Club Troppo

Well the ABC God bless its cotton socks can't quite bring itself to mount videos that can be embedded elsewhere - or I can't see a way to do it, but they did a great story on Kaggle tonight - so I thought I'd post it here. Just click here and all will be revealed. Update: some...

Continue reading →

Yesterday's gathering of angry redneck opponents of the Gillard carbon tax on the lawns of Parliament House scored the sort of blanket MSM coverage its organisers wanted. Actual political significance appears to have little connection with electronic media decisions on what st...

Continue reading →

In the American Scholar, George Watson writes about the forgotten Churchill -- the Liberal who helped lay the foundations for Britain's welfare state. Churchill was president of the Board of Trade in the Asquith government -- a Liberal government that favoured free trade, a mo...

Continue reading →

I ran into this excerpt from Q&A a day or so ago and it struck me. I'm actually not sympathetic to the general wailing and gnashing of teeth from the left about how right wing terrorists come out of intemperate language on the right. On the other hand Alan Jones did actually i...

Continue reading →

Most 'shouts' for movies - those quotes you see promoting movies have the quoted person saying something like "plumbs the depths of human emotion" or whatever. A 1974 film by left wing Italian feminist Lina Wertmulla, had this 'shout' on the Walhalla poster that hung in our li...

Continue reading →

The recent debate over Matt Yglesias' 'left neoliberalism' reminded me what an ambiguous term neoliberalism is. There are at least five political movements or schools of thought that are called neoliberal. While they are distinguishable, they are not entirely separate. Accordi...

Continue reading →

HT: Skeptic Lawyer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SHKhvVjLIc&feature=player_embedded

Continue reading →

ASIC, one of our main financial markets regulators, has today declared that short-selling is a "legitimate business in the market" . Good on them. Markets need short-sellers, far more than most people realise. The reason is that financial markets are markets in ideas - ideas a...

Continue reading →

A modest proposal for debt ceiling reform: It's spending on Medicare that's driving up the deficit, writes Noah Millman. So at the American Scene he suggests replacing the debt ceiling with a ceiling on Medicare spending . Austerity and Social Protest: Governments might not be...

Continue reading →

I don't generally take much notice of Henry Ergas's op-ed pieces in the Oz, but even one-eyed Coalition shills sometimes have important things to say. So it was with Ergas's article this morning drawing attention to actions by the Gillard government to diminish the role and ef...

Continue reading →

Adam Smith recognised that a well-ordered society can never develop "when a sizeable number of its members are miserable and, as a consequence, dangerous", writes Mary Riddell in the Telegraph . She argues that "social democracy, with its safety nets, costly education and heal...

Continue reading →

Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy has a post musing about whether carbon emissions trading permits would be regarded as property rights which would entitle the holder to compensation if abolished by a future federal government. The obvious context is the fact that Tony Abbott has...

Continue reading →

I have written a few posts about education. But I'd not seen this presentation by Conrad Wolfram - brother of someone who may be one of the intellectual giants of our time - Stephen. (Since Stephen is a good deal older - born in 1959 with Conrad born in 1970 - perhaps one migh...

Continue reading →

As you may have heard, on Friday the debt of the United States was downgraded by Standard and Poors. Subsequently everyone continued to rush to buy said debt, and the 10 yield fell to an astonishing 2.20% , and taking into account inflation, many people seem keen to pay the go...

Continue reading →

I've long been puzzled why Michelle Grattan is seen as an eminence grise of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Unlike her corpulent male counterpart Laurie Oakes, who still occasionally produces major scoops and penetrating political analyses, I can't remember the last time Grat...

Continue reading →

Televisions, DVD players and mobile phones have become so cheap that even poor third world families can own them. In Foreign Policy , Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo write : In rural Morocco, Oucha Mbarbk and his two neighbors told us they had worked about 70 days in agricul...

Continue reading →

Reviving an old Troppo tradition - and you can cheat if you want to by following the picture's url. And what's causing the dark streaks?

Continue reading →

On the other side of the Pacific, bloggers are arguing over something called 'left neoliberalism'. What began as a dispute over monetary policy between Yglesias and Doug Henwood quickly widened into a debate over political philosophy and strategies to rebuild the American left...

Continue reading →

HT New Matilda .

Continue reading →

Here's an open thread for all those ideas, links and arguments that don't fit anywhere else.

Continue reading →