Club Troppo

"Over the past five years, a group of young and unpredictable rightward-leaning writers has emerged on the scene", writes David Brooks in the New York Times . Instead of rising through the official channels of the movement, he says, "they found their voices while blogging. The...

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Dilbert is running mashups , many of which are less funny than the usual. IMHO the one above is an exception.

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Help! My insanity level is increasing. I've just written another letter to the editor of the Northern Territory News : Its understandable when political flacks and criminal lawyer advocates exaggerate the extent of crime in the Territory. Its both disappointing and puzzling wh...

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From the 'being grateful for small mercies department, and from this website , here is extrasolar planet HD 209458b (also unofficially known as "Osiris", which orbits a star in the constellation of Pegasus) revealed the strongest ever spectroscopic signature for a giant extras...

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From Paul Krugman Its just a glancing mention in this Times piece on how Fannie Mae won friends and influenced people: Fannies board once included Frederic V. Malek, a longtime friend of the Bush family and a former business partner of the current President Bush. Theres a bit...

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Brilliant! HT: Peter Martin .

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Verily this is a cool new development. Boeing is building super airships to double the capacity that can be airlifted around the world. These babys will be the size of football fields (not ours but America's) and fitted with four helicopter rotors and able to drag 40 tons of s...

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I couldn't believe my ears today when I heard The Queensland Police Minister, Judy Spence interviewed about the paedophile who is living in the semi-rural town of Carbrook on Breakfast on ABC Radio National. As you no doubt know, there's a baying mob there right now. I might b...

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I've made various suggestions about the possible terrificness of open source approaches to government, for instance here . The Poms are having a crack at this kind of thing. They're trying to use suggestion boxes to improve policy. Thus the front page of betterregulation.gov.u...

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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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And exciting presentation of fascinating data. Hat tip to a Troppodillian whose email I have now lost but who emailed me a week or so ago suggesting I watch this and write it up on Troppo. Apologies, this isn't much of a write up, but I'm afraid I'm flat out. And I didn't thin...

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Government and the private sector are good at different things, and there are gains from trade. Thus government has certain assets at its disposal. One of those assets is the taxing power. That asset should be 'worked' wherever it gives rise to value. Bruce Chapman has spend a...

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Since I posted this post on my problems with my wireless broadband, I've received constant emails from around the Tropposphere on how I am going with the problem, begging for a sequel. Well folks, I can report the next exciting episode is that I contacted Optus at the end of m...

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This article by Charles Krauthammer seems cruel but fair to me. Obama is pursuing a 'small target' strategy against his opponents. John Howard did this - and Kevin Rudd. But Obama has an additional reason to do it on top of the fact that the incumbent is on the nose - he's a c...

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Superstar CEOs by Ulrike Malmendier, Geoffrey Tate - #14140 (CF LE LS) Abstract: Sounds right. From the NBER's latest research . Compensation, status, and press coverage of managers in the U.S. follow a highly skewed distribution: a small number of 'superstars' enjoy the bulk...

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Robbie Deans' tweaked team lineup for the upcoming second rugby test against France seems pretty sound to me. Neither speedster Lachie Turner for the injured Tuqiri nor Stephen Hoiles for Wycliff Palu will weaken the team, and Turner might even add desirable speed on the flank...

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From this site , via Kathy G , regarding Charlie Chaplin. They were dreadfully poor. Charlie's parents were third-string strolling players. His father died early of alcoholism; his mother was often in asylums, whether through drink or because of periodic mental illness. Whenev...

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Toyota Prius - not as green as it seems, but the forthcoming "plug-in" one might be If there's a certain bet flowing from last weekend's Gippsland by-election result, it's the proposition that any inclusion of petrol in Labor's emissions trading scheme will be carefully struct...

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In an interesting post a day or so ago Ken Parish made this claim, which went largely unchallenged (though I've not read all the comments). The need to avoid stifling innovation as the primary engine of capitalisms remarkable success was Hayeks principal answer to those who ar...

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With the departure of Andrew Leigh from the blogosphere and from the AFR, the AFR have asked me to step into his outsize shoes. So I've got a fortnightly column for six months. That suits me very well, as once a week can be a bit taxing after a while. And I think all columnist...

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