Blogotariat

Oz Blog News Commentary
Pure Poison Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 14:10 Source

Pure Poison IconAs if the story of who said what about Tony Abbott’s comments and whereabouts to members of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy wasn’t already a first class clusterf*ck, we’re now treated to up to the minute pieces of speculation from our gallant press corps.

First we hear from Misha Schubert at the Age:

Labor figure Kim Sattler named as go-between in protest

Sources at the Aboriginal tent embassy say the mystery intermediary between Julia Gillard’s office and the protesting mob on Australia Day was Kim Sattler.

Read more Views: 17
Huffington Post Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 13:56 Source

The FDIC shuttered four additional banks today bringing the 2012 count to seven. The four banks closed were BankEast in Knoxville, Tenn., Patriot Bank Minnesota in Forest Lake, Minn., Tennessee Commerce Bank in Franklin, Tenn. and First Guaranty Bank and Trust Company of Jacksonville in Jacksonville, Fla. The general pattern of the FDIC closing banks with weak operating characteristics and deepening asset quality troubles continues. All four banks found buyers and will be spending the weekend changing over to their new owners.

Forensic analysis pages for these banks can be found here:

First Guaranty Bank and Trust Company of Jacksonville -- Jacksonville, FL 1/27/2012

Read more Views: 5
Left Focus Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 12:28 Source
Above: Swedish Political Economist Rudolf Meidner was partly-responsible (along with Gosta Rehn) for the "Rehn-Meidner" model of the Swedish economy, and the radical attempt to institute democratic wage earner funds.
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The Stump Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 11:49 Source

Well it looks like Mitt Romney will start a short priced favourite to win the Republican Florida primary but it has been an up and down ride to get there.

The fluctuations on Intrade over the last month

The market has closely followed the polls.

Read more Views: 6
The Stump Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 11:36 Source

From a London Daily Telegraph look at the 40th anniversary celebrations of Friends of the Earth:

Last year, a former executive director, Charles Secrett, accurately accused it and other green groups of being “out of touch, ineffective and bureaucratic”, adding: “Interminable meetings, not action, are the order of most days.”

FoE’s present leadership, however, does recognise the problem, and is finally trying to tackle it, starting with a long-overdue restructuring. The campaign team is being shaken up and new issues, which concern a broader public than just environmentalists, are being taken on. One such project on energy bill increases – mainly caused by the rising cost of fossil fuels – has already started, another on saving collapsing bee populations starts in April.

Read more Views: 6
Huffington Post Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 11:03 Source

Sundance, for me, begins and ends with Ice-T. Attending for the first time this year, I landed Saturday amidst a disastrous snowstorm, and, due to time constrictions, was forced to schlep my suitcase around in the blizzard. Plus, I forgot my hat (I live in California!). Nevertheless, I remained calm in the face of meteorological adversity, knowing my reward was the premiere of Something From Nothing, Ice-T's documentary on the craft of hip hop. The film, as expected, was worth the vexing hustle. At any given moment, I was rapping with Grandmaster Caz and B Real; smiling to hear Dre talk Pac; looking over my shoulder where Ice sat with his son and Coco. It was magnetic.

Read more Views: 6
Huffington Post Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 10:46 Source

In his State of the Union address, President Obama spoke about his grandparents, who were part of the World War II “generation of heroes” who “built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known.” The President said, “My grandfather, a veteran of Patton’s Army, got the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. My grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line, was part of a workforce that turned out the best products on Earth. The two of them shared the optimism of a nation that had triumphed over a depression and fascism.

Read more Views: 8
Huffington Post Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 10:46 Source

On arrival at Davos I wrote about how appropriate the "transformation and new models" theme of this year's World Economic Forum is for framing what needs to happen in education. What I'm realizing a few days into the Forum however is that the topic of education really isn't on the agenda at all!

We've addressed everything but -- the threats to our economic strength, our environment, our public safety, our health. We've addressed youth unemployment and the need for international cooperation and collaboration. But we just aren't focusing on education or on the need to address the enormous educational disparities that persist in countries all around the world.

How can this be?

Read more Views: 7
Huffington Post Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 09:43 Source

There's the published agenda for the World Economic Forum (WEF) this week in Davos -- and then there are the elephants in the room.

"Severe income disparity" is the most likely risk facing business and political leaders according to the World Economic Forum's Global Risk 2012 Report. This finding really caught me by surprise. So while the Occupy Wall Street movement isn't anywhere on the agenda here at WEF in Davos, its impact has been very much felt.

Read more Views: 8
Harrangue Man Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 09:42 Source
It's landing. Being blessed with slow motilty, motility being the name given to passage of matter through the inrestines, it means material banks up. So when I go then boy do I go. Not in one great glorious brown cascade but in painful sections where it's haed to pass and exhausting but you seem to have passed a normal load. Only there's two more normal loads banked up the chute and the next one off the rank is due for a pain-wracked drop off in half an hour.I've taken SUPERMEDS! and with theWife up I am back to bed. Cross fingers I can sleep the pain off. theBoy was fun when I did the morning wrangle. We told stories. I tried to introduce a subplot where I got cuddles but theBoy yelled 'no subplots!' Later he was on a roll and started doing Storyverse himself.
Read more Views: 5
Popular Science Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 09:30 Source
This Week in the Future, January 23-27, 2012 Baarbarian

Look, world's longest ongoing experiment. You're impressive. We won't deny that. But the fact that nobody has ever seen your tar pitch actually drip in person, after 85 years, is infuriating. Just ask this trio of impatient folks: Ms. Hawk, Admiral F-35, and Dr. Whiskeybottle are all waiting for something, anything, to happen.

Read more Views: 9
Huffington Post Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 09:23 Source

This election process of ours has become reminiscent of an overcooked, deeply redundant television series written by a cabal of hacks with no concern for freshness of tone or inventiveness of detail, relying instead on weary bromides, eye-rolling hyperbole, sophomoric name-calling and the deadening boredom of clichéd characters made interesting only by the manipulated controversies stirred up for the sake of media drama.

Welcome to Election 2012, the Series.

Read more Views: 5
Huffington Post Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 08:35 Source

The perpetual rabble-rousing issue of Republican politics -- illegal immigration -- is making its way through the primary season. In largely predictable ways, candidates mold their view to the particular contours of each primary state -- vicious toward undocumented workers in places like South Carolina, more nuanced in Hispanic-rich Florida.

Mostly, Romney, Gingrich and Santorum pile on the old tropes about job-stealing Mexicans, criminal gangs of Latinos, the porous border that may be infiltrated by no less than al Qaeda, and, of course, President Obama's craven incompetence in securing America from all these terrible things.

Read more Views: 13
The Piping Shrike Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 08:30 Source

Oops.

What I utterly condemn is when protests turn violent, the way we saw the violence yesterday.

J Gillard Press conference 27 January

How annoying. This blog took quite a while going through the debate around the Constitution to set out the position of indigenous people in relation to the state. It needn’t have bothered. All we needed was a Canberra farce and we have all we need to know.

Read more Views: 14
Popular Science Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 08:30 Source
Inside the Landslide MSU/Kelly Gorham

Ed Adams, an engineering professor at Montana State University, used to study avalanches from inside a fortified shack. He would attach his shack to a boulder on a mountain, set small explosives in the snowpack, and trigger an avalanche, surrounding the shack.

Read more Views: 9
Christopher Joye Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 08:20 Source

My old Goldman colleague poses this question over at his Reuters blog. He could have added that there is currency manipulation via QE too:

Mysteries of macro
By Emanuel Derman JANUARY 27, 2012

1. Consider two countries, America and China. Suppose (only suppose) China manipulates its currency to keep it low, thereby making exports cheaper and imports expensive, benefiting its balance of payments and mercantile ambitions, harming America’s.

2. Now consider America alone, with two subpopulations: borrowers and savers. Suppose someone at the top manipulates T-bill prices, keeping them high (i.e. keeping interest rates low), benefiting the borrowers and harming the savers.

My question:

Read more Views: 8
Huffington Post Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 08:18 Source

I've spent a decade and a half in the publishing trenches as I wrote in my, admittedly highly opinionated, opening salvo on the current state of all media in the Digital Age, "It's the End of the Word as We Know It." I'd like to journey back in time a bit and chronicle my journey in the book publishing world, first with my novel Sideways, and then its sequel Vertical.

Read more Views: 8
Huffington Post Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 08:11 Source

I'd been downsized. Thrown under the bus. Killed, some people call it. What a rip-off! I'd made a deal--"I'll give my time on Earth to the Corporation in exchange for money and health insurance to keep my family safe"--and now they weren't holding up their end of the bargain: "We don't want you anymore. Get lost!"

But, surprise, now I was found. I had thought I didn't like spending my precious days on Earth sealed into a box at Time Warner headquarters, where I toiled in corporate communications, but I had no idea. I wasn't fully conscious of how alienated I was, how estranged from myself. I couldn't afford to be, because then how could I have kept doing my job?

Now, anything was possible.

Read more Views: 4
En Passant Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 08:09 Source

Brett commented on my recent article about the attempted genocide of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. He said:

‘You either believe in an erroneous definition of the word genocide, or are ignorant and/or bat-shit crazy, pardon my French.’

Thanks Brett. Why is my view of genocide erroneous?

I quote from the Bringing Them Home report done for the Howard Government on the Stolen Generations and headed by Ronald Wilson. Wilson was on the High Court of Australia between 1979 and 1989 and was the President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission between 1990 and 1997. He describes the stolen generation action as genocide. But I guess he is batshit crazy too.

Read more Views: 12
Huffington Post Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 07:48 Source

Mortician And Newly-Minted Internet Sensation Caitlin Doughty Wants To Radically Change How We Think About Death, Dying And The Funeral Industry

Read more Views: 10
Loon Pond Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 07:46 Source

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Popular Science Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 07:30 Source
Hell-Monkey We love all living creatures here at PopSci, but that doesn't stop us from getting a little creeped out at the, you know, nightmarish appearance of this rare Burmese snub-nosed monkey. It's the first time the species has ever been photographed live; the only other time it's been professionally photographed is after it was killed (and just before it was eaten (warning: graphic image)). Read more at National Geographic. FFI/BANCA/PRCF

This week's image roundup is a particularly good one: the best "blue marble" picture we've ever seen, a video of the aurora resulting from the biggest solar storm in seven years, a foldable car, a stunning green-energy art installation, blah, blah, blah. All great. But what we really want to talk about is that ultra-creepy snub-nosed monkey, or, as we've christened it, the Hell-Monkey of Doom. Feel free to describe in detail exactly how much this picture (and a Google image search for the snub-nosed monkey) gave you the shivers.

Click to launch our guide to the upcoming year in science.

Read more Views: 11
Christopher Joye Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 07:20 Source

After being sensationally nuked twice by the RBA with his rate calls--ie, calling it confidently immediately before the event and then being wrong-footed by the outcome--Terry McCrann is back at it again for February. A week and a half before the RBA Board has even had a chance to meet, and almost a week before the RBA's internal policy group meets to determine their own Board recommendation, McCrann is somehow confidently declaring that it is "almost certain" the RBA will cut rates. Not once but now twice in the Herald Sun and The Australian. Now this is odd for a few reasons. First, McCrann is gun-shy and does not want to get it wrong again, as there are direct costs to his readership. He would not be swinging this hard without some basis to do so--ie, without someone wording him up.

Read more Views: 9
Huffington Post Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 06:58 Source

Amy Storch and her son Ezra had a messy afternoon yesterday.

As Amy describes it on her blog, amalah.com, the little boy came down with a stomach bug after eating a whole lot of raspberries, and the results were very magenta -- all over Amy, Ezra and the house.

Read more Views: 8
Huffington Post Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 06:48 Source

I've just returned from the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where I serve as a board member. I met daily with directors, talent, and supporters. As always, it was dynamic and exciting. And, as always, the festival showcased scores of extraordinary films. Some hilarious, some heartbreaking; some fantastic, some frightening; and some that are sure to be commercial hits in the months to come.

Yet, my most cherished takeaway from Sundance this year is something I hadn't anticipated. I was joined at the festival by my 22-year old son Brett, a designer who works in New York. Seeing Sundance through his eyes gave new meaning to the experience for me.

Read more Views: 6
Skepticlawyer Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 06:47 Source

Mrs Petrov's shoe

JULIA Gillard’s office has been rocked by the resignation of a media adviser who helped spread information used to incite an Aboriginal tent embassy riot.

Tony Hodges, who has worked in the Prime Minister’s office since 2009, told an unnamed source that Tony Abbott would be at an awards ceremony near to the Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra on Thursday.

Read more Views: 13

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