Alain de Botton is starting to irk me...

from our friend, Dr. Vacy Vlazna

“Everything depends on our propelling force. And what is that force? The misery of the Jews” (Theodor Herzl, father of Zionism)

 The news out there has different paces... You get the run of the crap-mill tabloid press at news.com.au and you get the literary essays at the Monthly... One always has a .22 riding shotgun by the side of the computer to shoot the strays. 

The CSIRO has duped one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies into buying anti-counterfeit technology that could be easily compromised - passing off cheap chemicals it had bought from China as a ''trade secret'' formula.

Here we are... Gus is about to blow his chance to work for the public service, though he has long passed retirement age... If my informants in the APS are correct, the deck chairs are being moved from here to there...

The capture of the Enigma code machine 70 years ago changed the course of the second world war. But the secret codes broken by this event were not history's toughest ciphers. Plenty of codes are uncracked and, as MacGregor Campbell discovers, their solutions may provide the key to murders or even buried treasure

The Somerton Man

One could cope with a gas-guzzling family sedan, but a road machine that goes four times the speed, despite our road speed limits, for barely 20 per cent more, is attractive... even if we have kids...

Not only we know that our fast car is backed by a vastly superior warranty, the restored sedan could be a lemon within three months... Yes, the old Telstra network is not what it used to be, especially when it rains...

But there are some fanatics of the "PC" who support the horrible concoction designed by the coalition boofheads...

The "double-cross system" has been used in war and peace, in order to deceive. 

from Crikey …..

Rundle: John Howard's still lying about Iraq invasion

from the Anti-Empire Report ….

Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher made "unabashedly racist" comments during a meeting with Bob Carr, the Foreign Affairs Minister has told Lateline.

I am not really fond of he Archibald Art Prize... For those who don't know, the Archibald Prize is given to the best portraiture in Australia  — apart from its rival the Moran Prize... The Archibald is prestigious and is usually won by the same artists in a small group of brushies who seem to know their stuff... 

Bob Carr may have been Foreign Affairs Minister for only 12 months, but he started talking to United States diplomats about internal Labor politics nearly 40 years ago.

from The Shovel …..

In a final nod to the benefits of market capitalism, Baroness Thatcher has, on her deathbed, asked that all public memories of her be privatised.

In an interview with Inside Business, NBN Co chief Mike Quigley conceded the capital costs of the Coalition's FttN plan could be more than 20 per cent cheaper.