I recently read Alice Pung’s lovely ‘Unpolished Gem’, an autobiographical account of growing up as a first generation Asian migrant in Melbourne’s Western suburbs. For a variety of reasons it really struck a chord with me.
After discussing it with some other fans of the book recently, a friend sent me this Op-Ed that the author […]
Bob Dumpling at Polliegraph highlights this shocking paragraph from a recent SMH Op-Ed by Paul Sheehan:
“The hysterics in the refugee and mandatory detention debates have always thrown around words like “shame” and “gulags” and engaged in moral relativism, comparing Howard to Saddam Hussein, while refusing to recognise that there are real consequences of failures […]
A new report from the Rand Corporation includes the following graph:
Abstract
How do terrorist groups end? The evidence since 1968 indicates that terrorist groups rarely cease to exist as a result of winning or losing a military campaign. Rather, most groups end because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they […]
With Apologies to the Life of Brian….
Leader of the Australian People’s Front: What’s the Rudd Government ever done for the Left? They’re no better than the Howard Government!
Man 1: Um – signed Kyoto?
Leader of the Australian People’s Front: Well, yes, ok signed Kyoto. But other than signing Kyoto, what’s the Rudd Government ever done […]
John McCain has put a lot of eggs in the basket(case) that is the Iraq War in this presidential election. Unfortunately, as Matt Yglesias describes, Obama’s Iraq trip has backfired on McCain in a rather substantial way:
[McCain had] spent, several weeks with the main theme of his campaign being, quite literally, to criticize Barack […]
Ordinarily I don’t like to mock religious types - each to their own etc.
However, intelligent design proponents are fair game. If they want to fight on the terrain of reason rather than faith, then they ought to be subject to intellectual scrutiny… and mockery where appropriate.
Which leads me to the ‘Athiest’s Nightmare’, Kirk Cameron’s explanation […]
If only the Howard government paid as much attention to corruption at the Australian Wheat Board:
FORMER immigration minister Kevin Andrews instructed his department to lift the intake of Christian refugees from the Middle East in response to what he saw as a pro-Muslim bias created by corrupt local case officers.
The Weekend Australian says Mr Andrews […]
The reaction in the left-wing blogosphere to the Rudd Government ETS Green Paper’s cent-for-cent reduction in the fuel excise to compensate for tax increases in the ETS seems to have been universally hostile –Larvartus Prodeo variously describes it as “highly problematic” and “ALL Wrong” and An Onymous Lefty describes it as “Absolutely pissweak”, which was […]
Chris Blattman is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Political Science at Yale with a penchant for fieldwork in development economics. He also runs a very entertaining as well as generally thought-provoking blog on his experiences. He’s far from a conservative.
I say this as background to the following post:
Today the ICC’s Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, […]
“The weight of scientific evidence tells us that Australians are facing risks of damaging climate change. The outsider to climate science has no rational choice but to accept that, on a balance of probabilities, the mainstream science is right.
There are prominent dissenters on this matter, gathered under the rubric of ’sceptic’. For the most part […]