Club Troppo

I've been meaning for a while to draw attention to cartoonist Jon Kudelka's excellent site 101 uses for a John Howard Today's Missing Link is a bit shorter than average (only 13 highlighted posts), partly because there haven't been as many posters as usual over the weekend and...

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Last week, Eygptian blogger Wael Abbas (NB he writes in Arabic!) was credited by French newspaper Le Figaro with striking a major blow against oppression, thanks to three of the ubiquitous incidents of material progress a mobile phone with integrated videocamera, the multimedi...

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The Financial Review asked me to write an op ed for them on prospects for reform in 2007 with an international flavour. (Actually they asked for international economic influences on Australia in 2007 and I sold them the idea of an op ed on reform. The result was published on o...

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Back in 2002, then aspiring US presidential candidate John Kerry began arguing that "the war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation". To my ear back then, this sounded like one of Kerry's more thoughtfu...

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In view of Nicholas Gruen's very sensible post below about extreme animal liberationists, I feel it's my duty to draw readers' attention to an alliance that many may find surprising perhaps even disturbing. Uber-Right Wing Death Beast Tim Blair is promoting animal lib organisa...

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Best Post Predictably, the blogosphere is full of posts about GW Bush's "Iraq surge" policy announced yesterday. At least, that's true of the left and centrist blogosphere. I can't find even a single post about it amongst Australian RWDB bloggers. Can anyone point me towards o...

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I've just been on hols with my kids to (aaahhh!) the Gold Coast. We visited Dreamworld, Sea World and, in the middle of the renamed 'Steve Irwin Way', the Australia Zoo where Terry Irwin impersonated the late Steve in a croc show and Bindi Irwin sang with the Crocmen and other...

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Back in late 2005, a brilliant young US moderate-left commentator named Matthew Yglesias and his colleague Sam Rosenfeld penned a prescient essay for The American Prospect called " The Incompetence Dodge" . They began by noting how many policy figures were coming to the conclu...

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George Bush's announcement of extra troops for Iraq is significant not for its announcements of actions, but for its official admission that Iraq is a horrible mess. See the official US government PDF for details. The scariest bit is the official admission that the Coalition c...

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Previously published - in edited form - in the SMH yesterday - 10th January. Parents, teachers and coaches often tell their charges that 'you only get out of something in proportion to what you put into it', or words to that effect. Economists are interested in this idea too....

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Am I the only one to have programmed the glossary of my word processor with lots of personally tailored shortcuts? I hardly think so. When I type "cssn" in Microsoft Word, my dictionary says that the word "cssn" doesn't exist. Then the program turns to my glossary and finds th...

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Bill Leak cartoon from the Oz As you may have noticed, Missing Link has been, well, missing for a week longer than planned. I have no excuse other than holiday season torpor. However, as Mark Bahnisch pointed out in a comment this morning, time, tide and the blogosphere wait f...

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Today US President George Bush told lawmakers that he would be sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq . And Australia? What will we, as a " firm and faithful friend " who is "in there with the President in the fight against terror" be doing to help? Send a small additional contr...

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Outside of the arguments of political parties, ideologies, policies etc; government is predominantly an administrative structure. We would expect government to be relatively fluid as it changes in size, shape, boundaries and structures in order to remain at maximum administrat...

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I meant to post a note saying that the ABC are re-running a fantastic series "Prisoners under Nippon" at 11.00 am on weekdays. Made (I think over a year or more) in the early-mid 1980s it's a remarkable piece of radio. Go check it out.

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Sun Microsystems is open-sourcing Java under the GPLv2 license . Naturally this made Richard Stallman very happy who was recently quoted as saying: It'll be very good that the Java trap won't exist any more. It will be a thing of the past. I have spent the majority of the last...

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Here is Ken's and my introduction to the Best Blog Posts of 2006. They will be published at the rate of two a day throughout January at Online Opinion. . As regular Troppodillians will note, this post is written at a very introductory level. Indeed for those who don't even kno...

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I get irritated when people throw the word 'definitive' around. So ignore the headline which is - in the words of Lady Bracknell - altogether too sensational. But in a recent post of mine that seems to have found its way into the side bar of recent comments for a surprisingly...

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Lennon and McCartney, Lerner and Lowe, Rogers and Hammerstein, Gilbert and Sullivan, John and Taupin, Lloyd-Webber and Rice. Were any of these guys quite as good on their own as they were with their partner? Are these gains from trade? Well in some cases one of the partners co...

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