Monday, August 21, 2017

Confetti of Stories: Swiss man charged for spying in German tax evasion case

“Give it everything you’ve got. Leave nothing out there.”
(Andy Murray)


PREPARING FOR AMERICAN COLLEGE FOOTBALL IN AUSTRALIA: Rice and Stanford play Down Under on August 26 Even busy Icebergers and Commishes will binge on the game ...


Inside Story
“It helps a [person] immensely to be a bit of a hero-worshipper,” Sir William Osler remarked in 1889, “and the stories... Dear media dragon readers,  my heroes, consider reading more

Virginia Woolf on the eclipse of 1927


Debunking the Myth of “Free Speech”

Contrary to widespread misperceptions, we’ve never had free speech in America, and there are good reasons why not.


Runaway train never going back
Wrong way on a one way track
Seems like I should be getting somewhere

The state's Auditor-General recently warned that Sydney's trains will increasingly struggle to run on time unless "sustained and substantial investment" is made in the existing heavy rail network. Rail patronage growth has been outstripping both the government's forecasts and the rail system's capacity to cope


Like clockwork, the Turnbull government keeps making bad decisions that only result in humiliation. Bernard Keane at his cracking best. 

ONE OF the staples of parliamentary theatre is confected amusement, when MPs on one side or another, on cue, roar with laughter like extras in an opera. With Labor MPs struggling to stop themselves grinning from ear to ear this week, there’s been little need for fakery.

The government’s conspiracy theory about Barnaby “The Maungatapere Candidate” Joyce, and its insistence on doubling down on it yesterday in Parliament, turned question time into a farce of an altogether higher order than it normally is. Shambles of A Government shambling through Shambolic shambleathon





Opal figures show skyrocketing passenger demand on Sydney train ...


Passenger demand for trains in Sydney has risen by almost 20 per cent .... Transport Minister Andrew Constance told a business gathering on ...


Senate investigates tech failures




US agrees to give Australia additional intelligence to chase tax...


jonaspeterson_alienskinexposure021





WHEN YOU’VE BEEN THROUGH HELL, YOU RECOGNIZE THE SMELL OF BRIMSTONE: The Blessings of a Soviet Education

Lecturer fires up on LinkedIn after being faced with empty classroom Hungarians have the best sense of humour and the absurdity of life ...

CHANGE:  IBM Watson Makes a Treatment Plan for Brain Cancer Patient in 10 Minutes; Doctors Take 160 Hours


HEALTH:  Brain scan study adds to evidence that lower brain serotonin levels are linked to dementia: Results suggest serotonin loss may be a key player in cognitive decline, not just a side-effect of Alzheimer’s disease.





The White House nonetheless issued a statement Sunday saying Mr. Trump “includes white supremacists, KKK, Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups” in his condemnation. As so often with Mr. Trump, his original statement missed an opportunity to speak like a unifying political leader.
Yet the focus on Mr. Trump is also a cop-out because it lets everyone duck the deeper and growing problem of identity politics on the right and left. The politics of white supremacy was a poison on the right for many decades, but the civil-rights movement rose to overcome it, and it finally did so in the mid-1960s with Martin Luther King Jr. ’s language of equal opportunity and color-blind justice.
That principle has since been abandoned, however, in favor of a new identity politics that again seeks to divide Americans by race, ethnicity, gender and even religion. “Diversity” is now the all-purpose justification for these divisions, and the irony is that America is more diverse and tolerant than ever.
The problem is that the identity obsessives want to boil down everything in American life to these categories. In practice this means allocating political power, contracts, jobs and now even salaries in the private economy based on the politics of skin color or gender rather than merit or performance. Down this road lies crude political tribalism, and James Damore’s recent Google dissent is best understood as a cri de coeur that we should aspire to something better. Yet he lost his job merely for raising the issue.
A politics fixated on indelible differences will inevitably lead to resentments that extremists can exploit in ugly ways on the right and left. The extremists were on the right in Charlottesville, but there have been examples on the left in Berkeley, Oakland and numerous college campuses. When Democratic politicians can’t even say “all lives matter” without being denounced as bigots, American politics has a problem.


A picture of John Wayne lords over a recent op-ed by Professor Amy Waxof Penn Law and Professor Larry Alexander of USD Law titled “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.” In a nutshell, the professors argue that if everyone went to school, got married to their biological opposite number, and stayed married for the kids, everything would be fine in this country.
John Wayne was a twice-divorced college dropout


The rise of domineering firms may have sapped the US of the competition needed for "creative destruction". Big business around the world may have become too powerful, to the detriment of the economy. This emerging school of economic thought is gaining traction among reputable economists and investors in the United States. The potential problem deserves serious analysis, devoid of the typical simplistic ideological fights between capital and labour.

How America's corporate giants are hurting the economy | afr.com

The government is poised to pass the biggest changes to media regulation in more than 30 years and there are a number of potential deals which could reshape the sector with the first out of the block a possible resolution of Network Ten's ownership

Media changes could see a wave of mergers and acquisitions | afr ...


Party pill kingpin Hugh Robinson loses appeal against conviction