Comment and Opinion

Q Society Australia
[Dead. Deader than a doornail.]

Plus les choses changent, plus elles ne devraient pas (13/2/2021)
In a slight modification of Ambrose Karr's famous saying, the French above means "The more things change the more they should not". When I did this month's regular check for broken and changed links on this site I discovered that two places to which I had lots of links have simply disappeared.

I've made good use of the Therapeutic Goods Administration's Complaints Resolution Panel to illustrate action taken against quacks and other people who make outrageous medical claims. The TGA have completely closed the CRP web site – no archive of articles, nothing except

I assume that the relevant information has been subsumed into the main TGA site, but I will have to do an individual search for each link to see if the information still exists. Or I could dive around in the Internet Archive.

Of course there is always the possibility that someone at the TGA forgot to pay a renewal fee for something. Remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." Or, put more crudely, is it a conspiracy or a cockup?

The other site causing grief is Yahoo!. I have lots of links to messages posted to the enormous number of mailing lists at Yahoo! Groups. Yahoo! have decided to get out of the mailing list business and now all links to any of the groups or their contents are redirected to the main Yahoo! front page. No archive, no "We are mothballing Groups and no more messages will be accepted". Nothing.

So for all of next week I'll be tracking down where the links used to go to to try to salvage something. I might be retired but I have better things to do with my time.

Not all the news from the link check was bad, however. I was alerted to a change in the site belonging to Australia's outpost of the Qanon insanity movement. The site now just says that they have closed down in Australia and won't be coming back. Apparently they became extremely offended at recognition of Islam as a religion and now think that the country is a lost cause in the fight against everything because antifa has won over bigotry. As the saying goes: "Door! Arse! Way out!". [Update: When I did my monthly link check in March 2021 it showed that the Q web site had vanished completely. The good news continues.]