En Passant

Labor - making the Liberals look good
The Coalition has overtaken the Labor Government on primary votes in the latest Newspoll. Labor – making the Liberals look good. (0)

Alistair Hulett - another great socialist dies
Alistair Hulett - singer, songwriter, socialist – died overnight. Chris Harman, Daniel Bensaid, Howard Zinn and now Alistair. Farewell comrades. (1)

Let's give one million pounds to Goldman Sachs!
Goldman Sachs has agreed to limit its UK partners’ pay and bonuses to 1 million pounds. That sounds about right - one million pounds into their money grubbing greedy guts. (0)

McGorry backtracks
Australian of the Year Professor Patrick McGorry has backtracked from his recent comment that detention centres are breeding grounds for mental illness. He now says he was criticising past government policies. Ah, that explains it. Howard and Keating detention centres bad; Rudd detention centres good. Shame, McGorry, shame. (0)

White Australia has a black history
White Australia has a Black History 6 pm Thursday 4 February Room G 31 Copland Building Australian National University. Socialist Alternative Canberra. (0)

Happy Invasion Day 2010
A great video about invasion day on 26 January. (0)

Moderation, comments and the like
Dear Readers, sometimes your post might get held up for moderation. This might be because it comes from a source often identified with spam, or contains words that are often used in spam.  And to avoid late spam I have cut down the time for comments to be made to a week from publication. Because I work it means I do not always get to look at the moderation queue immediately. So it might take some time for your comment to appear. If it is commenting on an article more that a week old it won’t appear. Finally a combination of work and a certain medical issue may see me posting less material in the coming months. (Stop that cheering!) We shall see. (0)

Australia's imperialist Antarctic claims
According to the Australian Antarctic Division website: Australian Antarctic Territory covers nearly 5.9 million square kilometres, about 42% of Antarctica and nearly 80% of the total area of Australia itself. In addition Australian claims that ‘the Australian Antarctic territorial waters extend 200 nautical miles out to sea from the Australian Antarctic territory.’ Only 4 countries recognise our (imperialist) Antarctic claims. Japan does not. I think that crimes on the high seas – Australia won’t push the idea that the ramming of the Ady Gil occurred in Australian territorial waters – fall under the jurisdiction of the country in which the relevant ship is flagged. In this case that is likely to be New Zealand. (1)

I've been blaired - hallelujah
Ah, I wondered why some fairly reactionary and inane comments were on my blog piece on cricket and conservatism. I believe Tim Blair from News Ltd has mentioned (and presumably attacked) me on his blog for previewing (or perhaps predicting?) the result of the second test. Actually I stayed away from that and was arguing that Australian cricket was too conservative and that would lead to its further decline. The win over Pakistan in Sydney only masks that. (0)

Warning: bad joke
Margaret Thatcher went to dinner with her male Cabinet. ‘Steak or fish?’ the waiter asked. ‘Steak of course,’ she replied. ‘And what about the vegetables?’ ‘They’ll have steak too.’  With thanks to the Australian Financial Review. (0)