Club Troppo

At last count eight people had been seriously injured and seven arrested after an extended family group returned to the Central Australian remote Indigenous community of Yuendumu, having earlier fled to Adelaide to escape "payback violence" after a stabbing murder in Alice Spr...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cAFf_UDj9Y&feature=player_embedded

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And yes, if you want you can do some sleuthing from the url of the picture.

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Early next month we'll learn whether Australia has won the hosting rights rights to the FIFA World Cup in 2022. Surprisingly, given this would entail such a large amount of government expenditure, discussion in the media relates only to the tactics of the bidding team and the...

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It always seems to be two steps forward and then two back with Australia's asylum seeker policy. In the wake of the High Court's M61/M69 decision, DIAC has apparently begun offering all offshore asylum seeker s who have been refused refugee status a renewed assessment and pres...

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How do people respond to evidence of their own privilege? Some will deny it. They'll try to tell you that earning $90,000+ per year makes them a middle income earner. Others will ignore it. And others still will try to justify it -- they'll say they deserve to be better off th...

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A fertile collaboration A brief reflection, albeit belated, on the passing of Henryk Górecki won't be out of place in such a hive as ours of classical music enthusiasts. The Polish composer secured immortality with his Third Symphony. It's a shame the expression 'achingly beau...

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Cheating students, immortal hamburgers, housing nutters and a cunning plan to improve the affordability of Grange Hermitage, all feature in this week's Missing Link Friday. Lies, lies and more lies Joe Hockey is an expert at deception, writes Ad astra at The Political Sword ....

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I have a dim recollection that somewhere someone has done a set of graphs of the rapidly contracting time horizons of scientists’ and economists’ predictions of environmental and economic problems arising from climate change, biodiversity reduction, risk to food supply and ene...

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I can finally see the point of Twitter. It lets you inflict isolated thoughts on people that are too trivial or even self-indulgent to merit a full blog post but that you need to share. The Librarians is the best Australian TV sit-com. Ever. Discuss. My ideal final episode: Oi...

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Well folks, some of you may not be chess fiends. But tonight and for the next two nights even you may be intrigued to pop in and watch world championship blitz tourney. Players have 3 minutes plus 2 seconds per move each. So they've got to get a wriggle on. And they are stupen...

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There is growing recognition that the dispersion of credit risk by banks to a broader and more diverse group of investors, rather than warehousing such risk on their balance sheets, has helped to make the banking and overall financial system more resilient. The IMF, 2006 (pdf)...

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Don't diss economies of scale in finance. Well I do actually. There's lots of evidence that, beyond a certain modest size, dis-economies of scale come to dominate economies of scale. And now it looks like those areas of finance that are not simple commodities that anyone can d...

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Under the wonderful post title " Copyright Infringement And A Medieval Apple Pie ”, the blogger Jane Smith (not her real name, one would guess) has documented the history of an online copyright infringement. Hardly unusual, you would think, indeed the internet is supposed to b...

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It's wrong to tell children that Santa Claus is real, argues Edward Feser : Parents who do this certainly mean well, but they do not do well, because lying is always wrong. Not always gravely wrong, to be sure, but still wrong. That is bad enough. But there is also the bad les...

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As Jason Kuznicki writes at Cato@Liberty , there's "a game lately played in the bookish corners of the left side of American politics" that you might call the "We Know Hayek Better Than You" game. It sounded fun, so I thought I'd have a go. Many self-styled classical liberals...

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Troppo co-host Nicholas Gruen made an impressively well-groomed appearance on Alan Kohler's Inside Business program on ABC TV this morning. Nicholas canvassed a really interesting idea I don't immediately recall his having yet ventilated here at Troppo. It's the concept of por...

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The thought hadn't occurred to me until I read this . The Impact of Income Distribution on the Length of Retirement By: Dean Baker David Rosnick Social Security has made it possible for the vast majority of workers to enjoy a period of retirement in at least modest comfort wit...

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What Australia needs is a "genuine grassroots free market advocacy organisaiton [sic]", writes Tim Andrews . And he's convinced he's the man to make it happen. Andrews is currently in the US equipping himself with the training and experience he'll need to create an Australian...

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I was browsing in borders and came upon American Essays of the Century (ie the last one) edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Which was very tempting. I would have bought it if it wasn't $45 too. But I read the essay below - full as it is of what are now cliches of the civil rights mo...

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