November 3, 2009 – 7:53 am
Rudd’s ‘tough but humane’ bob each way rhetoric on asylum seekers was always a crock but hey worth a try and great if you can get away with it. Today’s newspoll shows that he hasn’t got away with it.
Of course, Rudd could hope that this newspoll is an outlier and the damage is not [...]
November 2, 2009 – 8:32 am
The November issue of the SMH’s Sydney magazine features a profile of the ABC’s managing director Mark Scott which contains this curious line on page 36: “Their scant private time is devoted to family; once identified as a prominent evangelical Christian, Scott now says he doesn’t attend any particular Church”
Scott may not ‘attend’ any particular [...]
October 27, 2009 – 6:23 am
Ouch:
John Julius Norwich is an earnest and somewhat stiff-backed editor. So it’s not entirely surprising that he reveals in his introduction that he is “braced for objections” over his selections for “The Great Cities in History,” a collection of essays and images. He anticipates that readers will ask, for instance, why Timbuktu is included and [...]
October 26, 2009 – 6:37 am
The much-heralded Copenhagen conference looks like it is about to be dealt a fatal blow, with the Obama administration in ‘lowering expectations’ mode.
October 19, 2009 – 5:34 am
Barbara Ehrenreich:
It’s an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, the doctors discovered “micromastia” — the “disease” of small-breastedness. More recently, as big pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43% of women have [...]
October 16, 2009 – 8:56 am
Immigration can improve the national gene pool:
Geneticists have shown that there is literally such a thing as American DNA, not surprising when nearly all of us are descended from immigrants. We therefore carry an immigrant-specific genotype, a genetic marker expressing itself—in some environments, at least—as energetic risk-taking and competitive self-promotion. Even when famine, warfare, or [...]
October 16, 2009 – 7:51 am
Before ABC managing director takes his organisation down the path of the so-called pro-am model (no-one knows what this means but the words sound ‘inclusive’), he should have a chat to film-maker Oliver Stone who told Terra’s Orbita US 2009 conference in New York on Tuesday night:
“I’ve heard the democratic argument [for the internet] and [...]
October 15, 2009 – 8:36 am
Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves …
– John Milton, Samson Agonistes
In a speech this week, ABC Managing Director, Mark Scott, strangely compared the media revolution (currently ongoing) [...]
October 10, 2009 – 7:04 am
A passionate argument for re-integration (and a longer version here):
This is not to say that the macroeconomic model-building of the past generation has been pointless. But I do think that modern macroeconomists need to be rounded up, on pain of loss of tenure, and sent to a year-long boot camp with the assembled monetary historians [...]
