Rafe’s roundup 11 May. Take a break from the budget!

Australian gifts to the world. We did not just give the world the rotary clothes hoist, Don Bradman, Phar Lap and Les Darcy, we also let loose the songbirds of the world.

Renowned for its unusual mammals, Australia is a land of birds that are just as unusual, just as striking, a result of the continent’s tens of millions of years of isolation. Compared with birds elsewhere, ours are more likely to be intelligent, aggressive and loud, to live in complex societies, and are long-lived. They’re also ecologically more powerful, exerting more influences on forests than other birds.

But unlike the mammals, the birds did not keep to Australia; they spread around the globe. Australia provided the world with its songbirds and parrots, the most intelligent of all bird groups. It was thought in Darwin’s time that species generated in the Southern Hemisphere could not succeed in the Northern, an idea that was proven wrong in respect of birds in the 1980s but not properly accepted by the world’s scientists until 2004 – because, says Tim Low, most ornithologists live in the Northern Hemisphere. As a result, few Australians are aware of the ramifications, something which prompted the writing of this book.

Literary Celebration. T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock at 100. Brief biography of Eliot. More detailed account of his life and work. An interview with the poet, critic, commentator and scholar. The New York Review of Books.

Regulation. Charles Murray on a way to fight back against the regulation nation.

And so my modest proposal: Let’s withhold that compliance through systematic civil disobedience. Not for all regulations, but for the pointless, stupid and tyrannical ones.

Identifying precisely which regulations are pointless, stupid or tyrannical will be a lengthy process, but categories that should come under strict scrutiny include regulations that prescribe best practice for a craft or profession; restrict access to an occupation; prohibit owners of property from using it as they wish; prescribe hiring, firing and working conditions; and prevent people from taking voluntary risks.

Within each category, the task is to discriminate between regulations that should command our voluntary compliance from those that are foolish or worse.

A classical liberal in the NSW house. Scott Farlow’s maiden speech.

I stand in this place as a liberal, in the classical sense of the word.

I believe, as John Stuart Mill laid out in his seminal essay, On Liberty, that: The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Put simply, I believe the role of government should be a limited one—not to be there to administer the lives of its citizens, but to protect them from the imposition of their rights by others. As Milton Friedman put it: Government should be there to act as a referee, not a player.

Transnational progressivism. The enemy within. The tenets of transnational progressivism

The ascribed group over the individual citizen.
A dichotomy of groups: Oppressor vs. victim groups, with immigrant groups designated as victims.
Group proportionalism as the goal of “fairness.”
The values of all dominant institutions to be changed to reflect the perspectives of the victim groups.
The redefinition of democracy and “democratic ideals.”
Deconstruction of national narratives and national symbols of democratic nation-states in the West.

Culture. The Spectator Culture House. Depression era pulp fiction in the USA.

Phoenix churned out hundreds of titles and developed a reputation for paying less than generous royalties to its authors, and that meant it produced some rather suspect literature over the years. However, there were some real gems published by Phoenix, including a large number of debut novels by up-and-coming authors, books from talented writers cut loose by larger publishers, and even a number of established writers who were down on their luck and needed a pay check.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the kitschy nature of some titles, collectors of pulp art and design have embraced Phoenix Press for decades. Beyond the content of the books, they are inarguably a treat to look at because of their stylized specters, cartoon cowboys and designer damsels in distress all bursting off the dust jackets in vibrant colors.

Lifestyle. Make yourself unforgettable.

Ice stable.

It is well known that there have been gains in sea ice extent and area in the Southern Hemisphere during the satellite era. Those gains have been exceeded by the losses of sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere, so that globally there has been an overall decrease in sea ice extent and area.

There was a resurgence of sea ice globally in 2013 and 2014, however. That recent resurgence allows us to present the data in another way. We can use a linear trend analysis, starting in April 2015, to determine how far back in time we can go while the global sea ice extent data show no losses or no gains. See Figure 1. Based on the linear trend, there has been no loss (or gain) in global sea ice extent for 178 months…almost 15 years.