another waste of tax payer money:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/05/14/1210444490103.html

hard working and efficient producers being unreasonably persecuted by the law. a war on “the war on drugs” perhaps should be the top of any libertarians campaign.

For once Iemma-Costa are doing the right thing with their crash or crash through stance on privatisation. Meanwhile, former Libs leader Peter ‘Speedo’ Debnam, supposedly from the Right of the party is quitting the Opposition front bench because of his party’s decision to support power privatisation, and this after a period of hemming and hawing and revealing themselves to be unprincipled populists. Read more »

2,370 warrant requests granted in 2007, up 9% from 2006, to search or eavesdrop on suspected terrorists and spies in the U.S. 

9,254 national security letters issued in 2005; 12,583 in 2006 (data for 2007 is not yet available). Such letters request information like your bank account details and telephone usage, but do not rely on a court order and are issued without informing the person spied upon. Read more »

While browsing today at my neighbourhood Berkelouws I saw out on the new book shelves Three new deals by Wolfgang Schivelbusch. This is a book which will probably interest and delight Catallaxy regulars as it purports to explore the parallels between FDR’s New Deal, Italian fascism and German Nazism. Read more »

Annie Leonard argues in the presentation at the top of her site that the modern means of production and rates of consumption are fatally flawed. She backs up her assertions with some interesting (though US-centric) numbers. I particularly like how every time she refers to the “golden arrow” of consumption, there’s a little “aaah!” sound. Read more »

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/sydney-teacher-suspended-for-posing-naked/2008/05/09/1210131228074.html

outrageous!

how did the kids whose parents complained come into the world? ivf? for shame, a teacher having sex…run for the hills, and won’t somebody please think of the children…

Last month, I won a scholarship to further my academic research at Oxford from this fine US libertarian organisation, and it occurred to me that I needed to stop frigging about and actually focus on what was important. Read more »

Sexual assault is no laughing matter, unless it doesn’t involve humans (link via GNXP):

An Antarctic fur seal has been observed trying to have sex with a king penguin.

The South African-based scientists who witnessed the incident say it is the most unusual case of mammal mating behaviour yet known.

The incident, which lasted for 45 minutes and was caught on camera, is reported in the Journal of Ethology. Read more »

I’ve seen some pretty strange stuff in my life. No doubt, too, there are perfectly normal things that I think strange because, ahem, I’m pretty strange.

Anyhoo, that’s by-the-by.

The hot-penny-chucking ritual I witnessed yesterday was right up there on teh weirds list. A mate of mine suggested the RSPCA would be on your case if you did this to animals, and one of my tutors suspected the whole exercise was a tort waiting to happen (even he was weirded out, and he studied for 3 years at Oxford and is now a Fellow at Balliol). Read more »

The so-called Birdsville amendment to the TPA which was introduced by the previous Coalition government under pressure from economic populist Barnaby Joyce would have essentially discouraged ‘big’ business from giving price discounts to customers. The provision as it stood stated (s. 461AA): Read more »

Anthony Lane is the New Yorker’s movie critic. He is generally tough, but comes across as considered, fair and interesting. He rarely pronounces a movie bad or good, often being highly critical of aspects of a movie he obviously thinks is wonderful overall, & often praising elements of movies he considers to be just bad. He can, however, take a fairly pronounced dislike to a movie: Read more »

Tibetan flags made in China:

Reports in a Hong Kong newspaper say police in China have discovered a factory making thousands of Tibetan flags for activist groups overseas.

The Ming Pao newspaper in Hong Kong says the Tibetan flags were being made at a factory in the southern province of Guangdong.

It says the factory owner was just fulfilling an order and was not aware of the sensitivity of the flags which are outlawed by the Chinese authorities.

The term “luvvie” refers to “pretentious, overblown, narcissistic people of an artistic or dramatic bent”.

The time has come to make up a collection of choice statements by our own luvvies, not an original idea but a good one. This is a small list on Wikiquotes.

Local examples are invited. There must be some good ones from the Comedy Festival.

How did economics or political economy ever get to be known as the dismal science when such good sense was being written in 1821. This is an extract from the translator’s preface to a collection of letters from J B Say to Malthus. Read more »

Henry Ergas (disclaimer - my employer but I would have linked to him anyway) has some critical comments on the outcomes of the 2020 Summit:

What is most striking is not the varied quality of the outcomes but the underlying commonality of approach: an approach almost always centred on making government do more, rather than on questioning whether it can even do as much as it now seeks to do. Read more »

Andrew Norton comments on his 2020 weekend:

I was in the productivity stream. At that 100 person level - as opposed to the collective behaviour in the 1,000 person plenary sessions - there wasn’t a smothering consensus. But nor was there much debate. It was more a case of people trying to put their pet topics into the stream statement that was to be included in the summit initial report. By Sunday morning I was bored and disengaged. Read more »

Sinclair very kindly left this in the comments, and it’s so timely I thought it deserved a post of its own. I’m watching this process from Blairland utterly aghast, even though a week after Rudd was elected I could ‘detect the Blair’ and was warning accordingly. Read more »

The Oxford Union has moved on from political and historical wingnuts.

This time, they’ve invited an actor convicted of downloading child pornography. Chris Langham:

[W]ill talk to students on 27 May about his conviction and his “vilification” in the media, union president Ben Tansey said. Read more »

The Malcolm and Mugabe Show. Malcolm Fraser wrote a plausible defence of his role vis a vis Mugabe, claiming he was an ok guy for many years before he turned bad. Tell that to the Matebele (or Ndebele) who were massacred in thousands (10,000 to 40,000 but who was counting).  That was in 1980, very early in Mugabe’s watch, while Fraser was PM. Is there any record of Fraser’s response to that episode? Read more »

This looks like a textbook example of trying to force or engineer from the top a move towards diversity and acceptance of diversity and freedom of choice which at the same time disparages and (it appears) almost outlaws traditional practices that have stood at the heart of civilisation as we know it - the well-functioning nuclear family.

How real is this, to stop using terms like “husband” and “wife”? Read more »

France seems to think so:

French politicians called on Tuesday for stiff penalties of up to three years jail and heavy fines against “pro anorexia” websites and publications that encourage girls and young women to starve themselves. Read more »

While musing on the recent death of Charlton Heston, Brendan O’Neil of the ex-commie turned pro-technology libertarians of some stripe or other crew at Spiked tries to argue that gun control is racist.

My most recent read has been The Bin Ladens by Steven Coll (I’m still halfway through). This extremely gripping book is as much about the creation of the Saudi state and Saudi politics as it is about the intimate workings of what is now, tragically, one of the world’s most infamous family names. Coll lays bare how intertwined the fortunes of the Bin Laden family have been with those of the Saudi royal family. Read more »

While Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious may be a load of hogwash, it probably derives from the notion that there are common narrative themes in all human works of art which in turn come from recurring features of the human condition. Read more »

Googled “objective knowledge” to check a para in my piece on the topic, “This article is written to encourage literary intellectuals who may feel threatened by Lord Snow’s scientists who  ‘have the future in their bones’ (and who know all about the second law of thermodynamics)”, and  stumbled onto a very handy site. Read more »

Via GNXP, great to hear that this year’s Pulitzer prize has gone to a science journalist, Amy Harmon, who has written many interesting pieces for the NYT on the implications of the ‘DNA Age’. A list of links to her pieces so far is available here. Read more »

A hilarious Camille Paglia take on Hillary’s beta males: Read more »

i’m kindof surprised that i haven’t heard of e-prime, a subset of the english language without the verb “is” or “to be”, until today. my mother studied linguistics, a good friend is doing a PhD in computational linguistics, i studied maths, computer science, philosophy and philosophy of science at uni but somehow this slipped through.

here is not a bad introduction: http://nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm Read more »

Inquiring minds want to know.

Woke up this morning for a spot of early morning study, to be greeted by the scene over the fold.

More pics to follow on Facebook - the lovely historic buildings do look impressive dressed in white. This shot was taken out of my window.

i cleaned up the site a little…

the aqua colours were making me feel a little green.

and catallaxy is now advertising free!…to all those who were searching for a wife online through catallaxy’s sidebar i apologise…

comments? applause? death threats?

Considering two kinds of bias on campus. One is the one-sided or aggressive promotion of particular points of view and the failure to create a climate of discussion where all points of view can get a fair and civil hearing. The other is course content that fails to put students in touch with the best thinking in the field.

I think that it is good to have a wide-ranging debate about both of these kinds of bias despite the efforts of lefties and others to either hose down the issue or turn a blind eye. Read more »

Not all over in Zimbabwe. Security forces move against journalists and the opposition.

Reports that Mugabe has support from the army and security chiefs (the people with the guns).

The table of contents of the April Quadrant is on line. Some of the items can be read on line as well, including a piece by John Stone on the travails of Aboriginal policy and an article by Hal Colebatch on the “new English disease”.

The book of sand (can read online here: book of sand) is the perfect analogy for the interweb.

I stay awake at night and waste my days feverishly reading more and more information in this infernal book.

I think i need to dispose of it in a forest somewhere!

Reader Amir points out that the invite list for Rudd’s talkfest is now online. Read more »

I haven’t done one of these for a while but got inspired to after listening over and over again to one of my favourite Dylan albums, Blood on the tracks last week. Below the fold you can watch a live performance of a young Bob singing ‘Idiot wind’ which has to count as one of the angriest breakup songs of all time. However, it’s more than a breakup song. Read more »

Currency Lad has a nice expose of the depths of lunacy that some elements of the Labor party are sinking to in their hatred of Israel. Read more »