The teams I back seem to be losing pretty steadily at the moment. I’m just back from seeing the Bullets go down by 2 points to West Sydney. Kevin Freeman took a difficult shot to push it into extra time on the buzzer, but missed. Still, there’s plenty of time to turn the season around.

I watched Cry Freedom last night, for the first time since it came out in the late 1980s. It’s a great film, but the scene that stuck with me this time was right at the beginning. The police were clearing a squatter settlement, burning houses, arresting and beating people and so on. The scene shifts to Donald Woods listing to the apartheid government’s news broadcast, which announces that “the raid was a complete success, and many illegals were arrested or gave themselves up”.

I’m five years too late, and McNeil PPC has beaten me to the name, but it struck me the other night[1] that iModium.com would have been the ideal name for an Internet/telecom/dotcom IPO in the late 1990s.

fn1. There was no medical reason for this thought, just a random neural connection

As the blog seems to have some new readers, I thought it a good time to point out yet again that if you’re in Brisbane or the Gold Coast, and want to study karate in a rigorous traditional style, you can’t do better than Seiyushin. Kancho Nagayama was the winner in the 1988 All Japan National OpenWeight Tournament, and is a great teacher. The group is friendly, and open to a wide range of ages and skill levels (roughly 5 to 50 at present), and welcoming to both men and women. Dojos are in St Lucia, Toowong and Southport.

Peter Costello has obliquely answered the question I asked last week, in relation to the government’s brutal mistreatment of refugees in general and children in particular. He now looks forward to the end of child detention, which obviously presupposes the end of Howard’s Prime Ministership and the repudiation of his signature policy. As Tim Dunlop points out, this is a major (though unacknowledged) shift in Costello’s position. Whatever the motivation, it is welcome.

While I’m on the topic I’d like to express, yet again, my disgust at those who have endlessly parsed government lies about “children overboard” seeking to make them true by arguing that actions “morally equivalent” to throwing children overboard took place on occasions other than the one to which the lies refer. These people should never be allowed to forget that the policy these lies were used to defend is one of locking innocent children behind razor wire, in desert camps and remote islands, under inhuman conditions deliberately designed to discourage others. I can think of plenty of things to which this is morally equivalent, and they are all shameful.

I got an article accepted in a journal today and, if my count is correct[1], it is number 150 for me. Since my first article was published in 1979, that’s an average rate of six a year, with a slowly increasing trend. It’s not a startling rate of output, given that I’ve held research-only jobs for most of those 25 years. Still, by the time you take acccount of rejections, resubmissions and so on, there’s a fair bit of work involved, and not that many people keep up the pace indefinitely.

Because I’ve been active for quite a while, and because my work doesn’t exactly fit the mainstream mould in either policy content or analytical style[2], I’ve accumulated a lot of rejection letters, more than anyone else I know of, in fact. My records aren’t good enough for a complete tally, but I’ve certainly had several hundred rejections – I once got three on one day. Some papers have been rejected half a dozen times or more before finding a home. This isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. Most high-grade journals in economics have rejection rates of 90 per cent or more, which implies the average paper must be rejected pretty often.

On a happier note, I’ve covered a lot of different topics and used a range of different approaches to economics, more than most of my colleagues. For example, I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who’s published in both the Journal of Mathematical Economics and the (institutionalist) Journal of Economic Issues

fn1. I publish a fair bit of policy stuff, and there’s sometimes a bit of doubt as to whether the resulting paper counts as “refereed”. I usually err on the side of caution, but there are always marginal cases.

fn2. A lot of the time, it’s not so much that I’m challenging mainstream orthodoxy in a broad sense as that I don’t like the established way of doing this in some particular subfield, such as principal-agent theory.

You might have hoped, with the end of the Cold War and all, that we could have an Olympic games free of global politics[1] Not as far as the Oz is concerned, running this turgid piece of triumphalism from Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal. I doubt that many of the athletes he attempts to exploit would go along with him.

The Iraqis in particular have made vigorous protests over attempts by George Bush to score political points from their presence. Here’s what their coach has had to say

My problem is not with the American people. They are with what America has done – destroyed everything … The American army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the stadium and there are shootings on the road?

It’s not clear whether Henninger is arrogantly disregarding their protests or whether he wrote the piece earlier and the Oz has failed to keep up with the news.

fn1. Of course, as the troubles of several Australian teams have shown, there’s no way of getting away from the internal politics of sport.

I found this story of globalisation and soft power at charlotte street, via bertramonline. As bertram says, you can’t make this kind of thing up.

I had a look at a closely-related phenomenon (Americans seeking a Starbucks overseas and imagining all the locals go there) in this piece

Turning to trivia for a moment, I thought I’d raise the question of when the 21st century began. The commonsense view is that it began on 1 January 2000, and I think the commonsense view is right. Against this we get a bunch of pedants arguing, that, since there was no year zero, the 1st century (of the current era) began in 1CE, and therefore included 100CE. Granting this, the 21st century began on 1 January 2001.
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Most of the voters who were panicked into supporting the Howard government over Tampa have now forgotten their fears, while those who were horrified by the Pacific solution and the massive suffering it created (including the loss of hundreds of lives on SIEV-X) still remember. So we’ve seen a gradual easing of some of the most oppressive practices, such as the detention of children.

But the government is still up for gratuitous evil whenever they think they can get away with it, as is indicated by the reaction to the High Court’s decision that the indefinite detention of stateless asylum-seekers is legal. These people have no way of getting out of prison – no other country will take them – and they present no threat to us. But the government is still going to lock them up.

There’s a place in the coldest circles of hell (Ptolemea, to be precise) reserved for Amanda Vanstone, right next to Philip Ruddock.

Other comments Ken Parish has an analysis of the decision He makes a pretty good case that the High Court majority got it wrong, and concludes

I’m not even slightly delighted . In fact it’s a day of mourning not just for Messrs Al-Kateb and Al Khafaji, but for everyone who values liberty, the rule of law and the constraints on unlimited executive power which are so central to liberal democratic principles. What a bunch of miserable bastards.

Miserable bastards as McHugh, Hayne, Callinan and Heydon may be, they are only giving Vanstone and the rest of the government the opportunity to commit their crimes against humanity. They can still choose to set these people free if they want to. There’s more at Barista and Counterspin. I’ll add more links if anyone advises me. Of course, you can imagine what sort of link you’ll get if you support this decision.