Club Troppo

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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The US National Bureau of Economic Research an academic body which is regarded as the arbiter of American business cycles defines a recession as a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP,...

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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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Note to self: Where morale is high - for instance in a workplace or a community - at least some regulations - for instance dome designed to make sure people don't cheat or free ride are unnecessary as very few people do this and when they do they are detected and sanctioned. I...

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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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Fancy a little time travel? This time eight years ago, satirical magazine The Onion reported on the new Bush presidency. Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over' It may have been a joke, but reading it now, it comes across as historical fact....

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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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Why Obamas plan is still inadequate and incomplete Last week, President-elect Barack Obama duly unveiled his American recovery and reinvestment plan . Its title was aptly chosen, for Mr Obama spoke, astonishingly, as if the policies of the rest of the world had no bearing on t...

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Below the fold is today's column for the Fin. Cap on moralising needed The world's most pressing issues require moral courage, not self-righteousness, writes Nicholas Gruen. Since the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, weve tended to moralise disasters to see them as the just...

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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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I wrote this column for the Fin at the end of the year only to discover that I was on leave. Anyway, i t was put in this morning's Fin in a slightly edited back form . The original is below. Blogging the Crisis: Enter the bright world ushered in by 2008 George Soros called 200...

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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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