The weekend Fin (subscription required) has a profile of the eminence grise of right-wing Melbourne poltiics, Ray Evans. It includes a comment from this blog on the various Astroturf organisations Evans set up when he was working for Hugh Morgan at Western Mining (not greatly to the benefit of WMC shareholders as far as I can see). Here’s the quote used by the Fin

Australia has a string of such [Astroturf] setups, all apparently created by Ray Evans of the Western Mining Corporation. The most egregious is the Lavoisier Group, an organisation for climate change contrarians (about as plausible as creationists calling themselves the Mendel society) . If you move along to the (anti-Aboriginal rights) Bennelong Society you’ll find an almost identical website with the same postal address, shared with the (anti-union) HR Nicholls Society . The (monarchist) Samuel Griffiths society is from the same production line, though not quite as brazenly so.

So what is it about names like these that screams “Astroturf�? Most named institutes are either named in honour of the founder, or are explicitly partisan institutions whose name indicates their affiliation, as with the Evatt Chifley (Labor) and Menzies (Liberal) foundations. It’s not clear that those named would always agree with what is published in their names, but there’s some reasonable basis for presuming that this might be the case.

There’s been a lot of discussion on the Monday Message Board, responding to a piece by Gerard Henderson asking why Australian ex-Communists aren’t treated with the same disdain as ex-Nazis (Louis Nowra has said something similar). Meanwhile over at Catallaxy, they’ve been debating Mark Lilla’s book The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics This gives me a chance to repost my thoughts on this topic from last year.

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Here’s a neat example of creative giving. For 24 hours (this has apparently been extended a bit), Michele Agnew is promising to give a one dollar donation to Oxfam for each (non-spam) comment posted on her blog. The place to comment is here

Thanks to Scott Hagaman for the tip.

This is a blank post, put here to deal with problems linking to the top post on the page.

I’m still in relaxation/holiday mode, so I don’t plan a permanent fix of the problem for a while. Thanks to Yobbo, who has pointed out a diagnosis and possible solution in the comments.

I watched some of the telethon last night and was impressed by the amounts of money being raised. The entertainment was a little less to my taste, but I suppose you can’t please everybody, so the aim is to attract as many as possible.

The worldwide response to the tsunami disaster has been equally impressive, though no more than was merited by a tragedy on such a large scale. But tsunamis are not the only disaster affecting humanity. Preventable diseases kill millions every year, and the disability caused by diseases like malaria is a huge drain on economic growth in many poor countries. For $US50 billion a year, we could implement the program proposed by the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health which would, quite literally, save millions of lives. Based on our share of developed-country GDP, Australia’s share of this would be only about $1 billion. The US could finance the entire program with the money currently being spent in Iraq. Europe and Japan could easily meet their shares by scrapping farm policies that harm both domestic consumers and poor farmers in less developed countries. Or the whole thing could be done out of private donations of around fifty dollars per person per year – well below one per cent of personal income.

If we could only make the kind of concern that’s been displayed over the past couple of weeks a permanent feature of our personal and political priorities, the world would be a much better place.

Update Reader and Uni of Maryland colleague Darrell Hueth points me to this piece by Nicholas Kristof arguing that the use of DDT in anti-malarial programs should be expanded. This issue has been debated at length on this blog, and I think Kristof gets the balance abotu right. Also, if you’re interested in an economic take on the costs and benefits of malaria prevention, the chapter by Mills and Shilcutt in Bjorn Lomborg’s book Global Crises, Global Solutions , coming out of his Copenhagen Consensus exercise, is well worth reading[1].

fn1. As I’ve previously observed, the Copenhagen Consensus, considered as a ranking exercise purporting to private that action to mitigate global warming is a bad idea, was a dishonest political stunt. But a lot of resources went into it and they weren’t all wasted.