Czesław Miłosz is a Polish writer and Nobel Laureate who first came to Western attention in the early 1950s with the publication of The Captive Mind one of the earliest exposes of the nightmare of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe following WWII. He had not been in the Commu...

Continue reading →

Standards: continued from Part One . [caption id="attachment_35719" align="aligncenter" width="270"] Why is this man smiling?[/caption] I. Introduction Why is this man smiling? He's smiling because he is Charles Francis Richter and he came up with the Richter scale. And if you...

Continue reading →

We have a broken process for evaluating costly government investments. The evolving plan for an underground railway through Melbourne's middle suburbs reminds us that we need something better. The Victoria government is currently in the early stages of building what would like...

Continue reading →

I. Introduction Some prefer iPhones. Others prefer Android. These are the two standards left standing for what only old guys call smartphones. 'Standards wars' like this have arisen throughout history. No doubt readers can provide examples back to the ancient world, but the sw...

Continue reading →

I The university is one of the finest creations of European culture. Alas, as a troublesome fellow once said, all that is solid melts into air. I’m a bit shy of attributing things to a single cause. These things tend to built up over many, many decades. But certainly what migh...

Continue reading →

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpKGzulGikQ Reading the publicity for this new book I remembered a name — pathologist Colin Manock — thinking it had been at the centre of some deliberations here some time ago. I was right — it had . I reproduce the relevant column from the arc...

Continue reading →

https://youtu.be/cRhlvHQ0MWY Here's a podcast I did a few weeks ago which has garnered more reaction from people than any I’ve done before. That may just be because (as it turned out) I played cat and mouse with the listener by the podcast talking to an essay I'd written that...

Continue reading →

[caption id="attachment_35644" align="alignleft" width="1163"] For anyone who’s interested I recommend David Cayley’s series of CBC radio documentaries on Illich. (He’s the best broadcaster I’ve come across). The first series of five programs focuses on Illich’s social thought...

Continue reading →