An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
Possum’s analysis of the broad policy objectives being played out in a subtle, piecewise fashion shows the political strategy of the Rudd government in the large. Be that as it may, there’s plenty of evidence of raw political cunning as well; I’d just like to point to a little policy announcement in the budget that demonstrates it. Read more »
You can’t talk about class without talking about class, it seems. Over at Troppo, Ken Parish, who should be familiar with the BB concept of the grenade lob, lobs one in comments: Read more »
Surely the bedrock responsibility of any state is to protect its citizens in the case of natural disaster. The bungling and incompetence shown in New Orleans was the lever for Bush’s free fall in the opinion polls. Far graver is the appalling regime in Burma, which has never shown any interest in doing so, and which held an absurd constitutional referendum to entrench itself in power and ban Aung San Suu Kyi from ever holding office even as many of its citizens were being devastated and killed by Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath. Read more »
I’m thinking it might be fun to turn the liveblogging gaze on Brendan when he replies to the budget tonight.
In the meantime, Bernard Keane at Crikey has been gazing into his crystal ball: (more…)
LP has often been critical of the standard of mainstream political commentary in Australia, arguing that it concentrates too much on day by day horse race piffle framed by a narrow range of possible narrative scripts. Read more »
If you’re the sort of person who wakes up at the same time as a rooster, you might be acquainted with the comedy shows ABC Radio National puts on at 5.30am.
These programs are usually ancient English efforts featuring members of The Goodies (I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again) or the late Kenneth Williams (Just a Minute*). Read more »
The following is a work of fiction and any resemblance to an actual Australian university is purely a coincidence. 
********************
A group of researchers at an Australian university, inspired by Olaf Stapledon’s novel Sirius about an intelligent dog, decided to attempt to genetically engineer a tiger with human intelligence. Read more »
Terms like “securitisation”, “derivatives”, “longitudinal diversification” and “dynamic hedging” would make most of our eyes glaze over, I suspect. Yet all this arcana is now having an impact on us - vie the subprime mortgage crisis and the shock waves it’s set off in the world economy. Read more »
John Amato at Crooks & Liars has a really fantastic post about the media narrative on Hillary - first they crack the puzzle on how to anoint Obama as the presumptive nominee:
The media have figured out how to end the Democratic race. Declaring it over doesn’t work. Urging Hillary Clinton to drop out doesn’t work. Putting Barack Obama on the cover of Time as the nominee doesn’t work.
Read more »
I’m going to have a go at it. I’ll leave comments closed on this post until 7pm-ish. Until then, comments can be left on Rob’s speculation thread. Once the liveblogging starts, remember to refresh periodically to see the updates, and please leave your own updates in comments. Read more »
If so, you’ll be interested to hear that the Democratic Socialist Party has expelled a minority faction calling itself the “Leninist Party Faction”. Read more »
The Big Brother narrative takes yet another snarky turn. As Eye on Big Brother notes, all the glee on the panel show tonight (Big Mouth or whatever) was directed at the hapless Brigitte. Read more »
It must have seemed a bright idea at the time to get Noel Pearson to write an article for The Monthly on Obama. Trouble is - Pearson may or may not know anything about American politics, but almost his entire article is a discussion of Obama seen through the prism of a book written by Shelby Steele. Read more »
The price of oil continues to set records - it’s now reached nearly $126 US Dollars. While some of that can be attributed to the Pacific Peso-ization of the greenback, by most measures the oil price has reached a record. Against the Euro, it’s still a record. Inflation-adjusted, it’s still a record. Read more »
I’m no expert in health economics, but there’s been a lot of commentary over the years from some who are suggesting that the artificial lifeline given to private insurers and hospitals has done just about zip to “take the pressure off the public hospital system”, while nicely fattening pay packets and profit margins for some. At enormous cost to the public purse.
These comments from the Doctors’ Reform Society seem apposite: Read more »
Graph reproduced from Possum’s post. Read more »
Another dispatch from LP’s Indiana correspondent:
Aside from the Democrat primaries, the major talking point in the U.S. this week is whether the United States is losing ground in the global economy. This is different to the question of whether or not the U.S. economy is in recession (or ’slowdown’ as GWB prefers to put it), but is rather about whether the U.S. is losing the competitive race against the emergent economies of East Asia and the Middle East, and indeed to Europe. Read more »
While I’m quite a fan of allohistory, I rarely engage in it because (a) I’m not very good at it and (b) it’s rather self-indulgent. But like most indulgences, it’s a bit of harmless fun and it won’t make you go blind. Read more »
On a recent comments thread on LP, it was argued that LP readers are political types rather than Big Brother sorts. Well, I don’t think many people are either/or about such things, and at any rate I’ve been yearning to lower the tone of this blog for a long time. With this in mind, I’ve decided to do a celebrity gossip post today. Read more »
I’m pretty sure, as I’ve mentioned before, that I was the first to dub Queensland’s National Party leader the Borg when I was covering the Queensland state campaign for Crikey in 2006.
Now have a look at Laurence’s new website banner.
He’s stolen our bridge! Read more »
Not good, I’d wager.
When we looked at polar bears recently I was left with the feeling that their future was very much bound up with the future of the Arctic ice. They at least have the prospect of meeting the grizzly bears being forced further north and producing lots of little grolar bears - hybrid offspring of the polar bear and the grizzly. Read more »
The unfolding mass human tragedy that is the Burmese cyclone (the specifics of which I don’t have anything except that a) I hope that the junta stops putting up barriers to international assistance, and b) that it’s going to make the global food crunch worse) reminds us of the awesome power of nature to inflict death and destruction. Read more »
“Be proud of what we’ve achieved - don’t take any cheek from the other side.”
Andrew Elder wrote an interesting post the other day critiquing Gerard Henderson’s critique, and pointing to a fundamental problem the Liberals have: Read more »
When some terribly serious coot makes a history of 90’s Australian pop, I doubt they’ll deign to mention TISM. Read more »
LP’s Indiana correspondent is having a busy night in Bloomington! Here’s Terry’s latest dispatch on the Indiana and North Carolina Democratic primaries. Read more »
People might remember that I promised on the thread about the introduction of ads on LP to report back on how it was going. We’ve now gone through the first full month of ads, so here’s the report! Read more »
There hasn’t been much commentary about the government’s announcements on the Murray-Darling plan - notably, the beginnings of large-scale buybacks of water rights - in the blogosphere so far; Quiggin thinks it’s good because they’ve announced they’re going to start buying back water; the only problem is that they’re not buying back enough. Read more »
Just a quick plug - via the LP facebook group - for our friends at sQuareOne, who have a number of events coming up in Sydney targeted to people interested in independent publishing and freelance writing and blogging. Read more »
According to accepted narratives (same narratives that ran last year), the budget will be a test to see if Kevin Rudd’s honeymoon will come to an end. Note to pundits: it appears to have been going strong since December 2006. I’m inclined to agree with Mark that we’re seeing a very different political pattern take hold. The question is - what to do? Read more »
… probably a bit of an egotist, but there’s a very interesting take on Barack Obama’s former pastor at Salon, where Sarah Posner interviews religious studies scholar Jonathan L. Walton. Read more »
Whatever you think about the merits of the issue (and it’s certain that Morris Iemma doesn’t have the public of New South Wales on his side with his electricity privatisation drive), the politics of Iemma’s decision to ignore a contrary vote of the Labor Party conference which was carried overwhelmingly - by 702 to 107 - are intriguing. Read more »
There seems to be a great need for particularly heinous crimes to be invested with some meaning - a displacement, I think of “how could this happen?” into “what is it about this society that enables this to happen”? Read more »
If you want to see glorious and evolving represenations of the Australian landscape and Australian icons, the Sidney Nolan exhibition is highly recommended. If you want to see graffiti art, take a walk around the little lanes in Melbourne’s CBD. Here’s some examples of that graffiti.
An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
It’s a long weekend in Queensland. We celebrate Labour day with a public holiday on Monday.
Props to the Walkley Foundation and the MEAA for organising a conference in Sydney on the future of journalism. As Margaret Simons writes in Crikey (pay for view):
The future of journalism is the subject of much discussion and experimentation overseas, but until recently the debates has been largely absent among Australian journalists. Read more »
Except of course, they aren’t. Our world is chemicals, our life is chemistry.
This rant is brought to you by yet another TV talking head rabbiting on about
“natural remedies, not those chemical ones” Read more »
I suspect they’re dead and gone now as uni courses (cos’ Madonna is a very Gen X phenomenon), but one of the staples of the anti-pomo anti-cultural studies culture wars used to be claims that Universities were teaching subjects about the Detroit diva rather than, you know, Shakespeare. Read more »
Once upon a time, Big Brother was quite the topic on this here blog. After vowing last year never to watch it again, I got sucked in again to BB08. Ho hum. The supposedly more opinionated group of housemates this year have turned out just to be the usual bunch of suburban and rural fame seekers, as far as I can see, despite there being “a cult survivor”, “a UFO believer”, “a bellydancing short person”, etc, blah, blah. There’s also a law student. Read more »
Local government elections are taking place all over the UK today, and the results are expected to be rather dire for Gordon Brown’s Labour party. The most interesting race is for the London mayoralty - an executive style directly elected position created by the Blair government. The incumbent gets to steer the capital’s destinies and manage a budget of 11 billion pounds. Incumbent Ken Livingstone has had two terms. Read more »
Former Howard Government minister Kevin Andrews and AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty seem to be continuing their attempts to blame each other for the Haneef debacle. You’ll recall a couple of days ago that a “source”, most probably Keelty or somebody close to him, claimed that Andrews had cancelled Haneef’s visa without bothering to tell the AFP. Now we have the bite back from Andrews. Read more »
Channel Seven is being sued for defamation by Mercedes Corby. Read more »
“Olympism”.
Andrew Bartlett dissects for us the official goals of the “Olympic movement”: Read more »
I have no idea what that means. [I think I’m channelling Letterman.]
The point of this post, of course, is to register and share my excitement that Adelaide’s favourite, The Audreys have a new album out, When the Flood Comes. Available now.
Beneath the fold is the regular repost of the LP comments policy. All commenters are asked to read the comments policy before posting and abide by the policy on threads. In light of recent discussions, please also note this comment.
The dense booklet, which was overseen by former prime minister John Howard, describes the uses of the stump-jump plough, the emergence of the Heidelberg school of art, the location of Phar Lap’s heart and depicts Australia’s first governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, as “firm but humane”. Read more »
There’s a thought provoking review of Richard Barbrook’s new book Imaginary Futures: From thinking machines to the Global village at Mute magazine. Read more »
This post is likely to be of interest mostly to those who are hosting a blog on Wordpress.com. Read more »
It’s well known that the AFP harboured, and still harbour, strong suspicions about Mohammed Haneef. However, even if you make that assumption, the investigation and subsequent prosecution seems to have been stuffed up on several levels. Read more »
The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada has just decided that while Canada’s 15,000 polar bears are threatened by climate change they are not in immediate danger. The Committee found that numbers are decreasing in some places and increasing in others. Read more »
Unlike the last entry with this title, this is (tangentially) a post about Roxy Music. Read more »
So, it’s time again to condemn. Here’s an eighteenth open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat this month? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?) Read more »
Not a post about Roxy Music… I’ve just been watching Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii’s rather stunning film Avalon on dvd. It’s effectively a live action anime - made in Poland in Polish using Polish actors for a Japanese and international audience, rather than for a domestic one. Read more »
In Friday’s SMH, Peter Hartcher gave a sanguine appraisal of the Rudd government’s symbolic actions since winning the election, and concluded that Rudd has been “a keen student” of Howard in the effective political use of symbolism. Read more »
It has often been said that as Australians we have a predilection for remembering and even celebrating our failures. The ABC does a lot of remembering at these times. This year there have been a couple of segments covering an event that may eventually take over from ANZAC in our consciousness, an event that occurred 90 years ago on the third ANZAC Day. Read more »
Interest in nuclear weapons has faded a lot since the Cold War. These days, the possibility of nuclear confrontation between major powers isn’t treated terribly seriously, because the costs of such an exchange would be too horrible to contemplate. And, anyway, both the Russians and the US have been reducing their nuclear arsenals, right? Instead, concerns lay much more around nuclear terrorism, on the assumption that terrorists can’t be deterred by the threat of destruction. Read more »
Michael Molitor gave a public lecture last night at UNSW, where he now holds an adjunct professorship with the Climate Change Research Centre between appointments as a ‘Carbon Manager’ for PriceWaterhouseCooper. The talk was entitled Climate Change: ‘Show Me The Money’, which is the famous line from Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire - so when Molitor spoke passionately of the ‘Governor of NSW’, I was thankful that there were no couches onstage. Read more »
So Prince William becomes a Knight of the Garter, John Howard doesn’t.
PRINCE William, not John Howard, will receive one of Britain’s highest and oldest honours tonight - being made a Royal Knight of the Garter.
There has been feverish speculation since the beginning of the year that former prime minister Mr Howard was the Queen’s personal pick for the honour. Read more »
Nutrient deficiency is something we generally associate with the developing world. But in Australia? Hardly. But, apparently, iodine deficiency is so prevalent in Australia - around half the population is iodine-deficient to some extent - that the government is likely to mandate the use of iodized salt in breadmaking. At least one professor is arguing it’s still not enough: Read more »
It’s unrealistic to expect detailed policy prescriptions to come out of two days of discussion - though the choice of two days of discussion with SFA preparation was entirely the government’s. And a variety of sources are saying that the interim reports really struggled to capture the tenor of the actual discussions. Read more »
I’ve had a go at drawing together some of my commentary on the politics of and media reaction to the 2020 summit in my New Matilda column for this week.
There’s also a measured assessment of the summit in Eureka Street from John Warhurst, which I think is well worth a read.
A Newspoll sample of Coalition voters has found the preferred Liberal leader to be… Peter Costello.
No doubt coincidentally, Newspoll conducted the survey over the weekend at the same time as Liberal backbenchers were leaking furiously to The Australian.
It also comes amid a backbench move to draft Mr Costello to return to the political spotlight, despite his refusal to stand for the leadership after Labor’s election victory in November. Read more »
