme you'll probabl...
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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 From Jeff at Rigorous Intuition . Like a fat kid eyeing off a doughnut, the inevitable...
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TroppoSphere TroppoSphere is a project I've been working on for quite a long while on and off. It's intended as a feed reader for people who don't want to use a feed reader! A gateway to a world of news and expert opinion and analysis for those with feedreader phobia. I suspec...
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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 From Terry Sedgwick . It's a bit like the armadillo book that gave rise to the original...
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If you'll allow me my fancy, it occured to me that, mutatis mutandis , Edmund Burke might have been contrasting the slow cumulative progress of TQM or the Toyota Production System nicely written up by James Suroweki here , with more 'dynamic' (and often less successful) method...
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With tens of thousands dead ( possibly a hundred thousand ) and hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed, the disaster in Myanmar is approaching the scale of the December 2004 tsunami. The difference is that it's confined to one extremely poor country with particularly poor in...
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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 Apathetic Sarah takes Julie Bishop's latest pronouncement to its logical conclusion App...
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As many of you know, I'm usually around Troppo for Missing Link purposes, and it's Missing Link that can take a great deal of the credit for Legal Eagle and I heading off on a new joint blogging venture . Jacques Chester - Troppo's redoubtable blog admin - can also take a bunc...
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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 Holbein sketch of Lady Guildford (via Scarlett W Blue ) Apathetic Sarah notes that Quee...
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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 Bernice Balconey , Kim and clarencegirl review Morris and Michael's most recent public...
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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 Tim Lambert on the fallacy inherent in yesterday's umpteenth climate change denialist "...
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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 Gummo's New-New Political Compass Apathetic Sarah anticipates an interesting judgement...
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One of my grand kids is studying economics at the University and, to help him with an essay on current macroeconomic policy in Australia, he asked me three rather pertinent questions.. 1. If there is an inflation problem which is overwhelmingly supply-side driven, as we now se...
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"The phrase is suddenly everywhere", said the New York Times' Katharine Seelye . It was 2000 and Al Gore was running for president. In his acceptance speech , Gore used the phrase 'working families' at least eight times. In Australia, Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd seem equally kee...
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We've had web-translation for yonks. But given that podcasting is often an inefficient way to both take in and disseminate information I'd like to be able to go to a site and feed in a relevant audio or audio-visual file - or point the site to a YouTube video for instance and...
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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 From Terry Sedgwick Jason Soon points out how Craig Emerson has misrepresented Alan Mor...
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As I've said ad nauseam on this blog and elsewhere, and quoting John Kay, the way we work out what's good and what's not is not by assessing it individually but by reputation. We know that Apple makes insanely great products not because we get our screwdriver out and check its...
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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 Annie Leibowitz photo of 15 year old Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus (see items under "...
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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 The Worst of Perth sculpts former WA Premier Geoff Gallop and yearns for his return in...
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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 Mark Shorter's upcoming performance at MOP projects explores patriarchal modes of power...
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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 The new Political Compass per Gummo Trotsky Kev Gillett believes the only effect increa...
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Jacques is advising us that we should upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress. He may well be right, but Nicholas and I are nervous/remaining to be convinced. Apparently there are some potential security issues with the version we're currently running. Our concern is that j...
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John Cargher is one of a handful of people who have been part of my consciousness for as long as I can I remember, and who are still doing their thing -- at least, he'll be in this category until tomorrow. There won't be many of these great constants left after that: a quick m...
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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 Anzac Day march Ken Parish indulges in some refuting of Albrechtsen and if nothing else...
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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 Graham Young points out yet another pointless quick-fix by the government and then offe...
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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 If you imagined that concrete "big things" at tourist spots were a uniquely Australian...
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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 2020 Roundup Is it too late for Joshua Gans to get a guernsey in the Missing Link Wrapu...
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That's David Marr's verdict on the national song, and he asserts that many of his fellow best and brightest agree: EXTENSIVE soundings among delegates confirm I was not the only one who suddenly realised on Saturday morning as I was singing Advance Australia Fair that among th...
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I'm reading one of the better Web 2.0 books around instructively and amusingly called Here comes everybody which Peter Gallagher told me today came from Finnigan's Wake. I thought I was terribly clever when I discovered this book on the net within a day or so of it having been...
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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 Terry Sedgwick commits the ultimate act of Photoshop self-abuse 2020 Roundup Bernard Sl...
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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 Terry Sedgwick comes up with a strangely disturbing thought - the Bolter for Lord Mayor...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Andrew Leigh summarises some of his favourite results from an ANU-run Governance poll . dr. fa...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian How dumb is Liberal Frontbencher Christopher Pyne? Asked and answered at North Coast Voices ....
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Jacques Chester has scathing words for the Government's mealy mouthed excuses for formalising...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Australia is to get its first female governor general, with the announcement that Kylie Quenti...
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In an earlier blog, Mike Pepperday argued that equal opportunity programs enhance individual freedom - indeed that equality of opportunity (EP) is an essential pre-condition of effective choice and self-reliance. I instinctively agree with Mike. And I suspect most Australians...
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I don't know the ins and outs of gambling in Victoria. But I was amazed at the article by Stephen Mayne in Crikey! Victorian Premier John Brumby has acted to break the duopoly that holds licences to host poker machines in Victoria. Clubs will be able to bid for licences as wel...
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Ructions in Boganville: the first Camden protest, back in November A keen follower of events in Camden, I didn't overlook the news that the Camden/Macarthur Residents' Group, led by that great community bridge builder Emil Sremchevich, has announced plans to hold more protests...
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Yesterday, BG picked up one thread of the "mega blog discussion" kicked off by Don Arthur. I want to pick up another. In the discussion on Arthur's post, BG and I seemed to agree that, apart from a firm safety net which encouraged able-bodied people to work, the social policy...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Gary Sauer-Thompson provides a health update on the Murray River. Darryl Mason discusses an un...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Pavlov's Cat demanded a photo of Nicholas, Ken and James in swimwear to balance the ledger aft...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Hmm. Can we engineer a feminism snark thread two days in a row, thereby consolidating ML's tit...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian This is an entry in a contest to match new products with old advertising visuals. Check out al...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Saint just doesn't see the funny side of this unofficially sanctioned Toyota ad : In as much a...
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What shape is the income distribution of Andrew Leigh's dreams? Even he doesn't know. "I don’t have a strong sense of what the right level of inequality is", he writes . "Indeed, I'm not even sure I have the right intellectual framework for answering the question." The questio...
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BBC TV screened a debate yesterday on the future of old and new media. Panellists included Google founder Sergey Brin and Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. I'll certainly be watching when the streaming video becomes available in the next day or two. It's a popular topic int...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Brendan Nelson asks: " What is the suffering of the people who are evicted by banks, compared...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian To keep his hand in while he waits for the next election to bring on another season of bungled...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Andrew Bartlett reports on the Senate Inquiry into housing affordability : The first day of he...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Mark Bahnisch tries to avoid taking an obvious approach to the 2020 summit . Robert Merkel sho...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Petering Time is listening to Kevin and hearing a dog-whistle . Despite the end...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Derek Barry is unimpressed by the gimmickry of Earth Hour . Apathetic Sarah was...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Gary Sauer-Thompson is skeptical about whether co-operative federalism will imp...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Lewis Holden relays suggestions of incrementally enacting a Clayton's Republic,...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian RWDB JF Beck thinks this Guardian photo is typically misleading greenie propaga...
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James Farrell needs to take a break from Missing Link editing for a few months for work reasons. As a result, we need a replacement member of the Missing Link team, to cover his half of the "lefty" blogs. That involves reviewing articles from around 30 or so left-leaning blogs...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Andrew Bartlett puts the case for a "peoples' boycott" of the Beijing Olympics . It's a brave stance for a politician...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian John Quiggin responds to Ross Gittins' accusation that he and Nicholas Gruen didn't address the 'real reasons' for th...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Gam and Currency Lad both posted fitting tributes on the finding of the wreck of HMAS Sydney after 67 years. CL, howe...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian From Students for a Free Tibet - also see this CNN video Andrew Bartlett invites submissions to a Senate committee he...
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I've been playing around today with a Google Map Generator utility, to show CDU law students how to find the venues for various interstate intensive seminars we're running for our external undergraduate program over the next few weeks. It's pretty nifty, and depicts a location...
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Good on the monthly for putting up videos of various things related to its flagship publication - the monthly mag. But one request. I virtually never look at videos on the computer. I've got too much else to do. So when I go to Ted if I want to listen to something, I'm gratefu...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Gummo Trotsky's Word of the Day (Expression of the Day?) is ex gratia , as in the ex gratia payments to carers that t...
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Has anybody else who has read Mark Bahnisch's Online Opinion article today about Kevin Rudd's IR reforms been instantly reminded of the Monty Python sketch about how to rid the world of all known diseases ?
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Ken Lovell highlights the hijinks of a WA building industry employer : Given this long history of bastardry by builde...
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There was an extraordinary article in the Australian yesterday ( here ) by Vaclav Klaus. In his article, which is a condensation of a speech for a conference of climate sceptics, Vaclav makes mince meat out of the climate alarmists and accuses them of having bad intentions. He...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Mary, Frederik and family as Bald Archy winners Peter Martin is contemptuous of media and Coalition scare-mongering o...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Terry Sedgwick continues his focus on occasional Coalition MP Mark Vaile The Currency Lad on the limits of Rudd's Bru...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Jim Fryar takes a libertarian look at (repugnant) police raids in Melbourne on the homes of terminally ill people con...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian via Terry Sedgwick Pommygranate summarises former Treasury Secretary John Stone's arguments on why John Howard was Au...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian via Bastards Inc John Quiggin rejoices in the Federal Government's decision to buy water from irrigaters and give it...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian The Victorian Government's big new land release won't solve the housing crisis if people can't get there, argues Jere...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian tigtog believes that a Federal Government scheme for national registration of medical professionals will help to weed...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Does D.S. stand for "diced and sliced" or ... ? Nicholas Gruen finds time off from zig-a-zig-ahhing to compare and co...
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I've heard it attributed - perhaps apocryphally - to John Maynard Keynes the line that a legal training is a form of brain damage. I couldn't find it on google when I last looked, so I don't know if he said it. But is it true? Well I have a legal training - of sorts - and duri...
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We're only about 3 or 4 subscribers away from 50. If anyone wants to jump on board - this is your last change to email me on [my first name] AT gruen DOT com DOT au.
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In a recent post critical of a CIS article on New Zealand by Phil Rennie , Nicholas Gruen expressed "disappointment" that the author "cherry picked" to "make favoured points in line with the author's priors". Today there is an article by Professor James Allan in The Australian...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian David Tiley brings grossness into sharp focus with a post titled anyone seen Fido lately? Ken Lovell and Bridget Grea...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Yes I know some people whinge about excessive coverage of the Apathetic Youths , but this image about the Rudd govern...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Shaun Cronin regrets that there are as yet no grounds for sacking the NSW government : All Iemma is guilty of is gros...
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Odnyam Odsuren as the young Temudjin So Mongol has lost out to The Counterfeiters in the Oscars and I'm aggrieved. Mind you, Mongo l was the only nominee in the Best Foreign Film category that I'd seen or indeed knew the first thing about, so I'm slightly biased. But I loved i...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian John Quiggin wonders whether it's time to give the B team a turn in New South Wales, and Australian Politics believes...
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(posted on behalf of The Receptionist) Somehow it's always me who ends up doing the work around here. As Dr Troppo's receptionist I seem to have a never ending series of chores to perform. Clearing out beer bottles and pistachio nut shells from under his desk, washing cigarett...
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I was going to put this in the snark section of Missing Link but decided it deserved a post of its own. Tim Blair is currently stoushing with a trio of academic researchers into blogging and "citizen journalism". Jason Wilson , Axel Bruns and Barry Saunders apparently have an...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Harry Clarke admires the Garnaut interim report, and shows how the government's reaction to it conforms to a pattern...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian The main message of Garnaut's interim report , as John Quiggin sees it, is that: At this point, the risk of moving to...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Apathetic Sarah asks a difficult question: will Brisbane be stupid enough to re-elect Campbell Newman for a second te...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian RWDB J.F Beck notes that new PM Kevin Rudd is insightful enough not to piss off Brian Burke, while pissed-off 'lefty'...
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This post accompanies, and is explained by the post immediately above it.
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian Andrew Bartlett was not surprised by the revelation that some of Howards ministers didnt know that WorkChoices might...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australian John Quiggin has a guest post by Bree Blakeman and Nanni Concu with a field assessment of the NT intervention, with p...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australia Apparently Peter Costello is retiring from Parliament . As if anyone cared. The case of the Archbishop and Sharia Law...
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A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Darlene Taylor and Saint. Politics Australia Right wing gay Christian blogger John Heard approves of the Rudd apology. Economist Harry Clarke doesn't, while Tim Bl...
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By abbietabbie on Flickr Yes, folks. It's been a longer wait than we'd intended, but Missing Link is back for 2008. And, just as Peter Cundall always says " That's your bloomin' lot " at the end of every episode of his gardening show, so too I'm not going to resist the temptat...
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There now seems to be majority, if not overwhelming, support for the Apology along the ideological spectrum. But it's clear from comments by several parliamentarians , as well as the resurfacing of an infamous email letter that Hansonism is alive and well. It's no great surpri...
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As members of the coalition opposition struggle with finding the right words in response to Mr. Rudds plan to say sorry, it is pleasing to see that every man and his dog is pitching in and offering their own form of words to help them out of this pickle. To add my support to t...
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Sweeney Tanner, demon budget barber ... Everybody is giving advice to the Rudd Government on how it can best increase its budget surplus. I doubt that really draconian measures are needed as the economy will be slowing down markedly within the next 18 months without any help f...
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Probably too late to change their names by deed poll. From wesh on Flickr - nothing to do with this post, but it got your attention! Ever since I started blogging in 2002 I've tended to concentrate almost exclusively on reading and interacting with other Australian blogs. It i...
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A further rise in cash interest rates will cause great pain to many low income families at a time of mounting mortgage stress but the Reserve Bank is only interested in economic arguments so here are three reasons why it should wait a few months. * credit market are still brit...
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The Cato Institute strives to be the respectable face of American libertarianism. It's a difficult role to maintain in a movement with more than its fair share of eccentrics, extremists and conspiracy theorists. Earlier this month Dom Armentano , a Cato adjunct scholar, sugges...
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Australia, Australia, we think of you each day, Australia, Australia, at work and at play, we think of you in the evening and in the morning too, we even wake at midnight so we can think of you. Australia, Australia, we love you from the heart, the liver, the kidneys, the gibl...
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Pretty interesting paper . Abstract: Over time, increases in hours of work per capita have created the intuitively plausible notion that there is less time available to pursue social interactions. The specific question addressed in this paper is the effect of hours of work on...
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This week the Twentieth Century's seventh greatest mass murderer died a dignified death in his bed, amidst tributes from Western leaders. According to The Washington Post , President Bush sent his regrets over Suharto's death. "President Bush expresses his condolences to the p...
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Unemployment fell as low as 4.3% of the work force in December 2007 the lowest rate for 30 years. While there is still much hidden unemployment (under-employed and discouraged workers), this too has been falling. Should we rejoice or have we been living in a fools paradise? Is...
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One of Australian blogging's pioneers Tim Blair has announced that he has bowel cancer and is to have major surgery tomorrow. Tim has always been a combative and even divisive blogosphere figure, but it isn't so widely known that he has often provided considerable behind the s...
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As I took my seat to watch Atonement last night, I was thinking that I should have read the book first, and the feeling was even stronger by the time I walked out. It was beautifully filmed, and mostly very well acted. The chemistry between Keira Knightly and James McAvoy was...
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I hereby announce 'Best Blog Posts of 2007', an anthology of writing from Australian independent blogs over the past year, which began appearing at On Line Opinion on 2 January. The selection and republication of the blog posts in this series is a collaboration between On Line...
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Fiona Campbell For the sake of completeness, here's a brief and belated reaction to Juditha Triumphans , which I previewed last week. The production surpassed even my very high expectations. As commenter John Greenfield noted, the sets were not lavish, but I thought the use of...
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Christmas isn't quite the same in the southern hemisphere, is it? (via Darryl Mason ) 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad We've been operating short-staffed here at Missing Link over the last 2 or 3 weeks,...
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This is a diagram of a game that was played nearly 150 years ago. White castles long (on the Queen's side) and is completely lost, something that's clear within two more moves. See if you can suggest what black's two next moves are.
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Courtesy Tanja " Poligoths " Stark 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad This weekend edition of Missing Link has been produced by a reduced complement of James Farrell, Gilmae, Jim Belshaw and Ken Parish, wi...
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"With the Howard era over, we are about to engage a new family that we know little about, except that Theresa Rein is very rich and dresses like Count Duckula. In fact the entire family, with the exception of Ruddstar, likes to dress LOUD." (lifted from the Daily Telegraph) 1....
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Christophano Allori, Judith with the Head of Halophernes Every December Pinchgut Opera puts on on an opera at The City Recital Hall in Angel Place. Juditha Triumphans is their sixth production, following Semele , The Fairy Queen , L'Orfeo , Dardanus and Idomeneo . As usual the...
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We've been having a behind-the-scenes debate at Troppo for some time regarding the copyright claims for material published here. The site has had a standard copyright notice since its inception way back in 2002. However, I have intended for ages to move to a Creative Commons l...
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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad I was expecting the blogosphere to sink into a post-election/pre-Christmas exhausted torpor this week. On the contrary, almost everyone is firing on all cylinders, albeit...
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Miss Haversham refuses a proposal from Terry Sedgwick 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad I was nearly going to call this the Year Zero edition of Missing Link, but it would give people the wrong idea. I'm...
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Its a repudiation. Its a rejection of Mr. Howard and much that he has stood for, and behold it is good. The Labor victory is so emphatic that it makes a mockery of the conservative vanity that somehow they were more attuned to the pulse of the nation. Yesterday Mr. Howard turn...
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Honorable mention? Could this curdle milk at five hundred paces? Congratulations to reader Doug, the clear winner of Missing Link's prediction competition . I use the word 'clear' advisedly: I was intrigued when I tabulated the predictions to find that there was a very large g...
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What could be more appropriate on election day than to reproduce the last two of Jon Kudelka's epic series 101 uses for a John Howard ? Moreover, they're even ideologically balanced (well, almost). Speaking for myself, the best use I can think of for John Winston is as a crotc...
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"My wife was absolutely outraged when she heard about the incident." Let her convince us. "We, I hope, live in a society where we treat husbands and wives - although we respect the closeness of their relationship - we treat them as individuals and we shouldn't automatically tr...
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Last weekend I read Melanie Oppenheimers article in the most recent Australian Literary Review entitled Women missing in action , I was struck by the use of the word "misogynist" to describe retellings of Australia's World War One which did not give serious attention to women....
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Most economists like myself have come to believe that monetary policy now carries so much punch because a reduction in interest rates has a compound impact on borrowing costs, on exchange rates and on asset prices that it is unthinkable that we will have a serious recession ev...
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I saw Kevin Rudds National Press Conference address. At the start, there was a technical disconnection between his mouth and the words that came out which was distracting but it was soon corrected. The speech also seemed a little too long and repetitive (Rudd still lacks Howar...
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Warney dressed as his mum for a new TV beer ad. What is it about beefy Aussie sporting blokes that makes them want to dress up in drag in front of the cameras? The boofheads at the AFL and NRL Footie Shows seem to think it's funny too. Courtesy Will at The Corridor (cricket bl...
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Election campaigns are fascinating events for a social scientist. In a poor country with lots of tensions, the issues would be about survival and bitter divisions, whilst in some sedate countries with no problems election campaigns are about the length of socks. Hence the issu...
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Details below the fold. Optional fanfare. This time last year, regular readers may remember, Club Troppo sponsored a showcase of Australian independent blogging, which we called 'Best Blog Posts of 2006' . From a large pool of nominations drawn from a multitude of Australian b...
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I was recently sent this correspondence by occasional Troppo poster, and person of considerable knowledge about the tax and transfer system, Spog. Here's what he wrote. Hello Nick, I haven't bothered you in a while, so I thought it was time to send you something out of left fi...
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Gandhi's take on Miranda Devine's attempt to rescue fellow RWDB pundit Caroline Overington from her own ham-fisted effort at electoral rorting by the time-honoured RWDB gambit of labelling lefties "humourless". Nitpickers might observe that Miranda is actually a Fairfax Angel...
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Many years ago someone did up an animation for Peach Home Loans in flash and supplied it to me in an exe file . But you can't upload exe files onto YouTube. Cam Riley says that he thinks those with Apple OSX might be able to take a moving screen capture of the animation. If an...
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I don't s'pose that's news. but this graph from today's morning Crikey! provides the relevant "compared to whats".
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Courtesy of Terry Sedgwick (where there are more orangutan policy images) 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Today's Missing Link predictably publishes a plethora of political content, but we also have ver...
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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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The Sydney Morning Herald's article on the Sea-Eagles trying to sign Willie Mason has fallen to cost cutting journalism and now the server just returns a meta-comment which saves on journalist labor the and reader's precious time: Forbidden You don't have permission to access...
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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad This edition of Missing Link compiled by James Farrell, Gilmae, Peter Black, Amanda Rose and Ken Parish with editing by the latter. What with the election campaign and al...
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As America entered the 1990s, Republican speaker Newt Gingrich was busy making plans for the nation's future. " I keep reminding my friends we've entered the decade of the teenage mutant ninja turtle ," he wrote. His plans for the decade of the TMNT included "transforming the...
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Peach's longest serving employee is pregnant! Isn't that good! Well I think so and so does she. But she now has a problem. She's a vegetarian because she hates eating meat (not because she's strict about it on principle). But she's very very tired a lot of the time given her p...
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What a lucky little girl Polly must be to have a dad who gives her a story like this for a fifth birthday present . Read it and other polished jewels at Melbourne playwright Sam Sejavka's blog Sails of Oblivion (via Alison Croggon's equally wonderful blog Theatre Notes ).
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Australia's unemployment rate is at 33 year lows. This achievement is far from unique. It is a global phenomenon and Australia has benefited from the world boom more than most because of the impact on our export prices. That said, it is quite possible that some of the Howard G...
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Guest Post by Dan Walsh of Kwoff.com.au. For some time I've straddled two digital worlds. My 'hi geek' dual monitor setup allows me to read my daily dose of Crikey on one screen and the constant stream of tech news from Digg.com on the other. One world is determined by an edit...
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I noticed a link at the bottom of a piece on Auden by John Clarke in an Age supplement which is a couple of weeks old but which I just read today. I figured his site must have been there for a while, but not so. It seems to have been launched on 17th October this year. Complet...
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A picture tells a thousand words (via Apathetic Sarah ) 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad We're running a day late again. My fault, but we'll still publish again late tomorrow (Friday). This edition compi...
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As a fictional character, I'm fascinated by people who don't exist . There are just so many of us -- fictional people , imaginary people , hypothetical people and people who will exist but don't exist yet . But despite our non-existence, we are able to generate facts about our...
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On a visit to an art gallery yesterday I was told why paintings of the same size are typically priced the same, even when the artist and the gallery think one is better than the other. Any guesses as to why she said this was? It made perfect sense in terms of 'behavioural econ...
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Bicycles for carrying stuff Most Australians think of bicycles as children's toys or sporting equipment. The typical suburban bike shop is packed with full-suspension mountain bikes , lightweight road bikes and fat-tired retro cruisers . And as wonderful as these machines are,...
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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad This edition of Missing Link is a couple of days late, owing mostly to Ken Parish's broken Dell PC (don't buy one, their warranty service is truly appalling). It was comp...
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Recently, we had a policy discussion forum about the issue of whether Australia should follow most of the rest of the OECD and introduce the right to paid maternity leave. For the full slides, see here . During the discussion I introduced the topic of paid maternity in the con...
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From Crikey! (the figuring behind the blue line is set out here ).
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I was disappointed and perplexed that an excellent service run by Regional Express (REX) between Melbourne and Canberra was discontinued a few years ago. The tickets were a fair bit cheaper than the competition - and you just had to sit in a turbo prop for an extra half hour o...
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"It's like the Ferrari of bikes" says photographer Sam Ash. In Friday's Financial Review Magazine Ash is pictured standing next to his red Tommasini fixie -- a bike with one gear and no brakes . Given that the average age of AFR Magazine readers is 46 this doesn't bode well fo...
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For a limited time only - until Nov 1 to be precise. And if you might want to buy more than one book - I know it seems silly but print out multiple copies of the coupon - which is located by clicking on the image.
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I seem to be the only one, that I have seen anyway, in the Australian blogosphere who is excited about the 37c tax bracket going the way of the dodo in Labor's tax policy announcement. Peter Martin even suggested it might be bad politics . Hopefully this policy becomes 'common...
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Hearts were aflutter and the paparazzi were nowhere to be seen as Jen McCulloch married middle aged sweetheart Ken "Troppo Armodillo" Parish in a deliberately low key ceremony in Fitzroy Saturday. Naturally your Troppo correspondent was there and enjoyed the proceedings immens...
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As the Government turns up the heat in this campaign and tries to araldite the 70% Union Bosses tag to Mr, Rudds forehead, damning information about the Governments own front bench has surfaced which places this debate in a whole new light. One of the Governments key lines in...
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Not exactly home-grown art, but irresistible. Via Remember the West , original provenance unspecified. The News and Politics section is full of links on the election. But the Introduction to Missing Link is reknowned for its dignity and fair-mindedness, and not the venue for d...
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Not because I don't want to, but because I can't. I have been purged from the electoral roll. Like many Australian Diasporans I am in the curious position of being completely disenfranchised. My home country has kicked me off the rolls, yet I am not a citizen of another countr...
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Wilcox on the McClelland Affair, via Ken Lovell Hard on the heals of the Sudanese Affair is the Pine Boxes Affair; between them the two have raised the fury of the Government's boo-squad to new heights, whether from outraged principle or from fear that the tactics may work. An...
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In an earlier piece on economic freedom I raised inter alia the issue of Australias welfare to work measures under Howard. This attracted some debate and it seems appropriate to reiterate my views on the topic. Australias welfare to work measures have involved a tightening of...
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The AES has an interesting graph which shows trending on how people consumed political information during elections. Unfortunately the trend ends at 2004, however, the internet was already rivaling talkback radio, newspapers and radio for media consumption patterns. I am sure...
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The Patriot, courtesy of Mark at Seeking Asylum Down Under If there was a topic of the week it was the Immigration Minister's decision that Australia will accept fewer African refugees, and the associated furore about Sudanese gangs. Andrew Bartlett reports on a forum of the E...
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Telstra's just made my life easier by forcing me to upgrade my account from wireless broadband I to wireless broadband II. Having locked me into a 2 year contract on the first system, they cancelled it after about a year (their right to do so was all in the contract) and said...
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Who said this? Though it sounds paradoxical to say that . . . to prevent ourselves from making the wrong decision we must deliberately reduce the range of choice before us, we all know that this is often necessary in practice if we are to achieve our long term aims.
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I've just become aware of bot blogging curtesy of these three links to posts I've just put up. I guess they're part of the escalating SEO war. Anyway, if you look below the fold, my hope is that some geek will have explained what it's all about, whether and the extent to which...
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Apropos the discussion of a few days ago, Stephen Fry - yes that Stephen Fry - has some interesting observations on his blog about the iPhone. Apple is now doing what we all (well almost all) wish Microsoft would have done, which is to at least make beautiful things from its p...
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What a slimy, condescending, pox-ridden excrescence is ABC's Media Watch program. And Phillip Adams isn't far behind, judging by his response to Helen "skepticlawyer" Dale's complaints about his characterisation of an interview with her that apparently never took place ("chill...
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Like many of you I saw this on facebook: Graham Young is fighting attempts to expel him from the Liberal Party this Sunday. This is Graham's article on Ambit Gambit from July describing the situation and why the party is seeking to throw him out. I hope Graham gets the result...
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I'd not seen this before - though many better travelled Troppodillians will have. For those that have not - you read it first on Troppo! With the company slogan ruling out evil things, Google continues (so far) to do good things.
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Just as I'm praising him to the skies , uberjournalist Paul Krugman, not content with two fantastic columns a week, gives us a blog as well . And having discovered it, what is the first post I read on it? Krugman summarising the very point I drew attention to. That he has a su...
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Over at Lava Rodeo, tigtog posts about an advocacy site put together by American-inspired and left-leaning lobby group GetUp! and an assortment of greenie groups "advocating placing your vote according to candidates records on climate change." Tigtog laments the lack of any an...
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Well no doubt this has been around the net for months, but this is the first I saw of it. Prediction markets, ready go go on the net - well pretend ones - with token bets. These guys could make a lot more money - and we'd have better markets - if you could bet real money. But...
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A befriended blogger made a careless comment recently that American newspapers (with the New York Times on top) were 'unquestionably the best in the world'. Being from European stock, and hence growing up with the equally silly idea that everything European is better than anyt...
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I'm sure that when we look back in twenty years, we'll see that some of our declining media were actually sitting on Web 2.0 gold mines that they failed to realise or tried to realise in ways that they completely bolloxed up . Here are some great ideas proposed for the New Yor...
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Well there you go! I read that blog action day - whatever that is - is due for the 15th Oct. Not only is it blog action day, but it's all been arranged that we rap about the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own t...
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Commenter Link asked me to post on an interview I did on Counterpoint last Monday . In fact the transcript is up on the ABC website so I'm not sure there's a need. But because it's there I'll put up an edited version of it below the fold. Might be a good discussion starter for...
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I'll be doing another round with Geraldine on her Saturday Morning Radio National do this week on blogging - I expect with one or two other people. The Executive Producer has suggested we talk about the way in which blogging can take you into a discussion between people who re...
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Well I'm a friend of Crikey's Christian Kerr. He wanted to be my friend and I wanted to be his - it's Facebook you know. I guess his email contacts just twigged with mine and all of a sudden we're friends! Another degree of separation - gone! Anyway, we were gonna meet up for...
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Just print this page out and turn up at Borders before the 2nd of August and get 30% of any 'full priced' book. Or that's what they say. If you want to buy more than one book, print out the corresponding number of coupons and if they tell you it's one book only, make a separat...
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I couldn't help noticing this Reuters story at Fairfax Digital: BERLIN - A mysterious blonde has set pulses racing in Germany after walking into a petrol station wearing nothing but a pair of golden stilettos and a thin gold bracelet. Unlike the oz MSM, one of the advantages o...
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A reminder that there's a bit of a 'do' on tomorrow night in Brisbane. At Hotel Bravo, 455 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley at 8 pm. A couple of maps are below the fold. If you'd like to come mbahnisch (at) gmail (dot) com would appreciate an email. See you there!
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One of the the many things that has been preoccupying me lately (and not leaving time for blogging) is that Jen and I have decided to make it legal and get married. It's the second time for both of us, so we're aiming for a comfortable rather than glitzy event. The wedding is...
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I'll be in Brisbane next Wednesday night - so it would be nice to see anyone who wants to come along. Mark B has posted some suggestions on LP . I can make it from around 8 pm.
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I have just disonnected a phone/fax machine which I've used as the main phone on my desk for years. It's of no further (foreseeable) use for me. So if you want it - the first person to arrange to get round here (to Port Melbourne) to pick it up can have it. Price: $0 The catch...
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There has been a media and blogger gotcha moment when Nelson mentioned that armed intervention in Iraq was related to securing energy supplies. We know that the Carter Doctrine from 1980 stated clearly that the US would use military might in the Gulf region if American nationa...
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Welcome anyone who's arrived here since listening to Radio National. For others, you may be interested in a discussion on blogging on Radio National this morning . I prompted it by emailing Geraldine Doogue suggesting that she consider doing a regular weekly or monthly 'around...
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Having blogged for a couple of months now, I am conscious of the lure of writing 'why dont the people in charge do as I say' pieces. As an antidote I'd like to offer 5 observations which strike a European like myself on why Australia is a great country, some of which are likel...
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As I noted in yesterday's Missing Link, the second of Tim Dunlop's 1Q series of questions to bloggers is out and about. This weeks question (devised by Harry Clarke) is: How relevant are motives in assessing the public policy stance of a politician or commentator? Responses to...
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This post follows on from a discussion begun by Paul Fritjers and continued HERE . Most human activity has changed drastically over our lifetimes. And the rate of change is increasing see for instance the next generations user interface for computers. You would hope academics...
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Lets think constructively about the environment and lets try to think 10 years ahead in global environmental debates. There are many global environmental problems, and these are likely to get worse. The best known one is of course global warming likely due to greenhouse gas em...
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Well, things have been a bit lively on the technology side, so no internal hyperlinks (and no wiki, alas). Nonetheless your faithful Missing Link Editorial team (tm) have done their bit to bring you lots of bloggy goodness to enjoy. Kicking off today's issue is a variety of di...
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Im feeling cranky today, so readers beware. A must-read article for all those interested in global warming and CO2 emissions is the recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by our very own Michael Raupach from CSIRO and co-authors, to be found here ....
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What would you do with an academic economic journal if you were given control over it? What innovations would you enforce designed to make the journal more to your liking? Below I list some ideas talked about in the corridors of academia and ask you to give your opinion on the...
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What if I go to Italy and my mother comes here looking for me? How will she find me? So asks Vanya, a six-year-old boy in a depressing orphanage in the middle of Russian nowhere. A nice Italian couple have applied to adopt him. This ought to be a profitable transaction for eve...
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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S. 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Well, the news in this issue of Missing Link is that News Ltd appears to have played lots of people for suckers. First, there was the story that some of the proposed cit...
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Via MeFi . This gave me a good laugh, someone is trying to describe Australian politics to an American audience: It's all perfectly simple. Australia's ruling conservative party is called the Liberal Party. The opposing, allegedly more liberal party is called the Labor Party (...
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Jon Kudelka envisages Howard as Fred Flintstone and Bill Heffernan as Dino. Only trouble is that both look much too cute and loveable. Is Jon running out of inspiration? 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad...
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Mark at Stoushnet reflects on Heavy Kevy's alleged secret musings about re-introduing some form of AWA 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. The Yartz 3. Life and Other Serious Stuff 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad It's a rude shock returning to editing Missing Link, despite Helen...
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As a fan of Robert Manne, I've been a bit disappointed in his output of late. But he's usually invigorated by a newly worthy cause and in this case it's academic freedom from the excesses of the culture wars .
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According to Ross Gittins in the weekend Herald , There's been a lot of debate - and confusion - over the right way to assess the degree of stimulus the budget will impart to the economy and how this may affect interest rates. Well, he's dead right about the confusion. But unf...
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I'm a huge fan of Warren Buffett - the billionaire from a Norman Rockwell painting.He understands the central problem of finance reduced in economists jargon to the principal-agent problem in the context of asymmetric information.Investors need to be able to trust managers, so...
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Thx to to Ric Simes for sendinng me the link to this piece in the New Yorker bemoaning the Bush Govt's lack of accountability. As Ric said it is all of a piece with my bemoaning 'he said - she said' journalism . Attorney General Alberto Gonzaless admission that mistakes were m...
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Crikey ran a piece of mine today heavily reworked from my earlier Troppo post on 'he said - she said' journalism. In it I tried to further articulate - with the help of my friend George Orwell - how serious this issue is. For me it's the difference between reason and unreason,...
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Crikey has taken it upon itself to run a competition in which people get the same number of words Lincoln used in the Gettysburg address to get their rocks off about this great nation. The entries have been uniformly execrable - well execrable, but perhaps not uniformly. Even...
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Tomorrow, as the 2007 Extravaganza Budget is knocked off the front pages by the developing drama of Paris Hiltons bid for freedom, the Australian punters, flush with already factored-in cash from yesterdays tax cut announcement, will no doubt cast a critical eye over Treasurer...
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Paul Kelly is on the button, he tells us : The policy and strategic flaws of the Howard Government have been exposed this week with the appointment by ALP leader Kevin Rudd of Australian National University economics professor Ross Garnaut to produce Australias version of the...
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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Industrial relations got Ozblogistan going this week, with some great stuff from across the political spectrum. That apart, there was some interest in the French election...
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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Well, nothing's so handy as a theme, but this edition of Missing Link doesn't have one. I thought Julia Gillard and Bill Heffernan opening their respective mouths to chan...
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Well that's too much to hope for. I've posted on 'he said - she said' journalism at least once before. Like reality TV 'he said - she said' journalism is the logical consequence of the economics of profit driven newspaper reporting of politics. The journalists' knowledge is ne...
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Reading the Murdoch Press and hearing the Mining companies, one could be forgiven for thinking the apocalypse would descend on us if Labors IR industrial relations policies were implemented. I have tried to understand what the main concerns of business and the media are and I...
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Guest Post by Paul Hobson. A little bit about myself: Im female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. Thats all you need to know. Its all that matters these days anyway. Thats how Riverbend began her Baghdad Burning blog on 17 August 2003. Although for 4 years the war in Iraq has...
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For more than three decades, from the late 1940s to the 1980s, Heinz Arndt was the most prolific and energetic economist in Australia. His prodigious output of articles, books, lectures, conference papers, reviews and reports is testimony to his productivity. For twenty years...
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As you've probably noticed, Club Troppo has been almost unuseably slow-loading for the last few days. It has also been out of commission completely for substantial periods. Now the comment facility is not working at all. Apparently the latter is not an accident but deliberate...
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Stephen Hawking will be weightless sometime today (if it hasn't already happened). Free at last from gravity which sucks at his body day and night making his life much much harder. A minute later he will be back to the earthly reality.
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This is a film with lavish sets and costumes, set in Vienna , about the last years in the life of history's greatest composer. We see his life and work through the eyes of a fellow composer who, though less talented, uniquely comprehends the extent of the composer's genius. Th...
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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Terry Sedgwick had a camera secretly filming the recent meeting between Rupert and Kevie There hasn't really been a dominant theme in the blogosphere over the last few da...
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Why are these people smiling? It's not really clear but perhaps they've got an Amazing Loan. If they own Amazing Loans they may keep smiling. If they have just taken one out, lets hope they didn't do it smiling, but out of grim determination to pull themselves back from the br...
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When President Bush announced his "surge" strategy for Iraq in January, he replaced General Casey, the last in the conga-line of Rumsfeld yes-men, with perhaps the sharpest General in the whole Iraq campaign, General David Petreus . Gen. Petreus is described as a warrior intel...
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Media ethics and psychology experts have been in great demand for their opinions on whether the American TV network NBC should have shown the video they received from Cho Seung-Hui, justifying his planned rampage. If you google 'Cho video public interest', the first page of hi...
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After talking about it for years, its now official. Today's Australian announced that the University of Melbourne is going to copy the American liberal-arts style university system. They intend to do away with all specialisations and have 6 broad faculties. Students can pick a...
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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Nothing grabbed Ozblogistan's collective attention over the weekend, although as usual there was plenty of good stuff. Once again we at the Troppo Cabal (tm) are delig...
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Last weekend I decided I'd better do something about organising the shed. Well, to be accurate, I opened the doors of the shed to get the rake. The rake handle was just reachable if I leaned in over the clu tter, but in that awkward, out-of-balance posture, it was not possible...
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From Beyond the Fringe 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad This edition of Missing Link has been delayed until today (Friday the 13th) because I got carried away with my post on performance pay for teachers...
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"Talk to the Hand". That's the message the Prime Minister is giving the Australian people as an attempt at a cheerful smile collapses into a Dick Cheney impersonation with the results of yesterday's Newspoll What's going wrong in the house of Howard? Is the greatest politician...
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If a (very large) tsunami hit Noosa - from FunkyPix2 (correction Beyond the Fringe ) 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S. 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad There wasn't any political issue as such that brought Ozblogistan out stoushing this...
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Artist's impression of Brisbane's proposed Northbank development, on which The Pencil Guy gives his thoughts (see under "life and other serious stuff") The wiki is playing up today, so no internal hyperlinks. And I only had time to insert one photo, liberated from The Pencil G...
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Joshua Gans is very happy with Office 2007 . I'm much less impressed and was sufficiently worked up to respond at length in his comments which are expanded here. I generally try to stay away from Microsoft Software, but it's not that easy. I was an early fan of Macs when they...
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Staunch defender of freedom and Minister for "DIC" Kevin Andrews lunges for a firm grip on "Roger Migently"'s gonads 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad The usual superbly diverse collection of blogospheric...
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In recent blogs on this site, especially regarding the phrase `war on terror' and the political mud slinging of recent weeks, I have frequently seen the hope expressed that the media should be free of bias and just report the truth. A praisworthy sentiment. Can you however rea...
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From a recent Michael Kirby speech [pdf] : For example, our Constitution is too rigid. It is one of the most difficult in the world to amend. This feature of Australian legal arrangements can sometimes protect us from the risk of mistakes, as in the Communism referendum of 195...
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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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Courtesy Daily Flute 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. Troppo Sports Stadium 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad The NSW election was the big 'news' over the weekend, although - in this humble scribe's opinion (SL) - it was slightly less interest...
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This proposal is still ill-defined and it may be too early to make definite pronouncements on it but I thought I might chance my arm. First, is it needed? This is not my expertise but there are enough experts around arguing that it would have a high benefit cost ratio for the...
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From the 'where has Nicholas Gruen been?' department I just thought I'd mention, in the spirit of Missing Link, that I happened upon a stray copy of the ALR at Melbourne Uni the other day. It is now several weeks since it came out. I read what I think was the first of the edit...
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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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Courtesy of Daily Flute 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. Sportz 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad This exciting and fun-packed edition compiled and edited by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Helen Dale, Jason Soon, Cam Riley and our new arts recruit...
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In 1806, the Bowman's of Richmond, NSW flew a flag to celebrate the English victory at Trafalgar. The amazing thing about this was, the Bowman flag looks very similar to the modern coat of arms. It has a Kangaroo and Emu holding up a shield adorned with heraldry. Kangaroos hav...
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On the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war, Prime Minister John Howard has been forced to clarify his position on the existence of a plan to cut and run . The Opposition asked John Howard whether he was aware of reports the United States (US) has prepared a plan for a phased wi...
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UNCLE KEN NEEDS YOU Missing Link needs a new volunteer. Darlene Taylor has been forced to withdraw from the "Troppo Cabal" due to pressure of other commitments, so we need someone to review and compile the ML arts-related blog category. The arts category currently consists of...
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A cute account of one of our favorite tribes . The Econ tribe occupies a vast territory in the far North. Their land appears bleak and dismal to the outsider, and travelling through it makes for rough sledding; but the Econ, through a long period of adaptation, have learned to...
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Another one from Daily Flute Monday's Missing Link is an eclectic mix of political and broader posts, as well as a couple of rugby league posts from Shaun Cronin. No dominant theme, but a wealth of good reading. Editors again are myself, James Farrell, Patrick Garson, Darlene...
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A little post in last weeks' science news said that the South Korean government was thinking about the 'golden rules' of robot-human inter-relations. They are doing this because they sincerely believe that the technology of neural networks and miniature chips will pretty soon...
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Last week, a fellow by the name of Patrick West, TV columnist for the UK based internet-magazine Spiked ( Yes, the one of dubious provenance ) , published an entirely stereotypical and quite unenlightening piece about we marvellous Australians. Because despite all of their pro...
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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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When I saw that Paul's post was about chicks and tuna, I had an overwhelming urge to Google "naked women + fish" ... hmmm[KP] There was a very interesting talk yesterday by prof. Sean Pascoe of CSIRO on 'chicks and chuncks: a story of tuna and birds'. It raised an unusual ethi...
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Michelle Grattan was speculating this morning on Fran's Chat n' Chew , that the fulsome confession out of Gitmo resident and terror mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed might turn the tables in Australian politics. Ms Grattan's theory was along the lines that having a real proven...
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Courtesy of the great Daily Flute This is the second edition of Missing Link created by the collaborative method Jason Soon has christened the "hive mind" with a sly nod to hackneyed anti-feminist labelling. Using a wiki to compile a post like Missing Link certainly seems to m...
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It's been fifteen years since Captain Jeff Kennett, and his corporate turn-around team took the reigns in Victoria and started the State on the road to recovery. It's been thirteen years since Mr. Kennett applied his marketing genius to spruce up the State's fleet of car numbe...
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Poster for International Women's Day via Kirsty at Galaxy of Emptiness Missing Link is now into yet another manifestation. The problem is that it's just too time-consuming for any one individual to read lots of blogs, even with the help of a feed reader, and then produce a dec...
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Astonishing revelations Nicholas has already alerted readers to John Quiggin's call for sponsors in The Great Shave. But apparently the wind has gone out of the sails , so he's asking for a bit more help. He will throw in $1000 of his own if the $2000 target is reached by Mond...
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Because Wednesday's Missing Link won't be up till this evening, here's a titbit that needs to go up earlier. On the book launch of âOutrageous: moral panics in Australiaâ. The launch is by Richard Ackland and itâs at Gleebooks.
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Well you won't see them any day on this planet. You've got to change your perspective on things to see the earth eclipsing the Sun or Saturn from above/below. Click on either image for the full picture. Magnificent non?
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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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One thing everyone can agree on: people, media and politicians: is that elections are important. Democracy is the moral under-pinning of our political system. I remember watching the HBO documentary on Diebold and when it was shown that the electronic voting machines could be...
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Elections are surprisingly poor determinants on whether a Prime Minister will change in the federal government. The following graph has a post-1942 pie chart of Prime Ministers removed by general election (orange) vs those removed by just about everything else (maroon); includ...
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Well folks - do you want this feature or not? We had it up and it got quite a few comments for a while, and then they dwindled. I then stopped posting it without attracting howls of protest. Let me know if you want it to stay and I'll hoist it up at a time of general choosing...
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I've always thought that when my kids get to drive I want to buy some system to install in the car's computer that will give me a readout of how they drove when I ask it. How fast they accelerated, revved the engine etc. I've been surprised not to see anything like this market...
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If you like your crime stories to be littered with corpses. To feature brutal crims who live in a world of paranoia,deceit and ego, whoâll stop and nothing to be the last man standing, then youâll love this tale of true crime Melbourne style. And today the mystery body was als...
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This is a question I've asked myself for a long while - with particular regard to Whitlam's outrageous behaviour on a matter that turned out to have importance which vastly overshadowed any domestic events during his Prime Ministership. Here's Former Australian Timor diplomat...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Take a gander at this series of photos showing the VW Phaeton Factory in Dresden. Then consider for a moment why Germany is the worldâs number one exporting nation , and weâre just digging up coal to flog to China. (Via Jwalk)
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In a letter to the Australian published today I raise two distrinct issues - both controversial. The first is whether Work Choices and Welfare to Work offers the ONLY way of boosting labour force participation or whether, as I believe, there is an effective alternative. This i...
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For no particular reason I happened upon and then started reading the Economist's guide to business etiquette in various great cities in the world. Reading this one on Paris was a little like visiting there again - so I post it over the fold for your amusement and reverie. The...
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HBO just aired Alexandra Pelosi's Friends of God . Given that the maker of the documentary is the daughter of the current Speaker of the House, it could be expected that the documentary would be politically charged - but like any good documentary maker there are no judgements:...
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Andrew Leigh reckons we should adopt the Eureka flag as Australia's national flag. Nice idea, except that Howard would just use any such suggestion as a diversionary dog whistle ... Together with Wednesday's omnibus edition, today's Missing Link should provide readers with an...
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Today's Missing Link is a huge omnibus edition, partly because of the week's gap in publication of ML (for various reasons largely beyond my control) and partly because Google Reader allows me to cover more blogs more thoroughly. I'm still continually amazed by the huge volume...
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Ever since various RWDBs slated Best Blog Posts 2006 as a "lefty" benefit partly because it was judged by that notorious lefty Ken Parish, I've been idly concerned that perhaps I've started lurching in za socialist direction as I got older. As longtime readers of this blog wil...
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What with Troppo being down all weekend, I wasn't able to work on Missing Link , because I couldn't access my blogroll. However, once Jacques restored the blog to the land of the living, yesterday I set about logging all 150-odd blogs into Google Reader. I'd been meaning to do...
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Comets have been one of the disappointments of my life. We keep hearing of comets that are going to be huge - HUGE. This is when they're discovered or not long afterwards when the astronomers do their calculations on how big they could be. I don't know if the astronomers actua...
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The decision to ban the Australian flag and items bearing its likeness is a curious one. It is apparently for Sydney and only on the 25th of January. Presumably organisers of the Big Day Out have determined this is an efficient 'politically incorrect' method to determine the l...
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Allan Gyngell and Michael Wesley write in Making Australian Foreign Policy : Changes in foreign policy direction are rare but important. The most significant postwar changes in the focus of Australian foreign policy came with the election in 1972 of the Whitlam Government, whi...
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It was a forty degree stinker on Tuesday this week in Melbourne. The sky was a smoky haze, and the sunlight orange from the bushfires raging around the State. At 4.00pm. The hottest part of the day, the power went out. It wasn't just any old power failure. It was a doozy. With...
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Courtesy Daily Flute Wednesday's Missing Link is running a bit late. Maybe if I don't mention it they won't notice it's actually Thursday. As for Best Blog Posts 2006, Little Timmy Blair doesn't think much of it. The posts are too long, he reckons. The only real blog is a link...
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I've been meaning for a while to draw attention to cartoonist Jon Kudelka's excellent site 101 uses for a John Howard Today's Missing Link is a bit shorter than average (only 13 highlighted posts), partly because there haven't been as many posters as usual over the weekend and...
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Last week, Eygptian blogger Wael Abbas (NB he writes in Arabic!) was credited by French newspaper Le Figaro with striking a major blow against oppression, thanks to three of the ubiquitous incidents of material progress a mobile phone with integrated videocamera, the multimedi...
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The Financial Review asked me to write an op ed for them on prospects for reform in 2007 with an international flavour. (Actually they asked for international economic influences on Australia in 2007 and I sold them the idea of an op ed on reform. The result was published on o...
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Back in 2002, then aspiring US presidential candidate John Kerry began arguing that "the war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation". To my ear back then, this sounded like one of Kerry's more thoughtfu...
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In view of Nicholas Gruen's very sensible post below about extreme animal liberationists, I feel it's my duty to draw readers' attention to an alliance that many may find surprising perhaps even disturbing. Uber-Right Wing Death Beast Tim Blair is promoting animal lib organisa...
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Best Post Predictably, the blogosphere is full of posts about GW Bush's "Iraq surge" policy announced yesterday. At least, that's true of the left and centrist blogosphere. I can't find even a single post about it amongst Australian RWDB bloggers. Can anyone point me towards o...
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I've just been on hols with my kids to (aaahhh!) the Gold Coast. We visited Dreamworld, Sea World and, in the middle of the renamed 'Steve Irwin Way', the Australia Zoo where Terry Irwin impersonated the late Steve in a croc show and Bindi Irwin sang with the Crocmen and other...
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Back in late 2005, a brilliant young US moderate-left commentator named Matthew Yglesias and his colleague Sam Rosenfeld penned a prescient essay for The American Prospect called " The Incompetence Dodge" . They began by noting how many policy figures were coming to the conclu...
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George Bush's announcement of extra troops for Iraq is significant not for its announcements of actions, but for its official admission that Iraq is a horrible mess. See the official US government PDF for details. The scariest bit is the official admission that the Coalition c...
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Previously published - in edited form - in the SMH yesterday - 10th January. Parents, teachers and coaches often tell their charges that 'you only get out of something in proportion to what you put into it', or words to that effect. Economists are interested in this idea too....
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Am I the only one to have programmed the glossary of my word processor with lots of personally tailored shortcuts? I hardly think so. When I type "cssn" in Microsoft Word, my dictionary says that the word "cssn" doesn't exist. Then the program turns to my glossary and finds th...
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Bill Leak cartoon from the Oz As you may have noticed, Missing Link has been, well, missing for a week longer than planned. I have no excuse other than holiday season torpor. However, as Mark Bahnisch pointed out in a comment this morning, time, tide and the blogosphere wait f...
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Today US President George Bush told lawmakers that he would be sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq . And Australia? What will we, as a " firm and faithful friend " who is "in there with the President in the fight against terror" be doing to help? Send a small additional contr...
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Outside of the arguments of political parties, ideologies, policies etc; government is predominantly an administrative structure. We would expect government to be relatively fluid as it changes in size, shape, boundaries and structures in order to remain at maximum administrat...
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I meant to post a note saying that the ABC are re-running a fantastic series "Prisoners under Nippon" at 11.00 am on weekdays. Made (I think over a year or more) in the early-mid 1980s it's a remarkable piece of radio. Go check it out.
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Here is Ken's and my introduction to the Best Blog Posts of 2006. They will be published at the rate of two a day throughout January at Online Opinion. . As regular Troppodillians will note, this post is written at a very introductory level. Indeed for those who don't even kno...
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I get irritated when people throw the word 'definitive' around. So ignore the headline which is - in the words of Lady Bracknell - altogether too sensational. But in a recent post of mine that seems to have found its way into the side bar of recent comments for a surprisingly...
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Lennon and McCartney, Lerner and Lowe, Rogers and Hammerstein, Gilbert and Sullivan, John and Taupin, Lloyd-Webber and Rice. Were any of these guys quite as good on their own as they were with their partner? Are these gains from trade? Well in some cases one of the partners co...
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I took Alexander (my son) to the Australian Chess Championships being held in Canberra the other day. There on the top boards were four Grandmasters playing (I think Australia only has two - and both were there - Ian Rogers and Darryl Johansen.) Now I wouldn't be telling Tropp...
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Earlier this week I downloaded Mozilla Firefox and started using it as my default browser. However its inbuilt version of Google is much more primitive than the Google Toolbar I've been accustomed to using with Internet Explorer. Accordingly I tried to install the new Google T...
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Some weeks ago, Tim Blair, in his ongoing quest to ridicule Global Warming out of existence, decided to take a swipe at influential UK columnist George Monbiot. If you don't know of Mr. Monbiot he appears to be a very impressive fellow . He has led a very exciting life, having...
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Not content with continually revealing his true identity to the world, one of his seemingly numerous enemies has now gone and stolen Anonymous Lefty's blogs !! I hope for his sake Lefty backed up the contents regularly. I also hope Blogspot proprietors Google take the matter s...
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For those members of the Barmy Army who are over here and overawed. Spiked columnist Ethan Greenhart had some advice for you , which apparently you ignored. Flying to Australia is never acceptable.
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I was watching Rage while polishing off a bedtime snack and saw a video that I though was going to annoy me - but turned out to amuse me - and indeed to make me smile and feel good. And of course it's on You Tube. The city it's filmed in turns out to be Sydney as I realised wh...
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What I should be avoiding at Christmas (but won't) It's getting increasingly difficult to compile Missing Link , what with so many bloggers announcing a Christmas hiatus. And it's been even harder this morning, because Google's Blogger service seems to have been playing up, ma...
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After watching a replay of a Geraldine Doogue interview with Heavy Kevy on Compass last night, I find it increasingly difficult to credit Amanda's and Chris Sheil's hypothesis (developed on this thread here at Club Troppo) that he has already endeared himself to the general po...
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(via Sarsaparilla ) If you haven't checked out "Sublimely Gothic Cowgirl" and her blog Poligoths , now's the time. This cowgirl is a black belt Photoshopper. Probably my favourite is Amanda Vanstone (right) as Mistress of the Dark, followed closely by Phil Ruddock as Lord of t...
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Following its mooting on Troppo a few days ago, we're planning to (hastily) compile a Best Blog Posts for 2006. Online Opinion has indicated an interest in hosting the collection (and we can cross post it with links on other blogs). We're e-mailing a bunch of bloggers inviting...
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I was recently talking to Dennis Glover who told me of his October op ed equating the right commentariat with old style Marxists, making the pretty obvious point that most of them began as Marxists. I'd missed it when it appeared. It's makes a large number of good points so it...
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Howard's End? Matthew Talbot Hostel for Homeless Politicians, as imagined by Aussie Bob at Road to Surfdom There hasn't really been any clearly dominant issue in the political blogosphere over the last couple of days. I suppose it reflects the onset of the Christmas silly seas...
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The collected papers from the 2002 Popper conference in Vienna are now available at the cost of an arm and part of a leg. See if anyone here can manage some more intelligent comment than the parade of puns at Catallaxy .
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As Andrew Landeryou reported at 4:11am (and The Age at 8:13am), last night's Victorian Legislative Council recount in several seats resulted in the DLP indeed losing the last seat in Northern Metropolitan to the ALP, apparently as a result of 6000 Green preferences which had p...
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The [US] National Venture Capital Association released a study titled: American Made. The impact of immigrant entrepreneurs and professional on US Competitiveness [PDF] . The report studied venture capital backed public and private businesses consequently it does not cover imm...
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Victorian fires - Photo: Cameron Quinten, an Age reader The death of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Howard's citizenship test, the DLP winning two seats in Victorian's Upper House courtesy of ALP preferences(!!!), the latest Newspoll and the Victorian bushfires are...
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There's been a bit of discussion both here and at Lava Rodeo about the possibility of compiling a Best Australian Blog Essays 2006 anthology. Efforts in that regard are afoot. But what about best comments? This one from Nabakov over at LP (about Howard's Oz culture citizenship...
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These are detainees held in Santiago's National Studium after the coup, awaiting an uncertain, and in some cases hideous, fate. Thinking about them, should we be sorry that Pinochet managed in the end to evade a trial and sentence? Or should we rejoice that at least he lived l...
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Smoke over Victoria as at Friday - I guess it was much worse by yesterday - image via David Tiley Touring around the blogs this morning reveals that there are quite a few who have stowed away the keyboard early for the Christmas break. Fortunately there are still lots who cont...
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Back in 2003, Federal Liberal MP Sophie Panopoulos (now Mirabella) was keen to see that Australian "terrorist" David Hicks "paid for his crimes". Her eagle eye had spotted that Hicks' father Terry was trying to beat up sympathy for his son. In an attempt to attract sympathy,...
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Just remember. This link brought to you and endorsed by Club Troppo. Home of middle aged grumpy respectability .
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Yes folks - it's the new swiss army knife - link overleaf
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No caption needed really ... There hasn't really been a particular obsession in the blogosphere over the last couple of days. A few more Rudd posts, of course, but it looks like bloggers might have joined the pollies in heading off for summer holidays. I certainly hope not, ha...
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What do Schapelle Corby and John Howard have in common? (hint see Hansard page 54) What is it about Northern Territory politicians and fridges ? Why didn't I realise that Miranda Devine was right ? [ NB not work-safe ]
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I was alerted to this funny story on Late Night Live. When the London Review of Books began taking personal ads, the content was quirkily British - as for instance in the ad from which I took the heading. ""Bastard. Complete and utter. Whatever you do, don't reply - you'll onl...
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Adrian the Cabbie photoblogs a truly dreadful Christmas decoration at Sydney's (usually uber-trendy) Double Bay Most readers won't be surprised to learn that Rudd, Fiji and the cricket are the most common blogosphere themes of the last day or two. I'm only extracting a tiny se...
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In the late 1500s England was rising as a maritime nation. It was beginning to dominate the important technologies of cartography and longitudinal calculation. In 1598 Edward Wright produced the most accurate map the world had seen. Apart from using the new technology of Merca...
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The increasingly farcical Milne versus Mayne prizefight at last Thursday's Walkley Award presentations has taken an even more bizarre but very entertaining twist. Yesterday the Poison Dwarf came out with a very funny piece titled Why I snapped on live TV . It blamed Mayne for...
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The December 1st Senate Hansard had an interesting exchange during the debate over the Independent Contractors amendment to the behemoth Workchoices legislation. First Andrew Murray ; As the chamber knows, various state legislatures have attempted to grapple with this but at t...
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Not the football team you galahs, this man .
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Pursuant to Ken's ambition to make CT Australia's premium soccer and opera blog, it's my duty to announce that Opera Australia's production of Giulio Cesare launched its Melbourne season tonight. This is probably the best known of Handel's fifty or so operas, and, if that were...
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It was utter madness on the streets of Melbourne this evening, as literally tens of people listening to Huggy on the Gold FM, drive time, Bread back-to-back retrospective were thrust rudely into the new millennium by the shocking but welcome news that Shadow Foreign Minister K...
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I posted on this last year and it's worth mentioning it yearly. A lot of stuff gets exchanged each year that's pretty useless when we could give gifts to each other of donations to causes that could really do with the money. This would have had the assent of most economists be...
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I was browsing over at Lava Rodeo a few minutes ago, and noticed that Mark Bahnisch was asked about whether he was paid for the articles he writes for Crikey . His answer rather surprised me: The answer would be no and yes. I'm not on a retainer or a contract and can submit ar...
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The British Empire League was a bunch of Australians in the early 20thC who wanted imperialism to prevail rather than nationalism in Australia. The prominent politician of the time, Alfred Deakin, was the great compromiser and saw no difference between being Australian and a B...
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To start of what may (or may not) be a semi-regular post (whatever happened to Dr Troppo?) here is my quote of the week - from rookie Troppodillian DW Griffiths. Jagger seems a disciplined bloke, but he plays dissolute superbly - and it seems to be what the world reacts to mos...
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Ahead of this weekend's announcement of the 2006 Australian Idol , today's Age Green Guide acknowledges the popular culture phenomenon. The paper then labels the show, for about the tenth time, as "karaoke". The Age is not alone; a large part of the Australian pop/rock music i...
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Just to let Troppodillians know, watch out for the maiden post of of D. W. Griffiths, a raging moderate currently working in the public policy business.
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Comparing Australia with the rest of the developed world, we have a distribution of FINAL disposable incomes that is about average. Yet, measured the same way (i.e. using the GINI coefficient), inequality of MARKET incomes in Australia (the distribution of gross incomes before...
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Another blogger was arrested in Egypt for being critical of the government ; Rami Siyam, who blogs under the name of Ayyoub, was detained along with three friends after leaving the house of a fellow blogger late at night. ... No reasons have been given for Mr Siyam's detention...
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In Alexander's time the amphitheatre was a sign of Macedonian power. Especially for the new and conquered cities in modern-day Turkey. The amphitheatre combined the Macedonian dominance of technologies such as architecture, construction, science, art, culture and wealth. The R...
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Crikey alerts us to this story in the Daily Telegraph. BOB Carr has embarrassed his former State Government colleagues by racking up a new record of $438,683 for expenses billed by a retired premier. The huge cost to NSW taxpayers of keeping Mr Carr in his first year of retire...
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Adding to Don's observations below , here's a partial list of Friedman's achievements, with a score out of ten for each. The permanent income hypothesis. This was advanced in A Theory of The Consumption Function (1957). Keynes had argued that household consumption varies with...
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Michael Moore empathises with US conservatives and offers the poor dears a compassionate head tilt .
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Greg Ransom at PrestoPundit has set up a running file of notices , obituaries and tributes to Milton Friedman, including some of his last interviews.
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Disclosure: This is not a paid review Helen Dale (aka skepticlawyer ) has signed Catallaxy up with ReviewMe, a service that makes it easier for businesses to pay bloggers to review their products. Critics call it pimping , Sam Ward at A Yobbo's View calls it an antidote for wr...
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[photopress:kimbo.jpg,full,pp_empty] FEDERAL Opposition Leader Kim Beazley has committed a major blunder , confusing grieving TV host Rove McManus with White House strategist Karl Rove.
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Another paper confirms the importance of default options in influencing a range of decisions about retirement planning. I've written on this a few times . When will we get going on this agenda? The abstract of the paper is over the fold. Many workers in the U.S. and around the...
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Economists have a proud history of leading social causes of great value. The fight against slavery is my favourite cause of economists with Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill in the forefront. That's where economics got it's nickname of the 'dismal science' (from Thomas Carlyle w...
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Fred Argy has written a letter to the AFR protesting changes to cross-media laws. In it appears, to me at least, the incredible implicit assertion that Fox News is bad for American democracy. Because I think he is an intelligent man and I quite respect his opinion on most subj...
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A while ago I categorised the referendums at the federal level to see what voters were rejecting. It turns out it was centralisation; or the constitutional increase of power to the Commonwealth Government. Of the twenty-seven referendums for increased centralisation only three...
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Public transport is all the rage amongst the left of centre. It has a community feel to it which gives us a warm inner glow in these days which are heirs to the plummeting of social capital. It yields benefits in many forms. It typically generates less pollution than cars and...
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[photopress:nz_news.jpg,full,pp_empty] New Zealand is to get its first 24-hour news channel. News 24 will be launched late next year. Of course, it will be 24-hour news from 1950.
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This storm - on Saturn - really looks like it has an eye.
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Sometime commenter Spog sent me the diagram and the commentary below on the question of churning. He's produced an excellent diagram illustrating the incidence of churning. It seems to work approximately as one would hope, to target assistance where it's most needed - subject...
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One of the fun things about Don Arthur's posts is following the links. I followed a link to Peter Boettke and a few links later came upon this (pdf) fine statement of the early and (for so long) enduring American commitment to modesty in international affairs. I guess isolatio...
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"Hayek was wrong" says Jeffrey Sachs . For decades classical liberals have relied on Friedrich Hayek's 1944 book The Road to Serfdom to warn that tax increases lead to tyranny. But in a recent article for the Scientific American , Sachs argues that high taxing Nordic countries...
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[photopress:Weiners_and_gorge.jpg,full,centered] The prospect of Nancy Pelosi capturing the top spot in Congress and the continued rise of Hilary Clinton has unleashed a masculinity crisis according to Texas blogger Amanda Marcotte : The asswipes are relentless. Fear-mongering...
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Ever dreamed about blogging for living? Earlier this week The Road to Surfdom 's Tim Dunlop made the move to news.com.au. Tim is now firmly established at Blogocracy one of News' growing stable of blogs . The opportunity didn't just fall into his lap. Tim's PhD thesis was on d...
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Should I call this thing Weekend reflections? Any suggested alternatives?
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Senator Alan Eggleston has some interesting comments on the Western Australian boom with its economic and foreign policy implications . The Westralians have enjoyed the pressure that a booming China and India have put on commodity prices. Eggleston opens with an anecdote on th...
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America was in the grips of civic excitement last night; televisions, websites, phones - all running hot. A friend of mine who runs a prominent political website spent his day watching the loads on the webservers increase as the east coast Americans left work, and the west coa...
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This chart is quite revealing. Troppo readers either gloating over their high house prices, or groaning in anticipation of trying to ever buy one, are wondering what's driven house prices up. In the last few years an international deregulationist movement based around the webs...
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Over at Larva Rodeo a few days ago, "Atticus" forensically dissected a typically silly and dishonest Miranda Devine column . Devine bemoaned a recent NSW Court of Appeal decision in which a DPP prosecutor was heavily criticised. Prosecutors shouldn't have to be so dispassionat...
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From today's Crikey. As an admirer of Christian Kerr, I'm disappointed in his lack of responsiveness to a fabulous debate in September that he helped to kick off in Crikey it was then adjourned to Club Troppo. It was blogging at its best with experts dropping in from the burea...
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What a start! For a while one might have been nearly 10 years ago when Australia v Wales was just a question of how many points Australia would score. And then Wales, fortunately for their world cup hopes, came flying back, and what an anticlimatic finish. First though, I woul...
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There are two possible dominant political entities in liberal democracy, the individual and the state. Progressivism, republicanism, liberalism and libertarianism see the individual as the dominant entity whereas conservatism and nationalism sees the state as the dominant enti...
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This is Imre Nagy speaking, the President of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People's Republic. Today at daybreak Soviet troops attacked our capital with the obvious intention of overthrowing the legal Hungarian democratic Government. Our troops are in combat. The Go...
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Suggested reason for a trip to the Old Country. The Bank of England announced the making of a new £20 banknote which will feature Adam Smith (see here , and here is what The Times says). It will come out in the Spring 2007. It is ironic in some way that the Bank of England fea...
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Great piece by Margaret in today's Crikey. Last Tuesday Crikey published an editorial criticising Chris Masters's Jonestown for the way in which it "outed" Alan Jones and treated its subject matter with "breathless, censorious innuendo." It took my breath away. It wasn't only...
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In early 1996 my father Fred fell from his motorbike on the farm and cracked a rib. He had blood in his urine, which the doctors called haematuria which means bloody urine in Greek. The doctor told him that the indicated procedure for haematuria was a cystoscopy to check the b...
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What would you call a situation in which a man . . . [P]unched his wife in the face and she fell to the ground. He kicked her before smashing her face with a rock. She suffered multiple fractures to her skull, ribs, vertebrae, and shoulder blades, as well as a ruptured liver....
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Methinks this is a tad biased, but nevertheless an interesting run through the two contenders in the 'browser wars'. The authors conclude that in five out of five areas Firefox is better than IE7. I'd like to believe it but, as I've said, I think there's a bit of bias in there...
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Today's newsletter to the finance industry 'The Sheet' outlines a series of unfortunate events by which a consumer was lent money that he could not repay. Again and again. Fortunately the nasty lenders lost their money and the poor consumer didn't have to pay - anything. Kremn...
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I am reading David Kuo's book, Tempting Faith . It is an entertaining read. Kuo is up and down like a dunny seat - running from radicalisation to depression to radicalisation again and then back to depression - but he is a good writer. It is also rare in that it is one of the...
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It is clear that the Work Choices legislation, coupled with the welfare-to-work measures, has strengthened considerably the power and autonomy of employers relative to non-managerial, non-professional employees. Even before Work Choices, there was a trend for earnings inequali...
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Its been harrumphing and gasping aplenty in Australia's two ring media circus this week, as the Alan Jones Biography hits the stands, and the pundit-o-rama gets all precious about Mr. Jones' secret life being public fodder. A loathsome attack bleats Tim Blair. Rank homophobia...
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Microsoft are a much maligned company. Their software's got better over the years. And I'm sure this won't happen to everyone, but I just downloaded Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. It took a long time to install as it installed about four other pieces of software. Then it asked...
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There was an interesting debate in the Senate on October 16th between Andrew Murray, Chris Evans and Eric Abetz. It pretty much represents all that was good and bad with the Senate. Andrew Murray argued for discrete budgeting, line by line, in parliamentary entitlements which...
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I have a particular dislike of Richard Dawkins and enjoyed this demolition of Dawkins' latest attack on God. If you read carefully you'll notice that it's not done on behalf of religion. It does not presupose religious belief. The author - Terry Eagleton concedes, having concl...
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The Victorian Government is interested in taking Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) into education as the Blair Government has done. PPPs have so far represented a scandal of economic reform. A method used to shift debt off governments' balance sheets so they can commit to deb...
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If you've been having trouble connecting to Jason Soon's group weblog Catallaxy then maybe you've been looking in the wrong place. If you bookmarked the old site at badanalysis.com then it's time to update -- you won't be automatically redirected anymore. Catallaxy is fast eme...
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The readers of Melbourne's Herald Sun went into deep shock yesterday, when former Dutchman, and contrived controversy confectioner, Andrew Bolt launched his missiles of mockery in support of international pop sensation Madonna's right to spend her wealth on acquiring African o...
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Here is a brief extract from the beginning of a staff discussion paper (pdf) on the regulation of the professions published by the National Competition Council in 2001. I think there's something missing from it - do you agree and if so what do you think it is? The challenge of...
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Fred's last post prompted several commenters to mention subsidies for private schools. It's worth taking a closer look at this issue in isolation. As Harry Clarke reminded us some time ago in a related discussion, subsidising private education is efficient if it reduces the bu...
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Today's AFR has a letter of mine on education inequality. What follows is an extended version of the letter, drawing on material from my other writings. The current passionate crusade by Howard Ministers to weed out the so-called "left-wing" bias of the education establishmen...
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If I'm not mistaken the Beazer is actually getting some traction right now. Witness yesterday's delightful poke in the Prime Minister's eye in Parliament, where the Beazer with an admirable paucity of prolix jabbed out these belly punches on the failed strategy in Iraq. One: S...
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[photopress:cat_lady.jpg,full,pp_empty] Time for a cartoon, methinks.
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One of the curious aspects of an open economy is that economic liberty is synonymous with economic integration. In this respect immigrants have taken to Australia with a will and make up a significant proportion of our productive output. According to the 2003/2004 Tax statisti...
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I promised myself I'd post a couple of very cute chess puzzles on Troppo when I saw them. Now after the chess fest of Kramnik's great victory (he can't have made too many trips to the dunny when he was playing rapid chess with Topalov which he won), and after a long day at a b...
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"Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you're half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street....
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There aren't many topics that can tempt me out of self-imposed blogging retirement, but Coolhand James McConvill is one of them. I have to confess I've been wondering idly what happened to McConvill ever since his blog suddenly disappeared a few months ago at about the same ti...
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Apologies for not keeping you all up to date on the Great Match. My excuse - well I got less excited because Kramnik dug himself out of the hole he was in. He's won 3 games to Topalov's 2 over the board. But right now as I type there is a play-off because (if you recall from t...
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Obviously the biggest news of the day is the recent Lancet article which concludes that the number of excess deaths in Iraq since the war began is around 655k with 95% confidence interval (393k,943k)*. Cause of death is also attributed with over half due to gun shot, 90% viole...
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A clever bit of econometrics seems to confirm something that Mark Latham argued in his tome Civilizing Global Capital. That the tele undermines social capital. It seemed a plausible argument, but what was the evidence other than the historical concurrence of the rise of tele a...
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Edmund Phelps is a good choice for this year's Sviriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences . He's best known as the joint inventor, with Milton Friedman, of the concept of the natural rate of unemployment, in the late 1960s. The NRU essentially means full employment - or labo...
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Given the discussion on liberty and liberalism below , it might be a good time to revisit what Australian Republicanism is. Unfortunately most current perceptions of republicanism have been defined by the 'minimal' campaign run before the 1999 referendum which ended up promoti...
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Who are Australia’s top libertarian identities? At Thoughts on Freedom, John Humphreys nominates Andrew Norton . That's odd because I always thought that Andrew identified as a classical liberal rather than as a libertarian. About a year ago Andrew wrote a post for Catallaxy o...
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Heartening news for Australian patriots in today's Age (A hotspot of soft-Leftism if you believe the paranoid fantasies of Gerard Henderson on Sunday's Insiders ). According the Nielsen Poll Labor's primary vote jumped three points to 42 percent ahead of the coalition on 39 pe...
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If you want to go fill in a form on the subject for a PhD student - click here and do so. I have. (Hat tip: Chris Lloyd)
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The debate started by Don Arthur (Is bad Peter Saunders a neo-conservative?) has been very interesting and helpful (my particular thanks to Don for developing the distinction between the Hayek and Saunders positions). But as the subsequent discussion has branched out into equa...
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Topalov wins another marvellous game. He played with great precision and energy throughout though it was a more traditional storming of the kingside than the last miraculous game. Kramnik was passive and it's not looking so good for him. Though it's still drawn (if he gets bac...
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Those who are not opinionated out from commenting on public intellectuals, feel free to have a bash below.
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It completely beats me what Topalov is playing at. He is known for his swashbuckling attacking style, and is being slowly ground down by the very hard to beat Kramnik. His response? Get your manager to make all sorts of allegations that you're cheating and play quite aggressiv...
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From the pre-game commentary Slater was well held by the Dragons. He is probably due for a blinder. King could be ready to explode as well, his best work was done in defence the other night when he practically closed down Gasnier. The biggest danger for the Storm will be the p...
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A mate of mine made this tongue in cheek comment the other day to a Canadian fellow; Why do you hate America so much that you decided to be born somewhere else? Which is an appeal to the absurd in nationalism and the arbitrary nature with which it deals with individuals, citiz...
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Chess players are nothing if not temperamental. The story so far - at least as I could be bothered learning about it is that: Topalov's camp protested about the frequency with which Kramnik was going to the toilet(!) The officials seem to have required Kramnik and Topalov to u...
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Two weeks ago Ken wondered aloud on 'weekend reflections' that it might not work all that well on Troppo. It had only attracted between four and ten comments in the past. Anyway, the very thread he wrote this on attracted some interesting comments. Last week's weekend reflecti...
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In 1963 the Australian Government ordered the F111 at the then astronomical cost of $112 million with the final cost a decade later being 324 million. It has been the best bang for the buck purchase Australian has made in defence. Like all good deterrents it will be retired wi...
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There is nothing, I'm sure you'd agree, more fascinating, more delightful to observe, or more satisfying to the soul, than to see two grown men poke their tongues out at each other, fully extend to the other, the middle digit of both hands and for good measure unbuckle the bel...
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I've been doing some (fairly idle) thinking but not much reading about globalisation and the extent to which large amounts of 'offshoring' of labour will be good and who it will be good for. I can't say I've got far but was interested to read this post which was pointed to by...
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I'll be giving a presentation with the above title at the University of Canberra tomorrow - Wednesday 27th of Sept in Room B34, Building 6 University of Canberra at 12:30 pm. This is a repeat of a seminar I did at the ANU last year, but if you missed it and the title or abstra...
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The shelves in American bookstores relating to politics over the last few years have become dominated by titles such "How to kill a liberal and get away with it", or "How to dice a conservative and serve them for dinner without wasting pepper". I often think when faced with al...
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Susan Polgar - one of the best women players in the world on the second game between Topalov and Kramnik. Looks like the same story, as last game but different format. Topalov bounced out of the blocks with white and mounted a ferocious attack on Kramnik's king. Kramnik held o...
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Those many of you who don't follow chess will not know that the first game in a unification bout for the World Anyweight Champion of Chess took place last night - our time. The players? Topalov whose extraordinary swashbuckling style - never mind that rooks are supposed to be...
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This open thread last weekend started off with a whimper, but turned into an interesting discussion about why nothing was happening on the thread! How's that for naval gazing! Anyway, a long time ago when I put on a sketch as an undergraduate at Burgmann College Robin Bell the...
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I've admired Paul Monk's writing for a while now and have linked to a particularly good essay of his in the past. In any event, he's agreed for me to post essays of his on Troppo. Over the fold is an review essay of John Armstrong's recent book on Goethe and happiness. From th...
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I'm not much chop at reading poetry, but I was listening to a podcast of the Book Program and heard this discussion about Elizabeth Bishop. There was a marvellous reading of a poem about a Moose (would you believe). I reproduce it over the fold, though I expect I wouldn't have...
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That's the headline of the Washington Post's editorial on the subject. (Courtesy of Brad DeLong's Blog .) Of course, Mr. Bush didn't come out and say he's lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to "an alternative set of procedures" for interrogation. But the administration no...
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The IPA's article on Australia's 13 biggest mistakes (pdf) is a good conversation starter. I'm not very good at exercises like that, so I don't have a list of my own. Certainly the 'mistake' of publishing J S Mill's On Liberty is an odd one - I guess kind of tongue in cheek it...
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[photopress:robson.jpg,full,pp_empty] TodayTonight host Naomi Robson was trying to get to Papua to save the life of a young boy earmarked to be eaten by a tribe of cannibals, an industry source claims. They're kidding, right?
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Phillip Coorey in today's Herald praises the Opposition Leader for showing leadership in the debate over values. (In response to Howard's critique of Muslims who won't assimilate, Beazley proposed that vistors, including tourists, should sign a declaration on their visa form t...
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Via ex-coblogger Jason Soon , in case any Troppo readers haven't found it yet: Andrew's new blog . Andrew is an articulate and elegant writer, backs up his claims with facts and figures, avoids hyperbole, responds thoughtfully to reasoned criticism, and graciously concedes a p...
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"One of the best public intellectuals on the conservative side of politics" says ANU's Andrew Leigh . "A very thoughtful writer on the liberal side" says Mark Bahnisch at LP . A "radical neoliberal" says the University of Wollongong's Damien Cahill . Earlier this week Andrew N...
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I was setting up to deliver my talk on open source software at the Fabian Society. I decided to throw caution to the winds and the switch to Vaudeville by staring off with the same scene from Witness - 'raising a barn' - that i began my original essay for policy with. I'll ind...
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Economists have long been challenged by the question: how does one decide if a particular social program is in the national interest (to use the Prime Minister's favourite expression)? We economists talk a great deal about cost-benefit evaluations but it is never clear what go...
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More on Collingwood . Review of a collection of Collingwood's essays on political philosophy. Chapter 1 BENT OF A TWIG UNTIL I was thirteen years old I lived at home and was taught by my father. Lessons occupied only two or three hours each morning; otherwise he left me to my...
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Cedric Emanuel (1906-1995) was one of the most productive and versatile of Australian artists. He has major importance as a visual historian. For almost seventy years he sketched and painted the rapidly changing scenes of Australia from the outback to the inner suburbs of Sydn...
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Fear gripped the pulsing metropolis of Melbourne on this meaningful Monday the 11th. Fear and dread. Fear, and dread, and doubt (no doubt). We'd been warned just this weekend passed that we were on the top of the list of targets, and so on this day of symbolism and portent, we...
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Surely we cannot let 11/9 pass without a single relevant post? After all, the world changed forever five years ago today. For a start, folks the globe over ( sans moi ) have now begun quoting dates backwards, like the Americans. SBS recently aired a bizarre documentary allegin...
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Late night live sounds like it might be interesting tonight. I don't have time to read even this link , right now, but it all sounds interesting. World Bank economist Branko Milanovic says globalisation is in trouble. He shifts the focus from the economic effects of globalisat...
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A woman was riding a bike and was shot in the chest with a .22 bullet. It almost hit her heart, but it didn't and she was OK. It transpired that the accused person was cleaning their .22 rifle on their front porch and the gun accidentally discharged. The accused was charted wi...
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Cass Sunstein pumps out an amazing amout of stuff and yesterday I came across this brief blog post. The idea of ideological amplification rings true - though it needn't be ideological. Language itself and all use of it is an inherently co-operative exercise. Individuals use co...
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One of the ways in which economic reform might have developed and deepened from the fairly formulaic deregulationist mind set it got itself into from around the late 80s on would have been in the area of reforming legal procedure. It's still being left to lawyers. Here is a go...
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I'm very sad to say that Ken Parish has called it a day on Troppo. As he said there were some important private reasons motivating him, but there was also the agro and misunderstanding that flies around routinely. That increased the stress and tedium and that's a standing invi...
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The first time I heard about Steve Irwin, I was in the back of a taxi in San Francisco in 2000 with a couple of other Aussies. We were engaging in humorous banter with the heavyset black taxi driver. As you do when you're OS and you're looking to sample the local mood, and get...
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Interesting article in SMH wth which I agree. Especially this part. Yet this bedrock of the game - the Sydney and Brisbane club competitions - the source of most of the players for the four state teams, and most of the Wallabies, is never allowed its day in the sun, never allo...
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I once heard the late Lin Onus a teriffic aboriginal artist give a lecture to somewhere like the press club. He told a story of hearing his son singing the national anthem, which his son had picked up orally, to write out the words. They were truly hilarious when compared with...
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Michael Duffy never wanted the soccer World Cup here. Now he has solid grounds for his dread. He was evidently grazing in the archives of the Library of Economics and Liberty, an indispensable resource for rightwing culture warriors, when he came upon t his anti-soccer polemic...
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This is a blogging experiment. I'm teaching Jurisprudence to undergraduate law students this semester for the first time (although I've long been interested in legal theory). One of the early tutorial exercises I've set for my students arises from a very famous 1949 article/hy...
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I just ran across this abstract in the Journal of Public Economics . I reproduce it here for what it is worth. I mean that literally, as it is not me pushing a barrow. I don't have a considered view and have done very little reading on this. Anyway, here's the abstract. In 198...
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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 qual...
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Here's a diagram from a recent paper (pdf) on the Swedish distribution of income. It shows that the kinds of income distribution through time that Andrew Leigh and Anthony Atkinson came up with for Australia and NZ are typical of most western countries. It also shows that you...
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Saul, who needs little introduction, has kindly accepted my invitation to occasionally post on Troppo. Saul is a wise and moderate fellow and you could do worse than accord his thoughts on the economy as much weight as you give anyone else. Over the fold is an article Saul has...
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Commenter Chris Lloyd asked the other day whether I had any observations about the risks of defamation action against bloggers. As it happens I do. Moreover, it's an opportune time to muse on the subject because there's a fairly new uniform national Defamation Act that is rele...
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Hot off the press from Sarsparilla . Regular Sarsaparilla contributor Wendy James' novel Out of the Silence has been shortlisted in the 'First Crime Novel' category of the 2006 Ned Kelly Awards for crime fiction. How good is that ?
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I was recently banging on about the ABC and podcasting re-iterating Steven Bounds' suggestion that the ABC could lower the cost of distributing podcasts by distributing them over BitTorrent when the very next day I hear that the ABC are considering doing just that . The ABC is...
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Here's Stephen Mayne from today's Crikey on the ABC and podcasting. The ABC's extraordinary podcasting performance All those ABC critics who attack the national broadcaster for not attracting large audiences are eating plenty of humble pie over its extraordinary performance wh...
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Dear Crikey Subscriber, Father's Day is fast approaching, (September 3rd for all you forgetful children) and Dads across Australia are gearing up for another round of dodgy ties, el cheapo car cleaning kits, and of course, the three-pack of Bonds undies. Instead of going throu...
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I've just finished reading David Days very engaging and interesting biography of Curtin. It's an enjoyable, easy, long read. Early on I ran into the ten commandments of socialism. These were taught at socialist Sunday schools just after the turn of the twentieth century. Na¯ve...
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One audience member asked Albrechtsen what she thought of the media. She acknowledged the difficulty in speaking frankly due to her position on the ABC board, but thought the last five to ten years had seen steadily improving media, "such as Fox News."
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About three decades ago statistics a la USA arrived in rugby league. This had some interesting effects. One year (1976?) there was an epic battle between Ray Higgs (Parra) and Terry Randall (Manly) for a big prize for the leading tackler in the comp. Then someone realised that...
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We girly-men here at Club Faggot are nothing if not broad-shouldered. It's probably all that working out down at the gayboyz gym. So I thought it was only fair to re-publish Jason Soon's evaluation of Troppo: Club Troppo nowadays has such a prissy and precious atmosphere that...
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Well this item seemed to draw some responses last week, so here it is again.
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The Fabians are emulating the CIS (I think) in establishing a essay competition for young people. The details are overleaf and if you win from the competition after finding out about it here we'll throw in an additional prize. A year's subscription to Troppo (if you win the pr...
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Here's Charles Richardson writing for Crikey today. I've been involved in politics one way or another for about 30 years; I don't think I had many illusions about it even when I started, and I certainly shouldn't have any left by now. But I was surprised how touched I was by t...
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"Mammon calls!" Thus spake me one day in Florence about fourteen years ago to Eva as we spent more and more time snapping up the cool, cheap clothes and other goods, and less and less time in the galleries. We finally got home with 80 Kgs of the stuff to somewhat alarmed airp...
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Clive Hamilton has an attack on Tim Flannery in The Age here . The criticisms of Flannery are of interest and generally well made. It's also interesting to see Hamilton's attack on green groups that he thinks are going over to the enemy - a theme which was taken up at greater...
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Here's a link to a good article about Wikipedia - it's in Atlantic Monthly which I've never been able to get access to without subscription on line before. Perhaps they're 'getting it' as we like to say smugly in the 'online community' and they're publishing more open articles...
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I was mightily relieved to read this in today's Herald Sun. MADONNA has weighed in on the Middle East crisis ... The accompanying picture seems to show a preference for some sort of peacekeeping force separating the two parties although I'm yet to decide if it is a peacekeepin...
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You'll hardly ever hear the words "Mark" and "Latham" uttered in the same sentence in ALP circles without the utterer mouthing a sneer and shooting a small gob of distaste at the nearest spittoon. It's become de rigour to demonize de-Latham in the ALP. It's just another litt...
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Wayne Bennett hasn't the best of relationships with the press. He has applied the siege mentality approach so successful in State of Origin campaigns to create unity within the Broncos. And while that approach has had some success, with the latest Broncos premiership campaign...
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Troppo has had a pretty sporadic commitment to regular open threads like this. Not sure why - but I thought I'd give this a try. Any thoughts provocative or otherwise would be welcome. I'm going to set a reminder to set up a thread like this each weekend for a month or so and...
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I made some snide comments on the GPI on the New Matilda website - which I reproduced here . Anyway, the piece I wrote expanded itself before my eyes into nearly 3,000 words, so I split it - a little uneasily - into two. So here is the first installment published at NM today....
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Courtesy of Troppo commenter Gaby.
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Here's a request for Troppo readers to help me out. First the story - from Crikey today. Highly-respected ABC broadcaster and newspaper columnist Terry Lane calls it an "ignominious end" to a long career in journalism. Writing in last weekend's Sunday Age , he unwittingly reli...
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From the 'living in exciting times' desk courtesy of Slashdot comes the following bit of exciting news. An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com is reporting that four countries have together ordered 4 million low-cost, Linux-based laptops from the One Laptop Per Child (OL...
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Nice to see the OECD citing and supporting Lateral Economics' paper on income tax priorities - published as Tax Cuts for Growth by CEDA. The OECD has in the past lined up with the chorus of people calling for cuts to higher marginal taxes on the (unsubstantiated) grounds that...
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A great column by Krugman. Shock and Awe For Americans who care deeply about Israel, one of the truly nightmarish things about the war in Lebanon has been watching Israel repeat the same mistakes the United States made in Iraq. It's as if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been po...
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Big Pharma is in a bind. A big bind. As James Surowiecki explains in this excellent piece there are some really big problems looming for pharmaceutical companies. And like the saying about banks, when the problems are big enough, they're our problems, not just the companies'....
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I went hunting for pieces by one of the worlds really good economic journalists, James Surowiecki of the New Yorker (author of the truly teriffic best seller The Wisdom of Crowds). This nice piece on net neutrality reminded me that I have seen the issue discussed around the pl...
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This is what it looks like. Only it's bigger - even bigger.
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I vaguely remember wondering if Skandar Keynes - who played Edmund Pevensee (the bad child who gets saved by the others) - was related when I saw the credits. Running into his name again in an unlikely context here , I asked Google if he was related to JM Keynes, which he is -...
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The following opinion piece first appeared in New Matilda. Comments welcome. Many economists are fond of saying that a country can have relatively high employment or relatively low inequality - but not both. The argument runs like this. Good employment outcomes can only be ach...
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An interesting piece by Stephen Koukoulas on the extent to which our inflation numbers are being driven lower than they otherwise would be by the falling price of Chinese imports. It's over the fold and was reported in Crikey and on Henry Thornton The focus of most analysis of...
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One for Nicholas! As soon as I could safely toddle My parents handed me a Model; My brisk and energetic pater Provided the accelerator. My mother, with her kindly gumption, The function guiding my consumption; And every week I had from her A lovely new parameter, With lots of...
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One of the less attractive qualities of Melbourne is its inferiority complex vis a vis Sydney. I know that to my parents' generation they're very different cities, but I've always been skeptical that they're that different. But there are clearly differences. It may be a clich©...
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Long time reader, first time poster. Ken has kindly invited me to join the exalted ranks of posters at Club Troppo, so I thought I might briefly say hi and introduce myself. Floating in a google cache somewhere under a pseudonym is the remains of my former blog, which featured...
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D.H.LAWRENCE :GENIUS OR JOKE? A paper delivered at the annual general meeting of the D H Lawrence Society at the Julian Ashton Art School annexe at Georges Heights, Mosman on Sunday 20 July 2006. My theme is from Joseph Conrad and his tale, The Shadow Line: Only the young, he...
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I once put on a comedy sketch at my hall of residence - Burgmann College - whereupon the staff tutor, Robin Bell said to me. "That was good Nick. Surprisingly good". Ditto this piece by P.J. O'Rourke on Adam Smith. It draws contemporary lessons from Smith without doing anachro...
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People speak about their 'bullshit detector'. I reckon I've got one of those as well as a 'preciousness detector'. Where bullshitting is a particularly (though obviously not exclusively) male vice, preciousness is a particularly (though obviously not exclusively) female one. W...
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This is Tony Harris's latest column. But I wanted to add by way of introduction that Tony removed a great joke from it - which I've resurrected for Troppodillians. Namely "The one good thing about Phillip Ruddock's recent setbacks is that the egg on his face improves his pallo...
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Courtesy of Slashdot, World Firefox Day calls for little old people like me - and you - to spread the word about Firefox - the open source webbrowser. It works well and has a range of features like tabbed browsing that are terrific. Microsoft is trying to catch up and seems to...
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Rex Ringshot, nice guy, one time solo blogger , now blogmeister for Labor First, a self styled 'grass roots' attempt to renew an ALP that could do with some renewing, has asked me to draw your attention to a Labor First function to launch their 'good branch handbook' on the 4t...
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When I last pointed to something I'd read which was of interest Rafe wrote "Thanks for Club Troppo Ken, where would we be without access to these great pieces that other people find. Thanks Nicholas!" Well, thanks Rafe. Here's another great piece in today's Age - on the relati...
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The following letter was published in the Canberra Times today. I sent it because I am very concerned about what is happening to political freedom in Australia. Am I being paranoic or do others share my concerns? Text of letter follows. Both Brian Toohey ("Eroding State power"...
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A month or so ago I watched a video of an excellent and terrifying report on 4 Corners on youth suicide focusing on the story of one young boy who was good at everything, loved by all, with lots of friends. He got prodigious scores. Then at the age of about 16 he discovered th...
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Some of you will remember that John Singleton made a fortune by setting out to irritate his TV audience with his ads, the 'where d'ya git it' ad being the paradigm case. I listen to the ABC's Philosopher's Zone program not because it's particularly good (it's not) but because...
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Magnificent n'est pas? From Cassini. Explanation: Soft hues, partially lit orbs, a thin trace of the ring, and slight shadows highlight this understated view of the majestic surroundings of the giant planet Saturn. Looking nearly back toward the Sun, the robot Cassini spacecra...
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Who is this man and what is he up to? The French have a doctrine of the 'moral rights' of an artist. I don't know many of the details but it protects them against certain kinds of bowdlerisation of their works and (I think) is also the platform on which artists generates some...
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Those sixties were fun! A while back I posted on Rolf Harris's amazing song Sun Arise. Well in the process of doing so I downloaded a couple of additional files which intrigued me. One was called "Rolf Harris with The Beatles - Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport.mp3" and I've appende...
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Big Brother is unquestionably garbage. It adds nothing to our understanding of a complex world. Nor does it enrich our lives with stories of timeless quality. By all accounts, it is an excruciating blancmange of meaningless banter, Benny Hill-style ribaldry and, now, low-level...
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From the 'obvious when pointed out' department comes this idea for powering ships. I've thought about this myself for ages, and wondered why sails were not put on ships as a matter of course. I presume they wouldn't add a lot of power, but surely modest sails would pay for the...
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Given the failure of Dr Troppo to become a regular on this site, (he always seemed a bit dodgy) I thought I'd ask a question for light relief. Why are those shoes with canvas tops and rubber sole called Plimsolls (in Britain anyway)? The answer, and an interesting story from t...
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With federalism hotting up as an issue below the fold and here is Rory Robertson's piece from the Oz on how the states have not had the revenue windfall that they're supposed to have had from the GST. While I agree with Rory's argument, one thing that should be mentioned is th...
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Peter Botsman who runs Australian Prospect sent subscribers an email a day or so ago inviting people to check out and buy aboriginal paintings. Some of them looked good to me so I offered to post them up on Troppo for him - if you're interested please click on the relevant lin...
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In what can become a regular feature with your help, welcome to the first 'pun watch'. Please feel free to put some of your favourite puns in the comments section below. Meanwhile, Chris Caton takes out the inaugural award. Not necessarily a truly great pun, but it tickled my...
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Last night was Cracker Night in Darwin, when every bogan fucktard blasts the hell out of their neighbourhood until 3 or 4 in the morning. It's also V8 Supercars weekend, when the self-same fucktards spend all day watching gas-guzzling hotted-up family cars circling round and r...
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Here's an interesting abstract from the excellent Brookings-AEI joint centre on regulation suggesting that if real estate markets were regulated nationally to provide transparent listings, the real estate market - and in particular the market in real estate agents would be muc...
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Published last week in Crikey Speakers of parliament are well remunerated. In the commonwealth they receive nearly $200,000, more than most ministers and 75 per cent above the salary paid to parliamentarians. And they are well cosseted. They enjoy extensive office suites with...
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Yesterday's Independent newspaper carries a powerful article by Henry Porter . It charts the loss of civil liberties in the UK created by nine years of the Blair Government. He describes clearly and powerfully how, given a choice between personal liberty and collective securit...
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From a few weeks back. The High Court decided in 1997 - the case was Lange v the ABC - that Australia's constitution necessarily implies "a limitation on legislative and executive power to deny the electors and their representatives information concerning the conduct of the ex...
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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 slashdo...
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David "Barista" Tiley is out of hospital after a harrowing surgical and subsequent ordeal. Fortunately, as ubiquitous commenter Nabakov observes, the loss of part of the bowel and the whole of his spleen (not to mention a heart attack along the way) hasn't done David's writing...
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[photopress:snap.jpg,full,pp_empty] Take it from me, snapping your fingers at a waiter does not work.
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Readers with an interest in NT politics might care to tune into the streaming audio version of this morning's ABC Local Radio morning program, where (among others) yours truly discussed a sudden outbreak of ill-discipline in the Martin government backbench. A memo from indigen...
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I was walking in the Dandenongs with my kids the other day and told them of the extraordinary capacity of the lyrebird for imitating the sounds it hears in the bush (not much in the way of human speech unlike parrots). I don't know if they believed me about its virtuosity, but...
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A blog roundup is a type of post traditionally undertaken when you're bored and need a short break from the tedium of the working day, but are too lazy or lacking in inspiration to post anything original. Attention-seeking legal academic James McConvill appears to have done th...
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World Cup is of and running, and with the opening games we have already had a taste of some of the teams from around globe, which has sent body-clocks adjusting to a new form of nocturnal existence as thousands of viewers patiently wade through the early hours of mornings hopi...
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Courtesy of Slashdot, here is a picture of Jupiter with the two most perfect storms in the solar system heading towards one another. This is what is reported on the NASA website. Storm #1 is the Great Red Spot, twice as wide as Earth itself, with winds blowing 350 mph. The beh...
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I thought it was funny anyway
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In his book "A time of hope", Donald Horne details a remarkable passage in a speech about how we have all lost our bearings and how we needed to appreciate our environment more, worry about money less etc etc. The thing that was remarkable about it was not what it said it was...
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Courtesy of my brother, here's a quote which would be nice on our banner above, but which is a little long. The one really rousing thing about human history is that, whether or no the proceedings go right, at any rate, the prophecies always go wrong. The promises are never ful...
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Speaking of how to cut tax to maximise economic growth, how do you design shopping areas to keep everyone shopping? As some Troppodillians will know, the Viennese architect Victor Gruen gave us the shopping mall. My Dad thought he may have been a relative. But I don't think he...
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John Quiggin is concerned about the uncoolness of his genuine affection for ducks flying across the wall . As I commented on his post. I like the Sound of Music - the movie. Partly because of associations with my Austrian Dad who could have been one of the kids (and his sister...
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Emailed by Scott Wickstein. ...
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Ian Holm as Bilbo - not my mental image of the old hobbit, but still ... Someone needs to launch an independent enquiry into whether Dr Bob Martin is being secretly funded by Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor: Scientists who argue the "hobbit" is really just a modern human with a sm...
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[photopress:inflate_a_man.jpg,full,pp_empty] We have a lot of sex shops here in Darwin for some reason...
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Eels in Crisis Coach resigns midway through the season, players fined and demoted for disciplinary reasons and any chance for the finals are gorn not even half-way through the season. This is what life is usually like for a South's supporter but alas it is the Eels who are hav...
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One of the themes of the ALP spin on the budget is that the tax cuts don't make up for the 'triple whammy' of higher fuel prices, interest rates and lower wages from the new IR legislation. There's another triple whammy (silly expression isn't it?). In fact, in the spirit of t...
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Expressions of interest are invited from people who are prepared to comment for The Real Game on the prospects and performance of the following teams: Geelong, Swans, Hawks, Lions, Eagles, Crows, Port, the waterside workers, Saints, Western Bulldogs, Carlton. No experience req...
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Another top-notch article in the Age by Caroline Wilson looks at how the Brisbane Lions board was told in 2002 that the team was capable of four premierships in a row, but if they did try for it, there would be a long term price to be paid. The board took the short term option...
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Miranda strips down to the gym shorts and pom pom to barrack for Bill Further to my disparaging post on the ostentatiously ambitious Bill Shorten, there's something more than a little suspicious about an aspiring Labor leader who has uber-Tory Miranda Devine on his cheersquad...
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The inaugural award for mixed metaphors goes to David J Hunter for this passage in a poorly argued, but not otherwise woefully expressed effort. It's in an interesting e-zine (pdf) - Eurohealth hosted by the LSE . But the jury is out and the stakes and risks are high with the...
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Who said this a few years ago - I guess it's not that hard to guess who it might be. At the moment if you're on a 48 per cent marginal tax rate, and an employer makes a contribution into superannuation on your behalf, you get a 33 cent tax concession ¢â¬â if you are a million...
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Crikey has a write up of Carlton by Stephen Feneley which says this. "At his best, Carleton was THE best, and any journalism student wanting tips on asking hard questions need only dip into Carleton's archive for wisdom. For that we owe him an enormous debt." I beg to differ....
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He reminds me of someone, but who? Anyway, here is Parsons' Wikipedia entry Thinking alound about the way that economics and the human sciences could have evolved under the influence of Carl Menger and others, especially Ludwig Mises, Talcott Parsons and Karl Popper. Continuin...
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[photopress:Dreamtime_at_the_MCG.jpg,full,pp_empty] I watched quite a bit of the opening stuff on 'Dreamtime at the MCG'. I wrote a bit of a piece on aborigines and the AFL a while back on Troppo. It's nice to see the AFL flogging it for all it's worth. And apropos of the issu...
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Daniel Barenboim Through the wonders of podcasting, I was able to listen to Daniel Barenboim's forth Reith lecture on a plane back from Sydney to Melbourne last night. This was the forth of his Reith lectures in which he talks about the marvelous "West Eastern Divan" initiati...
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[photopress:King__s_College.jpg,full] This is one lovely building. Not sure the poem is up to it. But then again, I'm no connoisseur of poetry. Inside of King's College Chapel, Cambridge By William Wordsworth Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense, With ill-matched aims the...
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The man in question? Gay? There IS a faint resemblance to Oscar Wilde ... Andrew Norton asked me to write a review of a new book on Adam Smith - so here's a fairly advanced draft. I'd welcome suggestions for improvements. Postscript: I'm hoping this is a final now, and comment...
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Australia's twin pillars of foreign affairs hypocrisy You need a keen appreciation of irony and hypocrisy to really enjoy the daily practice of Australian politics. Dolly Downer lecturing the Solomon Islanders about governmental corruption while his own supine "three wise monk...
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From an email from Scott Wickstein:
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Tamsin Carroll belts one out in Dusty: The Musical Troy Dodds at AussieTheatre.com has an engaging rant about the "jukebox musical" genre, of which Dusty: The Musical (recently doco'd to death on ABC TV) is the most recent Australian example: Australia has been dealt some incr...
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Are birds better conversationalists than humans? Why the cover illustration? Some Troppodilians may be interested in this New York Review of Books review of a book du jour entiled On Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller. Though this is far from 'must re...
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Courtesy of Slashdot, there's a new documentary on open source and free culture featuring various leading lights - most particularly Laurence Lessig and Richard Stallman. Go see a trailer here . Looks interesting. It's odd that they haven't 'open-sourced' the doco itself, allo...
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Yesterday I asked people to tell me what a list of books have in common. They include Enid Blighton's The Magic Faraway Tree and Milan Kundera's Unbearable lightness of being . Lance Armstrong's It's not about the Bike and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights . Now you may think t...
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Jacqui Stockdale, The Nature Maker . Courtesy Art Gallery of NSW. The Art Life has a long-ish post reviewing the Wynn, Sulman and Photographic Portrait Prizes (decided at the same time as the much more famous Archibald Prize for portraiture). Actually, although TAL has some in...
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What do the following books have in common? Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins It's not about the Bike Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights Enid Blyton The Magic Faraway Tree His Holiness The Dalai Lama & Howard C Cutler The Art of Happiness Joanne Harris Chocolat Terry Jones Lady C...
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Another evil old man or a ray of unexpected hope? Tim Dunlop has an excellent post (with which I wholeheartedly agree) about an editorial in The Australian praising Pope Benedict XVI for deciding to reconsider the vatican's prohibition on HIV-infected males using condoms when...
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I hope this is the right Gillian Bouras. I Googled her to find a photo. I've just returned from a talk by Gillian Bouras as part of the launch of her book about her sister who took her own life which I wrote up here . I even met Peter - a Troppo lurker - which made me feel esp...
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Shaun Cronin has joined the Troppo team to write occasional posts on rugby league (cf Christopher Sheil's rugby union posts). Shaun mostly blogs at Larva Rodeo on political stuff. His LP bio sketch says: Shaun Cronin is the blogger formerly known as Immanuel Rant. Back in the...
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[photopress:beach.jpg,full,pp_empty] The Top End's dry season officially starts next Monday, the 1st of May, which I point out solely as an excuse to run a cartoon to see how it copes with this new-fangled layout.
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As you can see, we took the opportunity of adopting a new theme while fixing the formatting and database problems that have bedevilled Club Troppo for some time now. The work has been done by Vicki Berry of DistinctiveWeb (her blog is here ). It's a slightly tweaked version of...
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Jen's show isn't quite like the Disney Broadway version. It's funnier and more self-aware ... If anyone has wondered what's happened to Jen over the last couple of months, she's been working 80 hours a week (or more) on her school's production of Walt Disney's Beauty and the B...
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Astude readers of Club Troppo will have noticed quotes running at the top of the page. Quotes that Ken, I and others occasionally have half hearted debates about whether they're appropriate for Troppo. Well I found another one the other day and it's below. Readers might like t...
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Can someone please, please, please tell me why there are always stories in the press about our glorious tax office going on compliance rampages and 'discovering' whole heaps of people who haven't put in a tax return? Crikey reports as follows: Data matching has become a favour...
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Professor Richard Lynn, guru of modern eugenics, race and IQ Like a bad penny, former Macquarie University legal academic Andrew Fraser keeps turning up. Michael Duffy wrote an opinion piece in Saturday's SMH resurrecting Fraser's pet issue of race and IQ: [Last] Wednesday, Th...
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No time for dances: A memoir of my sister I had a fine old time over Easter having a read of various things. I read Gillian Bouras's No time for dances and thought it was wonderful. I didn't expect to because my wife had been rather scornful of Bouras's earlier work about (I g...
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Easter cartoon via The Art Life . There's no formatting to get buggered. And a rather more serious (not to say disgraceful and depressing) story from David Tiley . Anyone care to revisit their opinion about Tony Blair and his leadership qualities?
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(via Chekhov's Mistress ) A story from RGJ.com : Jacob Behymer-Smith, a ninth-grader at Coral Academy of Science in Reno, has excelled in classroom, school and county poetry competitions, reciting a W.H. Auden poem that contains the words " hell " and " damn ." Coral Academy o...
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The Larrakia native title claim on Darwin and surrounds was dismissed in a judgment handed down today in the Federal Court. Justice Mansfield said: The evidence shows that a combination of circumstances has, in various ways, interrupted or disturbed the presence of the Larraki...
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There is more than a faint whiff of hypocrisy about Kim Beazley and federal Labor's opposition to the just-announced Howard government plan to have all illegal arrival asylum seekers, even those who make it to the mainland, processed offshore and assessed by UNHCR rather than...
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[photopress:cross.jpg,full,pp_empty] Feel free to be offended by the above. I could use the publicity. Have a top Easter everyone.
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The three most talented politicians in the last couple of decades that I know of have all been left of centre pollies though really vigorous centrists - Clinton, Hawke and Blair. Other politicians like Reagan and Thatcher achieved as much or more, but these guys seemed to have...
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I'll be posting some reflections on the recent report on regulation shortly. In the meantime, here's an article that I wrote about a year ago and couldn't get placed in the media's op ed pages. The reason is instructive of the dilemma of regulation review more generally. Who w...
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I was thinking of this rather bad pun as a headline for a story on Mick Gatto (not that I was writing a story on him, it just occured to me as my wife was talking about Mick Gatto - a Melbourne underworld figure who I guess I figured might be called Mick Gateaux). Anyway, I fi...
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I while back I attended a very informative talk by Ken Harvey of Latrobe University. It was about prescribing software for medical practitioners. Your doctor probably has a computer on their desk by now the Federal Government gave grants of $10,000 in 1999 to GP practices to a...
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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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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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[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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[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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[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: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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[photopress:volcanoaurora2_shs.jpg,full,centered] A volcano and Aurora Borealis
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[photopress:Grogblogging.jpg,full,pp_empty] In case you missed it, bloggers from around Australia met up on Saturday night for Grogblogging III. And yes, they're just as opinionated in person as they are on screen. Flashman from Electron Soup was chatting with Jozef Imrich of...
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I was expecting to be safely ensconced in Melbourne by the 28th but no. I'll still be in Canberra, so I'm going to do my best to attend the Grogblogging event at 7.30 pm at the City RSL (565 George St). Why it's at the City RSL beats me. Perhaps I'll find out on attending. Mor...
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Compared with a few hundred years ago the world works incredibly, almost miraculously well. But do you think of something really simple that you wonder why it isn't being done? I planned to compile a list of ten really simple things that should be done which were obvious (at l...
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Well, here you are at the capacious new premises of Club Troppo (formerly Troppo Armadillo ). Just about all the grunt, grind and skill involved in creating this shiny revamped WordPress blog has been contributed by the amazing (and amazingly patient) Stephen Bounds. We are de...
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This week's column - with the answer to the question about the picture below. And I hope Troppodillians had an enjoyable Christmas. Some Christmas reflections ________________________________________________________________ I'm afraid (but not ashamed) to say that I'm an abste...
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I've found from long experience that if you don't promote yourself no-one else is likely to do it for you. So it is with great pleasure that I note Troppo has been awarded the gong by Crikey as it's Best Blog of the Year . I'm usually not a great believer in awards, especially...
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Some recent converts to blog reading might not yet have stumbled across the delights of Gummo Trotsky's blog "Tugboat Potemkin". Gummo took a long break from blogging not so long ago (a dark blogging night of the soul not unlike my own), but is well and truly back and blogging...
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Old time Troppo readers who actually liked my stuff can get their fill at my new blog here . (Blogger is a really sound platform these days.)
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Andrew Ford - the lead ABC Radio National broadcaster on the world of music - seems like a remarkably nice guy. He just radiates good mental health. Talented, hard working, nice, modest. Daggy but just a tad - enough for it to be engaging rather than painful. In addition to be...
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As some readers may have noticed, the Troppo commenting system has been malfunctioning badly for the last week or so. When you try to post a comment, it invariably returns an error message saying that the " server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unabl...
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Today I found the message that Ken posted when Mark Bahnisch joined the team, with a profile and all that stuff, and I realised that Ken has been too busy to post the my cv. This is no big deal, but in case anyone is interested... There is also a photo that is only few years o...
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It looks like French bloggers are really blazing a trail as far as the latest blogging craze is concerned--pictologs, or BD blogs as they're also called, which are like a kind of blend of webcomics and traditional (!!) blogging. France is of course right up there in the graphi...
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For quite some time now I've been feeling radically uninspired about blogging. It's getting harder and harder to get enthusiastic about topics, or to find ones I haven't already posted about, sometimes multiple times. I've always been opinionated about political and broader pu...
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Just drawing readers' attention to the fact there's a longish piece, by Richard Johnstone, on the blogging phenomenon, in the May issue of Australian Book Review. You can find it here
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I posted on the theme of bullshit under the heading " Why is John Clarke so funny? And why now? " a while back. Just to let Troppodilians know, the author of "On Bullshit", Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Harry G. Frankfurt, is being interviewed tonig...
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The National Library of Australia wants to preserve Troppo Armadillo in its Pandora online archive . It's a welcome compliment to the consistent quality of writing by Troppo contributors over quite a long period (by blogging standards anyway). However, because there are so man...
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I ducked over to The Spin Starts Here just now to see if Caz and the crew had blogged a satisfyingly vicious coverage of the Logie awards. But disappointingly, they've fallen down on the job and spared the TV Week extravaganza, Rove's "F" word and all. Nevertheless, apparently...
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I'm in mourning. James Russell ( Hot Buttered Death ) has chucked it in and moved on to the Old Bloggers Eventide Home . James was one of the relatively early entrants to the ozplogosphere, although his blog soon developed into an eclectic mix of posts about the bizarre and un...
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I initially posted the following as a comment to my recent post on global warming . But I think it's worth creating a separate discussion thread: I think blogs offer a potentially very useful way to explore and understand complex issues, at least for the minority of amateur re...
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Scott has just deleted an Anzac Day post he'd written. I don't know why, perhaps it was written when tired and emotional early in the morning. But his judgment that it was unworthy of publication is just plain wrong. It was one of the most evocative pieces I'd read in a long t...
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I had every good intention of picking up on a reader's suggestion that I create a Frequently Asked Questions section of Troppo, to which new-ish commenters could be referred whenever they raised topics that had already been debated ad nauseum , either here or in the blogospher...
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An interesting speech by Rupert Murdoch discussing the mainstream media's shortcomings (as he sees it) in embracing the Internet age in an effective manner: What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don't want to rely on the...
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Australian Democrats deputy leader (and serious blogger) Andrew Bartlett has a post about the role and importance of blogs (or rather their lack of importance) from the viewpoint of working politicians: Occasionally I read something usually on a blog - about the power of the b...
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I was asked recently by the editors of Online Opinion to write a short op-ed piece on what I saw as the future of new media, such as blogs. I thought Troppo readers might be interested in the piece, which has just been published on the Online Opinion site My own piece, if you...
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Just popping in to my old home quickly to alert Troppo readers to a post on the Politics of Civility over at my new digs at LP . It's not a comment on recent controversies on these pages , but rather some reflection on how civility works politically in blogosphere debates, and...
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Moderating a group blog like Troppo, where both contributors and commenters possess a more diverse range of views than seems to be the norm in the blogosphere, is a challenging task. Sometimes (like now) it gets so tiresome I feel like walking away and leaving the zealots to t...
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Having apparently defeated the Trackback spammers with the (unsought but still welcome) assistance of Scott's domain host, we now seem to be under concerted attack by a renewed and virulent form of comment spam. At the moment it appears that MT blacklist doesn't delete thes sp...
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I got an email from the hosting company this morning alerting me to the amount of trackback spam and they have disabled the trackback script. I'm content to leave it off. Trackbacks are nice, but they are not worth the effort to keep afloat. It is a considerable pity that this...
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Ken's jumped the gun on me , so I may as well officially launch my new blog and declare it open! Troppo readers are of course very welcome visitors. And thanks everyone for all your kind words on my farewell post here .
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Is anyone surprised that Mark Bahnisch resisted his blogging addiction for approximately 1.5 seconds at his new digs ?
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Apparently left-leaning fact-checker extraordinaire and UNSW IT academic Tim Lambert is celebrating April Fool's day early, and has set up a mirror site of Tim Blair's blog . But there's a very real question of just who's the fool here. Naturally it's got all TB's RWDBs huffin...
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Bunyip's unlikely nemesis? Bloggers and spammers could be forced to put their names to political commentary in a bid to close a loophole in the nation's electoral laws. Roused by last year's furore over anonymous political websites such as www.johnhowardlies.com , the Howard G...
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A wise innkeeper never lets a bed get cold before renting the room to a new guest. So it is here at Troppo . Scarcely has Mark Bahnisch rubbed the sleep from his eyes and ventured out into the big bad world of blogging, than Nicholas Gruen leaps in between the armadillian shee...
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Or, Lapsing, then Lapsing into Solo-dom I think this will be my last post on Troppo . For some time, I've been thinking seriously about a number of conflicting impulses relating to my blogging life. For a start, I really need at this time to focus all my writing energies on my...
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One of my favourite bloggers, Phil Gomes over at Citystate has a very interesting reflection on the eclipse of op/ed columnists by bloggers - well worth reading . One of the constant bugbears of the blogosphere is the degree to which it's parasitic on mainstream media. Lately,...
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One of the nice things about blogging and teaching law is that the two often complement each other. Yesterday while searching for additional readings for my first year public law class I stumbled across the fact that legendary US federal judge and incredibly prolific " law and...
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Just eight days after she announced her retirement from blogging , to general and justified lamentations from her devoted readers, Gianna came back ! Yay! Welcome back, G! Why wasn't I told earlier???!!!!
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You'd get the impression from parts of the recent comments threads around this joint lately that Western civilisation is about to collapse if the shaky heteronormativity in schools isn't immediately reinforced. As a number of us have pointed out, though, there are real people...
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Trackback spam is coming in thick and fast this afternoon. As blogs' defences have eliminated much comment spam, this is the new spammers' method of choice. What's extremely outrageous is that some of the spam that Troppo has been reeling under appears to come from legitimate...
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One thing I share with Neo-Conservatives (and there aren't too many to put it very mildly) is a belief that politics is and ought to be about much more than the economy (though I deplore their economic irresponsibility). This insight, of course, is not original to Neo-Conserva...
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Frequent Troppo commenter and proprietrix of her own blog, yellowvinyl , who's a friend of mine, rang me today to let me know that she has cancer. She asked me to pass on her apologies for being testy in comments threads, which I'm sure are wholly unnecessary in any case. She'...
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I thoroughly enjoyed the Inaugural Brisvegas bloggers' meetup on Friday night. My first post-grogblog comment was at Mel Gregg's place and a round up of other attendees' posts can be found at the Meetup message board .
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Quick pitstop from the Toowong net cafe closest to Thesis land. Just wanted to remind people in Brizvegas of the grogblog at Ric's Bar tomorrow night - Troppo readers and commenters are most welcome. Also a plug for Funk for Tsunami at No. 12 in the Valley tonight - which a fr...
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As part of my work, I regularly read US periodicals such as The Public Interest and Foreign Affairs . The former is home to leading neo-cons, while the latter is more the house journal of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. Both are enormously influential in setting t...
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Looks like Troppo was right to place Saintinastraitjacket in the "centrist" category on the blogroll - he's done the Moral Politics Test and scored the perfectly centrist position . It's a better test than some, and one of the fun things is that you get compared with US Presid...
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Since, as we all now know, Troppo is home to lovers of literature, I'd urge you all to visit Catallaxy where two posts are of interest. Andrew discusses the importance of the opening line in written expression , which has led to some great examples in comments, and Jason has a...
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As a follow up to his last commentathon, which raised over 2k for the tsunami disaster relief fund, John Quiggin has opened another comments thread - this time he is donating $1 for every comment up to 1000 to Medecins Sans Frontieres , with a preference for the money to go to...
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As Mark Bahnisch observes below , the confected furore over Wayne Sawyer's silly editorial has now given federal Education Minister Brendon Nelson a pretext to launch an enquiry into teacher education. Readers will recall from multiple previous posts ( here and here and here )...
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We interrupt this blog temporalily to announce the first meeting (well, in a while) of the (grandiloquently titled) Brisbane Weblogger Meetup Group . We're meeting at Rics Bar in the Valley on Friday 25th at 6pm . Any visiting or resident bloggers, commenters or blog readers a...
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We're getting far too serious and polite here at Troppo. Something needs to be done about it. Other bloggers don't labour under the dead weight of deep civility, and this week has seen some vintage fearless and full-bodied opinions: Currency Lad (on abortion): In [ Emma ] Tom'...
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I've been doing some rearrangement of my life and working arrangements to reduce the time taken on my PhD to manageable proportions, without driving me crazy. I've now got til March 31st to submit the thing, and what I'm also doing is hiring an office in a suburban location wh...
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A Troppo Scoop* Troppo was the first to bring you news that Australia was discovered by Chinese Admiral Zheng He , and also broke the story that the Templars live in tunnels under Hertfordshire ... The true identity of "Nabakov" (pictured above, centre), the commenter who alwa...
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Mark Bahnisch continues to struggle valiantly against his blogging addiction, but with less than complete success. Instead of posting himself, he's started to send me emails suggesting topics for me to blog as a proxy!! In fairness, the topic in question involved Mark being un...
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Troppo has been getting its usual share of blog spam over the last week since I've been back on deck. The volume is substantially less than it was late last year, due to some magic "fixes" worked by our genial blog host Scott Wickstein, but it's still enough to be irritating....
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Not yet being reliably inspired by the blogging muse, I've instead been catching up with the rantings of others over the last couple of months of my semi-enforced Internet absence. I noticed that Mark B posted an item a few weeks ago in which he referred to Marx's immortal obs...
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[In Place of the Shorter Hendo] I'm off for a bit. I need to clear more time for focussing on the last stages of my thesis, and enjoyable as blogging is, something has to give. At least I won't have to read Hendo this week . Thanks very much to all those who reminded me of wha...
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...is now done. There are a lot of new blogs added to the leftish and centrist categories. 15 new leftish links and 4 centrist ones. It's interesting to note how many of the new blogs are written by women and also by people in their 20s. As opposed to us thirty something bloke...
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John Quiggin thinks that the left side of the blogosphere is a much more vibrant place than the right - a turnaround in John's view from when he first started blogging. I'm in the process of updating the Troppo blogroll - and most of the blogs I plan to add are leftish or cent...
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Keks has announced the results of the 2005 Australian Blog Awards . Troppo won in two categories - best Australian Collaborative Blog and Best Northern Territory Blog (this year there was some competition). Congrats to all the other winners and runners up - including Troppo fr...
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I see the results of the Australian Blog Awards have just been published at Keks (Vlado). Troppo Armadillo did quite well, despite the fact that I didn't even know the awards existed and therefore missed the opportunity to engage in surreptitious lobbying or vote-stacking. Tro...
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...comes Chris Sheil at BackPages , with a momentary Friday night return to blogging to endorse Ruddy for leader (and Julia for Rudder if there's a Deputy spill) with the persuasive argument and fine political reasoning that made BackPages the doyen of blogosphere political co...
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My name's Mark and I'm a blogoholic. Well, I'm not drinking any grog, have just decided to change the "go out once a week" rule to "don't go anywhere except to Coles or the Uni library", and progress is happening on finalising my PhD thesis for submission . But not enough, and...
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If anyone's still having difficulties posting a comment, it's probably because of an issue to do with the way your firewall interacts with our site. Please refer to this thread for information as to how to configure your settings to avoid this issue. As is well known, Troppo i...
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And Other ALP Leadership News Nic White at The 52nd State has helpfully compiled votes in the blogosphere primary for ALP leader. So far Gilly's got 6 bloggers backing her, the Beazer 3, Rudd 3, anyone but Beazley 1, and "never voting ALP again" 1. Elsewhere on the net, Margo...
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After John Quiggin set a useful precedent with his commentathon to raise money for Tsunami aid, Gianna at She Sells Sanctuary has announced that she'll donate the proceeds of her blog ads to Tsunami relief. Good one, Gianna!
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Rob Corr at Kick & Scream has come up with a good argument for Gillard as leader - unlike Henri IV, for her, Paris isn't worth a mass. She's got some convictions.
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While voting is underway for the 2005 Australian Blog Awards , news surfaces about another award. For sexiest RWDB . ELSEWHERE : Visit Darlene's place , to learn why this award might constitute objectification of RWDBs.
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The Currency Lad has returned , and is supporting the Tractarian Ticket for the ALP leadership... Welcome back to blogging, C.L. To commemorate this event, Troppo is happy to unveil a blogosphere exclusive - a candid snap of Currency pondering his next post taken by one of our...
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John Quiggin is offering to donate one Australian dollar for every comment on this post at his site until midnight tonight to the Australian Red Cross tsunami appeal ... Click on the hyperlink, go over there and post a comment now! At the time of writing, John has received 209...
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While Troppo Armadillo has pioneered a new form of direct democracy through its advice to the Labor Party to pick either 1. Julia 2. Rudd for Rudder (thanks, FXH) or the other way round, the blogosphere primary is now well and truly off and running. Staying at home first, blog...
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Many of us will always remember the election campaign of 04 through the lens of frequent late night visits to BackPages . So, this tidbit from an article on the internet and democracy is interesting indeed: Most blogs languish in obscurity but some give rise to new media perso...
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With a bit of encouragement from her friends , frequent Troppo commenter yellowvinyl has turned blogger. Her blog, also called yellowvinyl , should be one to watch. Good luck, Kim!
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Mark at his Doctoral Graduation I'm slowly finding my way around the Brisbane blogosphere. It's very random - we don't appear to have the same sort of community that exists in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. Or at least if there is one, I can't find it. As I reported earlier , I...
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The Evil Pundit, baiter of left-wing bloggers everywhere, writes This applies to people using Norton Internet Security, Norton Personal Firewall , or similar software firewall products. For people who use this, the default privacy settings on the firewall will prevent posting...
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Some commenters have reported that it's not possible currently to post comments. I'm extremely grateful to Evil Pundit for a possible diagnosis of what's gone wrong. Please read the comments on this thread if you're having any difficulties. Unfortunately, I'm no technical guru...
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Tim Dunlop at Road to Surfdom has the latest info well summarised. UPDATE : I'm happy to join Tim, Phil and Rowen in commending the Prime Minister for his handling of this issue and the extent of Australia's commitment to Indonesia .
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It's time to vote in the 2005 Australian Blog Awards .
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The number of right-wing blogs I read has just dropped from one to none. Sadly for the blogosphere, The Currency Lad is taking a blogging hiatus to work on finishing a book and a new research project. We'll miss you, C.L., you were always worth reading - a fine writer, very fu...
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The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Francisco de Goya, 1746-1828 One of the nice things about blogging is the feeling of camaraderie and collegiality that you get. One of the not so nice things about writing a thesis is that you feel almost necessarily isolated. So I was ab...
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Or, The Thesis That Ate January Just a quick entry to let people know that my blogging activity will be a bit sparse for a while while I bring my PhD thesis to a state warranting submission. Rejigged bits of the thesis may pop up from time to time, and I'm really grateful for...
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I hope all Troppo writers and readers have a wonderful 2005. May all your resolutions be kept and all your hopes be fulfilled. No doubt it will be a good year for the Australian blogosphere. It's nice to be able to welcome back Georg , formerly of Psephite , who's returned wit...
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I concur wholeheartedly with Scott's condolences for those affected by the terrible tsunamis. I've posted the links for readers in Scott's thread, but I'll repeat the post here of some links to bloggers advising of appeals which can be accessed online as well, as it's easier t...
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Terrible earthquake in Indonesia has claimed an estimated 14,000 lives although it is quite possible that this number could climb much higher. See Tim Blair for many links about what is going on. There are estimated to be close to 6,000 Australians in the affected areas. If yo...
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Revellers on a Hot Hill End Night That's me in the middle. I don't normally wear Hawaiian shirts but it's a good troppo look. Well, all the presents are bought and only the grog remains (though I made a start on the bubbles on my partner's back deck last night relaxing with a...
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Just popped by to wish everyone a Merry Christmas etc. Jen and I have been doing battle with swimming pool installation and assorted other home establishment tasks, while Telstra finally informed me the other day that we can't get ADSL at our new home because it's on a "rim" a...
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Tim Blair has put together some of the quotes of 2004. The year's nearly over. But the Currency Lad is writing some fine stuff as well. Me? I'm stuffing my face, and drinking lots of beer etc. Writing? Pfft.. I'll be back sometime after Christmas, but before New Year. Merry Ch...
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At last, some insight into why John Quiggin is a Professor (I mean apart from all those publications, research projects etc...). New research has shown that academic promotions often go to the hirsute . ELSEWHERE : I missed my daily dose of Prof. Quiggin for a week or so, due...
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I've been keeping an eye on the nominations for the 2005 Australian Blog Awards . Good thing too. Courtesy of one of the nominations for Troppo (thanks everyone!), I discovered a fellow Brisvegas Blogger, Observant Little... , and one with good music taste and a shared fondnes...
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Via Kick & Scream , I've just learned that the home-grown 2005 Australian Blog Awards have called for nominations. Interesting to note that Evil Pundit has already been nominated... I'm still wondering why he hates Sweden so much...
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Or, Yet Another Troppo Contest At Fafblog , the Medium Lobster has a post which begins: You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when you look down and see a tortoise. This is standard procedure, designed and developed to protect you and the homeland. Do not be alarmed:...
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Brett Whiteley's ghost haunts BackPages In the week that a ghost fetched $65000 on Ebay , something spooky is also happening in the Australian blogosphere. It's not quite the face of ET in a piece of breakfast cereal, or the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast, but it's definitely...
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Comments boxes not working? You might be using crap software. Thanks to ace technical consultant boynton , I learn that the cause of the comments box thing being forbidden is that users are using Internet Explorer! Oh, the shame! Get Real. Get Firefox! Of course, if you MUST u...
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Many readers will have noticed that pressing the comments button will produce a 'forbidden' message. This is happening across the domain. I do not know why this is happening (it is not happening for me- everything seems fine here.) However, if this is happening for you, a way...
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Courtesy of Melbourne blogger Alex at Psephological Catechism (whose honours thesis on St Augustine looks to be really interesting), this news just in for Troppo readers. A Google search for the string fetishised armadillo only yields two results. And one is a link to a post b...
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Brisvegas residents or visitors might like to note that the Straight Out of Brisbane Festival has an event on tonight which could appeal to anyone with a predilection to (occasional) ranting: 6-8pm :: The great ideas rant-off :: Venue :: Festival Club Speakers OUT, Ranters IN....
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According to the US publishers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary , the most frequently searched word on their online site this year has been "blog" ... It's interesting to note that in an election year, five of the other nine words were political terms (eg "electoral", "sovere...
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For anyone who might be idly curious about my continuing blogging absence, here's an update. Jen and I have moved successfully into our new home, and we're very comfortable. We're even getting a pool installed starting tomorrow, a week ahead of schedule. So we'll be swimming b...
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Or, The End of Empire Part Two John Quiggin has an excellent take on the US Imperial overstretch I commented on in an earlier post .
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There is a good review in the Guardian by Simon Waldman of Dan Gillmor's new book on the impact of blogging on journalism , We The Media . And the Guardian is also raising the profile of the British blogosphere for its readership with a competition for the Best British Blog ....
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Nightmares including SQL databases crashing, and the like. UPDATE- Everything seems to be back to normal. The SQL part of the server crashed, and I had to remember to repair the database. Once I did that, everything worked, except for Troppo, which required a rebuild. To see h...
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Over at Kick & Scream , Rob Corr's commenters kick around the idea of another non RWDB-centric Australian Blog Award. Rob also has some interesting thoughts on bloggers and commenters meeting in "real life". I'd be interested in hearing Troppo readers' perspective on this. Do...
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Today is moving day, when Ken and Jen move into the new nest we've been preparing. The removalists are due at Jen's place at 7am, and at my joint some indeterminate time later to move the piano and the rest of my worldly goods for the third time in 12 months (aaagh). I'll prob...
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Now is the time to submit your nomination for Best Australian Blog . Apparently, according to Jess at Ausculture , Tim Blair wins every year. Will this poll break the run of the 'coalition of the willing'? UPDATE: David Tiley advises us in comments below of another Best Austra...
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I have just spent the last hour deleting and rebuilding over 400 spam comments that came in a wave just after midnight. I'm trying to watch the soccer, not hacking away with this blog all night. But it only took that long because the server was belching under the assault. Once...
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Sad day. Christopher Sheil has given up blogging , at least for six months or so while he finishes writing a book. The blogosphere will be a less interesting place without him. Chris and I didn't always see eye-to-eye (to put it fairly mildly), but he is an unfailingly thought...
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The months of October and November are sometimes referred to as suicide season in Darwin. Even when, like me, you're having too much fun to consider such a drastic solution for existential angst, the unremitting humidity still breeds rampant crutch rot while the screeching of...
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Observant and long-time readers will certainly have noticed "spam" comments popping up frequently in Troppo's "most recently commented posts" sidebar. I say "observant" readers because the spam never lasts very long. I delete it as soon as I see it, and that's always within an...
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As readers will see from the post immediately below, Sophie Masson has joined the growing team of Troppo bloggers. She probably won't have time to blog very frequently, being a busy working author and occasional op-ed pundit in the daily press, Quadrant and elsewhere. I'll pos...
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This comment a few minutes ago by the aptly nick-named "fool" is fairly typical of comments on very old Troppo posts. Comments on old posts are almost always either blog spam or moronic (and sometimes both). In fact, the entire Ubersportingpundit empire (including Troppo ) has...
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As readers will notice from the post immediately below, Mark Bahnisch has joined the ever-growing team of Troppo bloggers. Mark is employed at QUT as a sociologist, has a first class honours degree in Industrial Relations from Griffith and a Graduate Diploma in Industrial Rela...
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To help readers get a bit of perspective and rise above the depression or elation of the election outcome, I thought I'd draw attention to an interesting post by Andrew Leigh of Imagining Australia (the blog rather than the book), where he nominated the three best things Austr...
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As you can see from the post immediately below, Don Arthur has joined the Troppo blogging mob. Don is a longstanding stop-and-start blogger, due to the demands of employment and postgraduate study and research. His most recent blog is here , but Don found he was unable to upda...
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When US television network CBS presented explosive political documents without enquiring too closely as to their actual credibility, they unleashed a firestorm from US bloggers who quickly identified the documents as fakes. Soon enough, the ferment from political bloggers spre...
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Quite a few election blogs have sprung into existence recently. Here's a list of the ones of which I'm currently aware: Peter Brent's Mumble election site (ongoing psephology focus, in operation for some considerable time) William Bowe's The Poll Bludger Matt Liddy's Poll Vaul...
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Sometimes Troppo comment boxes attract very strange visitors .
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The Currency Lad is one of the more entertaining right wing bloggers around the place, mostly eschewing moronic RWDB thuggery in favour of piercing leftie pretensions by more gentle and effective methods. His take on Mark Latham's silly " ease the squeeze " line is a neat exam...
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Online Opinion e-journal (run by Graham Young and Hugh Brown) has recently implemented a feature called The Domain , which provides a one-stop shop page displaying excerpts from and links to new posts on a range of prominent Australian political blogs including Troppo . It app...
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Stan from South Pacific Federation Project has emailed me with a query about copyright and use of other people's material on blogs. Copyright isn't my specialist area (see Kim Weatherall's blog if you want someone who really knows about this area), but I have a basic working k...
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As readers may have noticed, the "10 most recently-commented posts" sidebar feature is broken (blank). I don't know why. I suspect it's some sort of corruption of Scott's MT installation, because it won't allow me to rebuild the main index template to fix the problem. I've sen...
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This story won't please Professor Bunyip , whose third greatest pleasure in life (after castigating Phillip Adams for alleged serial plagiarism, and futilely fantasising about fornicating with firm young female flesh) is ridiculing the commercial acumen of Fairfax boss Fred Hi...
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One of the many great things about the blogosphere is that when you get bored with the political stuff (as I am at the moment - I can't even be bothered reading it let alone writing about it), there are usually more intimate posts to read and ponder. And some of them are very...
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Darp Hau's blog is another one I've just stumbled across as a result of his posting a comment about rugby. He's another depressed, besieged fellow Manly fan. And yet another blogger who's been banned by the lovely Andrea Harris, the obergrupenfuhrer at Tim Blair's blog. Darp h...
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Re-arranging my blogroll has been a mixed blessing. The good part of it has been that several new-ish bloggers have been induced to post comments, and I've discovered their existence as a result. All have been added to the Troppo blogroll, because that's my policy: - I want it...
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The Troppo blogroll was getting far too long and intimidating for comfortable use. Accordingly I've decided to revert to a previous organisational principle, namely listing blogs in rough ideological sub-divisions. Along with the individual description tags attached to each hy...
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Margo Kingston's Web Diary is a bizarre, eclectic and idiosyncratic publication, mostly with a tiresomely left-wing bias. And Margo herself is a strange creature to say the least. I often find her journalistic efforts shrill and irrational. But a long article by Margo in today...
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As others have no doubt noticed too, the Gravett Right Wing Death Beast Blog Empire has been off the air most of the time for the last fortnight or so. For this lover of blog bile, that leaves a yawning gap in my daily blog browsing. What with Tim Blair being away somewhere in...
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Al Bundy waxing lyrical from current bitter experience on the qualities necessary for public service promotion in Canberra (or, I would add, anywhere else): These people know 'superior performers' when they hear of one over their prawn toasts at a cocktail party. They're not a...
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Yesterday I mentioned Tim Dunlop's post on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme aspects of the Free Trade Agreement as telling us everything we need to know on the subject. But Chris Sheil's post is even better. What's more, most of the meaty detail and analysis of the pros and...
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Needing a break from endless administrative and student support tasks generated by CDU's embarrassingly successful external law degree program, but lacking the energy to write anything original. Here's a mini-race-around of the blogs: Tim Dunlop has a long post setting out jus...
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Since I'm making insomniac posts that technically breach my resolution to have a holiday from blogging while finding and re-inserting my dummy, I thought it might be a good idea to explain the origin of the blog title "Troppo Armadillo" to readers. The "Troppo" bit is easy eno...
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A change is as good as a holiday, they say. But a change and a holiday as well is even better. Non-abusive feedback on the new style is welcome.
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My mum always used to say: " If you can't say anything nice about someone, don't say anything at all ." Mind you, that was usually after she'd made a decent hole in the cooking sherry, verbally knifed just about every neighbour and relative she had, and was looking for a way t...
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(via Al Bundy) Currency Lad , a frequent, well read and provocative poster at this and other blogs, has launched out in his own right and started a solo blog. And not before time. He's a welcome addition to the blogosphere, and can be expected to vex the left of the 'sphere on...
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Sam "Yobbo" Ward doesn't think much of Qantas. But he probably should thank his lucky stars that Aeroflot isn't our national airline: Two crew members on a domestic Aeroflot flight beat up a passenger who had complained that the flight attendants were drunk, airline spokeswoma...
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Don Arthur's recent blogging comeback has stimulated a flowering of creativity, at least on the left of the blogosphere. As Tim Dunlop's Blogjam roundup seems to be on holiday while Margo promotes her new anti-Howard book (which I haven't been tempted to buy or read), I though...
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Kept out of bed by rampant insomnia, I've finally finished my long-delayed project of adding description tags to all the blogroll links in the right column. I was more or less shamed into it by John Quiggin's generous mention of TA on last night's Sandy McCutcheon Australia Ta...
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Jen and I are going away for a few days into the tourist-infested wilds of Kakadu. Not all that wild, actually; we're staying in four star comfort at the Gagudju Crocodile Hotel at Jabiru. It seems that our roughing it in a swag days are over. We'll be back Thursday night, but...
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This post at The Spin Starts Here would be a worthy recipient of a Blog Bile Award next time it's up for adjudication. It's also a fairly convincing demonstration of the decline of civility (a phenomenon never evident here at Troppo , where the worst social sin we ever commit...
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I've added a couple more blogs to the Troppo blogroll: Ambit Gambit , a blog associated with Graham Young's Online Opinion ezine (sorry Gianna), and Andjam . I'll be keeping a very regular eye on Ambit Gambit , because I have a high regard for Graham Young's qualities as a pol...
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It's taken me a while to identify a sufficiently worthy winner of the Blog Bile Award . But Paul from Paul and Carl's Daily Diatribe has come up with this little beauty about a German-made doco on "the horrors of America's brutal treatment of prisoners and heartless war crimes...
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A couple of commenters have asked what is going on with the beastiality links in various comment boxes. Presumably they haven't been paying attention to the fact that (apparently) most blogs running on a Moveable Type or similar platform are now subject to periodic attack by b...
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Sam "Yobbo" Ward has put in a blatantly self-serving bid to win this week's Blog Bile Award by republishing substantial extracts from his previous anti-West Coast Eagles rant under the guise of a new rant against just retired Weagles player Glen Jakovich . Despite the arguably...
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I'm thinking about instituting a "Blog Bile of the Week" award for the most impassioned, hate-filled blog rant, where the author makes no attempt whatever at balance or objectivity. After all, blogging isn't academic writing, so why even try to maintain a semblance of detachme...
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I'm getting increasingly pissed off by the spam porn "comments" appearing on Troppo Armadillo , especially because it seems the spammers have now decided to target us every day, and with a particularly nasty type of spam (beastiality, incest etc). We're now getting 10 or more...
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I think I'm finally sufficiently motivated to be bothered implementing the MT-Blacklist feature to block the increasing number of spam "comments" appearing on Troppo Armadillo . My current best intention is to begin entering IP addresses in the Blacklist starting next time a w...
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I had an overpowering urge to waste a bit of time this afternoon, so I've begun re-instating the blogroll labels which were a feature of my previous blog The Parish Pump . I've only reached the beginning of the "C's" so far, because it's fairly time-consuming. Hover your curso...
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Gummo's back , irascible and funny as ever. I wonder where he's been? Read his comeback post or I'll job ya!
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Just now I followed the Trackback link at the bottom of my Political Pooftah Bashing post immediately below, and found myself at Tim Dunlop's place . It was a fortuitous visit because, as well as kindly linking my post, Tim has just published a fantastic and fairly extended an...
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Paul and Carl are a couple of self-styled "hideous curmudgeons" whose views are well to the right of this armadillo (I might conceivably sound a tad similar by the time I'm their age, although not if "B" is around to take the piss out of some of my more pretentious opinionated...
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The blogspammers seem to have found a new and even more cunning way to post unsolicited advertising. They've found a way to post "comments" that aren't displayed in the Moveable Type editing screen, so that you can't easily delete them. See the "comment" by "Hospital" to Geoff...
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I thought about blogging on a particularly moronic bleeding heart leftie post by The Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony about the East Timor/Australia maritime boundary issue. And I contemplated discussing Michael Costello's excellent article about the US/Australia Free Trade Ag...
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(via Jason Soon ). Legendary leftie (and sometime linguistics scholar) Noam Chomsky now has a blog! Jason has also unearthed several other noteworthy blogs, including a leftie one titled Cyborg Democracy (can anyone tell me what a 'non-anthropocentric personhood theorist' is?)...
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If you look to your right, you should notice that I've finally gotten around to updating the Troppo Armadillo blogroll for the first time in six months or so. As far as I know, I've updated the addresses of everyone who's moved premises in that time. I've also added quite a fe...
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Being currently much more focussed on pleasures of the flesh than those of the mind, the prospect of my producing a fertile stream of blog posts in the immediate future is fairly remote. In the circumstances, I can't help wondering aloud what's happened to my fellow Armadillos...
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The cosmic echoes of April Fool's Day continue to reverberate, through blogosphere and mainstream media alike. Gianna has begun posting cute baby photos of newborn Harley , prompting Sedgwick to speculate on his parentage and implicate, wait for it, John Quiggin !! He seems to...
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It's well over-time to acknowledge Tim Dunlop's spectacular blogging achievement in undertaking an in-depth, multiple part review of former White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror . Tim combines his book r...
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TA's "Most recently commented posts" list has mysteriously disappeared overnight. Buggered if I know why. The code is still there and intact in the main index template, as far as I can see, but the list itself isn't. When I try rebuilding the site, I get an error message when...
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Gianna still hasn't dropped her sprog, but blogs a great little vignette about a nosey, attention-seeking neighbour. Paul Watson's last 3 posts don't mention Generation X even once!!! Could he be losing that chip on the shoulder, I wonder? Somehow I doubt it. Meika the Doleblu...
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I wonder what's happened to all the other armadillos?? No-one else has posted in yonks. I'm up to my eyeballs in uni administration work at CDU. It turns out we have 100 new first year external students where we had estimated 60!! It's a nice dilemma to have in the long run, b...
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I see the blog spammers are busily attacking TA yet again (and other bloggers as well e.g. John Quiggin). I've deleted most (but not quite all) of the spam comments, but unfortunately had to delete a couple of genuine ones as well to shorten the process. I have no idea how to...
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I thought I should post a brief Christmas message; if it's good enough for the Queen it's good enough for me. May all loyal Troppo readers (and even the disloyal ones) have a happy Christmas and a peaceful New Year. It won't surprise readers to learn that I don't expect to be...
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Rather than getting carried away and actually doing some substantive posting, I've tackled the rapidly shrinking index page of Troppo Armadillo by editing the preferences in Moveable Type to display 12 days of posts instead of only seven. Nevertheless, I'm rather hoping that G...
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Every Thursday night at around 8pm the same questions occur to me. Was John Clark actually as funny as I remember when he was Fred Dagg? Or were those sketches just as utterly devoid of humour as his 7.30 Report stuff with Brian Daw? Or do comedians lose their bite when they'r...
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As Roop Sandhu decided to post his first piece to TA before I woke up this morning, and Wendy James left hers until after I'd left for work, it's only now that I've found time to post their respective biographical sketches (after prioritising appropriately and watching The All...
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Stan Gudgeon has trained his beady, jaundiced bunyip eye on leftie econo-blogger John Quiggin: Being of the left, it goes without saying that John Quiggin is an enemy of pleasure -- at least those that don't involve curtailing the not-good-for-you joys of others. The focus of...
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The worst thing about failing to post anything on the blog for a week or more is that just about the only messages I now get in my home email inbox are Nigerian business proposals and marginally premature attempts to persuade me to buy some Viagra. Meanwhile, Sam "Yobbo" Ward...
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Chris Sheil reckons I'm having a "post-50 funk/sulk-out ". He might be right, although there's stuff going on in my life at present that's a bit more significant than that (at least from my subjective viewpoint) and arguably not related per se to being 50. However they're even...
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Keeping a blog gives you a glimmer of insight into what it must be like to produce a daily current affairs program on radio or TV. Finding enough fresh and interesting material to put to air can be problematic on slow news days. Of course, blogs aren't really like that, in tha...
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After persistent shaming by Mark Gallagher , I've finally gotten around to implementing some code he supplied that creates permalinks at the foot of all comment box contributions. People will now be able to create hyperlinks directly to specific comments published on Troppo Ar...
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This post is an experiment in audio-blogging (or oral blogging) using streaming audio. Click here to listen. You'll need to download and instal the latest version of Windows Media Player (free download) to be able to listen in "streaming" format (i.e. without waiting for the e...
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It's not often that I agree wholeheartedly with flaming pink blogger Rob Schaap, but I have no hesitation in endorsing just about every word of his fine post on great Aussie blunders (responding to Gummo Trotsky's contest ). Does this mean I'm lurching to the left as I approac...
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John Quiggin answers the question "Are blogs chatrooms?" with the obvious response: NO. But he also inserts a throwaway asserton that: Political blogs like this one are intended as competion for mass media such as newspapers, and have had at least some success in this role. Sp...
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I thought I should post a belated apology for the lack of bloggage from this armadillo over the last several days. I've just been flat out like a lizard/armadillo drinking. Fortunately the co-armadillos have maintained an admirable flow of challenging posts. I'll post a commen...
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This post is just an exercise in housekeeping, intended to provide short biographical details (and in some cases photos) of the Troppo Armadillo blogging semi-co-operative. The biographies are mercifully short, although they may still tell you more than you really want to know...
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Years of bitter experience have taught me that if you don't blow your own trumpet, it's fairly rare that anyone else will do it on your behalf. As readers may recall, a couple of months ago Tim Dunlop wrote an excellent analytical article about blogging for the Evatt Foundatio...
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Professor Bunyip has been notably AWOL from the blogosphere over the last week or so. However, his bile has obviously been quietly but ominously building up volcanic pressure during the hiatus, and today it burst forth in a spectacularly dazzling virtuoso spray against his fav...
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(Via Gummo Trotsky ) Big Western Benito is an Aussie ex-pat blogger who recently arrived in the Solomons, apparently on an extended stay. It's fortuitous given that his arrival coincided with that of the Australian-led peacekeeping contingent. Benito's blog is certainly one to...
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Tony the Teacher doesn't think much of "Kasey Chamber-pot ", who he accuses of "inflicting on us the worst, most whiney, most tuneless, most irritating song in living memory". I certainly agree "Am I Pretty Enough?" is a first rate puke-inducing shocker, but the worst in livin...
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I've just discovered through following blogroll links on Tubagooba that its author Dan is part of what may well be Australia's first (almost) complete blogging family. As well as Dan (whose surname appears to be Gordon), Dan's brother Angus also publishes a blog (a shiny new T...
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The running feud between Christopher Sheil and Norman Hanscombe is really getting quite out of hand IMO, and spoiling everyone's enjoyment of what could otherwise be challenging and worthwhile debates. I don't intend to censor or ban anyone from this site because it's against...
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The post below this one introduces Stephen Hill as an occasional member of the Troppo Armadillo motley crew. Stephen published his own witty, elegant blog "Rambling Man" until fairly recently, but found the time demands unsustainable because of tertiary study/research commitme...
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Yesterday's post Australia's worst government? generated one of the longest, most entertaining and occasionally incisive comment threads I can remember on Troppo Armadillo . Comment no. 54 by lapsed cultural blogger Stephen Hill is one of my favourites. Stephen manages to sust...
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If there's one aspect of the identity of the mysterious Professor Bunyip about which we can be completely confident, it's the fact that he really is a parent of teenage children. Only another fellow sufferer could have written this : The real surprise about teenagers isn't tha...
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There are times when Tex's earthy blogging style really suits an issue perfectly. This is one of them .
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The blogger behind the amusingly named in de-nial has taken blogging anonymity to new heights. S/he doesn't even adopt a pseudonym as far as I can see. I think I'll refer to him/her as Floating Baby Moses, because I suspect this will be a blog I'll be mentioning frequently. FB...
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It isn't just bloggers who rely heavily on the Google search engine, it seems. Ian Firns , the Perth-based Newcastle University contract lecturer who uncovered the fact that 30% of his Malaysian students had plagiarised large slabs of their assignments by copying and pasting f...
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Posting has been light from me for the last few days because it's been crunch time for NTU Law School's new external law degree program, for whose implementation the Dean and Head of School made me responsible, not least because I've touted it unmercifully for the last 3 years...
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I finally got so irritated with myself that I twisted my own arm behind my back and updated the Troppo Armadillo blogroll!! I've tried to be as inclusive as possible, linking all Australian bloggers who can be described even vaguely as "political". If your blog isn't listed, i...
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Gummo Trotsky has a truly inspired post on why libertarians dislike yum cha! Scott Wickstein spares no sympathy for OzTaliban David Hicks. I agree, but I certainly don't agree that the Americans are justified in depriving him of basic civil rights (like legal representation of...
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A reminder that the " 29 bullshit expressions in a single sentence " contest remains open until Friday afternoon. The contest has already attracted some quality entries, the last from William Burroughs' Baboon, who is himself about to initiate a new contest where contestants m...
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Readers not yet in the tertiary stages of Alzheimer's Disease will recall that a couple of months ago I conducted a contest where comment box participants were invited to nominate how long Tim Blair could last without mentioning his bete noire Margo Kingston . Sadly, all my re...
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Web design genius (and my former blog landlord) Mark Gallagher has kindly provided me with the code allowing comment boxes to be resized by users just like any other Window (by using the maximise icon at top right). It's a feature Ron Mead requested, and his wish was our comma...
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Caroline Baum had an interesting piece in the Weekend Age dealing with the stresses fiction authors may place on personal relationships when they use thinly-disguised friends or acquaintances as fodder for a novel or short story. As a blogger who occasionally pens "vignettes"...
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I see that Bright Cold Matt and James Russell are both in despair about the blogosphere in the wake of the Tim versus Tim blog wars. Matt's reaction is especially understandable, because it was a fairly innocuous post of his musing about Delta Goodrem and the nature of celebri...
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You'll see from a glance at the sidebar that I've implemented a "Most recently commented posts" category, using code kindly supplied by John Quiggin . Like John, I'm hoping that this innovation will tend to promote more considered, reflective comment box debate over an extende...
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Bailz has a truly inspired take on Channel 9's The National Driving Test 2003 , aired earlier this week. I confess I didn't bother watching it, because it was compered by Eddie McGuire, who I find about as talented as a brick wall. As it turned out, I suspect Bailz's take on t...
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The elegant and erudite Gianna is the latest (and second last, I'm told) blogger to be granted refuge by that great blogospherical philanthropist Scott Wickstein . What with Boynton et al , the Ubersportingpundit empire may well be the only part of the blogosphere to achieve s...
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Many apologies to readers that this blog has been effectively out of operation for several hours. We haven't been able to post articles; in fact I lost a very long one I'd been working on for over an hour, which made me very happy indeed. Readers also haven't been able to post...
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The BlogGeist seems to be in fine form at the moment. Like yours truly, Uberleftie blogger Rob Schaap has posted an item which shamelessly exploits sex. In contrast to mine, however, Rob's piece has a certain passing intellectual elegance. PS - Rob also pays out on Frog post-m...
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I see that the esteemed Bernard Slattery has joined the ranks of bloggers granted protection visas by Troppo Armadillo's warm-hearted host Scott Wickstein . And in contrast to Phillip Ruddock , cash donations are not required. I'm also given to understand that another prodigio...
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Perry De Havilland (via Stephen Dawson on Libertarians ) has a strange little post on Samizdata , asserting that blogging should be seen as a marketplace rather than a democratic conversation space. The reasoning seems to flow from the extreme libertarian/neo-liberal viewpoint...
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As you'll notice from the entry immediately below, Christopher Sheil has joined the co-blogger team at Troppo Armadillo . As many readers will be aware, Chris has been a frequent and valued comment box contributor to numerous blogs over the last couple of months, and I thought...
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What do you do if you're a university student and you've just finished 2 poorly researched, sloppily written undergraduate essays, neither of which contains even a modicum of critical or analytical thought? Go to the pub and drown your sorrows? Hit the books and start studying...
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Professor Bunyip is at his sardonic best this morning.
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Meika the dolebludger on belonging, alienation and "the system": To refuse to blame the system is to assume a certain power, the way a pretender assumes a royal title or titular duchy or two. Curiously you are more likely to gain employment in the system if you lie about this...
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Go to Tim Blair's blog , take the "dodginess" quiz and post your score in Tim's comment box. I was only moderately dodgy, as befits a centrist, at 7 years prison and a 7,500 pound fine. Of course, they were mostly committed when I was young and silly (as opposed to middle-aged...
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You might notice that I've deleted the hit counter Scott stuck in my new template. It was irritating me. Nevertheless, we seemed to be running at around 400 hits per day, which is quite respectable in all the circumstances. many thanks to all the bloggers who plugged Troppo Ar...
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I apologise to long-suffering Troppo Armadillo readers for the recurring blog access problems experienced today. I must have done something truly appalling to anger the gods of cyberspace to this extent. Being a daily visitor to James Russell's Hot Buttered Death , a fellow re...
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I see that Jozef Imrich is also back and blogging after a fairly lengthy hiatus. Jozef has a mostly European focus, combining literary with political interests. Jozef picked up on the same article on academic blogging from Chronicle of Higher Education that I mentioned yesterd...
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(Via Jack Balkin ) The Chronicle of Higher Education has a feature on academic bloggers . It has a strongly American focus (being a US journal), but is well worth reading. A sample: Mr. Balkin sees this openness and pluralism as a rebuke to the argument posited by Cass Sunstei...
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I see Scott Wickstein has announced the resurrection of Troppo Armadillo. It might have been better to wait until there was something resembling actual readable content, but que sera sera. Many thanks to Scott for granting a protection visa to this cyberspace asylum seeker, an...
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