It is no longer completely ridiculous to ponder whether the US might be heading towards a new low level civil war.
Indeed, it is arguable that it is already in an emerging state of insurgency. The number of weapons in private hands makes the prospect at least possible although, unlike the Civil War, the division may not be a clear division geographically but would be more like a patchwork.
The blog is taking a break. Back in a little while.
There is one area in which the Greens are out in a class of their own – hubris.
The Greens opposed the former Rudd Labor government’s Carbon Pollution Trading Scheme (CPRS) in 2009 and voted it down in parliament.
Later it supported the Gillard Labor government’s carbon price and claimed it only “happened because of the Greens”.
There are many secrets surrounding the Melbourne Grand Prix.
For instance: why they are the only big event in Victoria which can’t seem to manage to accurately count the number of people who attend and have to estimate attendance? How can they claim, on their estimates, that each year is a new record attendance? What real economic benefits, if any, accrue to Victoria? How the Kennett Government managed to ‘steal’ the event from Adelaide when in fact it was there for the taking because the SA Government thought it wasn’t worth the trouble and expense?
One of the great mysteries of the possible global impacts of climate change is the fate of the Gulf Stream more properly known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
A new Nature paper (2 March 2022) by Laura C. Jackson, Arne Biastoch, Martha W. Buckley, Damien F. Desbruyeres, Eleanor Frajka-Williams, Ben Moat and Jon Robson on the evolution of AMOC since 1980 throws more light on what might be happening with AMOC and why.
It would be easy to develop a history of recent Australian history around the theme of if only.
If only we had persevered with a carbon price and carbon trading system. If only we had cracked down on tax rorts such as negative gearing and dividend imputation schemes which benefitted the wealthy and/or pushed housing out of the reach of young people. If only we had embraced Indigenous reconciliation earlier and more meaningfully.
More than 30 years ago Umberto Eco wrote a book, Foucault’s Pendulum, about the creation of conspiracy theories by a group of Milanese book editors which embroils them in real conspiracies.
The editors, sick of looking at crackpot manuscripts, create more by randomly throwing hermetic manuscripts into a computer named Abulafia after the medieval Jewish cabbalist.
Works of art often have far deeper value than just their aesthetic appeal, their prices or their creator.
Over the centuries works of art have been destroyed by iconoclasts, burnt, stolen or damaged with graffiti.
But there is one work of art which will be characterised by a different fate – exemplifying much that is problematic about the City of Port Phillip (CoPP) and the way it is run. It is a relatively minor event but an immensely symbolic one.
Almost everyone will have ideas on what should be the priorities for the incoming Albanese Government.
While the manifesto was policy lite there were many significant institutional proposals such as rebuilding the Public Service and depoliticising it. The Thodey Review would be a good start but a better one would be just to get back to the traditional concept of a professional, apolitical, expert group capable of helping formulate policy and implementing it.
Much of the discussion about the emergence of the Teal Independents has focussed on the Morrison Government and its attitude to climate change and women as if this was the primary cause of the phenomenon.
Yet while it is immensely influential it is also significant that another source of their emergence, and possible success, stems from broader developments in western democracies.