Club Troppo

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="620"] B1 and B2, or as they're known here at Troppo, T1 and T2 "Are you thinking what I'm thinking T2?"[/caption] The contentious issue of obligatory quotas for commercial children’s television is now under review and has polarised the...

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[caption id="attachment_34256" align="alignright" width="505"] Source: Sortition in the History of Democracy , Slide 41.[/caption] Cross-posted from The Mandarin : Our world has been optimised to within an inch of its life. Usually from the top down. With the economic, social...

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[caption id="attachment_31194" align="alignleft" width="640"] Artist's incorrect impression, from the film "Minority Report". In the real future, these autonomous cars would be travelling much closer together, and there would be more of them.[/caption] This month's print and o...

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I am a big fan of the GOT books and series, loving Season 7 and salivating at Season 8 to come. Great escapism and fantastic acting and camerawork. Part of what I love about GOT is how it far more ruthlessly than, say, Lord of the Rings, describes blind ambition, lust, treache...

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Continued from Part One . The ABC and Children’s Programming - The Highs, Lows and Power-plays Part one here and part two here . The promise of the early years When ABC television first aired, on November 5, 1956, children’s programs presented a dilemma. There was no Australia...

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Many readers will have heard of Patricia Edgar who was a giant force in Australian cultural life from the 1970s. She more than anyone else was responsible for lifting the tone of children's TV in Australia. In any event I was talking to her recently about the current woes of c...

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[caption id="attachment_31109" align="alignleft" width="708"] Hat tip: Richard Halcomb[/caption] Barnaby Joyce is in the news a bit right now . Coincidentally, I wrote an assessment of his abilities in a column for The CEO Magazine way back on 31 July, before the section 44 sc...

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"Research has shown that cultures with greater gender equity have larger sex differences when it comes to job preferences, because in these societies, people are free to choose their occupations based on what they enjoy." A month ago, a Google employee wrote a memo about his t...

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[caption id="attachment_31072" align="alignleft" width="640"] Smurfing, sans cuckoos ...[/caption] There's a weird sort of dissonance in today's Australian Financial Review. On the front page, CBA CEO Ian Narev argues that CBA culture is "strong". Meanwhile, a detailed Neil Ch...

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I've known Dennis Glover since we were both staffers in Parliament during the Hawke-Keating years (I was there in 1981, 83-4 and 1991-3 until just after the 'sweetest victory of all' in 1993 which with hindsight I wish John Hewson had won as it would have kept in-tact Australi...

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[caption id="attachment_30982" align="alignleft" width="600"] The massed battalions of The Oz were quickly brought up to the front[/caption] Many hundreds of hours ago now, our foreign affairs community and parts of our media were consumed by the North Korean ICBM emergency. H...

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Does It Matter How and How Much Politicians are Paid? by Duha T. Altindag, Elif S. Filiz, Erdal Tekin - #23613 (LS POL) Abstract: An important question in representative democracies is how to ensure that politicians behave in the best interest of citizens rather than their own...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuehyRf88ac If you've got a bit of an appreciation of chess, this is a lot of fun. I've been watching it on and off today giving myself a little sugar hit by watching a game to take a break from doing other work. This is normally more a pro than...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJubuKDN7Fk Noticing my checking of vids of Wimbledon, Youtube has been serving up far too many excerpts of tennis for my own good but I've got a bit of a fascination with how the game has changed. Anyway, this is as good footage as I've seen of...

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The often good Institute for Government has added to the world's league ladders. As Woody Allen says in Annie Hall "All you people do in California is give away awards. Adolf Hitler: Greatest Fascist Dictator". Anyway, who doesn't need an effective civil service? I know Austra...

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You've heard it a million times: in developed nations, populations are ageing. But what does that mean? At the extremes, it could mean either of two quite different things. It could mean a host of frail elderly people stuck in nursing homes for 20 years, or it could mean a bun...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="472"] Can't resist this incredible picture I'm afraid. Brought to you by ClubTroppo ® "At least enough part of the problem to be complaining about the solution".[/caption] I've written about the Overton window previously. [1. The previ...

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Why do the Swedes put barcodes on their ships? So they can Scandinavian. (Sorry about that). More seriously, this looks like a good haul of films. Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks The Other Side of Hope (Opening Night) Wikström is a man wanting to change his life...

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https://youtu.be/i772m4UdadE?t=32s Watch as right-wing commentators Tucker Carlson and Ralph Peters go to war over who's defending American values. Carlson suggests making common cause with Vladimir Putin; Peters says Carlson sounds like Charles Lindbergh defending Hitler in 1...

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[vimeo 224904259 w=500 h=328] Helen Parish Funeral 7Jul17 (1) from Ken Parish on Vimeo . As the first of the four offspring of Helen and Cecil Parish, my job is to deliver the first section of a two part eulogy, commemorating but most of all celebrating the life of our mother...

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