Club Troppo

Michael Fullilove, of the Lowy Institute, last week gave a speech espousing the established (non-radical) centrist view that more immigration to Australia is highly desirable - that migration is an essential step to A Bigger Australia. I like immigration. In fact, my gut suppo...

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The noise and drama surrounding Putin, Russia and the Ukraine obscure crucial foreign policy principles. In "Lord Salisbury's Lessons for Great Powers" , Robert Merry takes a closer look at what they might be. First, avoid promiscuous jingoism of the kind that Salisbury despis...

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https://youtu.be/-9q-sMsXLHs I was bemoaning ethics committees to someone the other day and they told me of this case in which Australian Hospitals refused a patient - a nurse who had done her homework - aggressive chemotherapy for her MS. The ethics committee knew better. So...

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One year ago our daughter died and was born. We called her Sakura, for the cherry blossom. Sakura is a thing of beauty that does not, and cannot last, longer than a short time. But we meet its brief time in this world with joy and not sorrow. Not surprisingly, I guess, thinkin...

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“This hand is not the color of yours. But if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man.” Standing Bear to a Nebraska court, May 1879. More here . HT Three Quarks

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I recall seeing an exciting young player from Canberra at a Doberl Cup about seven or eight years ago. (The Doberl Cup is a regular fixture of the Canberra calendar. The comp was endowed by Mr Doberl with enough money so that the best from Australia and a few additional grandm...

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I don't pretend to understand the detail of the current situation between Russia and Ukraine, but it seems entirely reasonable to fear that this may well be the most significant threat to world peace since the Berlin Wall Crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960s. Eve...

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Vanavil is a school for the poorest of the poor in the middle of Tamil Nadu, India. It started in 2005 as an orphanage/school for the children of two historically nomadic communities left stranded by the devastating tsunami of 2004. Many of the children of these two communitie...

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From Chessbase where you can play the game https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EY27lgnPKWI In the above video we see a bullet game, played in Kragerø (Norway), between Magnus Carlsen and his second Laurent Fressinet. It was posted on August 6 2013 on Magnus...

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Attentive Troppodillians will recall Rooter , one of Troppo's stable of cars, frequently flown to locations around the world in order for the winners of our comps to to take do a few doughies with it. Now comes the learned journal article on Rooter (pdf). It's a hoax generated...

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Is there any area of public policy in Australia that gets weaker treatment than agriculture these days? Whether it's milk prices or agricultural investment , the normal Australian tough-mindedness about policy gets shunted aside in favour of emotive puffery. Not too many peopl...

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Relaxing Occupational Licensing Requirements: Analyzing Wages and Prices for a Medical Service by Morris M. Kleiner, Allison Marier, Kyoung Won Park, Coady Wing Abstract: Occupational licensing laws have been relaxed in a large number of U.S. states to give nurse practitioners...

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I know I took the notion of optimising to heart as I learned it - implicitly - from my economist Dad. And there are those who might argue that the idea in economics came from the society around economists as the discipline came into being. But now it seems optimising as the he...

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I just came across this largely trivial cultural skirmish . Obama said "I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree." In fact from the transcript you can see him, Eddie Maguire like...

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What's in a name? In the September 2013 round of re-shuffles , I count no less than 17 changes in names of government departments in Australia, either by some name disappearing or some name changing. This appears to be a regular game in Canberra. When I worked in Canberra in 2...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNTk29zXl4A OK so you all kind of know this, but I'm going to go out on a limb and just put it out there as one younger member of my family has been heard to say. It's depressing how much stuff is sent our way which repackages what's already in...

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This is an experiment in occasional linkage to insights that might outlast the daily news cycle. If you find any of it interesting, let us know in the comments. [caption id="attachment_25174" align="alignright" width="240"] Clock Tower, Freetown, Sierra Leone, October 2009, by...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Olc5C4SXAYM

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It may not prove much, or rather it proves the obvious - that stuff that makes its way between two pieces of land tends to take place over the sea - but it's kind of fun.

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