Club Troppo

At the risk of boring readers rigid, I can't resist another blast on climate change/global warming. It's partly provoked by Wayne Wood's Homer Simpson perspective on global warming (immediately below) and partly by a Salon article linked by John Quiggin , which highlights the...

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I don't really understand the in-depth research done by the IPCC, and always thought a 'hockey stick' was something Nova Peris used to get a gold medal. Then there is the usual dash of Ricardo ridicule, providing evidence once again that somebody enjoys Ken's blogging so much...

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Troppo Armadillo doesn't have the huge audience of a megablog like Instapundit, but it certainly attracts the attention of more than a few key participants in important debates. The latest is Nir Shaviv, one of the two researchers whose paper on the influence of supernovae on...

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Catallaxy's Andrew Norton blogs a review of Judith Brett's new book Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class . He actually makes me want to read it, and seems to explain its content and purpose far more thoroughly than Paul Kelly's effort in the Australian . Kelly appear...

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There are times when Tex's earthy blogging style really suits an issue perfectly. This is one of them .

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My wife and I have been away for a couple of days, far from the madding crowd. We went 250 kilometres down the Stuart Highway to a place called Edith Falls, actually it's called some other Aboriginal name now since it's been incorporated into Nitmiluk National Park, but we'll...

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From my fairly hazy memory of it, Judith Brett's Robert Menzies' Forgotten People ranks as one of the less incisive Australian works of political biography I've read in the last decade or so. But if Paul Kelly's review is anything to go by, her latest book Australian Liberals...

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The currently on-vacation Andrew Sullivan races back online to share his enthusiasm for Arnold Schwarzenneger's ah....candidacy....and demonstrates that gay bloggers need to be particularly conscious of the double entendre morass that unbridled metaphorical allusion can lead t...

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Alfred Einstein ? Still it's all relative, I suppose.

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Bali bomber Amrozi's death sentence has generated some strange resonances with the just-concluded Troppo Armadillo debate on Alison Broinowski's ideas about Asian perceptions of Australia. The first is that Amrozi's apparent apology to Australians (dealt with below by Christop...

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Ian Firns, the courageous (possibly in a Sir Humphrey Appleby sense) contract academic at the centre of the Newcastle University plagiarism cover-up scandal, contributes some fascinating observations to the comment box of my previous post . One of them is to express a degree o...

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Rob Corr has an excellent post on yesterday's decision by the High Court upholding the applicability of Australian industrial awards (and the jurisdiction of the AIRC) in relation to foreign-crewed and owned vessels operating in Australian coastal shipping. Here's an Age artic...

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I've been puzzled by the failure of any bloggers or mainstream op-ed pundits even to mention last week's Nine Network Sunday program which revealed apparent serious erosion of fundamental academic standards at University of Newcastle. It appears that widespread plagiarism by f...

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Despite my Resident Poof status on 'Dillo de Trop - or maybe because of it - I've resisted blogging, up till now, on the vexed question of gay marriage, propagation of the species and the increasingly strident demands of the over-privileged gay minority - and ever-cognisant of...

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My previous post about Alison Broinowski generated quite a bit of discussion. However, it's apparent that most commenters haven't actually read either her book or her thesis. I can't really blame them for that. Although the thesis is freely available in PDF format, some people...

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At the risk of fuelling up John Quiggin and UnAustralian Ken Miles (though only with renewable energy resources), here's a fascinating post on Aaron Oakley's Bizarre Science summarising new research suggesting that much of the observed 20th century global warming is actually c...

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Despite the title, this isn't a Bob Hope obituary. In fact it's a continuation of the Asian theme initiated with the previous post. I've just posted on the NTU Law School website a paper recently presented by NTU's Professor Jesse Wu in Malaysia. It was the 4th Professor Ahmad...

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I've been pondering on Indonesia and realpolitik. Professor Bunyip's elegant pay-out on Alison Broinowski first set me off on that track. I even took the time to skim-read Broinowski's doctoral thesis (of which her new book is a reworked version), which the Professor kindly li...

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I generally like the way Deirdre Macken writes for the AFR. She has the happy knack of making the most mundane report appear interesting. Her piece in the Weekend AFR is no exception. She discusses the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's 2002 report, in particular the...

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Having just finished Man of Honour , Michael Duffy's new book about John Macarthur - Founding Father, Sheep Husbandry Enthusiast, Major Rorter and all round cranky bugger - I'm extremely grateful that The Great Perturbator predated the internet. There'd be more stepping out go...

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