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Critical minerals including rare earth elements, lithium, and cobalt, play a crucial role in industries, from electronics and renewable energy to defence. Nearly a year has passed since ASPI hosted the inaugural critical minerals focused ...

Rare-earth elements (REEs) and critical minerals are the world's building blocks for emerging and future technologies and are essential to manufacturing, clean energy production, semiconductor production, and the defence and aerospace industries. Their supply ...

In July, I had the pleasure of visiting Darwin to speak at the 2023 Developing Northern Australia Conference. This was my first visit to Australia, and seeing Darwin firsthand reinforced for me the important role ...

The Northern Territory government often compares the proximity of Darwin to Asian and Australian cities. To be sure, Asia is very close to Darwin, with Dili just one hour's flying time away. An often-used government ...

The story of Darwin really begins with the necessity to establish a support route for the Overland Telegraph to the southern states of Australia. In November 1871, the 1,100-mile submarine cable between Darwin and Banjoewangie in Java ...

Darwin und seine bahnbrechende Theorie erfreuen sich nach wie vor größter Popularität, dem egoistischen Gen sind ganze Bücher und Debatten gewidmet. Doch ist Egoismus wirklich das dominante, naturwüchsige Charakteristikum des Menschen? Stehen wir uns in der Tat alle selbst am nächsten oder gibt es konkurrierende Konzepte? Jüngsten Forschungsergebnissen zufolge, ist Empathie...

Last year, while standing on the foreshore at Nightcliff in Darwin at low tide, I watched an ascending Bell MV-22 Osprey transforming from helicopter to airplane mode. Looking down just after it passed, I saw ...

Australia's food security should not be taken for granted. The Covid-19 pandemic shows what can go wrong with it during seismic strategic challenges. January's empty supermarket shelves across Darwin, caused by flooding, illustrate the precarious ...

Guzyal Hill (Charles Darwin University) & Jonathan Crowe (Bond University - School of Law) have posted Harmonising Sexual Consent Law in Australia: Goals, Risks and Challenges ((2024) 49(3) Monash University Law Review (Forthcoming)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The...

A V-22 Osprey crashed during a training exercise in Australia on Sunday, killing three Marines and leaving an additional five in critical condition. The accident is the third deadly crash including an Osprey since 2022.


The tragic incident has reinvigorated debate over the Osprey, which has been plagued by controversy since its prototype was first adopted during the Reagan administration. The aircraft's unique "tiltrotor" design, which allows it to take off like a helicopter and fly like a plane, has often led to cost overruns and safety issues in its two decades in service.


"It's probably time to retire the Osprey and look at a new tiltrotor/VTOL option for the Joint Force," said Michael DiMino, a fellow at Defense Priorities.


"I'd never step foot in one of these things," wrote military analyst and Air Force veteran Patrick Fox in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.


The cause of the crash is "under investigation," according to a press release from the Marine Corps's rotational force in Darwin, Australia, where the crash occurred. The V-22 was "transporting troops during a routine training exercise," the statement noted.


The Air Force briefly grounded its entire Osprey fleet last year following a string of engine malfunctions that led to crashes or near misses. The Marines and Navy also grounded an "undisclosed number" of their V-22s last year while they tried to repair a component that had helped cause the malfunctions, according to Defense News.


The rash of V-22 crashes is part of a trend of increased U.S. military plane accidents in recent years. A 2020 congressional report, which found that 198 soldiers and civilians had died in crashes since 2014, argued that the increase in accidents was primarily due to weak safety oversight and a years-long drop in average flight hours for military pilots, which has left them less prepared to react to rare but potentially disastrous mechanical issues.


Flight hours have continued to decrease in the intervening years, a problem caused in part by the Pentagon's focus on purchasing big-ticket items while skimping on maintenance costs for existing platforms.


Poor record-keeping and inventory practices have only worsened maintenance issues. As the Government Accountability Office noted in May, weapons maker Lockheed Martin has lost over 2 million spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet since 2018, further driving up the plane's costs while also driving down flight hours. But the military continues to argue that the F-35 program is a necessary and effective replacement for America's previous generation of fighter planes.


It should perhaps be no surprise, then, that the Pentagon has already set its sights on a shiny new tiltrotor aircraft. The Department of Defense announced last year that it would replace the Black Hawk helicopter — one of the military's primary workhorses for moving people and cargo — with the V-280, a tiltrotor aircraft that strongly resembles the V-22. It remains to be seen whether it will finally fix the problems that have plagued the Osprey.

Selective Death RateThe same thought that had occurred to Charles Darwin ten years earlier occurred to Alfred Russel Wallace recovering from a bout of malaria on an Indonesian island. Each had been considering Malthus' theory that population growth would always exceed growth in food supply, dooming many to death. Both had the same question, "Which ones will die?" and both came up with the same answer, "The ones least able to live."They presented together the notion that evolution proceeds by a selective death rate. Those least equipped to survive and to breed would die off at a higher rate than those better equipped, leading to the development of new species that incorporated the innovation that improved their chances.A similar selective death rate operates, when it is allowed to, in a market economy. Innovations occur in products, services and organization, and the most successful ones survive at the expense of those less well equipped to compete with them. In market economies, flux, rather than stasis, is the norm. Few of the companies in the top hundred remain there for decades as technological change combines with changing tastes to erode their market share.Existing firms often use political clout to make life difficult for newcomers, using regulation to raise costs and barriers against new entrants. This is not the free market at work, but the use of legislative influence to thwart its operation. The coach operators lobbied Parliament to insist that the new motor cars must be preceded by a man on foot with a red flag. Progress, growth and consumer satisfaction are maximized when a selective death rate is allowed to cull the businesses that can no longer survive on merit.Innovations which increase productivity and growth lead to job losses. It is the way of the world. Those job losses are resisted by political representatives more anxious to secure the support of present voters than to make life better for future ones. But countries prosper more if they allow that selective death rate to operate instead of trying to resist its effect by subsidies and trade barriers to protect extant businesses at the expense of future ones.Sir Karl Popper made the famous observation that the aim of politics is not to select the wisest and best rulers, but to ensure "that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage." In other words, the advantage of democracy is not that it allows the people to rule, but that it can apply a selective death rate to political ideas and their exponents. It enables failed rulers to be changed peacefully and to allow alternative ones to be given a chance. Because politicians in a democracy know they can be called to account at the next election, their behaviour is tempered. No such restraints are there to curb the behaviour of despots.The methodology is a selective death date, as it is in evolution and free market economics. It is less efficient in the political realm because popular will is not as brutal as it is in nature or a free economy. The same failed ideas can resurface no matter how many times they have sunk in the past. This is because some ideas appeal in theory even if the real world discredits them repeatedly. In scientific method, new theories are put forward and tested by experiment and observation. Those that are less successful at predicting what we shall observe are discarded in favour of those that do this more successfully.A selective death rate operates by trial and error. In evolution it is blind, but in market economics, politics and scientific method it is purposive. But in all these areas it is by counting out the less adequate in favour of the more adequate that development and change take place. To interfere with this process is to mitigate its benefits.

 I am a follower of Chantal Jaquet's work. I have read her works on Spinoza with great interest, and have also been a big fan of her work on the concepts of transclass and nonreproduction. I have also read her little book on the body. In short, have read most of what she has written, but I have been very reluctant to pick up her book on smell, Philosophie de L'odorat. I met her once, and we talked about her book, her interest in the arts and aesthetics of smell, and all I could think was that I was glad that she was interested in it, but I could not imagine being interested. I just did not find smell that interesting."You do you," I thought as I listened to her explain Kôdô, the Japanese arts of scents, secretly wishing she was writing another book on Spinoza. I was less than a hundred pages into her book when I started to change my mind. The first thing that strikes one about Jaquet's book is its utter thoroughness, a consideration of smell in history, philosophy, and literature. Smell may be overlooked in our culture, but Jaquet has not overlooked any reference to smell. Since there is little written about smell, even in philosophical books dedicated to the senses and sensory knowledge, Jaquet begins with the question of that omission. What can we conclude from the absence of smell as an object of philosophical inquiry? A beginning of an answer looks to the history of the marginalization. The most classic example, found in antiquity, is that smell is excluded because it is inferior in humans. As Aristotle writes,"We have next to speak of smell and taste, both of which are almost the same physical affection, although they each have their being in different things. tastes, as a class, display their nature more clearly to us than smells, the cause of which is that the olfactory sense of man is inferior in acuteness to that of the lower animals, and is, when compared with our other senses, the least perfect of Man's senses." The idea that smell is not important because we as humans lack it as a sense repeats again and again in the history of philosophy, eventually even gaining its evolutionary explanation in Darwin and Freud. Smell ceases to matter as human beings stand upright and away from the world of scents.Jaquet raises two objections to this claim. First, the inferiority of the sense does not justify its exclusion. Human beings have worse hearing than dogs, and worse sight than hawks, but that does not lead us to dismiss those senses. Moreover, as is often the case with humanism, the concept of the human is situated at once above and below animals. Human beings are said to be deficient in smell, unable to smell what a dog notices, but are also in some sense above other animals in their appreciation of smell. Only humans have an aesthetics of smell, have flowers and perfumes. Which brings us to Jaquet's second objection, it is not entirely clear that our smell is entirely deficient. Human beings are unique in that we can smell and and taste at the same time due to the connection of nasal passages to the throat--connecting two senses and transforming our experience of both. It is possible that the dismissal of smell is as much of a cultural issue as a natural one. For this second point Jaquet looks to different cultures where smell is not devalued, and even the infamous example of the wild child of Aveyron. Children raised outside of our society demonstrate abilities of smell that we would think impossible. Viewed from this perspective the human sense of smell is not so much a natural deficiency but a cultural one. Humanity's sense of smell is not naturally deficient, but much of culture, especially in the modern west is predicated on a denigration of smell.As a true Spinozist Jaquet spends time investigating the relationship between infants and smell. Infants are at the border between the natural and cultural dimensions of smell. Children do not naturally have the same tastes and judgements regarding smell as adults. This leads to one of the most amusing paraphrase of Spinoza's remarks about the relative nature of aesthetic judgement. As Jaquet writes,"The categories of dirt and stench, cleanliness and a good smell, are pure social constructions, ingrained habits which are not however unbreakable. The dirty and the clean, the fetid and perfume, are an effect of fictive ideas which do not express the essence of things but our manner of being affected...Spinoza underlies the relativity of these categories which are not part of the properties of things, but of modes of thinking which emerge in the comparison between the different ways that things touch and act on each other, which varies according to the difference of bodies, the constitutions and encounters. The proof this is, as Spinoza says, "For one and the same thing can be, at the same time, be good, and bad, and also indifferent" (IVPref), he gives the example of music but it can be transposed to smell. Thus the odor of excrement is good to infants, bad to adults, and to the anosmic neither good nor bad." Smells and the sense of smell, are often a border phenomena, placed between human beings and animals, but also placed at the divisions within humanity. Colonial accounts are filled with discussions of the foul smells of the other, racial hierarchies and divisions often entail smell as a regime of disgust and disdain, and even gender has its own economy of smell. Jaquet has some amusing passages in which she discusses the asymmetrical gender expectations of smell, women are construed to be in need of perfumes in order to be considered attractive or even feminine while men are pretty much allowed to stink. Smell is a marker of exclusion and power. As Jaquet writes,"All of these olfactive figures of racism, of sexism, and of xenophobia demonstrate that odor functions as principle of discrimination and exclusion to the extent that acceptation and integration of the other pass through deodorization as a kind of purification." I am not going to try to sum up much the rest of Jaquet's massive book on smell which covers everything from literary representations of smell, in Proust, the history of the aesthetics of smell, from Kôdô in Japan, and the perfume industry in the west, and philosophers on smell from Condillac to Nietzsche. What emerges is a philosophical consideration of smell as precisely that border between nature and culture, identity and difference, self and other, passivity and activity. Reconsidering smell then makes it possible to rethink what it means to be human and what it means to be social, drawing our attention to the relational aspect of our identity and subjectivity.