Club Troppo

Jon Hawkes was one of my class mates at Launceston Grammar. He was the brightest kid in the class and also the youngest by a fair margin. Mr Hawkes was an anglican cleric with an interesting series of posts - Jamaica, King Island, the Huon Valley in Southern Tasmania, Monash U...

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This week's column. It's pretty self explanatory. For anyone who has arrived here via Counterpoint on ABC Radio National or the Courier Mail where this site is mentioned, welcome. I hope you like our site and you'll come back for more. Simples Surpreendente I'm excited! Seriou...

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This is reminiscent of the time a Melbourne company offered stoves in VFL club colours. The marketing ploy did not suceed, presumably due to the regretable prevalence of mixed marriages and other forms of social mixing between the tribes. "Fans of soccer club Reading can now t...

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Interesting problem halts games in the Nigerian football league. "Away teams rarely win games in the Nigerian league while many teams usually rely on securing points through protests to the league's disciplinary committee."

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A disturbing report from the Old Dart. The Anglican Consultative Council has recommended that its member churches divest their investments with firms that support the Israeli occupation of Arab territories. A strangely misplaced example of moral equivalence.

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Andrew Ford - the lead ABC Radio National broadcaster on the world of music - seems like a remarkably nice guy. He just radiates good mental health. Talented, hard working, nice, modest. Daggy but just a tad - enough for it to be engaging rather than painful. In addition to be...

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Lingua Franca is usually a teriffic little program, yet another hidden gem on our great national broadcaster. Being in bed with a nasty wog (so to speak) I taped and then listened to this week's episode at some time in the wee small hours. It really has to be heard so if you w...

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This article indicates that the US provides nearly 0.7% of GDP to third world nations, compared with the usually quoted figure of 0.15%. It also notes the importance of other forms of aid such as private capital to establish so-called sweatshops that provide a ladder of opport...

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Peter Saunders wants unemployed people to pay their own dole. In a recent paper for the Centre for Independent Studies, he suggests that unemployment allowances could be replaced with Unemployment Savings Accounts (USAs). Under this system workers would be expected to save eno...

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I just found this on the net on David Walker's interesting site Shorewalker . It's Paul Graham explaining why one might write an essay. To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history ... to Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he ca...

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The Age ran an interesting and quite critical piece on Live 8 yesterday. One of its themes is a line that irritates me a little. The romanticisation of the idea of music 'changing the world'. But the article does make the point that this time around, for all his scruffiness, S...

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Troppo has been quite blokey lately, what with Wen and Sophie AWOL and Jen in Melbourne. So I thought I'd post over the fold something to indulge the prejudices of female readers just for a change. There is of course no resemblance to my own domestic behaviour in any of these...

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You may nor may not think this is a good colum, but it took me bloody ages to write. It helps to have a single line to stick to in a column given the need for simplicity, clarity and brevity. But it seemed to me that there were important parallels between what William Easterly...

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In case anyone finds this observation reassuring, less people have died in the London bombing than the US authorities incinerated at Waco . I support joint activities with our ally when it is proper or expedient to do so (and especially when it is both proper and expedient). S...

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As some readers may have noticed, the Troppo commenting system has been malfunctioning badly for the last week or so. When you try to post a comment, it invariably returns an error message saying that the " server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unabl...

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I have just discovered that this post has been linked to by Tim Blair . Please take your pick. a) do a quick word association on some words chosen at random (but inflenced by Blair's misleading heading "VILE MURDERING SCUM HAVE FEELINGS TOO" and put whatever abuse you like in...

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I regret to announce that the wars between humans and computers have pretty much been won - by computers. Michael Adams, a very talented young Englishman and number 7 in the world played a nasty contraption called Hydra in a six game chess match. Result. Five wins - all to the...

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Don Arthur has posted on the London bombings immediately below (although there's something very strange going on with his post at the moment). For me, it's too early to say anything wise or even sensible about these dreadful events. We don't even know how many have been killed...

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Today I found the message that Ken posted when Mark Bahnisch joined the team, with a profile and all that stuff, and I realised that Ken has been too busy to post the my cv. This is no big deal, but in case anyone is interested... There is also a photo that is only few years o...

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The post immediately below argues that we could achieve something worthwhile by changing the 'default setting' of our superannuation contributions. Namely we could require that the level of super contribution required from someone who doesn't make any active election is not 9%...

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