Just because you were lying on a beach debating whether it was time for your next sunscreen application, doesn’t mean the Crikey bloggers were. The website has been bustling with blogs, stories, political analysis and lots of feisty debate in the comments sections. Here’s our pick of the best:

Andrew Bartlett’s been busy at The Stump, first writing about the continuing refugee torment in our region:

With literally hundreds of thousands of refugees and other displaced people living precariously in various parts of south-east Asia, and more than one country engaging in serious human rights abuses, it is amazing that we can consider a couple of thousand refugees arriving in boats over the course of a year as some sort of  ‘crisis’. Or that we think just trying to blockade means of transportation is likely to prevent a flow of asylum seekers in the long term …

and then discussing the potential for social media in developing countries such as India:

The mass media in some developing countries can be either overtly censored, government controlled or seriously constrained in other ways to varying degrees. This makes social media far more crucial as a means for genuine information and expressions of opinion, including for opposition politicians.

In other cases, the political culture is such that there is far more of an overt distance between politicians and general public. This means that the potential for expanded open engagement is greater, and social media can be well suited to this given its exploding popularity in many developing countries (which is why openly authoritarian regimes such as in China or Iran go to such lengths to block or censor it) …

Read the rest here.

With Labor becoming more and more popular in urban areas, how will Abbott fair in the cities? asks Possum Comitatus.

Labor cannot lose while it has a strong city vote. But worse, the stronger Labor becomes in the cities, the fewer metropolitan representatives the coalition ends up with in a given Parliament — forcing the policy and leadership choices the coalition takes to any later election being mostly designed and supported by non-metropolitan interests.

That generally alienates any metro voters that have even a slight interest in political modernity — which usually happens to be most of them.

Check out all the data and graph pr0n here.

Plus, how at risk is your local member if an election occurred now? Possum crunches the numbers.

Now that we have the full spectrum of quarterly polling data from Newspoll and Nielsen, not only can we run election simulations, but we can also use those simulation results to take a closer look at which seats would have been most likely to fall were an election held sometime over the past 3 months and the result was consistent with the polling.

We can split these seats up into 3 categories:

Extreme Risk — being those coalition held seats that would almost certainly have fallen to the ALP. It would have taken an historical anomaly for any of these seats to have been retained by the Coalition.

High Risk — being those seats that would probably have fallen to the ALP. A large majority of these seats would have changed hands.

Moderate Risk — being those seats which would have been in some danger of falling to Labor. For nearly every High Risk or Extreme Risk seat which did not fall, there would most likely have been a seat in this Moderate Risk group that would have taken its place.

See if your member would make it.

Aviation blog Plane Talking has been a hive of activity.

The Jetstar/Qantas/AirAsia love fest will rewrite the rules of aviation in the Asia-Pacific region, argues Ben Sandilands.

In the shorter term the alliance means joint purchasing of fuel at airports common to both brands, shared ground handling and combined hotel room booking at leisure destinations to include in packaged deals.

In the longer term it means joint fleet purchases, and a joint approach to Airbus and Boeing over the specifications of the replacement each manufacturer was planning for their single aisle A320 and 737 families as well as a bulk purchase price …

Today’s announcement brings into sharp focus a future in which the two largest and most successful low cost franchises in the hemisphere intend to keep themselves strong enough to see off inevitable challenges from the emergence of similar competitors in China, Japan and South Korea.

In this sense both Jetstar and Air Asia share the advantage of true cross-border branding, something that the Singapore Airlines controlled Tiger operation lacks, and the established national carriers in other parts of the hemisphere do not show any sign of recognising at this stage.

Will they squash Tiger? Have your say.

The increase in airport security and full body scans demands one major question. Will full-body scans cause cancer or just embarrassment?

That is the health consequences for frequent fliers of being repeatedly digitally stripped and intimately imaged at airports by devices that can see through clothes and at least part of the way into places where the sun don’t shine.

Sure, the expert advice if you search for it is that there is no health risk. Just as there was no risk from exposure to asbestos fibres (1960s) or smoking (1950s-1980s).

Older, if not ancient readers might recall that in the early 50s parents buying shoes would examine the bright green X-ray images of their children’s feet in special fitting boxes in the footwear departments of stores, and the use of glowing radium laced paint to illuminate the hands of clocks and watches was nearly universal. And perfectly safe, no, really!

But what is missing in relation to the machines now being pressed into everyday use at London and Amsterdam and possibly soon in Australia is a cast iron guarantee, that can be framed and hung on the wall, that says that repeated exposure to these techniques will not increase the risk of cancer.

Read the rest at  here.

How will the government’s changes to the obstetric safety net affect families popping out babies? It’s not the “expensive surprise” some would have us believe, writes Professor of Midwifery, Sally Tracy.

In March 2004 the Howard Government changed the Medicare Safety Net to allow for an unlimited, non means tested increase in the supplement payable for Medicare benefits for these charges over and above a threshold set by the government each year.

The inherent risks in introducing an unlimited benefit were soon realised when it was discovered that the safety net was not necessarily benefiting those with a low to middle income or who were sickest in the community, despite the existence of a lower threshold making it easier for them to qualify.

The people who really benefited were the providers themselves. It was found that some doctors were cleverly taking advantage of the safety net to increase their fees with the knowledge that the majority of the cost would be refunded by the government. In 2008 this cost Medicare (and the taxpayer) the sum of $211.3 million.

In fact in the five years since the introduction of the new safety net, fees charged by private obstetricians for in-hospital services reduced by six per cent, whilst the fees charged for out of hospital expenses such as the ‘antenatal care package’ increased by 267 per cent.

Read the rest at Croakey here.

Dubai’s giant monstrosity, the Burj Khalifa Tower, is an omen of doom for the troubled economic power, writes Binoy Kampmark.

The Burj Khalifa Tower, renamed in tribute to Dubai’s bailout donor, Abu Dhabi’s Sheik Khalifa, dwarfs all that have come before it. It is a monstrous compilation of gimmicks in some ways, another addition to the mix of Vegas-styled faux islands, shopping centres and ski runs. Dubai portends to be a place of trickery, entertainment and massive expense accounts. The building itself boasts 200 floors, and rises to 828 meters. It promises to be the home of the first Armani Hotel. Patrons are whisked between floors in elevators at the speed of 18 metres a second. But what does this building suggest about Dubai and the architectural madness that characterizes such efforts?

…

Dubai suffers, like tyrants, from an overwhelming edifice complex. Its spending complex resembles the efforts of the Pharaohs and their pyramid projects, or those of the medieval Catholic Church: bigger is better, huge monuments to progress, humanity and God. Sometimes, the smaller the state, the more obsessed the efforts in building the Tower of Babel. Megalomania is the classic byproduct of inferiority complexes, often induced by money without sense.

Is it the end of Dubai? Read the rest here.

The holiday season is the season of giving, which local charities are good at abusing with guilty pulls on the heart strings and a dose of holiday cheer, notes W.H Chong at Culture Mulcher.

Well, it was just so smooth.

Man on phone, mellow voice: Good morning, are you X from Y Avenue?

I’m from the Z Hospital (where I had been last year) Oncology Unit and we’re doing a raffle for the kids – can I put you down for a book of 20 tickets – that’s $30. Are you still at Y Avenue? We take Visa, MasterCard, Amex. Take your number when you’re ready.

Okay, we’ll send it out to you next post.

Normally, I’d have killed the call by the fourth syllable but … maybe it was: the extenuating extension of the season; or the fella’s voice was so soothing; or, mostly maybe, it was the umimpeachably good cause from an institution I had depended upon.

There must be a ring-bound, colour-tabbed, seasonally updated Manual of Guilt-Leverage which no doubt is written up in bullet points and that phone workers read off.

Add your charity guilted stories here.

Our film blog Cinetology has the reviews on all the best summer viewing, from the latest Disney flick The Princess and the Frog, to Peter Jackson’s take on the literary favourite The Lovely Bones, George Clooney’s much-hyped Up in the Air and Meryl Streep’s latest romcom It’s Complicated.

Our new travel blog Back in a Bit is taking off and spreading its wings, as Scott Bridges blogs his way through the gastro, bathing elephants, movie sets and plastic dinosaurs of India.

The men’s queue for ferry tickets was already extremely long, but the queue for ladies was much shorter so Spyker got to stand in line while I watched the backpacks from outside of the crush of bodies. Neither of the lines were moving because for some reason that must make perfect sense to somebody, the ticket seller wasn’t selling tickets. Over the next 20 minutes the queue kept getting longer, by now holding at least 150 people, but the ticket seller just kept reading his paper. Finally, after tensions started to visibly rise amongst those waiting, he decided to relieve some customers of their Rs. 2.50. Lisa was about 20 people from the front of the women’s line but just before she got to the window the ticket seller stopped again. For no apparent reason. By this stage I could see the ferry approaching from across the harbour, and could see over a hundred people still waiting in line, and I knew that it was going to be tight. Eventually, with the ferry preparing to dock, the customer service officer again decided to service some customers, Lisa finally got to hand over five rupees in exchange for two stubs of paper, and we joined the crush of bodies pushing and shoving for a seat on the ferry.

To amuse myself during this whole episode I had watched the constant stream of men walk into the ferry terminal, straight past the queue and up to the ticket window, and attempt to shamelessly push into the very front of the line. This is apparently how Indian queues have long worked, and is one of the main reasons why women get their own queue (along with the famously wandering hands of Indian men), but a few times now I’ve seen both officials and queuing customers angrily scold men that attempt to subvert the queuing process and get themselves served straight away. That’s not to say that queues are orderly – they’re not – but the queue-jumping just doesn’t seem to be as blatant as it once was.

And join in the discussion over what the current decade is called, on the Crikey Team blog.

We are now in a new decade, the 2010s.

All right, so you may be of the ‘but a decade doesn’t start until 2011’ school of thought. Too bad, because I think the rest of the world has decided it is a new decade, and thank god, cause the noughties were getting a little old. But at least “the noughties” had a witty little moniker …

But does this decade actually have a name yet?

Top (or worst, depending on your opinion) suggestions includes “the tenners”, “the tensions” and “the decadents”. Or perhaps, “Steve” (just because) or “the porkies” (since we’re so fat). Got a hilarious suggestion?

There you go. Now you’ve caught up on all your holiday reading and it didn’t involve a single Stephen King novel.