Mark McKenna has been the most prominent Australian Republican historian in the dead tree media during the last fifteen years. This book, Australian Republicanism: A Reader was edited by Mark and Wayne Hudson. It can be probably viewed as a primary source complement to his book, The Captive Republic .

I picked up my copy from the National Museum. The book is not new, having been published in 2003, but has a such a wealth of historical material in it, that it will not age, nor become out-dated quickly. The editors divide the book up into;

• A Deep Undercurrent of Republicanism that will Someday Burst Forth and Astonish the World (1788-1856)
• A Commonwealth for the British Race, a Commonwealth Under the Crown (1856-1901)
• Still Captive After All These Years: Imagining The Republic (1901-2001)

The first section contains wondrous sources such as Deniehy's Bunyip Aristocracy speech, Harpur's Tree of Liberty, Dunmore-Lang's Deceleration of Independence for Victoria, plus numerous other articles from newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald and People's Advocate. I am a fan of Harpurian Republicanism, and this section contains much of the exuberance and hope of republicans who saw New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland making the transition from colony to Republic.

The Commonwealth Debate

The second section is dominated by the conflict between the loyalists and the republicans. Ultimately the loyalists enforced their views on Australia through the constitution in 1901 and effectively made the monarchy and Australian nationalism entwined. Often this was achieved through brutish and illiberal means .

Nationalism was often mixed with racial purity, especially to do with the Briton race. This period contains the nationalist writing of Henry Lawson, George Black and William Lane. For instance an article in the highly pro-republican and pro-nationalist Bulletin was titled, "A Republic Without The Chinese".

But this was not unique to the republicans, the monarchists and loyalists were just as heavily of the Briton view - one of the reasons the Australian Constitution does not have a Bill of Rights is so the government wasn't restricted constitutionally against discriminating against the Chinese.

This section also covers the republicanism in Queensland during the second half of the 1800s. In Charters Towers the firebrand Frederick Vosper ran the local labor newspaper. Queensland being provincial and independent minded even back then, had republicans in all walks of life, from workers, to writers, to judges. McKenna notes that Vosper's writing often made Eureka look tame;

The men [shearers strike of 1881] - they must either have BREAD or BLOOD - WOOL OR HEADS - and if the government be not careful they will have BOTH ... The government ought to know that in no country is revolution so easy as here; and once let the masses be roused, then good-bye to capitalistic domination and the sham royalty that is inflicted upon us now, and hurrah for the Republic.

To be fair to Vosper, Horace Tozer enacted laws that allowed strike organisers to be shot on sight . Despite Tozer making the government of Queensland and the Squattocracy an easy target, Vosper had a revolutionaries zeal, he claimed to have been involved in two revolutions in Bolivia before coming to Australia. Despite this this, the journal he edited was distributed widely in Brisbane, and was met with approval by other Queensland republicans.

Inevitability

The third section contains the republicanism after the establishment of federation. It all became inevitable - an inevitability that is yet to be achieved. There is some source material from the first half of the century, and a good chunk from the 1999 referendum.

Great collection of source material. The only thing I would ask for is Mark McKenna to either set up his own website/blog or join an existing one (such as SSR) and start writing on Republican history for the internet as well as dead-tree media. His voice is needed on the internet.

cam

Yarislav Trofimov should throw a couple of dollars Thomas Lippman's way as his book review of Trofimov's Siege of Mecca directly led to me buying it today. Sadly for the Washington Post it was about the only thing worth reading in the whole Sunday paper.

From the book review:

... but the book's value goes well beyond these findings [about the siege of Mecca]. It establishes two points essential to understanding the turbulence in today's Middle East and the rise of al-Qaeda:

First, the Islamic extremists who seized the mosque on Nov. 20, 1979, and their leader, Juhayman al Uteybi, represented a crucial link in an unbroken chain of radical Islamic violence that runs from the fundamentalist warriors who helped Abdul Aziz ibn Saud take over the Arabian peninsula and create Saudi Arabia early in the 20th century, through the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, to the group that assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat after he made peace with Israel, to the Taliban in Afghanistan and, finally, to al-Qaeda and today's terrorists. None was an isolated phenomenon; all are part of the same movement. Their tactics differ, but their aspirations are the same: a return to what they imagine as a pure, pre-modern Muslim society as the Prophet Muhammad would have run it, untainted by Western ideas and Western materialism.

Second, Uteybi and his surviving companions, who were publicly beheaded after French commandos helped Saudi authorities retake the mosque, may have lost the battle, but they won their war. Saudi rulers, terrified by what Uteybi represented, essentially gave in to his demands that the country's drift toward liberalization be reversed. Women were taken off television, theaters were closed, and huge amounts of cash were disbursed to the country's most xenophobic, reactionary preachers and teachers. Therein lie the roots of the terrorism that arose from Saudi Arabia two decades later and brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

"At the time," Trofimov explains, "such an embrace of the Wahhabi orthodoxy seemed like a wise survival policy for the House of Saud. It was only after decades of this indoctrination produced a new generation of al Qaeda radicals that some senior princes realized the extent of the folly."

I have argued in the past that the cure for terrorism is liberal secularism. It is interesting that Tromifov identifies the internal or domestic organisational technology in Saudi Arabia as being an issue.

Currently reading Civilizations. It is a book with soporific word usage and flagrantly over the top sentences where the author comes off as over-impressed with himself. I would skip it if I was to make the decision again. What is a civilization is an interesting issue though. Several definitions were offered but one that stood out was:

In practice, this meant becoming progressively less violent, more scientific, and more welcome to outsiders.

It is a difficult question but the civilizations we think of as fitting the term all have a pax that go with them of one form or another. The largest of those is the Pax Romana, Pax Tartar and Pax Brittanica.

All three of those enabled massive increases in trade and consequent swapping of ideas, technologies, goods and culture. All three were exceptionally tolerant and liberal for their time as well.

However the peace of smaller and larger civilizations has come with conquest and the forcible amalgamation of legal and trading systems into the conquerors own.

Fernandez-Armesto decided to come at the problem of civilization and how to define it through ecological regions, exploring how the environment enabled, sustained and even destroyed civilizations. He comments:

A fashionable romantic myth identifies everything in early America with a form of ecological correctness and asserts that indigenous people were "at one with nature".

People everywhere adapt a variety of strategies in coping with the limitations their environments impose on them; none is inherently more virtuous or more innocent or more irrational than another; all have to manage, exploit or prey on other species to varying degrees.

The range of responses forms a gradient along an unbroken scale between ruthless adaptation of the environment to human needs, and cunning self-adaptation to the demands of the environment.

So we constantly come back to technology and the human application of it. Pretty much everything can be defined in technological terms. So the purity of humanity, the purity of ideology, the purity of politics, or the purity of culture; are all just applications of technology itself in order to allow society to continue to scale. Culture is just another human organizational technology designed to enable the humanity to scale its tribe to the increasing levels of political, social and technological advance.

I recently bought and read Coders At Work mainly for this reason; Jeff Atwood wrote this on his site:

I also realized Coders at Work can potentially serve as a job interview filter. If the next programmer you interview can't identify at least one of the programmers interviewed in Coders at Work and tell you roughly what they're famous for ... I'd say that's an immediate no-hire.

After reading the book I totally disagree with this. Most of the people in this book are old, very old. They started on PDP systems and wrote in Fortran. Most have peaked in writing C and have not gone any further. They also mainly write in emacs and use gdb as their debuggers.

They are largely academics and use functional languages. Those that are still working in modern industry are in hallowed positions where they aren't under the same project pressures that coding monkeys are. For instance one of those interviewed is at google but hasn't been checked out on a language and so can't commit code there.

This is so far removed from the modern engineering experience it is not funny. The day to day things I have to deal with are producing quality code while satisfying all the managerial demands for documentation, meetings, etc while juggling an arbitrary project deadline, demoralized resources because software is a system of perpetual crunch and leaves no light at the end of the tunnel.

The things I am really interested in is how to achieve quality code within these pressures. Because they are constant. Anything in a language and its inherent architecture that aids me in producing a quality product and easy to manage codebase and architecture within all the restrictions of a modern software shop is a bonus. I don't have the architectural freedom of academia, nor do I have the openness of timelines. I am constantly under pressure to produce things by an arbitrary date.

Engineering is never powerful enough to influence that date or make it real. Management always wants a date and often makes one up on their own. I can understand their need. They have to marshal resources other than engineering such as physical production, marketing, so forth. When engineering does give a date it is usually wrong anyway due to scope creep and how pitiful we are at estimating tasks with any degree of accuracy.

The best book I have read is Martin Fowler's Refactoring. The very next day I could apply some of those techniques and have higher quality code. In engineering terms it offered instant gratification. Refactoring is a pure engineering book. Coders At Work in comparison is an interview book about historical celebrities in the engineering field.

To me, in the past ten years or so the biggest improvements in productivity have been:

Not managing memory. I take this totally for granted in languages like Java, C# and Python.

Eclipse adding import statements with a click (please do that soon Visual Studio. Also add automated compile please ...)

Google. If I get a stack trace now, I know I am not alone, someone else on the internets has had the same problem and I google the stack trace explicitly and within minutes of browsing have the answer. When the internet was less stable and connections at businesses commonly went down, we would joke that we can't debug without an internet connection to a search engine.

Refactoring tools in eclipse. It used to be if you refactored something you would go through clean compile after clean compile. The tools make it a five second job.

I used to use emacs until about four years ago. Since eclipse matured to the level of Visual Studio it has become a fantastic tool. It is nice and stable and has a great array of tools and perspectives. It is a wonderful piece of software.

Many of the engineering advances of the last five years have gone straight into eclipse as well. For me it is not unusual to be flicking between perspectives in the one project doing multiple ant builds, junit tests, etc etc as a mini continuous integration before the code is checked in to the repository.

If someone didn't know the history of computing and the celebrities in the field then that is ok to me. For a constantly under-pressure code slinger working anonymously cube farm to an arbitrary project deadline date, it is more important to me that they have read 'Refactoring' and understand the tools to achieve it in eclipse. I wouldn't disqualify a candidate because they didn't know who created Javascript, or who is fighting over the current standards at ECMA and so forth.

Recently read Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendick. For software it is of limited use, most of the examples are from heavy industry such as the car industry in arguing that up front design doesn't work. This is a well known issue in software already. Probably the best maxim is the delay decision making.

But then it is competing with the short, sharp absolutes of Extreme Programming which are not as long winded and directly related to software engineering. As an agile book it is probably best for a manager who has come heavy industry and is now working in software and is trying to understand why all their projects are coming in late, poorly done, and incomplete.

For software engineers who read these types of books for fun; meh. We know it already and are aware that much of the problem stems from procedural issues that software engineering has no control over.

Weak book, would avoid it if you are a software engineer. -1.

This book is the recollections of John Henebry of the Third Attack Group in the Pacific during World War II which flew B25s and A20s. It is disappointing to say the least. The book is kind of light, rather trite and doesn't always stand up to historical scrutiny.

It is like he let telling a good story get in the way. This is probably wonderful to a fifteen year old who would enjoy reading a historical adventure rather than someone more interested in the history of what is an important and unique aviation group that influenced bombing doctrine.

Henebry was right there in the Third Attack Group from the very beginning of them being assigned to the South West Pacific [SWPA]. The Third Attack Group was very significant as they changed the doctrine for anti-shipping and airfield strikes in the United States Air Force, in the Pacific and later in Europe as well.

The Third Attack Group under General Kenney and Colonel Pappy Gunn fitted out the B25s with eight 50 caliber machine guns, similar to how the RAAF Beaufighters had a tonne of forward facing firepower. The main difference was that the B25 was a medium bomber and could not only strafe a target but also drop bombs on it.

The other important doctrinal change the Third Attack Group introduced was skip bombing. Again this stemmed from Kenney and Gunn deciding that bombing ships from 7,000 ft was - correctly - ineffective. Bombing them from 30 ft with a delayed fuse was far more effective and this was proven during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea.

Henebry provided some interesting details about squadron life such as the aircraft put together from scraps to do liquor and supply runs to Australia. But other things do not stack up. For instance the Battle of the Bismarck sea was trained for and practiced by RAAF and USAF units so that it was a co-ordinated attack. Henebry writes;

Larner kept strafing in close as he pulled up to clear the masts, he slapped his 500 pounders into the ship. At least one, maybe two or three of his bombs smashed into the side. ...

This sight, in this instant, of this caourageous leader in action set a tremendous example for all to see. Our first successful hit from a minimum altitude was confirmation that General Kenney's and before him Brigadier General Billy Mitchell's controversial theory of attack aviation against enemy shipping was sound. ...

Larner's run had installed in his initially skeptical squadron pilots, and I was included among the doubtful, an immediate confidence in this new tactic. "What the hell", we thought, "if he can do that, so can we." Thus sustained, we each picked a ship and went after it. I made three low level runs, attacking a damaged destroyed and two transports.

That makes it sound like Larner went in alone, hit a ship and then everyone else went in and attacked afterward. It was a coordinated attack though; with the Beaufighters going in just ahead of the Third Attack Group by seconds, strafing the ships to keep anti aircraft fire down and then the B25s that were out fitted for it, coming in directly behind them. Larner appears to be an inspiration leader and a great pilot, but from MacAuley's book, the skip bombing B25s pretty much came in as one group.

John Quiggin's book is largely about how the Great Financial Crisis [GFC] had discredited neoliberalism's excesses yet those policies are persisting despite the empirical evidence of the GFC and the ineffectiveness of neoliberalism's policies to foresee it as well as deal with it.

The book goes through each of the economic theories supporting the policies of The Great Moderation, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium, Trickle-Down Hypothesis and Privatization. I got kind of a bit dull toward the final third as the theories were repetitive. That isn't Quiggin's fault more the dry nature of the subject in creating a consistent thesis.

The book isn't against the social organization technologies of liberal democracy and free markets. The policy prescriptions are quite mild in reality and can probably be adopted without the need for public debate on them. Where that might hit a brick wall is in the United States the Republican Party is increasingly demagogic and not really interested in good governance in my opinion. Then again that is where the zombie part of his thesis appears - something that isn't unique to the American Republican Party, nor America.

Well worth the read and an excellent attempt to inform the political interested but economically dull average reader about the economic theories that have informed economic policy since the 1980s.

Would read again.