Club Troppo

Today the AFR Friday Review published an essay of mine based on the series of posts I did on Adam Smith. They've locked it to their subscribers (lucky things) but if you want to email me on nicholas AT gruen DOT com DOT au, I'll send you a copy. It has now been posted by Gavin...

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The Sydney Morning Herald certainly seems to be making a determined pitch for the airheaded end of the Generation Y demographic, at least judging by its blog Sam and the City (whose author is if anything even sillier than The Australian 's Emma Tom ) and an opinion piece yeste...

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Is there a simple way of explaining what Paul Krugman calls "Ricardo's difficult idea"? Who knows? But the way most people talk about trade and tax shows that they don't understand it. Paul Kelly is in this group, but so too was the PC (then the IC) until Paul Krugman made it...

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Some people who post material on the Internet have far too much time on their hands. That's certainly true of a bloke named Jeffery P. Dennis who obviously spent vast amounts of time writing an article called Queertoons - The dynamics of same-sex desire in the animated cartoon...

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It seems like it's been raining forever here in Darwin. Mould is growing on just about everything that doesn't move, and all our clothes are vaguely damp despite clothes dryers working overtime. Things are even worse for the people of Katherine, where the river is in flood aga...

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[photopress:taxcartoon.gif,full,alignleft] In the wake of Treasurer Costello receiving (but not yet announcing) the results of his tax review from Dick Warburton and Peter Hendy, we've seen ongoing usual op-ed nonsense over the last couple of days from the hucksters for cuttin...

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I attended a function this afternoon put on by Liberty Victoria featuring Major Mori the marine who has been appointed to defend David Hicks. Maybe I'm making it up, but I've always thought this guy was great. You can catch him tomorrow night giving a public lecture details he...

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Another advantage of Wikipedia - no 'spin' department. (Well they probably have one, but not as well resourced and shameless as Britannica's.) Anyway, as some Troppodillians will know, Nature Magazine did an independent review of Wikipedia and Britannica and found that the deg...

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Federal politics hasn't been this action-packed for constitutional law buffs since the time of the Whitlam government, when I was studying the subject at Sydney Uni. That's fairlt ironic given that we currently have a "conservative" government which has hitherto paid rather mo...

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George Williams and David Hume (not the philosopher unless UNSW has invented some truly remarkable new technology) have an article in today's SMH focusing on the Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment Bill about which I posted last week : Under the Telecommunications (Int...

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I recently commented on John Hirst's compelling portrait "The distinctiveness of Australian Democracy". I've since gone out and bought the book Sense and Nonsense in Australian History which is a very interesting read. Robert Manne, having been ejected from Quadrant seems to b...

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I love cliches, and there aren't many better than " I don't know much about art but I know what I like ". It just so happens that for me it's a true statement (and no doubt for many others as well, that being how cliches become cliched). I like Dobell and Whitely and Albert Tu...

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I've known Tony Morris QC for a number of years as webmaster of a very useful legal site called Lex Scripta . More recently he attained national fame and then notoriety as the Royal Commissioner investigating events at Bundaberg Hospital involving the so-called "Dr Death" Jaya...

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I've been regularly monitoring opposition and minor party media releases over the last fortnight or so. That's the sort of boring person I am, sadly. But it's brought me to a few conclusions I think are important, and I'm going to share them with you. One specific issue and a...

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Only last week I was speculating about why Terrence Cole QC hadn't sought an extension of his terms of reference to enable him to make substantive findings and recommendations about the conduct of Ministers and public servants in the AWB affair: I would have expected that Comm...

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[photopress:jevons1.jpg,full,alignleft] As a practiced poster, I now find myself spinning inane puns for my headlines, like any good subbie. Be that as it may, I happened upon an interesting post by our Troppodillian friend and sometime colleague Rafe Champion over at Catallax...

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Sometime Troppo commenter Gaby sent me this amazing article from New Scientist. DARK energy and dark matter, two of the greatest mysteries confronting physicists, may be two sides of the same coin. A new and as yet undiscovered kind of star could explain both phenomena and, in...

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Tim Dunlop posts on the situation in Iraq, and it doesn't make happy reading. No doubt RWDB readers will dismiss it as just another piece of lefty defeatism, but others might care to consider the facts on their merit in a more sober, analytical spirit: [W]ith militias from bot...

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What is the collective noun for volunteers? Well I'm just starting to recover from swarms, of them, whole irritations of volunteers. There were fifteen thousand of them! I first encountered games volunteers in Sydney. Not having encountered them before it was a magic experienc...

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