Trevor Cook

Gillard vs Abbott: duelling transcripts

hilarious. transcript from Abbott's office of the same JG & TA Today Show int. don't include any of Tony's 'ums,' 'ahs' and 'I,I,I,Is.' about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

transcripts from Gillard's office of the JG v TA Today Show clashes include every 'I,I,I,I' and 'ah' and 'um' Abbott utters. about 4 hours ago via TweetDeck

via twitter.com

PowerPoint and losing the war

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

via www.nytimes.com

The academic art of writing a lot without saying very much

). Based on “a multi-stage area probability sample that gives equal chance of selection to all non-institutional dwelling units in the conterminous United States [and that] was clustered geographically at each stage and stratified with interlaced controls,” it is a specimen of what Charles Lamb called biblia abiblia—things that have the outward appearance of books but are not books, since they cannot be read. Methodologically, it employs something called the “multivariate analysis,” which is explained in Appendix E. Typographically, Appendix E looks like language, but it turns out to be strewn with booby traps, all doubtless well known in the trade, like “dummy variables,” “F ratios,” “regression coefficients,” “beta coefficients” (and “partial beta coefficients”), and two kinds of “standard deviations”—“of explanatory variable A” and “of the dependent variable.”

My experience with such works may be summarized as follows: (alpha) the coefficient of comprehensibility decreases in direct ratio to the increase in length, or the longer the incomprehensibler, a notion that is illustrated here by the fact that Dr. Kolko’s short work is more understandable than Dr. Morgan et al.’s long one; (beta) the standard deviation from truism is inversely related to the magnitude of the generalization, or the bigger the statement the more obvious. (Beta) is illustrated by the authors’ five general proposals for action (“Implications for Public Policy”). The second of these is: “Fuller employment and the elimination of discrimination based on prejudice would contribute greatly to the independence of non-white persons, women, teenagers, and some of the aged.” That is, if Negroes and the rest had jobs and were not discriminated against, they would be better off—a point that doesn’t need to be argued or, for that matter, stated. The authors have achieved such a mastery of truism that they sometimes achieve the same monumental effect even in non-magnitudinous statements, as: “Table 28-1 shows that the proportion of parents who indicated that their children will attend private colleges is approximately twice as large for those with incomes over $10,000 as for those with incomes under $3,000.” Could be.

via www.newyorker.com

This is an excerpt from a 1963 article, sadly things seem to have only got worse in the meantime.

The Great American Bubble Machine - Rolling Stone

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates

via www.rollingstone.com

Must readstuff

News Ltd's Storm gives Rudd a break

the quip travelling the Gallery, 'News Limited has finally done Kevin Rudd a favour.'

via twitter.com

Too good. Batts dropped down the bulletins.

Abbott the revolutionary

disturbing trends for the Rudd government as a result of Tony Abbott's Liberal leadership revolution

via www.theaustralian.com.au

I just wanted to bookmark this little absurdity from siller shanners at the OZ because I suspect it will look sillier as the year wears on

The power of a single book review

But it was a book review, rather than a book itself, that helped launch one of the major policy initiatives of the 1960s. Walter Heller, chairman of Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisers, gave his boss Dwight MacDonald's influential 13,000-word New Yorker essay on Michael Harrington's "The Other America," which chronicled poverty in the nation. Inspired by the piece (and feeling vulnerable on the left after pushing for an across-the-board tax cut), Kennedy asked his staff to look into the problem. They came up with a plan for an "attack on poverty," which Heller discussed with the president a few days before Kennedy's fateful trip to Dallas in November 1963.

His successor, Lyndon Johnson -- who was influenced by British economist Barbara Ward's "The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations," which he said he read multiple times -- turned the attack into a War on Poverty. Future editions of Harrington's book had "the book that sparked the War on Poverty" on the cover, but the New Yorker deserves at least some of the credit.

via www.washingtonpost.com

David Hare on journalism

Journalism is reductive. This is not always the fault of journalists. It is in the nature of the job. At its best and worst, journalism aims to distil. It aims to master, even to subjugate, a particular topic. In this ambition, the journalist will always run the risk of tipping over into contempt. As soon as something can be summarised it can also be dispatched. Anyone who has ever attended morning conference at a national newspaper will know the form: everyone taking part in the human comedy is a fool. What was once the humorous stance of Private Eye has become the humourless stance of the entire press. The gap between what people are and what they are treated as in journalism has never been wider. Only the very best journalists know how to suggest that a person, theory or event is not just what the journalist believes it to be. It is also itself. Holding that balance between your account and a proper respect for the truth of what something or somebody is outside your account involves a level of self-awareness hard to achieve in 600 words.

In the west a journalistic culture which takes in both the internet and television has now become both tiring and ubiquitous. It has also led to a curious deformation in society. As citizens, we consider our family, our friends and, most of all, our children as likeable and virtuous. But we are encouraged to consider everyone we don't know – and most especially those we know only through newspapers – as ridiculous or vicious. To this tendency, this desire to bundle people and thereby to dismiss them, art and death are the most powerful antidotes. Art frequently reminds us that things are never quite as simple as they seem. Nor are people. Journalism is life with the mystery taken out. Art is life with the mystery restored. Put people on the stage, in all their humanity, propel them into a course of events, and in even the most savage satire or preposterous farce, characters may acquire a sympathy, a scale, a helplessness, all of which draw forth feelings eerily reminiscent of those elicited by people you actually know.

via www.guardian.co.uk

Love that line - "Journalism is life with the mystery taken out".

Exclusion, not immigration, drives right-wing support

ippr conducted regression-based analysis to see whether or not high levels of immigration do raise communities’ support for the BNP, or if other variables – such as political disengagement – are important. Our findings suggest that areas that have higher levels of recent immigration than others are not more likely to vote for the BNP. In fact, the more immigration an area has experienced, the lower its support for the far right. Rather, the evidence points to political and socio-economic exclusion as drivers of BNP support.

via www.ippr.org.uk

The new multilateralism of climate change | The Climate Institute

Today I want to make three main points:

1.    Copenhagen didn't go backwards, it did go forward but not as much as was hyped or hoped.  This was because of crucial misunderstandings and new developments in climate geopolitical factions.
2.    We need a glass half full approach to the Accord and climate negotiations, not just because it is the only one we’ve got but also because of developments before and after Copenhagen.
3.    Filling the rest of the glass requires delivery of
a.    fast start finance commitments made in Copenhagen,
b.    a new approach to climate multilateralism, its forums and its factions and,
c.    even more important than ever, credible domestic policies

At the core of the challenge of the new climate realpolitik, the new climate multilateralism are two questions:

·    Is an all embracing legally binding treaty possible or required to drive the much stronger action we need?
·    Will Australia and others be creative and committed enough, amongst souring domestic politics, to play a constructive role?  Or will Australia drift back to old factions, a narrow focus, and even worse back to being a millstone on climate negotiations.

via www.climateinstitute.org.au

How journalists respond to new technology: an historical example

This delightful and instructive anecdote is taken from Alan Reid's preface to a later (1982) edition of Warren Denning's classic: "Caucus Crisis: The rise and fall of the Scullin Government", first published in 1937. Denning was the ABC's first Canberra political correspondent, and as such brought the new medium of radio to the Canberra Press Gallery:

In those halcyon days, the Prime Minister held two daily news conferences in his office in Parliament House. There was one at midday for the afternoon newspapers and one for the morning press during the dinner break. When Denning (recently appointed as the ABC correspondent) indicated that he proposed attending these conferences, the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery met in solemn session.

The Gallery decided that radio should not have access to the answers secured from the Prime Minister to the print media's 'searching, intelligent and well-informed' questions. Therefore, while the print media representatives were with the Prime Minister, Denning was debarred. He waited outside, and only when they filed out did he enter for his solitary session. 

After finding that Denning emerged from his sessions with better stories than theirs, the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery met again. They graciously - and sensibly - decided that radio should have access to their press conferences, provided they had equal access to answers evoked by Denning questions.

 Which just shows that it is the quality of the journalist, not the nature of the medium, that matters most.

In defence of prudence

The following is a comment that I submitted on the ABC's The Spirit of Things program site in response to a program they did this week on "Prudence":

Hi I'm glad you did a program on prudence. I did an honours thesis on the concept of prudence in Aristotle, Machiavelli and Burke nearly 30 years ago. That is phonesis in Aristotle, prudenza in Machiavelli and prudence in Burke. It's been awhile but here goes. Prudence can mean restraint and caution but not always. What is really meant is practical reason or wisdom ie knowledge gained from practice, experience of the study of history. The idea is wisdom from first principles (sophia) doesn't adequately equip us (and particularly political leaders) to make decisions on the fly as it were. Leaders, and us, can't wait till all the evidence is in so we need to make assessments based on experience. This is more of an art than a science and is therefore unpopular with academics and revolutionaries. Of course, Machiavelli distinguished himself by separating out morality from the equation and advocated some very ruthless, but in his view, prudent activities. Burke was also an advocate of change but warned against the French revolutionary idea of change from first principles. On the other hand he argued, unpopularly, that the policy of the British Government towards its american colonies was imprudent because it left them with little choice but to revolt. In your program, there seemed to be general agreement that the catholic church had not been prudent in its handling of the child abuse issues. I would suggest quite the reverse is true. A prudent church leader would have recognised that in changing times institutions must also change. Burke famously said that a state without the capacity to change lacks the means of its own conservation. Machiavelli might have pointed out that a few well-publicised examples of priests being defrocked would have (prudently) gone a long way to defusing the scandal. Prudent leaders are not timid leaders they are brilliant leaders, they have a rare capacity to understand and predict, in very uncertain times, the likely flow of future events and to influence those events with a timely intervention or two.

The Irish debt - now that is scary

Let’s take some admittedly very crude figures sketched by Nat O’Connor on the progressive-economy.ie blog. There are 1.9 million people at work in the Irish economy. Their average earnings last year were €36,300. After tax, that’s €29,500 each. From this, each one will stump up an average of €4,600 just to pay the interest on the money the State is borrowing to fund the bank bailout.

Or, to put it another way, everyone lucky enough to have a job in Ireland over the next 10 years will be working most of one day a week to pay for Seanie, Fingers and the lads. It is no exaggeration to call this feudal. Medieval lords exacted food and money from their vassals. They called it “coign and livery”. We call it “Nama and recapitalisation”. Why would anyone who can do otherwise choose to donate about five or six hours of free labour every week for 10 years to the banks? In all of this, the humiliation is actually worse than the money. The financial cost is, admittedly, hideous. Let’s just consider the €2 billion a year we’ll be stumping up for the zombie institutions, Anglo Irish and Nationwide.

via www.irishtimes.com

Malouf on language

David Malouf talks about the importance of language and literacy, and his love of language, but also laments its overuse and debasement.

via www.nma.gov.au

An excellent lecture

Abbott squanders Coalition's advantage on economic management

In last week's Newspoll, Labor recorded its highest approval rating as an economic manager, outscoring the Coalition on this measure for the first time since 1990; 44 per cent of respondents nominated the ALP as the best party to handle the economy, over 39 per cent for the Coalition.

The significance of the result is that it erodes the Coalition's most valuable strategic advantage over Labor, its economic credibility. Education, health and the economy are the real vote-shifters in Australian federal politics and Labor owns the box set. How has this come to pass?

via www.theaustralian.com.au

A remarkable achievement given that Abbott has been leader for just a few months.

With Howard, Costello, Minchin and now Turnbull lost to the Coalition its credibility on economic management is sinking like a stone. Abbott's decision to install Barnaby Joyce as finance minister was a complete disaster. Andrew Robb will be better, because he'll say a lot less. But Abbott would have done better to show confidence in his own leadership and bring Turnbull back inside the tent by giving him a senior front bench position.

Worse still was Abbott's economic headland speech, delivered in a halting, uncertain monotone before a small audience last week, which had everything except a clear understanding and vision for economic policy. It was a stump political speech, not a coherent piece of policy work. It had all the trademark Abbott oneliners and smears and self-justifications. Abbott did not allay any of the growing concerns that he just doesn't get economics. It is clear that Abbott and his policy team are either clueless, lazy or both when it comes to economic policy. 

Losing Turnbull will only serve to underscore the lack of economic talent on the Opposition frontbench.