The Australian Energy Market Operator has SUSPENDED the National Electricity Market across all five participating states, saying the market has become:
“impossible” to operate because of the soaring cost of fossil fuels and generators withholding their capacity from the market.
AEMO 2022
Tony, Scott, Barnaby, Angus… Everybody OUT of the Pool!
Children at the wheel… or perhaps in the words of Shopernhauer
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Two articles, one from 2020, the other, FOURTEEN YEARS ago, in 2008. The connecting theme?
The Clinton Circle, maps emails from Hillary Clinton, John Podesta and the DNC in the United States.. Certainly topical!
The data is entirely sourced from WikiLeaks, and was last updated on Sun Oct 30, 2016.
People-centric view of email
ClintonCircle was not created to visualize these emails, but it is a fork of a tool called Immersion that they launched in 2013 that helps people visualize and understand the networks they weave through email interactions. They say:
Immersion is an invitation to dive into the history of your email life in a platform that offers you the safety of knowing that you can always delete your data.
[Source: Hillary Clinton MIT Macro Connections]
Macro-Connections study collective learning at @MIT@medialab by looking at the evolution of what people make, and by making tools to improve how they communicate.
An outstanding comparative analysis of the dollar “cost” of US Wars, “then and now”.
Apologies to [either Dirksen or Rockefeller], but certainly, once we have a trillion here, and a trillion there, “pretty soon, you’re talking real money” !
We know these numbers are staggering. Recently [late 2015], Bank of America Merrill Lynch [ BoAML ] produced analysis showing that:
The US spends more on its defence budget than the next fifteen [15] countries combined
The US Pentagon spends more than all 50 States in the US spend on health, education, welfare and safety combined
The US has 5% of the world’s population but almost 50% of total global military spending
Note: Consider the little country in the bottom right-hand corner! [Australia], punching above our weight as they say! More to come
Global Defence Spending
[Source: BoAML – Transforming World Atlas 2015]
Norwich University has produced this infographic, depicting the comparative size/percentage of military expenditure in wars fought by the United States of America.
Though it lasted fewer than four years, World War II was the most expensive war in United States history. Adjusted for inflation to today’s dollars, the war cost over $4 trillion and in 1945, the war’s last year, defense spending comprised about 40% of GDP. During that time, the government used new methods to raise the required funds and succeeded in accomplishing its goal. While the wars waged in today’s world are significant and costly, they still pale in comparison to the size and financial impact of World War II.
The Lowy Institute Interpreter has highlighted a new video from Vox giving a simple, quick and easy breakdown of Iran’s government and upcoming parliamentary elections that will be held on 26 February.
They say: Often Western media portrays Iran as just another top-down dictatorship with ‘no politics to speak of’, but there is real ideological ‘tussle’ within the Islamic Republic and its complex institutions. Iran has also been the subject of that question in the West: are Islam and democracy ‘compatible’?
Australian donations to political parties visualised.
Look closely at the starting state of the visualisation. Do they look like lungs to you?
[Source: http://au.politicaldonations.info ]Of course, the phrase “tip-of-the-iceberg” comes to mind.
The Political Donations visualisation website takes publically available data from the AEC and presents it in a graphical view to make visual analysis of the donations to all political parties in Australia easier and more intuitive.
The data is presented as a force directed layout showing both links and magnitudes of donations to all major parties. The data can be filtered and detailed information is available by clicking on any node in the layout.
Profound economic, social and civil changes have provoked a remarkable series of temporally cogent observations from vastly different actors this week. This highlights the diverse yet converging, social, academic and political recognition at the heart of public-policy challenges in the 21st century.
At the CORE of future policy and an inclusive, functioning civil society, is the recognition of the centrality of good governance.
Tim Lyons [@picketer] writing in todays Saturday Paper has produced a masterful argument centred on the higher-order challenges for post-industrial, modern economies and has moved me to connect a series of pieces I have seen this week.
Lyons hits the nail on the head when referencing Dr. Ken Henry’s oft-used phrase that “good governance can be a source of national competitive advantage“.
Whilst neither Tim Lyons or Ken Henry would perhaps agree with my references to the “Old Whig”, Edmund Burke, they would, I have no doubt, forcefully concur with his observation that:
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
As Lyons points out in his article, it is not simply a matter of illegality or corruption, but the more negative and corrosive consequences of influence, lack of transparency and confusion of “access” with “representation” that challenges modern policy to be effective beyond the few.
James Hamblin [ @jameshamblin ] writing in this week’s The Atlantic, provides an equally compelling and well researched argument on the Paradox of Effort. Hamblin’s excellent article highlights the research of Professor Gregory Miller and his team from Northwestern University highlighting the medical research behind what some may euphemistically call the “protestant work ethic” that underpins much of the Calvinist predilections[my term] of modern economic and social policy.
[The Paradox of Effort: Source: The Atlantic ]
We’re talking about people hardly being given a chance to pursue their goals without having to pay with their health. This is really, really important work.”
As if by design, both Agnes Török [ @AgnesTorokPoet ] and Mhairia Black [ @MhairiBlack ] appeared this week, to provide a qualitative commentary that is equally lived, researched, eloquent and authentic. Young, powerful women making genuine assessments of the structural flaws in modern, advanced economies/societies.
Wisdom beyond their years.
These are the voices of a modern civil society. They are also the voices that many would consider “subversive” or “counter”, yet ironically compliment the words of the “Old Whig”
Consider Agnes’ observations on a young person’s experience of the transition to the UK Labour market.
Worthless – Agnes Török
Also consider the United Kingdom’s youngest MP, the SNP’s Mhairi Black.
Maiden Speech – Mhairi Black -MP [UK House of Commons]
Commission for Governance
Returning to Tim Lyons’ original premise of a flawed and [at best] biased polity, no longer serving the whole, it seems prudent if not prescient to consider his contention of a “Commission for Governance“. I will certainly #vote1CommissionforGovernance
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
