Club Troppo

I posted a big rave about VoIP a while back . It's a great thing. But you may want to consider which service provider you use. If anyone has any suggestions regarding which provider I move to from TPG I'd be grateful. We've had an 'outage' for several days disabling the VoIP p...

Continue reading →

Rough justice for roughnecks Blogging op-ed pundit and law academic Mirko 'The Torturer' Bagaric apparently subscribes to The Phantom's Theory of Justice ; rough justice for roughnecks. And David Hicks is one of those roughnecks, whose rights (if any) must be sacrificed to the...

Continue reading →

Iâve been musing lately about the connection between womenâs labour force participation and income inequality and Iâve been forced to the conclusion that, once again, itâs probably womenâs fault. Increasing inequality in market incomes, that is. My logic goes something like th...

Continue reading →

Those who saw the corresponding post last year, or who participated, may realise that it's around a year ago that something like forty of us subscribed to Crikey. If I can join as many people as that this year I'll probably sign up, but doubt I'll do so at the single rate. If...

Continue reading →

Continue reading →

How John Quiggin sees the climate debate Soon this process will be automated. Someone will program the Google Reader to choose the best posts of the week and string them together with hilarious banter. But in the meantime I'll persevere with the manual method. News and politic...

Continue reading →

Flap Flap, Squawkety squawk. Itâs the sound of feathers flying, and wings beating with nervous Nelly intensity, as the Rodent transmogrifies in the space of a week to a chicken hawk thatâs more chicken than hawk. After spending the better part of last week trying to brush the...

Continue reading →

He's a funny old fellow ... ? I've never subscribed to my colleague Nicholas Gruen's high opinion of SMH journo and "blogger" Jack Marx . Marx's 2006 article on his dealings with actor Russell Crowe , which so impressed Nicholas, was in my view not only undisciplined writing t...

Continue reading →

J. M. Coetzee reviews The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer

Continue reading →

I received an e-mail a while back from a very enterprising TR Rose Associates a small New York public advocacy publishing house who have published a comic in aid of the cause for giving money to caregivers in the US. Parents and Grandparents. I don't know what the arrangements...

Continue reading →

Something to hate I had hoped that Helen would set a mediocre standard for the new crop of Missing Link debutants, but was severely disappointed. Hers will be a hard act to follow. News and politics stuff Howard haters were on the march this weekend. Hater-in-Chief Tim Dunlop...

Continue reading →

Openly discussing the possibility of a US air strike against Iran no longer courts banishment from polite company. To see why, we need look no further than a remark volunteered by the new Senate Majority Leader in the US, Harry Reid, just a few weeks ago: "Much has been made a...

Continue reading →

Deinococcus radiodurans is an amazing bacteria . It can happily live in the waste tanks of nuclear reactors. Bacteria is a brutally simple and resilient form of life. It can survive vacuum, cold, heat, radiation, pressure: you name it, a bacteria has evolved to solve that envi...

Continue reading →

All that hype about the internet - well some of it is coming true.

Continue reading →

Martyn Indyk put it like this: If the surge strategy is Plan A, we need to start thinking now about what the United States needs to do if it doesn't work. Indyk (who grew up in Australia) was United States Ambassador to Israel in 1995-97 and 2000-2001, and now directs the Saba...

Continue reading →

Ubiquitous blogosphere commenter Joe Cambria has posted a really interesting contribution on Rex Ringschott's coal thread , suggesting a variey of greenhouse gas reduction policies as an alternative to either carbon taxes or tradeable emissions permits. Joe's ideas deserve a t...

Continue reading →

All utopias begin in hope and end in despair. Marx's vision of a world where you could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner collapsed into Orwell's image of boot stamping on a human face. At the hands of its critics,...

Continue reading →

It looks like they have cracked the US market such they are becoming a regular exporter into it. The Chicago Motor Show debuted the VE Commodore as the Pontiac G8 . The photo below shows Bob Lutz introducing the car to the American motor press. The pre-show excitement was quit...

Continue reading →

Popper fans, acolytes and those less impressed might like to download the podcast of Melvin Bragg doing a show on the great man. This is on his ' In Our Time ' series on the BBC which I've found a bit disappointing. He gets three experts in and has a gasbag about some great ev...

Continue reading →

Well, in the couple of days since Wednesday, climate change and the Turnbull-Garrett debate moved to the forefront of Ozblogistan's concerns. Alas, the posts on the debate weren't as classy as some of the global warming pieces. This means I've forgone Missing Link's usual Sci-...

Continue reading →