Blogotariat

Cheating as always, ReachTel finds 47.4 percent of Tasmanians voting Liberal, 23.6 percent Labor, 18.2 percent Greens and 6.7 PUP. Machines rang landlines on Thursday, late shopping night, while the Debate was proceeding, and got those uninterested in it, and not on a mobile, and not preparing dinner, or still at work, or driving home, and, sure enough, these underoccupied nonagenarians favoured the Liberals.

Similar machine-Thursday-landline polling in August by Lonergan, ReachTel and Galaxy had Rudd, Swan, Clare, Burke, Bowen, Dreyfus and Albo losing their seats.

Rake embellishes Sydney and its buccaneering stumblefootedness like no other comedy-drama. Roxburgh’s fumbling rogue, in equal parts Hamlet, Feste, Mo McCacky and Harold Hill, has an intimate force like Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces and O’Toole in My Favourite Year, and his attendant, defiant ensemble of first-rate uppity actors (including, for a minute, Cate Blanchett) and pitch-perfect writers and directors comprise an experience unlike…anything really, except, perhaps, an unlikely amalgam of Casablanca, Duck Soup, Guys and Dolls and State and Main.

Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you'd like to...

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With exactly a week to go, two general matters to relate:

• The Poll Bludger state election guide now comes equipped with a comprehensive review of the Legislative Council.

The rain has continued. It is not really a problem. Dexter and Hannah could cope with getting bit wet. Fortunately, we did not get the hail that was forecast elsewhere.

I am sure that Dexter and Hannah have become used of been photographed. As dogs they seem to adapt to human ways. If so they recognize the species difference. What is captured by the photos is often luck. Sometimes I notice things that otherwise would have escaped my attention.

Misunderstandings and misstatements perennially pervade any debate about public funding of research and development. That must be so for any topic involving public money, almost by definition, but arguments about funding for scientific research and development contain a unique and special irony.

Well-working government funding is, by definition, difficult to assess, because of two criteria common to subsidies for R&D at virtually all western governments: specifically, governments seek to fund activities yielding large benefits, and these activities should be actions not otherwise undertaken by the private sector.

In the milling maggoty squirmy sludge that makes up the far right, one occasionally catches a glimpse of an older evil amongst all the present-day phobic paranoiacs and yammering identity movements.

Here’s one who gave us a laugh.

• France backs warship deal but not Paralympics – “Despite France’s anger over Russia’s stance towards the Crimea the country’s president François Hollande said a controversial sale of two state-of-the art warships by France to Russia was still on course. But the French government will boycott the Winter Paralympics in Sochi.”

from Crikey …..

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Global technology giant Microsoft has asked the Federal Government to review a controversial policy enacted by the Attorney-General's Department last year which which require departments and agencies to explicitly acquire the approval of the Attorney-General and the relevant portfolio minister before government data containing private information can be stored in offshore facilities.

In the global Stock Market Olympic awards last week, the race to beat their pre-GFC stock market highs was won by  Denmark – the home of Lego, King Canute, Soren Kierkegaard, Hans Christian Andersen, Hamlet, Jørn Utzon, Helena Christensen, Danish pastries, and a long line of Vikings called Erik.

By Leith van Onselen I wrote on Wednesday how both sides of politics plan to sell Victoria’s last major state-owned asset – the Port of Melbourne – in order to fund infrastructure to support Melbourne’s rapidly growing economy. One of the proposed new infrastructure projects – the $8 billion East West tunnel – is reportedly [...]

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