The first Australian TV series about the home life of a sitting PM is about the home life of the first female PM. Is this a coincidence?

Betty Ford dies at 93.

Remembering Geraldine Ferraro.

About how American politics is affected by hopes of a transformational landslide election.

Printing a pamphlet including Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, carefully leaving out two words.

About the power of extra information and position to affect the actions of the powerful ( Read more... )

In a discussion of libertarianism and tolerance, economist Bryan Caplan comes up with the line:
If your end is the elimination of millions of people, the means of coercion will call to you like the One Ring to the Nazgûl.
Indeed.

Made here:
Our main problem is that Indonesia is not a signatory [to the Refugee Convention]. The mechanism of the Convention is modelled around people trying to go anywhere they can until some conflict is settled, not shopping around for the nicest country nearby ( Read more... )

Here. They seem to get all the highlights nicely.

The ASIC website has a list of scam companies.

About the CFMEU’s campaign against independent contractors and self-employed people. Which is getting traction in the Federal Labor Government. More.

Noting the problem of inner city creeping nimbyism. About the problems of Oz as a polarised nation, particularly about environmental issues.

An ( Read more... )

An excellent study of the origins of the Indo-Europeans by an archaeologist who respects (and uses intelligently) the findings of linguists is reviewed here, here and hereThis has been a particularly fraught scholarly and pseudo-scholarly area, given all the "Aryan" fantasies it has given rise to, which the author handles very intelligently ( Read more... )

This graph sets out how catastrophically bad youth unemployment is in debt-ridden EUROpe. Meanwhile, in Oz, unemployment is holding steady at 4.9%The euro was a bad idea: lots of economists said so at the time, but the EUrosuperstate decided that it could make it work in a Triumph of the Will. As folk discuss the odds of various states (starting ( Read more... )

Does that make me a bad person? Actually, what I have been laughing at is Bones, where the dead bodies are brilliantly constructed props. I bought the first five seasons in a box set for $112, so I have been working my way through the five seasons ( Read more... )

A friend of mine spent three years of his youth being active in the ALP. He now has become very active in the Liberal Party. This gives him a basis on which to compare the very different internal cultures of the two ( Read more... )