When history was made and other stories

The Economist: When history of made, a graph in which the historical novelty of the last six decades or so is made breathtakingly clear. H/T Michael Tobis, who offers his own reflections upon it.

SMH: Bob Brown, the most ______ man in Australia. Fill in your own adjective to complete the title of an interesting profile of a fascinating man.

Naomi Klein: Climate change, capitalism and the transformation of cultural values. Klein suggests that perhaps the insistence of the deniers that climate change implies the necessity of a left-wing cultural transformation ought to be taken with more seriousness.

Slavoj Žižek: Occupy First. Demands come later. Žižek answers the critics of the movement who claim it is a gathering of un-American violent dreamers. Speaking of Occupy (which surely deserves its own post or three at some stage), I found this summary (from a NZ perspective) useful, these images illuminating of protesters' motives and this warning (from an American in London) quite salient.

ABC: Anti-consumerism is the new democracy.

John Dickson: Art of persuasion not so simple. Dickson turns to Aristotle to gain some basic insights into how to be convincing: logos, pathos and, crucially, ethos.

Orion: The Consolations of Extinction. A reflection on how deep time affects our perception of the ongoing sixth extinction event and of our own mortality as a species.

How to balance a budget

The ABC's Clarke and Dawe give a masterclass in budgeting. Those not following Australian politics might be a little baffled.
H/T Dave Taylor.

Famous last words: David Suzuki's Legacy

This is one delivery of the final address of one of the great public communicators of our age, hosted recently in Perth (the Australian version).

Suzuki mentions many themes I've discussed at various times: the spiritual sources of ecological failure, the cancerous nature of endless growth, the dependence of economy (management of the household) on ecology (the principles of the household), the staggering novelty of scale that human impacts on the biosphere have reached in recent decades and the necessity of political, not merely personal, responses to our present path of ecological self-destruction.

I found his reflections on air and breathing particularly fascinating. We all share the breath of life, a community of living beings sustained by God's Spirit.

And some readers may be delighted to hear that he told Bob Brown that the Australian Greens ought not to exist.
Suzuki starts at 4:15 into the video. More information on the talk can be found on the ABC site as well as a four minute highlights video.

The ideal PM: half Brown, half Turnbull

Elizabeth Farrally argues that what we're really looking in a national leader is someone with intelligence and integrity. Why are such people pushed to the margins while we allow poll-puppets who put sound bites over sound policy to run the show?