Club Troppo

Readers of Troppo will be familiar with my concerns about the Australia Institute's recent foray (pdf) into name-calling and finger-pointing at city drivers of 4WDs. A creepy development if you ask me. (And here on what my old friend and occasional lurker Kathy call's "Pontifi...

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I think David McKnight has to move a lot further to locate himself in a viable position vis a vis left, right and neoliberalism. In addition to the links provided by the indefatigable and mercurial Nicholas Gruen in the post below, there is an appraisal of the concluding chapt...

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There's been a bit of interest in the blogosphere regarding David McKnight's book 'Beyond Left and Right: New Politics and the Culture Wars'. Rafe has some links here . I'm going to try to go along, because from what I've seen and heard on LNL, McKnight's effort is a worthwhil...

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Last Christmas I was doing some writing on intellectual property and got interested in how James Watt was a bit of a forerunner of Bill Gates. Microsoft bought MS-DOS and built an empire out of it. James Watt did better, and introduced an important innovation, but his was an i...

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Concentrations of people with university qualifications in Melbourne in 2001 (from the ABS's social atlas of Melbourne) From a talk to be delivered tonight . The pattern is striking n'est pas?

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My Adam Smith posts haven't exactly laid them in the isles - at least judging by the number of comments they've generated. But perhaps some people have enjoyed them. I enjoyed writing them. In any event part of their purpose was to collect my thoughts in preparation for an int...

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From the Social Change project , at the Mercatus Centre, George Mason University, a link to a report on the recent three-day World Islamic Economic Forum held under the auspices of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The forum hosted more than 500 delegates from...

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Another triumph - another brilliant piece of work .

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I doubt this will be of much excitement to many Troppodillians, but, emboldened by Troppo's webmaseter Scott Wickstein , I am posting my second chess post. The first was a game by Albert Einstein. Every now and again something amazing happens and right now someone whose been i...

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Those interested in the development of our economy may be interested that insurance against one's house prices falling has just been introduced to the Australian Housing Market not a bad time to get a policy if you ask me! Of course the beloved Peach Discount Mortgage Broking...

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In this week's column, I took a certain amount of pleasure in being 'right wing' (ie pro-market) about petrol and 'left wing' (ie pro-collectivism) on greenhouse. It surprises me how many people get caught up in the greenhouse denialist agenda. It's not that scientific consens...

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Adam Smith sketched what I've called a 'dialectical' picture of humanity in which people grow from infantile 'self-love' to become socialised and psychologically much more complex individuals. Self love remains powerful throughout their lives, but so too are the internal restr...

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This is a picture of Enoch Mankayi Sontonga who, though he only lived 32 years, somehow managed to bottle over a century of suffering into South Africa's magnificent national anthem. I've always been moved by the song and did a little reading on the net from here an edited ver...

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I don't know why regulation and its failures annoy me so much. It's not healthy - because there's a lot of bad regulation about and only so much nervous energy to go round. Anyway, I got my GST installment advice today. The story of the GST has been a sad farce from the beginn...

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Hyperion, the strange tumbling moon of Saturn has been photographed by Cassini. Remarkable non? I read about Hyperion when I was doing some reading on Chaos. Hyperion gets its own chapter in Ivar's Peterson's Newton's Clock: Chaos in the Solar System alas not available to be p...

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Having bagged Australia's latest efforts with film - or more specifically said that the New Zealanders were leaving us in the shade, I'm pleased to say that I thought "Little Fish" was a very good flick and good enough for you to try to go and see it - even if I wouldn't put i...

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The Age carried stories on the weekend of the collapse of a company called "Money for living". It preyed on elderly people who were asset rich(ish) and cash poor by buying their home (often worth around a third of a million dollars in return for a paltry lump sum of around $50...

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While the Australia Institute was pouring over the numbers which show that the drivers of four wheel drive vehicles are solitary, nasty, brutish and short (well fat anyway), the Canadian Recording Industry Association was commissioning similar research about what a bunch of na...

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Old time Troppo readers who actually liked my stuff can get their fill at my new blog here . (Blogger is a really sound platform these days.)

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Nicholas Gruen is coming to town next weekend, Sunday Oct 9. It is a long way from home so he might appreciate some convivial company. What if we make this an opportunity for a bloggers night out? How about the Clock Hotel in Crown Street, Surry Hills? Any takers, any other su...

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