loon pond

And now the shocking truth: Kevin Rudd like as not wrote the plays of William Shakespeare ...

2012-01-29T06:47:00.007+11:00

(Above: found here at Judge: Bacon Wrote Shakespeare Plays).

A few months ago, Eric Idle (who was most likely Michael Palin) established some important points about authorship in The New Yorker with Who Wrote Shakespeare?

While it is perfectly obvious to everyone that Ben Jonson wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, it is less known that Ben Jonson’s plays were written by a teen-age girl in Sunderland, who mysteriously disappeared, leaving no trace of her existence, which is clear proof that she wrote them. The plays of Marlowe were actually written by a chambermaid named Marlene, who faked her own orgasm, and then her own death in a Deptford tavern brawl ...

There are many aspects to his theory:

Many people believe that Richard III not only was a good man who would never hurt a fly but actually wrote “She Stoops to Conquer,” and that the so-called author, Oliver Goldsmith, found the play under a tree in 1773 while visiting Bosworth Field, now a multistory car park (clearly an attempt to cover up the evidence of the ruse).

And it leads the pond to announce that Christopher Pearson finds his columns for The Australian in the chimney, where they're delivered by the stork.

How else to explain this?

It is sadly a PP (post fickle finger of gold bar paywall) column, so no link, but clearly Pearson was upset by Robert Manne's bout of man love for former chairman Rudd in Why Rudd's return is Labor's only chance of survival (not that there's anything wrong with man love, but why former chairman Rudd? Why does he attract all the man love? What's gone wrong with George Clooney?)

Now it's true that Manne seems to have undergone some kind of trauma, such that it might well be that his columns are currently written by Paul Kelly, because back in the day Manne was front and centre propounding profound insights at universities, and so blessed La Trobe University with The Rudd Government: What Has Gone Wrong.

... the bit that I now think is very strange is that he said that his great hero was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who stands for the greatest kind of act of moral and political courage in the twentieth century for Rudd. And then, in the last few months, it’s been said by almost everyone, I’ve never seen such cowardice over the ETS. Both cowardly and mis-judged. But the cowardice is what I want to concentrate on. How can one put together a person whose moral hero is Dietrich Bonhoeffer and whose actions make Graeme Richardson seem to be principled? And who has acted on the greatest moral challenge of the twentieth century for humankind in such a cowardly way. I can’t put it together.

Oh curse and damn you cowardly lion Rudd. Quick, Dorothy click heels three times and escape.

Not so quick, because happily Judith Brett was to hand to confirm Manne's worst fears:

Well, I don’t actually have much of a psychological take on Rudd because I find him so incredibly unappealing. So I find him very unempathetic. I thought what Lenore was saying about this moment things snapped because I can bear almost… I can’t bear to listen to him any more except that I have a professional commitment to hearing what he says. So I think that he’s now at the point where people leave the room. You know, you turn him off.

Oh the man hate.

Yep, it was a hate fest of the first water, with one questioner evoking the ABC series The Hollow Men, and damning ridiculous media speculation about Julia Gillard as a potential leader, and Paul Kelly throwing things wide open (with Lenore Taylor) to a faint glimmer of hope:

One of the interesting features of the government is, there is an accepted successor to Rudd, that's Gillard, which could make the second term particularly interesting.

And so we now live in interesting times - thanks Chinese proverb - and now Manne wants to bring back Rudd to make the times even more interesting, but the most amazing thing is that Christopher Pearson somehow thinks this sort of contradiction is contradictory.

Astonishing really, given his endless campaigning and speculation last year from the very get go of the Gillard era about the imminent return of Chairman Rudd. Next day, next week, or in a worst case scenario by next month.

It wouldn't be easy, but Kevin Rudd could pull this off is but one spectacular example of an avalanche of pieces allegedly written by Pearson - but possibly ghosted by Miranda the Devine or Piers "Akker Dakker" Akkerman - explaining how former Chairman Rudd could return to the throne of power, change policy, take a new stance on people smuggling, the carbon tax, gambling in clubs, and so end the reign of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Happily such pieces are PP (pre gold fickle finger of fate paywall), so the pond can link to them, and readers can still frolic through them for free, therefore not violating the most offensive PP of all (Pay to read bloody Pearson?)

Yep, it was back in September that Pearson went overboard on Rudd's return:

There's a joke doing the rounds that Rudd has only one friend, Newspoll, but it's a very powerful ally. How could Rudd convert that political capital into a return to the Lodge? He'd have to act quickly, perhaps within the next few weeks before parliament resumes, while the mood in caucus grows ever more desperate and before support gathers behind another candidate. Simply by being in the House of Representatives, Rudd is a reminder to many voters, especially in Queensland, of the legitimacy problems that dog Gillard's leadership.

Within the next few weeks?

There's a joke doing the rounds at the pond that Pearson has the predictive insight of random tea leaves at the bottom of an over-brewed cup of tea, soggy and lumpy, and it surely makes it even funnier to realise most likely it was Robert Manne writing his columns way back then ...

Unless of course it was Phillip Adams, mounting his clarion call last September Let Rudd resume rightful role. He had a helpful illustration from Nicholson to make his point:

Yep, at various times Adams and Pearson and Manne have been one in their desire to bring back Rudd, except when they have been three on the matter of bringing back Rudd, and so the world came to understand the concept of the unholy trinity.

Meanwhile, Gillard might well be going, though she's been longer in the going than some expected or demanded, but there's an authorship crisis surrounding her involving Tony Hodges and Kim Sattler - Outed unionist Kim Sattler says PM Julia Gillard's story is inaccurate).

This week's capers haven't helped, but does anyone - outside of Manne now, and Pearson and Adams back in September last year - think Rudd is the solution, as opposed to being part of the problem?

More to the point, in this PP environment, would anyone pay to read the unwholesome, unseemly spectacle of Pearson, preening prat and sufferer of long term memory loss in the matter of Rudd, bag Robert Manne, sufferer of long term memory loss in the matter of Rudd ...

Truly expert analysis and opinion might matter, but the theories of Manne and Pearson are probably only worth a pinch of Python:

Mere lack of evidence, of course, is no reason to denounce a theory. Look at intelligent design. The fact that it is bollocks hasn’t stopped a good many people from believing in it. Darwinism itself is only supported by tons of evidence, which is a clear indication that Darwin didn’t write his books himself. They were most likely written by Jack the Ripper, who was probably King Edward VII, since all evidence concerning this has been destroyed.

Uh huh. Well the pond's theory that Miranda the Devine is actually Christopher Pearson who is actually Piers Akerman will have to wait another day, until we've proven that Tim Blair is actually the pigeon droppings from Andrew Bolt's table ...

Paranoia? Of course not. It’s alternative scholarship. What’s wrong with teaching alternative theories in our schools? What are liberals so afraid of? Can’t children make up their own minds about things like killing and carrying automatic weapons on the playground? Bush was right: no child left unarmed.

Why this dictatorial approach to learning, anyway? What gives teachers the right to say what things are? Who’s to say that flat-earthers are wrong? Or that the Church wasn’t right to silence Galileo, with his absurd theory (actually written by his proctologist) that the earth moves around the sun. Citing “evidence” is so snobbish and élitist. I think we all know what lawyers can do with evidence. Look at Shakespeare. Poor bloke. Wrote thirty-seven plays, none of them his.

Right. Look at Christopher Pearson. Poor bloke. Wrote at least thirty seven columns demanding, mentioning, pleading or praying for the return of former Chairman Rudd, and now none of them are his, because Robert Manne's stolen the idea, and gone overboard with it, and Robert Manne, poor bloke, wrote many many columns and spoke many many words, denouncing former Chairman Rudd's cowardice and now none of them are his ...

It must be the lawyers, it has to be the lawyers. First shoot them all, and all will be well, eh Bill?

(Below: we've run it before, and like as not in these Rick Santorum/Tankard Reist times, we'll run it again).

While Menzies House unveils a petition, the pond unveils plans for an Über weekend ...

2012-01-28T07:46:00.007+11:00

(Above: together in unity and vitality).

Does anybody at all pay attention to Menzies House?

The valiant battlers against their own obscurity have launched a staunch campaign of defiance, demanding people sign a petition to close down the illegal, racist and divisive Tent Embassy. And they've bravely and boldly issued a press release to back up their agitprop action.

And never mind that Tony Abbott doesn't agree with them, or want to go there ...

Why even the average Trot or Maoist would blanch at this fine display of bolshie activism.

Oh those bloody black racists, wherever did they learn their racism from? It seems the tent embassy is a divisive attempt to create two Australias based on people's race ...

Thank the long absent lord no one ever attempted to create two Australias way back when ... and it only began when those pesky blacks set up a tent embassy.

Come to think of it, it's likely enough that the entire unfortunate history of the Aboriginal people in Australia is entirely the fault of Aboriginal people because ... well because they're just so damn divisive, and racist, and inclined to judge people by the colour of their skin.

The pond keeps forgetting the comedy potential of Menzies House, but it was good to see that others visit the site and leave the occasional comment:

I'm all for closing down racist & divisive institutions. Let's start with the Young Liberals and the Australian Libertarian Society.

Meanwhile, there have been other comedy highlights arising from the fracas, most notably Martin Flanagan's incisive analysis: Why we need to find a new date for Australia Day.

Flanagan is anxious that Australia Day is currently conflated with Invasion Day, and the pattern has now been set. Henceforth dissidents, radicals and ne'er do wells will seize the day for ratbaggery, and harmony and peace across the land will disappear:

A situation now exists which extremists on both sides can work to their advantage.

By simply shifting the day, such extremists will be defanged, detoothed, dearmed and disenfranchised.

It will simply never occur to them to use the Australia Day symbolism on a new Australia Day to protest about various issues, and instead everybody will be happy and frolic in the meadows together in bliss, possibly to a tune sung by The Seekers.

There's a new world somewhere

They call The Promised Land

And I'll be there some day

If you will hold my hand

But then there's the problem of deciding on the new day.

Anzac Day simply won't do, though it's absolutely fair to say that Australians have never ever used Anzac Day to mount protests about the uselessness and folly of war, most notably the Vietnam war.

Oops. But hang on, hang on that was in London on April 25th 1968, and was all the fault of lax Pommie security. In Australia no one ever used Anzac Day as an opportunity to protest against war ... did they?

Not to worry, surely there's a day of war when we can all come together to honour war yet again?

My suggestion is January 22. That is commonly regarded as being the date when the Battle for the Kokoda Track - sometimes referred to as the Battle for Australia - ended in 1943. Australia was on the verge of being invaded by a force, the Imperial Japanese Army, with a record of mass human rights violations. The New Guinea campaign involved at least one Aboriginal hero, Captain Reg Saunders.
We must summon an occasion when we were united.

Is that a kind of Anzac Day lite? Will the government issue little koala toys and a bunch of chocolates so we can in unity celebrate the efforts of the chocolate soldier diggers on the Kokoda track?

Will Japanese people in Australia be led into the town square and ritually excoriated for the Japanese army's massive human rights violations? Could it become burn a Mazda day? Compare and contrast with the nuking of Hiroshima and the fire-bombing of Tokyo, in no more than five hundred words ...

Oh dear, the pressure of turning out words and columns, how it shows sometimes.

Never mind, the pond has its very own solution, inspired by the massive amount of sickies that struck across the nation last Friday, and inspired by the 'floating day' way that Easter and the Melbourne Cup work.

Every child in the nation - in training to become a poker machine addict - knows that the nation stops for a horse race the first Tuesday in November.

So why not stop the nation for Australia Day on the very last weekend of January, no matter on which date it falls. And here's the kicker. Each Friday before that weekend will be deemed the Good Dinkum True Blue Get on the Piss Good Friday, and each Monday will be the Day of the Vegemite on Toast reviver. And the Sunday will be deemed You Must Attend a Non-Divise United As One Barbecue, No Matter What the Weather, Day ...

Sorry Martin Flanagan, eat your chocolate soldier heart out, the pond is applying for patents at this very moment ... a four day holiday at the peak of the heat that will stop the nation dead in its tracks.

How can it possibly miss?

Meanwhile, the pond has been brooding about the tent embassy, and by a curious coincidence on the weekend watched Phil Noyce's Backroads, and was reminded how Gary Foley was front and centre once upon a time:

And how attempts to banish the embassy gave its adherents a sense of purpose, and it turns out, longevity.

Well played Menzies House. Now all you need to do is get the police to demolish the tents under a Government ordinance, and that's the last the nation will hear from troublesome racist, divisive, illegal blacks ... and we can all, because things are going so swimmingly well in every way every day for everyone, join together on the pond's Über January weekend ...

Put it in another George Santayana way. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it...

On the utility and futility of satire, and the urgent need for Stewart and Colbert to travel down under ...

2012-01-27T07:01:00.012+11:00

The pond is all in favour of a satirical magazine in the antipodes of the Private Eye kind, as proposed by Richard Ackland in A Private Eye helps the search for truth, though as Private Eye rather pre-emptively pointed out in its 5oth anniversary celebration cover, satire is completely and utterly useless ...

But you have to wonder which planet Ackland has been living on:

Australia is a weird place with lots of amusing possibilities. There is plenty to satirise. Slowly people are beginning to realise that someone like Alan Jones is a brilliant comic having a huge lend of us every morning. If only we could mainstream a sort of local Private Eye, it might ensure that we don't become too dull a lot.

Ye ancient cats and dogs, people are slowly beginning to realise ....??

People have been sending up the pompous prat ever since he was dubbed the parrot, and he's been celebrated for his squawking for what now seems like eternity:

People have been parroting on about the parrot, and the parrot's keeper John "life's a rort" Singleton for years (Does Alan Jones deserve a place in our licensed radio community?), but in terms of hide, Jones is more elephant or rare white rhino than parrot:

Happily Alan Jones is now just an aging parrot with a croaky voice, and his participation in the Convoy of No Confidence to Canberra, and his bizarre claims thereto showed he was out of his depth in the federal scene. (Police baffled by Jones' blockage claims).

Even Tony Abbott begins checking the time when Jones starts speaking:

Yes Tony, it's way past time to enliven Australia Day in your own inimitable, puggish, verbally thuggish and aggressive way.

That gaggle of tents might be an eyesore to the bourgeois mind, always intent on the neat and the tidy, but really, it's outside old parliament house, and only the caretakers, the tourists and the burghers of Canberra noticed it ... until you stepped in and promoted it to the front page, by offering up your very own brand of Telephone, Chinese Whispers or Gossip (How to Play the Repeat Game). On Oorrstralia Day, you bloody beaut ...

Meanwhile, if the pond has its druthers, it would rather see a Jon Stewart or a Stephen Colbert liven up the political scene in Australia.

The coverage of the Republican primaries by the indomitable duo is of a kind and quality that suggests satire might, in some locales, have a visceral, discernible impact on the electorate, at least when it comes to the absurdity of Super PACs.

Instead what we get is a sitcom like At Home with Julia which has as its only claim to fame a feeble sex scene.

Amazingly Tony Abbott confessed to having a good belly laugh, which perhaps explains why humour and satire struggle in the antipodes ...

Colbert and Stewart would have had a field day today, and they possibly would have started with the wild coverage of yesterday's events, with the Daily Terror leading the way:

Say what? Bodyguard ready to take bullet for Julia? What bullet, where?

It seems Paul Whittaker might be safe at the Terror, which surely must be the most depressing story to emerge this Australia Day season, not the rampaging mob ...

Naturally the Bolter was there to savage the mob, in his usual pompous, overblown, over the top, hysterical, alarmist way.

There's never any shame for the day of shamers.

Ah yes it's payback time black people. Which is why you can find Piers 'Akker Dakker' Akerman brooding yet again about the Orwellian ways of the world in Second-class meddling is selfish, deceitful, and the dreadful, shocking treatment of the Bolter along with the dreadful shocking treatment of the language:

... the Orwellian newspeak of the politically correct "indigenous" does not mean born in Australia. It means Aborigine as in Australian Aborigine, a definition that is also becoming increasingly fluid.

Indeed. No doubt Akker Dakker yearns for the days when Aborigines were defined as part of the fauna, and so could be classified as truly indigenous:

indigenous - originating where it is found; "the autochthonal fauna of Australia includes the kangaroo"; "autochthonous rocks and people and folktales"; "endemic folkways"; "the Ainu are indigenous to the northernmost islands of Japan" ...

And the Veddoid Australoids are indigenous to Australia ...

Meanwhile, the HUN took a surprisingly sotto voce whimsical approach to the clash:

But if you've got the Bolter in full indignant apocalyptic war cry, you can afford a little perspective and slipper sinking in the news section.

UPDATE: well the slipper whimsy didn't last long, as the HUN provided an update full of shock and horror.
Yes, it's one thing to make fun of princess Gillard and her slipper, but quite another thing when valiant indigenous leaders jump to the defence of Tony Abbott.

Now who's going to explain to Akker Dakker that the Herald Sun is in the grip of Orwellian indigenous language? Oh you Murdochian big brother fiends, not you too. It's a Herculean task for Akker Dakker to clean out his very own Augean stables ...

So there you go Ackland. Wrong magazine, wrong request.

What we need is a Jon Stewart doing over the latest grandiosity from the grandiose Gingrinch, like his discovery that there's a war against religion even fiercer than his war on marriage. (here). And what we need is someone to dismantle Hulu so the pond can embed a clip of Stewart in full flight.

And what we need is Colbert doing over Rick Santorum, even if it doesn't mention Santorum saying that rape victims should accept their babies as gifts from God.

Say what? Rapists are acting on God's orders, and seeding babies like Santa coming down the chimney?

... I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created -- in the sense of rape -- but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. (here)

So there you have it. God works his magic through rapists ...

No wonder Santorum is the gift that keeps on giving to US comedians, and would that we had comedians that could do the same for the Abbotts and the Gillards here, instead of having to rely on Anthony Albanese ripping off a speech from The American President.

Is there a speech in an American movie about the urgent need for a second airport in Sydney? Bet Albo doesn't rip that one off ...

Take it away Colbert, embedded from another source - damn you Hulu, damn you to hell - but ain't it grand to spoof Comedy Central and score a direct hit to the veins in the eyeball from the dynamic duo.

Not that satire would make a jot or whit of difference to Tony Abbott ...

Australia Day, and the pond is standing in it ...

2012-01-26T07:14:00.009+11:00

(Above: putting money into the answer on being Aboriginal in the lucky country).

It wouldn't be an Australia Day without someone in the commentariat being offensive about something.

Come on down Paul Sheehan and jump from the matter of magistrate Pat O'Shane to a wider commentary about being aboriginal and black in Australia, and running out the oldest meme about how being black is a sure way to cash in the paw:

When it comes to indigenous issues, our legal and political system has monetised race. It has racialised the law. In doing so, it has created a problem about identity: who is an Aborigine? There is money involved in the answer.

Oh yes, they've monetised race all right, so there's only one answer to the question of whether you'd experience all the cash and advantages of being black in Australia ... or experience the joys and satisfaction of being a pompous, preening member of the commentariat. Go on, name one Aboriginal person in the mainstream media given a perch to squawk on a weekly basis to the masses about the way things should be, as Sheehan does so predictably and pathetically in For the sake of her Honour and ours, no more double standard.

No wonder the Herald didn't throw it open for comments, speaking of double standards as we are ...

Moving right along, it wouldn't be Australia Day without some literary or cultural critic coming up with a bunch of twaddle. Come on down Peter Craven, and hit us with your best insights on why cultural nationalism is a good thing (forced video at other end of link):

It's all good (and has particular poignancy for us) because as Australians, we so often feel lost in a vast world that we think of as somewhere else. That's the paradox that makes us sceptical about Australia Day, and it's a reaction born of defensiveness. In fact every day is Australia Day in Australia.

Dear sweet absent lord, say it ain't so. China is a vast world somewhere else, and every day in Australia is a day in Australia ...

It's true, of course, that we always feel we have to ask the question, ''How Australian is it?'' before we do anything else. We can never, like our New Zealand neighbours, just decide that now we'll make a film of Lord of the Rings.

Yes, that's exactly the sort of question people asked before throwing taxpayer money at dancing penguins in Antarctica. Are they dancing in Australian Antarctica, and how soon before Australia owns all of Antarctica? As for Mission Impossible 11, I remember a heated debate with a fellow film buff as to whether Tom Cruise should be given honorary Australian status even though he's a scientologist for all that he'd done for Australian film culture ...

When it comes to runaway productions, we can never just decide to make another gormless, useless Alex Proyas science fiction film, without asking why Alex Proyas doesn't happen to be Peter Jackson.

Meanwhile, it wouldn't be an Australia Day without someone being silly. Come on down Michael Koziol and deliver us A land of tough talk and thin skins. Koziol sees thin skins everywhere in the response to Dr. Charlie Teo's Australia Day speech, and in Melinda Tankard Reist going feral about Jennifer Wilson, while at the same time thinking the twitterati had performed an over-zealous witch hunt on Tankard Reist, before turning his attention to Kyle Sandilands and demands for his demise:

There has long been an elitist witch-hunt against Sandilands, which has taken on a competitive nature among those vying to be the final scalp-taker.

Bugger me dead, the tabloid Daily Terror and The Punch, gutter crawling trash from the outer rings of Murdochian hell are elitists? Go on, type in the tag for Kyle Sandilands at The Punch, and see what an elitist witch hunt you get ...

For the absent god's sake, will someone give the inner urban inner west chardonnay sipping elitists a break. Are we responsible for every crime against humanity and Kyle Sandilands?

Speaking of The Punch, it wouldn't be Australia Day without a completely gormless quiz to identify the Australian-ness of quiz takers (How Australian are you? Take our test ...), including this gem:

Q. Who sang in a pub with no beer?

There are, of course, at a minimum, in terms of hits, two answers, and so today the pond celebrates the epic effort of Bobbejaan Schoepen. Well done, dinky di true blue ocker Bobbejaan ...

Meanwhile, it wouldn't be The Punch without a column brooding about racism on Australia Day, decrying how Australia Day is used to brood about racism. Come on down Dai Le with Change the topic, Australia Day is not about racism.

Actually Australia Day can be about anything you like Dai Le, and you can make it a black-bashing day in the style of Paul Sheehan if you like.

What have you got, the punters are standing by, ready to have a bash at it, including Indian cricketers ...

Poor Dai Le dances around on the head of a pin as a way of avoiding the naughty "R" word:

What we do have in Australia, from time to time, is what I would call, the “tension, the drama of the human condition.” It’s a reaction to the arrival of a group of people, especially those coming here on refugee resettlement, or those who have sought asylum. And the emotions, the feelings among the general population tend to be more intense particularly in times of economic difficulties.

Oh bugger me dead, the pond grew up in a perfectly respectable racist environment. Sure we appreciated the Chinese folk in the restaurant across the road giving the white trash 'luck' soup, but we also knew we were superior. Just as we knew we had the edge on wogs ...

No big deal. Stroll across the road to China and especially Japan, and you'll get the same attitude in spades ... yes old woman who wouldn't let us into the temple because we were filthy alien despoiling gaijin, I still remember you fondly. You could have made a fine guardian of a temple in Tamworth ...

There's no need for half-baked equivocation in regard to the naughty "R" word, though there are degrees of conviction when it comes to actual racism, where prejudice often collapses when the generalised prejudice meets the individual, who turns out to be human after all. There's no need for this sort of nonsense:

The automatic human reaction to a perceived “threatened” situation is to “attack” and protect common territory. It is too simplistic to just react and call someone a racist. And I am personally offended that my country is described as a “racist” country. But we have our fair share of people who are ill-informed, uneducated, insensitive, and unsophisticated.

Yes, and racist to boot, and no benefit to sweep it under the rug in a wave of verbal evasiveness. But naturally Dai Li got the comments she was looking for:

Of course Australia is not racist. The claims of racism come from minority groups and the PC media who can’t live with their own life guilt.

Yes, and don't forget the elites. Whenever there's a problem, whenever there's smoke there's fire, so don't forget the that it's the 'leets what done it ...

So what is Australia Day for? Well there's always a chance to catch up on a little back reading, and so inspired by Bernard Keane, with Misogynist abuse online and playing the victim, we headed off to catch up on Miranda the Devine, and Travails of a pro-life feminist.

First up, you're greeted by this splendid pic:

And then you cop the Devine's seemly contribution to polite rational debate: miserable orcs, 'driven offline' by vitriol, nemesis, abuse, internet haters, twitter hate exploded, Christophobes, spite, sanctimony, anti-Christian malice, 21st century McCarthyism, the purging of Christians and abortion enthusiasts.

The funniest thing? McCarthy of course was a Christian conservative. And who on earth would be an abortion enthusiast? On the other hand, if you ever experienced an abortion in the family back in the days of the McCarthyist fifties, who on earth would put up their hands and be enthusiasts for backyard abortions? Who would be enthusiasts for women bearing a child even if the pregnancy was the result of a rape? Well you can find some Christian conservatives who would ...

It's always funny how Catholics like the Devine recognise that fundamentalist conservative Islam is an issue (oh yes, they're at work in Egypt), while mouthing the same sort of anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-porn, anti-right to have an abortion rhetoric on the domestic scene, and never capable of acknowledging that it's liberal secular values that make the difference ...

Not to worry, it seems that the Devine has been on quite a rabid roll, what with her scintillating endorsement of David Evans on the matter of climate science (Open and shut - the climate skeptic's case). Dammit, there it is again, skeptic, archaic and Unites States only please ... If you want some balance, David Evans features heavily at Skeptical Science (and here too). Dammit, there's that word again ...

And what about the Devine's proposal that monster trucks should only be driven at night when fewer cars are on the road. By golly, that should cull monster trucks. Now if only we can make bicyclists only ride at night, and in best socialist communist style, hire more flesh and blood highway patrol officers to make it happen, why all will be well on the roads. The trucks that ate Paris and cyclists ...

Then there's the Devine on the joys of flag-waving, and suddenly the true meaning of Australia Day occurred to the pond. It's doing over the Lebs:

Forget Clover Moore as the Grinch of Sydney's Christmas. The "Lions of Lebanon" with their Glock pistols and Molotov cocktails have put her to shame this holy season. While the NSW police lock down entire beachfront suburbs, instruct stores to stop selling baseball bats, and apply the full force of the law to pasty-faced nerds with a taste for Nazi literature, they continue to cower from the real hardmen, the Lebanese-Australian criminal gangs of Sydney's south-west who have ruled the roost in this city for at least a decade and now number in their thousands. (Gangster's hold on Sydney is safe).

Second thoughts, no, it's not reading yet more vicious ad hominem attacks from a scribbler who routinely decries vicious ad hominem attacks on Christians.

Hell is reading the commentariat and having a memory, and hell, it's time to head off to a barbecue ... yep, Australia, you're standing in it ...

(Below: more cartoons on the battle for Cronulla here).

And now the further doings of POTUS, Bronwyn Bishop, the world of Rosewarne and the world of chairman Rupert ...

2012-01-25T07:04:00.006+11:00

Typically it was POTUS (that's OPTUS to you know nothing anti-Murdochians) who set the tone for the week with this message last night.

While the news about cyberlockers has fallen off the front pages, the fall-out from the Megaupload affair has been a virtual massacre of sites (Cyberlocker Ecosystem Shocked As Big Players Take Drastic Action).

The funniest thing? All this happened without the help of SOPA or other draconian legislation. Turns out that the authorities had ways of tackling the issue all along ...

Of course there's already been some kicking back (Anonyupload: faceless group steps in after Kim Dotcom's arrest) but the point is, there are already plenty of laws available in relation to breaches of intellectual property rights, and contrary to talk of the intertubes being the wild west, what users get up to is easily trackable. And if you get to a certain size, you become noticeable ... and steps can be taken.

Somedays the pond feels like making wildly defamatory statements about certain politicians to prove the point, but then again, even a minnow can cop a Meryl Tankard Reist, so maybe not ...

Meanwhile, what else is new in the world of the digerati? Well yesterday they had the splendid chance to see Bronwyn "Kerosene bath" Bishop shedding crocodile tears and maintaining the rage in Labor's mean-spirited attack on our most vulnerable.

Now think what you will of the proposal to remove high income earners of the 30 per cent rebate in relation to private health insurance - parliament has already rejected it twice, so it will be a tough sell third time around - but the proposal relates to ending the right to claim for individuals earning more than $80,000 a year and families earning more than $160,000 a year (New push to means test the private health rebate).

In relation to these figures, Bishop manages to produce some splendid statistical gobbledegook:

Peter Slipper had good reason to vote down this mean-spirited means test because 58 per cent of his voters are over 50 years old, 32,000 of those being over 60 years. 70 per cent of his electorate earn less than $50,000.

Oh the beauty of data. But wait there's more, a further frumious, furious, flurry of floozy figures:

The Government’s own figures show that of the 10.3 million people with private health insurance, more than half live in households with incomes of less than $50,000 a year and of these 3.4 million live in households with incomes of less than $35,000 a year.
These people will bear the worst of the pain.

And how will that happen? Seeing as these figures have actually nothing to do with the means test target?

Well there'll be a demise of regional private hospitals and the disappearance of visiting specialists, and the whole private system will collapse and we'll all be rooned.

And then the wild and woolly rhetoric disappears into the world of the north shore and shrieking privilege:

The private health insurance rebate is a moral issue. The Medicare system is a universal system. It only works because the private health system is an integral part of it and must also remain universal and therefore means test free.

The rebate was a policy introduced by the Howard Government to rebuild private health insurance participation after it was decimated by the Hawke and Keating Governments.

A moral issue! Would Bronwyn Bishop know a moral issue if it bit her on the Riverside nursing home bum?

Well can anyone punching on at the punch-drunk Punch out punch Bronnie?

Sure can. Come on down Lauren Rosewarne scribbling Sex scandals should not render a leader impotent.

Bizarrely she tries to give Newt Gingrinch a 'get out of jail' card in relation to his behaviour:

I’m not advocating Newt’s behaviour. Quite clearly he’s a scumbag.

Uh huh. He's a scumbag, but on the principle that everyone should be able to have their cake and eat it too, his scumbaggery should be completely ignored:

My position however, is that provided he is not committing any crimes, his personal life is entirely his own. Instead, I am suggesting that the obsession with moral character needs to be put on the backburner. That arbitrarily plucking a single personal indiscretion out and expecting it to function as a predictor of performance in office is insanity and that doing so has resulted in some very good politicians being ousted.

Well it's a noble ideal, and to break Godwin's law just briefly, it would have worked a treat for Adolf Hitler, who was inclined to vegetarianism, and a relatively discreet private life, mixing marriage (to set things right) and suicide (to set things right).

If only Newt himself had lived up to Ms. Rosewarne's lofty ideals, no doubt all would be well in the United States. But readers only had to reach the second comment to see Rosewarne's bit of trolling laid to rest:

The problem is these people run on themes of family values and moral judgement against others. These two things underpin their entire political outlook. If they can’t abide by the foundation of their political philosophy, it is correct to question their ability to lead.

Indeed. Glass houses and all that. Now hop into your time machine Ms. Rosewarne and go back in time to suggest to Newt that maybe, just maybe, leading the charge to impeach Bill Clinton over an intern blow job, while fucking around on the side, was a tad problematic for a politician wanting to live in a Rosewarney world.

Of course Gingrinch dressed up his Clinton campaign as protecting the sanctity of depositions, with never a no mind for the sanctity of depositions to partners, along the lines of "oh no honey, of course I'm not fucking around". (Gingrich impeached Clinton to preserve sanctity of depositions).

There's plenty of fun at Wonkette about Newt, about him getting non-wife blowjobs during Bill Clinton's blowjob hearings (here), and how Newt Gingrinch committed adultery because American made him horny, and how in another place his infidelities helped him to understand how to impeach Clinton.

Of all the candidates to try to get off the hook in relation to personal lives ...

Of course private lives should be private lives, but when you run around celebrating traditional marriage while fucking around like a rabbit in untraditional ways, even blind Freddy (no disrespect to the blind or Freddy intended) might realise that questions will be raised ...

Take it away Doonesbury and click to enlarge:

And finally, since the pond asked the question of what was happening with The Australian, at last some news from the Murdoch front line in Whittaker in the firing line at News Limited.

Oh it's juicy, and it's not just the Daily Terror and the wretched Whittaker likely to see changes, it seems that the HUN still intends to roll out a subscriber paywall in March.

Bring it on. Oh frabjous day, callooh callay, the pond chortled in its joy.

Could this mean that Andrew Bolt is a Dickhead awareness week will now have to be re-titled Andrew Bolt is a dickhead locked behind a paywall awareness week?

Probably not, but hope, how it springs eternal ...

And now a reminder of your June awareness duties, provided you don't have to breach a paywall to pay your respects ... take it away First Dog ...

Gerard Henderson, and all the debates we don't need to have because a silent Gerard Henderson is golden ...

2012-01-24T07:23:00.005+11:00

(Above: today's piece is so dull we offer up this image as a visual metaphor for the need for a little risk-taking, or a good distorting lens, or a little Photoshop, found at Kevin Garrison the CEO of the Cockpit).

There's nothing like dipping into the past to be reminded of splendid historical insights.

What a pity the world is now spared Gerard Henderson's insights into the Xmas office party as first unveiled in The Australian in December 1987 under the header Our Passion For Party-Going Is Such A Brainless Pursuit.

Yep, he was a desiccated prudish coconut of a conservative way back when. No doubt it was intended to be whimsical, in the same way that being smacked about the head by a dead fish is Monty Python whimsical.

Henderson is so conservative in fact that in Australia's Aborigines And The Rights That Went Wrong, he scribbled these immortal words:

Those Aborigines who worked on cattle stations were paid a minimum wage which was significantly below the award wage for whites. But station owners were required by government decree to supply food and shelter for Aboriginal employees and their families.

This was not utopia but the system worked well enough.

Sadly you have to chance on a fifty cent copy of Gerard Henderson Scribbles On (and On and On and On and On) in an op shop to discover such gems, bon mots and insights.

Yep, it was way better for blacks to keep on working for bugger all in a feudal system, than fall prey to the variation in the cattle station industry (Northern Territory) award of 1951, which thanks to the Sir Richard Kirby archives you can find here in pdf form or here at Fair Work Australia (and while there considering such weighty matters, why not drop in on Mrs Beeton's cookbook - All About Cookery).

Of course if you look at it another way, the discrimination and the abuse led to one of the most seminal moments in twentieth century Aboriginal history with the Wave Hill walk-off and the activism of the Gurindji people (and these days the National Archive seems intent on revealing online a little more of the data it holds on such matters).

Hang on, the pond is getting as dry as sawdust or Mr. Henderson, when after all, what's wrong with a little feudalism in the north. Sure feudalism isn't utopia, and it might be a tad difficult for the serfs, but it worked really well for Vestey. (Labour relations on northern cattle stations in pdf form)

Never mind, a little background of this kind is handy if you've been forced to contemplate today's offering from our prattling Prufrock, which is titled No vote at all is better than a win for the No.

It's a long and tedious summary of Australian referendum history and the difficulty in achieving any changes to the text, and the need for opposition and government to agree in trying to persuade the punters to vote for any referendum, and the likelihood that the current proposals for recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution might well fall foul of Dr. No, assuming that Tony Abbott decides that a win for No is yet another win for his brand of nattering negativity.

It leads to one of the most arcane arguments by Henderson for doing nothing that's ever graced an opening par:

It is always a good time to remove racially discriminatory provisions from the constitution. Except when such a sensible act might be defeated at a referendum for failing to obtain an overall majority and a majority of votes in a majority of states and there are unintended consequences.

So if it's likely to be No, then do nothing, have no discussion, have no debate, waiter bring me a closet, I feel the need to hide.

Funnily enough the pond had just been reading about how Ezra Pound's daughter takes on right-wing movement over name, and stumbled across this Poundian quote:

If a man is not prepared to give his life for an ideal, either the man is worth nothing, or the ideal.

Oh well, Pound was a right wing ratbag of the worst Hitler/Mussolini Admiration Society kind, and thank the absent lord he didn't mention anything about women being prepared to give their lives for an ideal, but do we have to follow our prattling Polonius down the path of doing and saying absolutely nothing for fear that a No vote might erupt?

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair -
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin -
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Indeed. Which gets us to this line of argument:

In his decision in Eatock v Bolt last year, Federal Court Justice Mordy Bromberg felt the need to address Aboriginal identity when discussing a group he referred to as ''fair-skinned Aboriginal people''. Justice Bromberg accepted that the term Aboriginal Australian applied to ''a person of mixed heritage but with some Aboriginal descent, who identifies as an Aboriginal person and has communal recognition as such''. However, he did not rule out the possibility ''that a person with less than the three attributes of the three-part test should not be recognised as an Aboriginal person''. This is the kind of debate that Australia does not need right now.

This is the kind of debate Australia doesn't need right now? Will it ever need it? Will there ever be a right time? Can Andrew Bolt just type what he likes, without debate?

Why that's the worst sort of attitude, the kind you'd expect from inner city urban elites, and their sanctimonious cluck clucking and tut tutting. Hush now children, the last thing we need is a debate about anything, even if Andrew Bolt initiated the debate, and so children bring me a broom and a carpet for thereto sweeping under so sweet silence can litter the land ...

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

Well actually it's always worthwhile presuming, as it was in the matter of fair treatment of aboriginal stockmen, and as it is in the discussion of the current constitutional amendment proposals.

Already some Aborigines, whose priorities do not focus on constitutional change, are being criticised for not going along with the panel's proposals. For example, on the ABC TV program The Drum last Thursday, leftist activist Antony Loewenstein attacked Warren Mundine as a ''Murdoch pet who hates everything about mainstream society''. This is mere abuse posing as analysis.

Uh huh, but it's good to see Antony Loewenstein calling Mundine a Murdoch pet because it's better to have mere abuse posing as analysis, than Henderson's mere hand-wringing, do-nothing impotence posing as analysis.

Not least because it seriously undercuts Loewenstein's credibility, and because it draws attention to Mundine's legitimate concerns - even if he did make his points to The Australian, and eek, here's a link to Warren Mundine to fight new race power in Constitution.

Yep it's a Patrick Dodson v. Warren Mundine smackdown, and the pond intends to stand well clear.

And while we're at it, it's a pity there's not some more hearty 'abuse posing as analysis' debate in relation to the Northern Territory intervention, and the effectiveness of said intervention.

Somehow it seems change will come about if everyone gets about on tiptoe, and is relatively silent and all will be well, or at least so Henderson thinks:

This sort of line of attack against critics, or any allegations labelling Australians as racist if the proposal is rejected for being too complex, would be counter-productive. The 1967 referendum on Aborigines worked because the political timing was correct, the proposal was straightforward and the extremes of left and right were relatively silent.

But hang on, Mundine can give as good as he gets, and maybe it's not a simple-minded matter of left and right, and maybe it's up to the proponents of the case for change to convince the punters that they have a modest set of workable proposals which won't deliver unintended consequences - of the kind Henderson moaned about in relation to aboriginal stockmen way back when, even if there were changes to the working practices of the industry that would have resulted in similar changes to the feudal employment of aborigines then fashionable amongst station owners, with or without the change to the award.

Change and debate, debate and change. Isn't that always the way?

By this kind of logic of the power of silence, Henderson should at once fall silent, and stop publishing his carping columns full of caveats and distortions.

Or at least relatively silent ... perhaps a column once a year at Christmas time reminding the world how hideous Xmas office parties are, and how drunk Australians get and what a terrible time Xmas is.

Or is that too the kind of debate that Australia doesn't need right now ...

And now, with another apology for suffering through yet another column by our prattling Polonius, with the pond proposing that debate on everything and anything might be needful and useful - even a debate about why Gerard Henderson exists - how about a debate on the Australian film industry, which managed to score a mere 3.9% of the box office in 2011? (here)

The next time you see an advertisement proposing that piracy is destroying the local industry, laugh in its face.

The industry is already destroyed, the American combine dominant and rampant, its tawdry and pathetic lies given free reign, its imperialistic twaddle routinely peddled to the punters.

It turns out that one feel good doggie show, Red Dog, with a box office take over the 20 mill mark, did almost fifty per cent of the unboffo Oz box office biz, and the other 43 films - count 'em, 43 - did the other fifty per cent of the business. On average that's like 500k or so a show, but actually it's just a few shows doing okay business, and the rest far away and out of sight ... (yes Griff the Invisible, we're talking about you, the invisible).

Screen Australia is an abysmal failure, but lordy, do they do a pretty graph or what:

Here's the pond's idea of a graph in relation to the film industry - click on to enlarge:

Ah well it's funnier than reading Gerard Henderson.

A flurry of Monday thought bubbles about Newt, Eurogeddon and localgeddon Craig Thomson ...

2012-01-23T07:10:00.009+11:00

Another Monday, another Paul Sheehan thought bubble ...

Would there have been any chance for the header to have been given the gloss of accuracy?

US Republican voters in South Carolina, a conservative state riddled with Tea Partiers and 'anyone except Romney' conservatives reject the politics of past love ... as Gringrinch scores 243,153 votes against 167,279 for Mitt Romney in a country with a population of well over three hundred million (here for the figures).

Well possibly that's a bit too clunky for a thought bubble header - simple and wrong is always better - but if you want more of Paul Sheehan brooding about the ways of a woman scorned, you can toddle off to US voters reject the politics of past love. But remember, never ask why you don't like Mondays or you might end up sounding like Bob Geldof.

The pond much preferred Doonesbury's re-opening of the Museum of Newtisms (and more Doonesbury here):

The funniest thing is to hear Republican voters talk of getting back to traditional values, which presumably means the rip snorting, fornicating, hypocritical ways of Newt, because as Newt says himself, he has flaws, and what you see is what you get. A serial adulterer, and in the matter of Clinton, a remarkable hypocrite ...

You have to hand it to American politics, it's vastly more entertaining than a Paul Sheehan column ... though it is remarkable to see Sheehan dance around the grandiose grandiosities of Gingrinch ... so that he can land all his blows on the hapless second wife ...

Meanwhile, on the weekend, Mike Carlton struck a blow which resonated at the pond, when - in A field so scary that you can't turn away - he took note of the activities of one Chris Richardson, of Deloitte Access Economics:

On Thursday, the omnipresent Chris Richardson, of Deloitte Access Economics, was warning that Australia should brace for the "ugliest" of times if Europe can't sort out its financial woes.
"A GFC Mark II," he suggested.
Ho hum. Been there, done that. Two years ago, Richardson told us the federal budget was "buggered", that the economy would "unwind scarily fast" and that a recession was inevitable. Oh, and unemployment would hit 7 per cent last year.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. Let the good times roll.

Well the good times might or might not roll, but this morning the pond woke up to the sounds of Fran Kelly blathering on about the financial markets worldwide with finance reporter Sheryle Bagwell, producing a saturated with sound bite set of cliches which seemed to indicate that ...

... we're all doomed, we're all saved, Greece will fall over, Greece might not default, Australia might be doomed, or Australia might experience good growth through the year, China might have a bumpy landing, or it might have a managed landing, France and Spain and Italy might struggle through and raise the necessary funds, or they might crash and burn, and the stock market might be suffused with optimism in January but might well be suffused with pessimism in February, and whatever happens you need nerves of steel to invest in the share market or listen to her and Fran Kelly on RN (Monday finance with Sheryle Bagwell).

And so on and on. By golly, the dial shifted more quickly than you could say 'finance reporting' and hit the remote. Happily RN and Fran Kelly are now banished from the playlist. There must be better ways to wake up on a Monday ...

Meanwhile, Chris Richardson, as immortalised by Carlton, has been at it again, having a bet both ways.

Here's how you do it. Coin a neat word, then add a question mark:

The consultancy's latest business outlook, dubbed "Eurogeddon?", released on Monday says there are two main scenarios for 2012.

Oh what a clever portmanteau, Europe and Armageddon all in one. And don't forget the question mark, and the each way bet. On the one hand:

"Its (Europe's) mismanaged crisis means the euro could falter and that banks could go bust, sending shockwaves around the world," it said.

On the other hand:

"Yet it is still marginally more likely that the Eurozone muddles through this crisis, with sticky tape holding the euro together and ECB (European Central Bank) funding to banks helping to keep the market wolf from the sovereign debt door." (here)

It takes blather about finance and the markets to a new Gingrinchian level of grandiosity, but it means Mike Carlton might have trouble pinging Richardson in the future, because on the one hand he might be right, and on the other hand he might be right, unless of course on the one hand he's wrong, and on the other hand he's wrong.

Meanwhile, the outlook for Australia? Well it turns out what's most likely - as outlined in a report on the report at Bloomberg - that GDP will be up 3.6%, compared to an estimated 2% last year, inflation might also bounce up a little from 1.8% to 2.5%, and there's a good chance the Reserve Bank will lower borrowing costs by a quarter percentage point on February 7th, not that this will necessarily trouble the now recalcitrant big four ...

Eurogeddon? Let the bad times roll ...

Of course this overlooks whether Newt Gingrinch wins the nomination for the Republican party, Israel bombs Iran, Gillard loses the numbers after repeated displays of hypocrisy, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster lands in Sydney Harbour ...

Speaking of Gillard, it goes from bad to worse, what with grandiose Craig Thomson offering up an opinion piece to the Daily Terror today, under the header A potholed pokies path.

Do Thomson, Gillard and the Labor party imagine he's somehow rehabilitated, or that he presents better than the patent sincerity of Andrew Wilkie?

It was about this point in the Thomson piece that the pond spat cornflakes all over the kitchen table:

It is something that I and many NSW Labor MPs have been calling for - a comprehensive trial so that ultimately any legislation that comes before parliament is backed by scientific research.

NSW Labor? Scientific research?

Does he mean a slapdash humbug doomed to fail effort in Canberra will pass scrutiny as scientific research?

Oh wash out your mouth with Access Economics approved blather.

Hang on, hang on, Thomson does it again a little further on ...

The result this week is a big win for NSW Labor MPs who have argued this position strongly for the past year and a win for good evidence-based policy decision making.

NSW Labor MPs win for evidence-based policy decision making? As opposed to sucking up to Clubs Australia, Coles and Woolies, in mortal fear of losing their seats like their state ne'er do well comrades did recently?

Surely this must be a better approach than taking a "punt" to find the right solution to what is a very important but difficult area of public policy.

Put it another way. Big clubs, Woolies and Coles one, problem gamblers nil, and you can call that a big win for NSW Labor MPS ...

If NSW Labor go on winning like this, who knows, before the year is out Tony Abbott might be the new Barry O'Farrell ...

Who could imagine that anyone could make Tony Abbott seem like a viable alternative?

Trust NSW Labor ... drum roll please Rolf ... sure can.

Then again who could imagine anyone taking Newt Gingrinch seriously, apart from Newt and Paul Sheehan?

Take it away Doonesbury, see us out this sad and sorry Monday ... and as usual click to enlarge, or head off to Doonesbury here. It always helps to laugh as you cry, as you make your way through lashings of verbal spakfilla ...

In which Barney Zwartz explains the dangers of Muslim hardliners, possibly Iranian militants, and how this relates to a case of murder ...

2012-01-22T15:52:00.012+11:00

(Above: Barney Zwartz and the photo used for his blog, the Religious Write, which also might cover moments when the Religious Write wrong).

Here's Barney Zwartz explaining on January 11th this year a possible cause of the murder of a woman in Fears held for Christian convert:

The husband and friends of an Iranian woman missing from Dandenong for almost a month fear she has been abducted by Muslim hardliners because of her attempts to convert Muslims to Christianity.

Here's Barney in the same story explaining Islam:

Islam, strictly interpreted, mandates death for adults who leave the religion, and there are many cases of Iranian converts being killed, both in Iran and in Europe.

The same penalty may be applied to those who seek to persuade Muslims to leave their religion. While there are accounts of Muslims who converted being beaten in Australia, The Age is not aware of any claims of killings.

Here's Barney in the very same story quoting an informed source in relation to the matter:

Pastor Danny Nalliah, of Catch the Fire Ministries, yesterday sent an email to his mailing list calling for "urgent prayer" for Mrs Ahmadi and her family. He said he had known the family for eight years and they took a leading role in helping Muslim asylum seekers find accommodation, jobs and household appliances.

"Through their love for these people some Muslims accepted Jesus," Mr Nalliah said.

Here's Barney sticking in a quick caveat in the same story:

He and Catch the Fire were the subject of a complaint that they vilified Muslims in a 2002 seminar on jihad, upheld by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal but reversed by the Supreme Court.

Here's Barney back on the case and the chase with Pastor Danny:

Yesterday, he told The Age Mrs Ahmadi "really stuck her neck out" in trying to convert Muslims and that her husband was sometimes very worried for her. He said he was not suggesting asylum seekers had abducted her, but that her zeal had come to the attention of militants, possibly in Iran itself.

Here's the police allowing Barney the luxury of idle, unproven speculation:

An Oakleigh police officer confirmed police were investigating her disappearance but gave no details.

He said the police were following several lines of inquiry, and confirmed that one possibility was abduction by Islamic militants. "We are treating it as a missing person inquiry but are investigating other possibilities," the officer said.

Here's the Victorian police changing their tune later on Sky News, in a story Abduction fears for missing woman:

The disappearance of a 46-year-old mother has stirred up claims of Islamic extremists targeting Christians in Melbourne, claims which have disappointed Muslims.

Police have rejected suggestions that Zahara Rahimzadegan, also known as Mandy Ahmadi, could have been taken by religious hardliners as retribution for her role in converting Muslims to Christianity.

But the accusations have continued from her support base, especially Catch the Fire Ministries.

Egged on by The Age?

Here's Barney offering the husband of the murdered woman plenty of space for an alibi:

Mr Ahmadi said he dropped his wife off at home in the early afternoon of December 16 after a "pamper morning" at Cornerstone for refugees, then went to the supermarket with his eldest son...
After school he took his youngest son to Chadstone shopping centre to pick up presents they had put on layby. He called Mrs Ahmadi and left messages several times.
On Sunday, December 18, he confided his fears to leaders at his church, CityLife, who said that because she had been missing 48 hours he should go to the police ...

Here's The Age reporting the actual outcome of the murder investigation in Husband charged as body found under backyard slab:

Senior Sergeant Iddles said a body believed to be Mrs Ahmadi's was found under a slab of concrete in their backyard yesterday after police questioned Mr Ahmadi...

...Senior Sergeant Iddles said that Ahmadi had made full admissions to the murder.

Here's the pond acknowledging that it belatedly caught up this story during an idle moment's browsing on the tubes, and catching a website documenting anti-Muslim bigotry in Australia: Australian newspaper blamed disappearance of murdered woman on 'Muslim hardliners.'

And now here's the pond - while acknowledging a hearty disinterest in both the Islamic and Christian religions - wondering at the same time how The Age can consider itself a quality broadsheet (in that peculiarly old-fashioned and soon to be lost forever way of matching quality to format)?

And wondering whether anybody else thinks that, for a bit of reporting on a most unhappy murder - surely the place to show dispassionate objectivity and some care for the facts of the matter - Mr. Zwartz's initial report is a fine example of subjective fear-mongering, including but not limited to astonishingly irrelevant red herrings, mindlessly irrelevant assertions about Iran and Islam, and the mindless quoting of suspect sources who turned out to be profoundly wrong?

Yep, it's another piece of reporting from the very same journalist who wrote another story several years ago which won praise from Pastor Danny Nalliah:

We were just absolutely amazed to read such an accurate report by the journalist Barney Zwartz. It seemed like reading the CTFM newsletter. (and you can get links and read about the CTFM connection here)

It was a story about a woman being raised from the dead, and here's how Mr. Zwartz began it:

The rest here, if you can be bothered.

It's the sort of story you'd expect to find in a provincial rag like Geraldton Guardian or if it was still doing the rounds the Melbourne Truth, back when Tim Blair worked for the rag.

Here's the Guardian getting excited about the story:

Yep, you simply can't keep a good religious correspondent down.

Where would we be without miracle cures, people risen from the dead, and Muslim hardliners, especially Islamic militants and dangerous Iranians with a taste for abducting people from Dandenong?

But what if you only saw Mr. Zwartz's first epic egg-beating effort, and never caught up with the reality check that followed?

And now to a media Sunday ...

2012-01-22T06:34:00.008+11:00

It's a fire-sharing website?

Lordy lordy, the intertubes are ablaze, and people are sharing fire like the a bunch of extras in a Stanley Kubrick movie? Or perhaps as they did during the time of the great primordial sludge before the flint was discovered? No wonder they shut it down ... (and thanks SMH and Websites attacked amid piracy row, where would the intertubes be without typos?)

Meanwhile, a time of crisis looms for the faithful. You see The Australian's paywall cranked up back on October 24th with an offer of a three month free trial, and as fate would have it, that three month period ends in just a couple of days ... unless it's a kind of rolling free trial, and punters who signed up today might still be able to access a sample period of 28 days ...

That rolling free plan would be a nice way to obscure the take-up rate, but surely the first round of leeches and ne'er do wells must be reaching their use-by date, and will soon be asked to either dip on their pocket or depart. Oh the agony, oh the lack of ecstasy.

Here's just a few stories these philistines with redbacks in the wallet or purse will soon lose access to:

Oh that must whet the appetite, increase the desire to battle the redback. How about a little Catholicism with your breakfast?

Want a straw man argument with your egg and toast? Sure thing:
Yep, at a time when news is abundant, and there's no need to pay to access it, all a rag seeking to differentiate itself has got is its opinion-makers, but The Australian has done nothing to refresh its opinion pages, serving up the same ill-sorted stew of tedious conservatism, and phoney baloney controversies (as if calling someone a racist is risk-free, especially if it happens to be wrong).

Let's leave those fine offerings aside, and contemplate The Australian's navel.

There's been very little in the media these days about the paywall experiment. There was a little spurt when - during the same period - The Australian Financial Review decided to loosen its grip, and reduce the size of ask on subscribers (here), but News Ltd has kept the data close to its chest.

The last we saw turned up at AdNews under the header Online Traffic Drop Hits The Australian, behind a paywall there, but handily available at a fire-sharing site:

According to Nielsen figures, ‘same day' comparisons before and after the paywall launch show declines ranging typically from 15-39 per cent.

The Australian's chief operating officer John Allan told AdNews it was in line with what News Limited had planned.

"We expected and planned for that. When you go to a digital subscription strategy you absolutely expect to see a drop of that nature. Keep in mind we're in a free three-month trial period. We've been pretty aggressive in the first three weeks driving people to subscriptions. It means we've got a heavy percentage of content which is premium-only content," he said.

Judging by purely random and completely unsubstantiated by data or analysis or statistics, the premium-only content remains severe in the area of opinion, but varies in relation to news, with earlier in the day featuring premium-only content, and then dropping off at quieter times.

Today for example being a Sunday, the gold bar fickle finger of subscription fate features quite lightly on the front page:

Why the rag even offers up Brendan O'Neill for free, blathering on righteously about how Concordia provides no morality tale:

Our response to the Concordia disaster should be to sympathise with those who suffered, and then to go back to building even better, and bigger, vessels that might help to shrink our planet and extend our horizons.

A large cruise ship as a way of extending our horizons? Has he ever actually been on one? May he be trapped for all eternity in a ship of fools ...

But there you have it. Rightly the editor of the Oz judged that no one would actually want to hand over an email address to read O'Neill, and the safest way to treat his gadfly perversity was to fling it on to an open fire, and hope everyone would enjoy the barbecue.

And there's the problem in a nutshell. Anyone wanting an overdose of O'Neill can just head off to Spiked (warning - remove those Herman Göring-approved potassium cyanide pills from easy reach), or god help us, the Drum, though the new year has seen no banging of the O'Neill drum at the ABC ...

The world is saturated with opinion, and while peak oil might be coming along soon, there's simply no sign that we've reached a peak O'Neill phase ... and so the coastline is constantly threatened by thick, glutenous, gluggy, over-saturated, ruinous to health opinions, as if from a sinking cruise ship ...

So here's the question? Why has the media given a free pass to The Australian paywall experiment? Where's the data, where's the analysis? Where's the sense that with the three months trial about to reach its use-by date, independent analysts are slobbering at the bit?

Does anyone care?

In much the same way news of the Leveson inquiry and News Corp seem to have fallen over the horizon during the January silly season.

As usual, you have to hare off to the international press for reliable, regular updates on News Corp , or the Leveson inquiry, or the media more generally ... with the coverage of the Megaupload fire-sharing matter the latest example of ill-informed, breathless spinning of a story down under, already spun elsewhere in relation to Rapidshare and Hotfile ...

... and yet in none of those links to The Guardian will you find a request for cash in the paw, and with discreet usage - no more than twenty a month - you could do the same for The New York Times.

Which brings us back to the same question. With so much opinion-making, news gathering and reporting out there for free on the full to overflowing intertubes, why would you pay for the exclusive insights of a Christopher Pearson or an Angela Shanahan or a Frank Furedi? That's an unholy trinity even more inexplicable than the original trinitarian obsession ...

Well the holiday season is almost over - even the cardigan wearers are returning to the ABC, before dashing off again for the Australia day weekend - and surely some attention will at last be paid to the great paywall downunder experiment as its original period draws to a close ...

And now the pond is compelled to draw any stray reader's attention to the first significant day of action in First Dog's 2012 calendar (remember Andrew Bolt is a Dickhead Awareness Week - previously a mere commemorative day - begins this year on June 3rd, with perhaps the pond's favourite days falling on Still not Sorry Monday, and Carbon is invisible. I'm drinking it! I'm drinking it Thursday).

Make of it what you will, but if you ever visit Goop, you'll understand why hearts and minds are torn between Christopher Pearson and Gwyneth Paltrow ... or perhaps why sometimes even free isn't enough ...

Sometimes readers deserve to be paid ...

And so to the regular tour of the thoughts of the Pellists and the Jensenist nepotics, and never mind the fallout for pantheism or feminism ...

2012-01-21T15:19:00.010+11:00

(Above: it's a conflation of Pellism and barbecue time, so it's time to know your acronyms and brush up on your ancient intertube memes).

It turns out that the long absent god might well be a bit of a snob, not keen on a beer, or a sausage, whether or not it has lashings of dead horse, as Cardinal Pell explains in his introduction to the New Translation of the Roman mass for long-suffering readers of the Sunday Terror:

Not surprisingly therefore the new texts are more formal and less like the everyday speech used at a barbecue.

And there you were thinking that a barbecue might be a spiritual occasion, what with the scoffing of the lamb:

Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccàta mundi. Beàti qui ad cenam Agni vocàti sunt.

Oh okay, if you never did Latin, and so never started off a BBQ with a hic and a sunt, here it is in universal English (Chinese and other strange tongues excluded):

This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to his barbecue - or supper (if you must be precise and a tad formal, and refuse to accept that 'supper' might be confused with afternoon tea, tea, an arvo BBQ or even dinner).

Yes, the desire to conflate and confuse and cultivate mystery surges in the Catholic clergy just like it did in the middle ages:

They strive more effectively to evoke the mystery of God, while the translations from the Latin are accurate and precise, occasionally causing listeners to pause and think.

You can just imagine the average congregation pausing to think on the accuracy and precision of the Latin. As for striving to evoke the mystery of the omnipresent god?

Sorry Walt Whitman, did you get it wrong or what:

I hear and behold God in every object ... (Song of Myself)

Except of course in a pair of barbecue tongs, turning a nicely singed lamb chop.

And forget it William Blake ...

When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea
O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty ... (here)

Or as we used to say in pantheistic Tamworth, imagining that god was everywhere and in everything:

When the barbecue flame flickers alight, do you not simply worry about the amount of gas left in the bottle?
O no no I see an innumerable number of burnt lamb chops crying eat me, eat me, and never mind the carbon overload ...

All this nonsense about god being in everything, when really you can only find Her in a church speaking decent formal English and a precise, accurate translation of the Latin (and don't give the pond any of that Mel Gibson jibber jibber about Aramaic).

Moving right along, Cardinal Pell is full of concern for parishioners ...

Some worried that migrant communities in Australia and e.g. African villagers would find the language too formal.

Yes, yes, the pond too is deeply concerned about the way migrant communities in Australia and e.g. African villagers simply don't have a clue about anything, especially formal language, or accurate Latin translations.

Despite some difficult words (consubstantial), the texts have been well received there because they are closer to the liturgical language in their tongues. People can and will learn a new word or two.

Consubstantial? Yep, that'll have mass goers taking a minute out of the solemn mass to browse Consubstantiality on their iPhone. And how relaxed they'll be to discover its ...

... an adjective used in Latin Christian christology, coined by Tertullian in Against Hermogeness 44, used to translate the Greek term homoousios.

Indeed. Is there an attitude to texting, messaging and browsing in church, even if it's to bring you in closer contact with the accurate lord - way better than than Google Translate - and Her mysterious formal ways?

The pond especially enjoyed the response of a certain Father Reese, who truth to tell sounds just like an African villager:

... Father Reese, a former editor of the Jesuit review America, questioned the Vatican decision to use the virtually defunct Latin version as the basis of the new text, calling the result “terrible, clunky, mechanical and wooden.”

“We’re still treating the Latin language as a sacred text,” Father Reese said. “It’s not inspired, it’s not scripture. What we should be doing today is writing new prayers in good English. We want to concentrate on the mystery of God’s love and the resurrection of Jesus.” (here).

Indeed.

Well the good father might want to take the pagan Latin out of the church, but is it possible to tear the church away from the pagan? Not, it seems, if you're a Pellist:

Each tradition has developed a distinctive style and while the Roman rite evolved from Jewish worship it also incorporated elements from the best pagan Latin prayers: concise, elegant and rich in meaning and nuance.

Eek, a pagan prayer lover ...

Father Mars, I pray and beseech thee that thou be gracious and merciful to me, my house, and my household; to which intent I have bidden this suovetaurilia to be led around my land, my ground, my farm; that thou keep away, ward off and removed sickness, seen and unseen, barrenness and destruction, ruin and unseasonable influence; and that thou permit my harvests, my grain, my vine-yards and my plantations to flourish and to come to good issue, preserve in health my shepherds and my flocks, and give good health and strength to me, my house and my household. To this intent, to the intent of purifying my farm, my land and my ground, and of making an expiation, as I have said, deign to accept the offering of these suckling victims; Father Mars, to the same intent deign to accept the offering of these suckling offering ... (here).

Actually that's a little windy and self-interested, don't you think? A bit like Rick Perry and the Texas drought ... and as for the suckling sacrifice, that really isn't up to a little flesh munching and blood drinking ...

And as for those Chinese, or perhaps Indians, with their strange babble of foreign tongues, how about a bit of linguistic imperialism?

A single English Mass text, approved by all the bishops' conferences including the North Americans, is an important achievement; appropriate too because English is the new Latin, the new universal language.

Yep, according to its wiki, some 375 million speak English, and no one quite knows how many speak or mangle it as a second language, but even at best count it would be well under a third of the world's population, but that's enough to make it the new universal language.

Did someone mention Anglophile ethnocentric eccentricity?

After all, who cares what African villagers speak ... and what could they possibly understand of climate science?

Well after those revelatory insights, it was time to drop in on the Sydney Anglicans, and the pond was tremendously heartened by the splash on the front page for Raj Gupta's story Rethinking Parish Councils ...

At last ... a time to rethink parish councils and the way they operate.

No doubt a story about the role of women in the Anglican church, and the need to get women away from the stove, and cliched images of their role in the world, and out into the Parish Councils, guiding and leading the church and its men to a deeper understanding of the role women could play if given half a chance ...

If only ...

Gupta's actual opening line?

Every Parish Council has been there: you need a new stove.

Not a word about the excruciating banality of the image, not a flicker of post modernist post twentieth century irony.

Stick to the kitchen, Anglican women of Sydney.

And at that point the pond didn't have the heart to go on. After all, there are cakes and lamingtons and sponges and scones to bake while the Anglican men go on about their important men's business ...

And of course there's also a great opportunity to pitch brand new up to date images to the editors of the Sydney Anglican website.

By golly, there are dozens and dozens of them on the full to overflowing intertubes, right up there with the most advanced Anglican thinking ....

(Below: click to enlarge if you're a Sydney Anglican and you want to see more detail).

And so to the doings of relatively peaceful cultures, at least when compared to those pagan Romans ...

2012-01-21T07:22:00.006+11:00

(Above: a problem since 1899, as revealed by the original The Punch in its cartoon. Click to enlarge).

The pond keeps a stack of old New Yorkers in the bathroom, in case of an emergency absence of loonery.

Flicking through a tattered back copy, it was one Chris Segedy of Brooklyn New York who brought a little light relief to pressing matters:

Christianity, it seems to me, played a central role in making Western Europe a relatively peaceful culture compared with pagan societies, including the "civilized" Romans.

Yes, and it culminated in the first and second world wars, with bonus holocaust. Now that's a knockdown relatively peaceful culture compared to those pagan societies. But wait, there's more:

... Europe's long history of Christianity has influenced its culture, particularly with regard to behavior and morality, and it's a mistake to ignore such a powerful aspect of the human experience.

Indeed, and its long history of warfare - whether the Hundred Years war, the Napoleonic wars, or the colonial adventurism from the Christian Crusades to the crusading ways of Christian Tony Blair - has been a powerful aspect of the human experience.

And wouldn't you know it. The New Yorker puts its letters up online, so you can read Chris Segedy in full here. So much silliness, so little time.

Even if there were a million monkeys typing a million ponds, only a thimbleful of the silliness available on the intertubes could cop a mention.

Speaking of silliness, this morning the tedious Jenny Macklin was all over the shop announcing great news for the clubs of Queanbeyan and Goulburn ... a trial of poker machine technology in the ACT.

Oh Labor party, you've done it again ... and come on Queanbeyan, don't be a bunch of spoilsports, you can make out like bandits and when the pond passed through at Xmas it looked like you could do with a bandit, ALP-led recovery (Barilaro rejects cooperation on pokies trial).

But I can hear you saying, okay, that's fair average silliness, but this is Saturday. How can we climb the Everest heights?

How about the solemn portentousness of the Daily Terror scribbling an editorial about the Wiggles?

Wiggles must get their act together, the anonymous editorialist intones, as he or she discussed the nation-wide trauma arising from one Wiggle replacing another Wiggle.

Ye ancient pagan cats and dogs, and not even a call for the Wiggles to be banned for their devastating impact on Australian culture ...

But wait, that's nothing, because you see Miranda the Devine has been out and about, cruising in favour of arch-yobbo Shane Warne, enthusiastically endorsing a jihad!

Shane Warne has declared a jihad against cyclists - and most motorists are with him.

Well we won't re-hash the saga of Shane and the cyclist, which is mainly of interest to those who think Shane Warne remains a celebrity because he could tweak a ball and a mobile phone.

But the Devine fallout from the fracas is all there in When will they stop pedalling nonsense?, and of course the answer is the twelfth of never, or at least until they stop peddling columns by the Devine as the best way to wrap your fish and chips.

Now you might think Warne and the Devine as co-crusaders in a campaign against cyclists is not even fit as lining for your budgie cage, but all that means is you lack a sensa huma and an ability to discover the shape of the universe in the froth on top of a cup of coffee ...

... perhaps Warne was so quick to hit Twitter with 16 tweets for his 630,000 followers on Tuesday night because he wanted to register his version of events before a less flattering interpretation cast him as a road rager.

Whatever the facts of the incident, it was an adept piece of damage control.

Yes never mind the facts of an incident. Who cares about the facts of an incident, when you can just carry on the road rage about bicyclists:

Even if he turns out not to be as blameless as he claims, Warne is right.

Yes even if he's in the wrong, he's absolutely right m'lud, and I refer to the principles established in the Mad Hatter's tea party. And now to maintain the mood m'lud a cartoon:

Now if it please m'lud, back to the Devine:

Motorists are sick of the silent two-wheeled menaces on our road. We are sick of the way they weave through traffic, run red lights, come out of nowhere and ignore road rules to suit themselves.

Yes, we're sick of it, sick of it all, sick of you, ya here, we're sick of everything, we're sick and we're not sorry we're sick, because we've had a gutful of being sick, and that's why we're sick and tired of it all, and when we're not sick and tired, why we're tired and sick ...

In fact, the only thing you might get even sicker about is the predictable bleating of the Devine, frothing and foaming like a demented, wailing, emotionally disturbed banshee ...

We are sick of the empty bike lanes that make already clogged roads impassable and the fact the bicycle lobby's power is disproportionate to their numbers. We are sick of their sense of entitlement and increasing aggression.

We are sick of the dangerous fiction that the road is there to share.

In fact, the road is there for cars. Bicycles are there only under sufferance.

And there you have - in a single snapshot - a portrait of the rude, boorish, arrogant, frequently verging on the psychotic - Sydney motorist, when offered a keyboard to express their feelings and attitudes ... rather than the more usual way of expressing their mood, behind a four wheel drive tearing around and tearing up the goat tracks that formed a foundation for the roads of inner Sydney ...

Next pedestrian you see daring to walk on a road, knock 'em down, and remind them that it's a dangerous fiction that the road is there to share, and remember, tell 'em Miranda the Devine sent you on your mission to create havoc and hell on the highway ...

Would it be a Devine piece without a spluttering final par offering up the heavy hand of the law?

Bike registration may be too unwieldy, especially for casual riders, but if guerrilla skirmishes between cars and bikes continue on our roads, the heavy hand of the law will have to intervene.

Now you might ask about the guerrilla skirmishes between cars and cars - like the car that rear-ended the pond's car last year - but we'll have none of that trouble-making nonsense from well known Trotsky-ites like yourself.

What we need is the heavy hand of the law, or at least the heavy finger on the heavy keyboard cliche of life ...

Meanwhile, it seems that Miranda the Devine and Harold Scruby are equally afraid of, and irritated by, bicyclists, as explained in Warne's bicycle rego demand belted for six.

It seems Mr. Scruby is with Warne in wanting some form of registration. Dear sweet pagan cats and dogs of Rome, Scruby and Warne and the Devine hanging around together ...

That would be the very same Scruby the Devine once called "a single issue zealot" while invoking Michael Costa calling him "Harold Screwball", as she moaned about anti-car activists and vegan cyclist Carl Sully (Fairness stuck in the slow lane).

Yep, the Devine has been scribbling about the evils of cyclists - in a fetid rampaging case of feral keyboard road rage - for many years, and the predictability is only matched by the banality of the thinking, and her capacity to provoke matching rage amongst cyclists. I guess it must help sell cockie-cage liner on slow days ...

So there you go Chris Segedy of Brooklyn, New York.

You might have your theories about Christians being better than pagan Romans, but we have Christian Miranda the Devine being benevolent, inclusive and embracing of bicyclists.

Sorry, you lose ...

Oh and you lose if you drive on Sydney roads too. Just remember somewhere someday you might well encounter someone behind the wheel with a pathological hatred of sharing the road with other users ...

I know, I know, anyone not living in Sydney will heave a sigh of smug relief. But remember the spirit of the Devine is everywhere.

As Chris Segedy sagely noted, it's a mistake to ignore such a powerful aspect of the human experience...

(Below: don't let the dress sense fool you. Those women are insufferable cyclists determined to ruin the Sydney road experience for Miranda the Devine and like).

And now for some ad hominem assaults on Katter, Court, Monckton, Riley, Galloway and Beard ...

2012-01-20T07:25:00.006+11:00

(Above: Bob Katter goes the axe).

The trouble with a smell of an oily rag operation like Crikey is that all sorts of odd pieces can turn up like an oily rag, because any kind of content is ... well it's content, and never mind the quality, feel the width ...

So it goes with Bob Katter is a lot of things, but he's not a racist, a piece scribbled by one Anthony Galloway, "a reporter at The Northern Miner".

It turns out that Anthony is perplexed:

The perception that Bob is racist utterly confuses me. He is preoccupied with a range of issues — his anti-gay streak being his only inexcusable — but never has it occurred to me, and never has he given any indication, that he’s hung up on race in any way.

Indeed. Well the pond knows very little about the deep north - not since a friend warned that the fierce dragons that roamed the bush liked a snack of city-based elites before settling down for the night - but it took only a few moments googling to stumble across some farewell remarks by Malcolm Weatherup for the Townsville Bulletin:

Bob once famously went into bat for a then-National Party colleague who had described citizenship ceremonies as "de-wogging".

Bob couldn't see anything wrong with that, and proved it by describing his colleague's critics as "little slanty-eyed ideologues who persecute ordinary average Australians".

That was a while back, and if said today (outside the coward's castle of Parliament), could attract the attention of those familiar with the Racial Vilification Act. (here)

Now it seems most peculiar that Galloway, a reporter at The Northern Miner knew nothing of this, and had nothing to say about it in what is little more than an idolatry puff piece about Katter.

Galloway gets down to the breathless point of explaining how he can't keep up with Katter when the man starts talking about de Tocqueville or John Stuart Mill, or reciting a Henry Lawson poem ... why whole verses from the bard down under.

But, hey, that’s Bob. He’s a lot of things — and there’s lots of things to criticise him about — but being a racist isn’t one of them.

Hey Anthony did Bob ever recite Henry's splendid poem To Be Amused for you?

I see the brown and yellow rule
The southern lands and southern waves,
White children in the heathen school,
And black and white together slaves;
I see the colour-line so drawn
(I see it plain and speak I must),
That our brown masters of the dawn
Might, aye, have fair girls for their lusts!

And don't let him stop there Anthony. There's verse after verse in the poem about the dangers of the lepers (Chinese, Jap, the yellow peril, whatever), just as Lawson offers verse after verse in his other poems.

If you want a more extensive guide to the Lawson oeuvre, why not head off to the Australia First Party's offering Henry Lawson, "Nationalist writer"?

And sure enough down in the comments section for the piece, the first worshipful one led off with a reference to 'city-based elites'.

Let's hope Crikey didn't have to pay too much for the copy.

Meanwhile, over at The Punch, where payment for copy is some kind of socialist communist conspiracy - a breach of intellectual property rights of the Murdochian kind - there's a splendid oily rag offering from Matt Beard under the header The biggest bigots are the buggers who blame bigotry.

Now it would of course be ad hominem to point out that Beard received his tertiary education from the University of Notre Dame, and currently holds down a job as Research Associate with the Centre for Faith, Ethics and Society at Notre Dame, and he's Junior Editor for Solidarity: The Journal for Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, but it's surprising how these qualifications inform his trolling ...

For starters, bugger me dead, it's really quite splendid to see a Notre Dame graduate sticking buggery in his header for a piece about bigotry.

Perhaps it's a way of getting people to head off to the Wiki (they'reeee baaaack) on Buggery, to note that the term was first used in English law in the Buggery Act of 1533, and it's been downhill since then ...

It turns out that in Beard's most peculiar world there's a whole series of outrageous ad hominem attacks on everyone, and it's shocking and shameful.

I know, I know, Catholic trolling is everywhere, but still this is most rich and juicy. You see poor Christopher Monckton is hapless and persecuted:

Take the controversy surround Christopher Monckton’s recent tour. In a widely signed open letter to the University of Notre Dame, Natalie Latter called for Monckton not to be given voice. The grounds for this claim being that letting Monckton speak undermined academic integrity.

Intellectual debate demands opposition - good and bad - and if the signatories to that letter are so confident of the scientific evidence, their time would have been better spent disproving Monckton than silencing him.

Indeed. Who would stand in the way of Notre Dame joining in the Monckton circus, but how strange that there seemed to be no plan for the University to invite robust debate and disputation with the Monckton circus ...

I guess it's better to propose that others spend their time disproving Monckton, but in discreet ways that would avoid any unseemly debate or a ruckus on campus, at least while the chief clown is front and centre in the big ring ...

And then there's the curious matter of the poker machine debate:

Recently, the usually well-respected Fr. Chris Riley spoke out against gambling reform. Rather than acknowledge his expertise as a man who has a wealth of experience in problem gambling, opposition called him a sellout who had traded his integrity for the ongoing support of a clubs Australia. Ad hominem.

By golly, that 'ad hominem' is handy, and covers all sorts of circumstances, even when a flock of Riley's fellow religionistas point out the bleeding obvious, including Tim Costello:

Costello told AAP this morning that Riley's support for the Clubs Australia campaign could be a conflict of interest, given the financial support Youth off the Streets receives from clubs. "The test is to find people who are independent, who are not getting any money," he said. (here)

Eeek, Tim, ad hominem, ad hominem, and just remember when a politician pockets some cash in the paw, it in no way influences their independent policy-making ...

And then, as if there wasn't already enough joy in the world, Beard jumps the shark and nukes the fridge in his passionate defence of Margaret Court:

Is Court unsupportive of gay marriage? Yes. Is she intolerant of homosexuality? No. She says just the opposite: “I actually love homosexual people.” But because she doesn’t agree with their agenda, Equal Love has made her a bigot.

Would that be the same Court who thinks gays engage in abominable sexual practices (as if gays somehow have reserved anal and oral sex for themselves), and believes gay relationships to be unhealthy, unnatural unions, as if heterosexuals have no claim on unhealthy, unnatural unions (don't get the pond started on its share of unhealthy, unnatural unions).

Would that be the same Court who told The Australian: "I help them overcome. We have people who have been homosexual who are now married."

Yes Court loves gays, provided they turn heterosexual. But the gospel according to Beard?

Court has offered particular reasons for her views: that man and woman, created by God, were intended for sexual union. Now, it’s one thing to take the bull by the horns and argue, say, that her theology is wrong, or that theology has nothing to offer this debate. It’s another to dismiss her as another homophobe, another Bible-basher; that’s bigoted.

Yep, it's bigoted to note the bleeding obvious.

Presumably the notion that Christian theology has also been bigoted these past few thousand years - in the matter of women, gays and evolution for starters - should also be stricken from the record.

And then in a fine flurry of foaming and frothing and inclusiveness as a closing argument, Beard shows the danger of too much trolling from an insecure historical base:

The empowered civil rights movements of the past may well have been inspired by Jean-Jaques Rousseau’s famous liberalist cry “I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it”.

Recently I was speaking with a state politician who informed me that he would refuse to deal with - or be in the same room as - those who were outspoken against his religion. Partisan politics has gone mad, and it will take a cultural revolution on the level of Rousseau to set things straight.

Actually it wasn't Rousseau, it was Voltaire. Actually it wasn't even Voltaire, it was Evelyn Beatrice Hall (feeling the need to write under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre, as women did in the days when Christians persecuted women for getting out of the house), attempting to capture the spirit of Voltaire and his response to a work by Claude Adrien Helvétius (yep, and the Christians gave him a hard time too).

Yep, it will take a cultural revolution on the level of persuading people to read Wikipedia if no decent history is to hand in the University of Notre Dame library before things will be set straight ...

Oh, and somebody stopping geese like Beard squawking and waddling about complaining of the injustice done to the likes of Monckton, Chris Riley and Margaret Court. If you lead with bigotry or silliness or special pleading, please expect a return serve every so often ...

And there's the price of reading smell of an oily rag offerings. No insight, but as Colbert might have said, a hell of a lot of geeseiness and truthiness ...

But there's an upside this day ... farewell Rick Perry, it was kinda good to know that goosiness has its own reward ...

Now how's that drought in Texas going? What's the drought monitor saying? Heard back yet from the Lord in relation to the Government Proclamation of a 6th August prayer day?

In times of trouble, even those who have been granted power by the people must turn to God in humility for wisdom, mercy and direction. In the spirit of the Book of Joel, Chapter 2, Verses 15-16, I urge a solemn gathering of prayer and fasting. As those verses admonish: "15 Blow the trumpet in Zion, declare a holy fast, call a sacred assembly... 16 Gather the people, consecrate the assembly..." As Jesus prayed publicly for the benefit of others in John 11:41-42, so should we express our faith in this way.

And he was in the running to be OPTUS! (Oh will that Rupert Murdoch gag ever run dry?)

(Below: by golly, it'll soon be Friday night, and time for a little six shooter action).

Time to take a stand, or at least wash the paws Pontius Pilate style and shed a few crocodile tears ...

2012-01-19T07:18:00.007+11:00

(Above: the pond thought of running a still from the movie The Mouse that Roared, or perhaps a snap of a crocodile shedding tears, but this will do).

Last night the Potus disconnected Sydney's inner west from the intertubes and from telephonic communications for several hours, and suddenly we felt at one with the world about SOPA. Let it all go dark, let the strike begin, teach 'em all a lesson ...

Who knows how long the outage lasted, because the p and p p enterprise (pond and pond partner) settled for watching the movie The Trip, then watched the last ten minutes of the show on the box, and spent a fruitful ten minutes arguing about whether there'd been any change to the cut between feature and series, in a manner and tone entirely consistent with the show (oh if you could only hear the pp do Bond).

Hang on a tic toc, did we say Potus?

Sorry the fingers must have slipped, something went wrong in the auto correct, we meant of course Optus. Oh Rupert, the pond and you are one ...

What joy to be reconnected this morning by the Potus, and read the grand news Web Protests Piracy Bills, and Senators Change Course.

But that's in the New York Times, and how pleasant it is to see the likes of Chris Dodd frothing and foaming in his folly.

The Sydney Morning Herald's contribution to the discussion?

Well its offering was to recycle a little FUD from AP under the header Wikipedia blackout a slippery slope: volunteer editors.

Sure Jimmy Wales might have polled the wiki community and its editors, but it didn't take long for AP to dig up a dissident dodo:

"My main concern is that it puts the organisation in the role of advocacy, and that's a slippery slope," said editor Robert Lawton, a Michigan computer consultant who would prefer that the encyclopedia stick to being a neutral repository of knowledge. "Before we know it, we're blacked out because we want to save the whales."

Bugger the pond dead, slippery slopes and saving the whales all in a couple of sentences.

What shocking advocacy, to make a stand against a legislative measure that might be used to shut down Wikipedia or any other website deemed to have breached MPAA standards of behaviour.

Fortunately the punters weren't having any of the 'save the whales' spin, and when last noted, voting in the accompanying poll was running in favour of the Wikipedia blackout 84 to 16%.

What a wretched rag the SMH is and nary a mention of the potent Potus protest in the inner west!

Thank you ZDNet for noticing, but please, forget the Potus spin, 5.30 pm isn't 11 pm, and the pond part of the inner west stayed offline until at least 11 pm in potent Potus protest ...

Meanwhile, it wouldn't be Thursday without the newly and entirely productive Paul Sheehan contributing a column.

Yep, these days he's as hard working as a waiter serving thirty tables, what with scribbling a full and handsome two columns a week, and today's effort, It's stiff cheese for the mouse that roared, is as fine an example of crocodile tears as the pond has seen all year (oh okay, it's only January, so let's include last year too).

Sheehan does a grand dance on the grave of Andrew Wilkie, who's been dudded by Gillard, and whose power play stance has been dudded by the Slipper conundrum (or is that the Slipper identity, supremacy or ultimatum?)

Sheehan starts off with a fine flurry of existential gloom, and a Pontius Pilate washing of hands. First the existential despair, which begins with a dark and stormy night, or is that a bright deep blue sky moment?

Leaving the beach on a recent Saturday afternoon on a day when a bright deep blue sky reached down to meet blue water, I walked through a beachfront hotel, through the bar and then a large room filled with poker machines. As always with gambling rooms, it was dark, with most of the light coming from the garish machines. The room was packed.

Then a little unseemly gloating, a strutting above the common herd, but not in a patronising way:

It was an off-putting contrast between beauty and the beast for someone who only gambles once a year (Melbourne Cup) and cannot see the pleasure people get from poker machines, but has no right to patronise them.

Except for the patronising bit that is, as Sheehan walked amongst ... the beasts, in their dark, garish rooms of satanic worship.

And then comes the Pontius Pilate washing of the paws:

While it is plain to even the most avid libertarian that there is a dark side to the gambling industry - the disproportionate amount of money made by clubs and pubs from problem gamblers - the question of how to respond does not offer glib answers.

Yes, a glib answer would involve taking actual action, which would simply be way too glib, especially for supporters of Dr. No. Why, it might even involve taking on the clubs, and the Woolies/Coles combine.

Okay, so now for the comedy routine:

The Liberals share the general concern about poker machine addiction destroying vulnerable families ...

Ah yes, no doubt, but the question of how to respond does not offer glib answers. Except of course, no, no, no and neigh ...

It turns out that poker machine addiction and legislative action is entirely a problem for Wilkie, a mad suicide bomber no one wants to negotiate with, whether in government or opposition.

Now how to spin this, and make a glib phrase or answer to the problem of taking any action?

How about micro-managing? Now that's a fine phrase:

The Liberals... regard Wilkie's signature reform as intrusive micro-management of the industry.

Intrusive micro-management! Even better. How cleverly crafted, what fine humbuggery, what a perfect excuse for inaction, inertia and indifference...

...because any action would involve an intrusive micro-managing of the clubs industry, and they've been managing themselves so well, even if it involves making out like bandits when it comes to the issue of problem gamblers.

After all, where's the problem, when the Liberals have been doing well out of the anger being fomented by the clubs industry?

Uh huh. As usual, if you read Sheehan expecting some kind of moral stand, well it's stiff cheese for the readers and bring out that bowl of water, and make sure you put a little lemon in it for that nice acidic touch on the fingertips ...

One thing you can guarantee. No one these days mentions it all stems from a Productivity Commission report, as the PC is no longer close to the hearts of the commentariat because of its PC ways ...

And so we're left with this closing, pungent par:

Wilkie is essentially on his own. Like the people who can't stop feeding the machines.

Yes, and don't expect Paul Sheehan to shed anything but crocodile tears about it (yes it's a wiki link, and it'll come good, or not to worry, it's all there in google cache)

O devil, devil!
If that the earth could teem with woman's tears,
Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile

Out of my sight! (Othello)

Meanwhile, it is possible to read sensible commentary on the magnitude of the Labor party's perfidy, in Welching on Wilkie: Labor plays percentages on pokies:

You could call it political ruthlessness, which it is. But it also looks a bit like yet another half-smart political play that this government excels at — moves that at first blush look clever politics, but eventually yield a host of problems. It might be the right political move in the short-term, but there are some serious longer-term risks.

The Gillard government may be lucky if this doesn’t come back and bite it.

What a pity the pond was never going to vote for the Labor party anyway, but if the Labor government wanted to convince the punters that having it in office guarantees nothing will happen except back-stabbing, betrayal and doubling back, they're doing it in style, folding like the playing cards in Alice in Wonderland.

Come on Potus, nothing to see except stiff cheese and stiff columnists in the antipodes, let's get back to that SOPA strike.

(Below: a neatly constructed protest - a flickering glimpse, then cruelly snatched away - and with a Learn more link - oh fond memories of Starship Troopers - that leads you here).

Margaret Court, Meryl Tankard Reist, Chairman Rupert's twittering, and strange days indeed ...

2012-01-17T12:49:00.008+11:00

(Above: Barbara Streisand in her den).

Nobody told me there would be days like these. Nobody told me there’d be days like these. Strange days indeed. Strange days indeed. Most peculiar Mama ... (John Lennon).

First up in the peculiarity stakes was former tennis champion Margaret Court, earning ire for her fundamentalist Christian ways. (Rainbow flags rule out love match with Margaret Court).

Head off to Court's website, and you get an undiluted blast from the Victory Life Centre.

Who knew - outside Perth - that she'd been travelling as the Rev Dr. Court for a couple of decades with her very own church since June 1995 (now incorporated as a recognised denomination), and that the mission statement is the usual collection of biblical quotes, with an emphasis on the born again, offering healing services and proposing that a good way to be filled with the Holy Spirit is to speak in tongues:

We simply ask Jesus in prayer to fill us with His Spirit and then begin to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gives you utterance.

Ask Him with this prayer:

Lord Jesus,
I ask You to fill me with Your Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues.
By faith I believe that I receive.
Now begin to speak out in the language that the Spirit gives you (not in English).

Uh huh. Speaking in tongues, but not in English. At last a solution to that problem with the backhand that sees the Pond do poorly in doubles.

Yep, it turns out that Court is one of the Leviticus mob, which is to say that undue attention is paid to 18:22 and the matter of homosexuality - as opposed to what Jesus had to say - what, he didn't say anything? - but no attention is paid at all to quintessentially more important matters:

19:19 Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.

Phew. Thank the long absent lord that tennis balls only mingle rubber, cotton or perhaps a wool/nylon blend. As for heads and tatts:

19:27 Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.
19:28 Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD.

Thanks, long lost one, how about slaves?

25:45 Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.
25:46 And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever ...

Dammit, the wrong side one in the Civil War, and as always we recommend a little light reading at the Skeptic's Bible before retiring (provided you're not the sort of person who might wake at 2 am to brood about the spelling of sceptic).

Meanwhile, on another planet, there comes the threat of Melinda Tankard Reist to sue blogger Jennifer Wilson, publishing under the name No Place for Sheep, as outlined in Anti-porn activist threaten to sue blogger over religion claims.

Tankard Reist, who trades as a feminist, while managing to work for many years as a staffer with Brian Harradine, might have a job putting the cork back into the bottle if she keeps wandering down this path.

For example, at another blog there's Melinda Tankard Reist - A Biography. Now we don't endorse the contents, or know of their truth and accuracy - we merely in the style of Fox - report and others - perhaps you - decide, but at the moment the contents don't seem to be the subject of a Tankard Reist action. What to make of this?

Could it result in what the Sceptical Lawyer calls The Streisand Effect:

...the Streisand effect covers those situations where the threat of legal action has brought publicity to the information sought to be suppressed.

Streisand had sued to get photos of her mansion taken down, and as a result of proceedings, according to the lawyer, more than 420,000 subsequently visited the site in the next month. Indeed vigilant googling might lead you here, unless you want to see the bizarre, completely legitimate Streisand dream house photo shoot as presented in Harper's Bazaar here.

But back to the Sceptical Lawyer:

In the event, I think that the Melinda Tankard-Reist case might fall into the category of case where the bringing of a legal action just brings more criticism and scrutiny of that person’s views. Certainly there has been a number of blog posts and tweets which are very critical. Ms Tankard-Reist may also find that her name is forever linked with the allegedly defamatory statements in other people’s minds, even if she does get a court order taking them down. To explain what I mean by ‘linking’, whenever I think about poor Liskula Cohen, the words “NYC Skank” also come into my head (courtesy of the defamatory blog). Although I know the blog was defamatory, the notions of “NYC Skank” and “Liskula Cohen” are inextricably linked in my head. I wonder if the same may happen to me with Ms Tankard-Reist. Will the notions of Christian fundamentalism and duplicity pop into my head whenever I think of her, even if she does establish defamation and cause Ms Wilson to take down all her posts?

Indeed. Important questions for us all to ponder, merely raised so that you might decide.

Already twitterers have been twittering (All of a twitter as legal threat to blogger adds spice to the public battle), and already Jill Singer has weighed in at the HUN, with Unholy row for feminism high ground, proposing that Melinda Tankard Reist is looking flakier by the day ... she risks painting herself as a reluctant Christian - and willing bully. Presumably the HUN lawyers legalled the column ...

Meanwhile, swimming against the tide, Dave Gaukroger proposes that no mention of Tankard Reist's religious views should be made in relation to her political arguments, since this would be a mere ad hominem attack (Melinda Tankard Reist critics create undeserved sideshow - behind the paywall, and - given the wretchedness of Gaukroger's arguments, long may it stay there).

It surely takes some skill to hang around with both Spinifex Press and the thoughts of Brian Harradine ...

If you're interested you can find the thoughts of mtr here. Think of a visit as the Streisand effect in motion ...

Meanwhile, the pond anxiously scanned the papers. After the unfortunate affair involving Andrew Bolt, surely the IPA would have already taken out a full page in The Australian bemoaning the attack on free speech, and the use of defamation threats to silence arguments, debates and opponents, and the commentariat would have been at full screech, like a flock of Major Mitchells wheeling through the air.

Come on down Janet Albrechtsen:

Okay, maybe not, because it seems Dame Slap just loves Tebowing. No Gaukrogering confusion between religion and politics for her.

Tewbowing is a strange on field ritual performed by Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, even as it seems the long absent lord has abandoned Tebow and the Broncos to the atheists, secularists, philistines, or perhaps to the true believers who play better football (A football field is no place for nutty religious fanaticism). Where is your messiah now, Tebowing Tim?

Meanwhile, the world now waits daily with tremulous excitement the tweets of one Rupert Murdoch, who has managed to confuse Optus and Potus (Potus to Optus: Murdoch blames iPad for mangling tweet spray at Obama), and who endorses SOPA, which will see Wiki and other sites fall silent in protest today - if only the pond knew how to switch off in solidarity.

It seems Chairman Rupert doesn't understand that revealing the inner goose online is the sort of thing wise old farts are supposed to warn youngsters about.

It was fair use, your honour, fair use ... because you see Chairman Rupert owns Fox, which backs The Simpsons, and the use of an image like this is exactly the sort of misuse of images and videos on YouTube that News Corp does on a daily basis around the world ...

Can we at least call it poetical piratical irony?

The likely result? Murdoch will do what he did for MySpace and make Twitter seem utterly uncool. It's the most fiendish business plan ever devised ... and once the young abandon it, and the stock's price falls, he'll snap it up, so he can drive it even further into the ground ...

Take it away Mr. Lennon:

Nobody told me there would be days like these. Nobody told me there’d be days like these. Strange days indeed. Strange days indeed. Most peculiar Mama ...

(Below: some recent tweets from arch twit exponent chairman Rupert).

Gerard Henderson, and still the dinosaur scribbles on ...

2012-01-16T17:45:00.002+11:00

You can imagine the excitement at the pond.

The trembling hands, the heaving breasts, the sheer palpitating excitement of it all as the partner thrust a first edition of Gerard Henderson's 1993 masterpiece Gerard Henderson Scribbles On ... at the pond, saying 'well here's something you don't need to buy.'

And then - oh silence beating, pounding, tumultuous heart - inside on the cover, a signature, and the pond was but one degree of separation from the scribbler:

Oh agreed, it was steeply priced, even though marked down from a gouging two bucks to a more generous fifty cents by the St Lukes's op shop Enmore, but the pond spares no expense when it comes to literary masterpieces. And this one happened to edited by Anne Henderson, who also provides an Introduction.

To be sure, it provides a whole new slant on uxorial.

In the introduction, Anne Henderson pens this poignant insight into commentariat column writing:

There is nothing quite like a deadline to concentrate the mind. Writing begins at the office sometime around 10am on Monday morning. Gerard flicks his Papermate Pacer with .5mm cassette (now only available in Melbourne - blue coloured ones are preferred), rules a 3cm wide margin (carefully measured with pin pricks top and bottom) along a dozen or so pages and writes an opening sentence. This is no mean feat. It may have taken all morning to work out the first five words. Sometimes it takes a lot longer. After that initial hurdle the rest flows easily ...

Yes quietly flows her anal retentive heroic Don aka the pedantic, Papermate Pacer-wielding Polonius (should that be Prufrock?), and amongst many insights that flowed in a quick dip inside the pages was Henderson's dismay at Ian Temby's suggestion that "if somebody offers to sleep with a public official if he or she will show them favour, it seems ... impossible to distinguish this from a proffer of money in terms of pernicious potential effect".

The prattling Polonius's mind was boggled by this talk of individual liaisons of the sexual kind being seen as a kind of bribery, and it's heartening to think that the NSW Labor party and its ministers and the Wollongong Council shared his boggled outrage for a decade or more.

If only Minister Ian Macdonald had the prattling Polonius as his advisor and his defender in his encounter with the hooker provided by developer and accused murderer Ron Medich (Minister Ian Macdonald me feel sick, says prostitute Tiffanie - sic).

Why eating meals for free at restaurants, and falling asleep in a room with a hooker - and waking up to consult the intertubes and then nodding off again - is simply routine business for a NSW politician, and Gerard Henderson showed deep forward-thinking insight in deploring the cult of Tembyism and allowing politicians to engage in normal human relationships in hotel rooms. (Plonk, prostitutes, a paranoid pollie).

But enough of ancient history, because the title of the book really should have been Gerard Henderson Scribbles On, and On, and On, and On, and On, and On, and On ... x 10³, and sure enough today he's scribbling On and On, in Fair work for some, but small business is not so easy ...

Somehow, somewhere along the line, Henderson has developed the fantasy that he is deeply affiliated with, and has a profound understanding of the trials and travails of small business.

Is this because he thinks the Sydney Institute is a small business, in the manner of a restaurant, cafe or newsagency? Well it's true it has a plethora of office assistants, an executive assistant and only two chiefs, being Mr. and Mrs Henderson.

But it also has a gaggle of names on a twelve strong board that any decent small business would find risible and a waste of time ... even a quango or a mango should stop at a board size of eight for board efficiency ... and a genuine small business shouldn't worry about a board at all ... unless the board is window-dressing for the business, and unless the business happensto be peddling power and influence and ideas, along with offers of associate and full subscriber status ...

Henderson has been running the Sydney Institute since 1989 and before that he was chief of staff to John Howard, and before that he worked as a public servant in the Commonwealth DIR and before that he worked for four years for Kevin Newman and before that he was an academic, and before that a student on the way to garnering a Ph.D. (here).

So show us the small business!

And yet somehow Henderson thinks he's deeply acquainted with the perils of small business as he berates his public service colleagues of the past:

Most of my colleagues had never worked in the private sector and none had ever experienced the responsibility of raising money to employ workers. Yet we were tasked with administrating the relationship between employers and employees at a time of economic downturn.

Uh huh. Small business is raising a quid to employ workers. So if your local bank fails you, remember to head off to Philip Morris or James Hardie or the Alder group (or so says naughty Mark Latham here).

Well you know where this is heading, yet another commentariat reprise of fifteen minutes of fame celebrity chef George Calombaris whingeing about penalty rates, in much the same way as yesterday Paul Sheehan was whingeing about how penalty rates forced the bosses to work on the weekend, a most peculiar and profound kind of suffering that would never have been allowed by Louis XIV in his sun king days.

But the funniest thing? Well you might recall reading Anne Henderson describing the agony of poor Gerard scribbling the first five words of a piece, which might take an entire morning. It turns out this was mere idle rhetoric, because in the day Gerard was a gun hand who might have shorn four hundred words before lunch:

... In the early 1980s, I worked in the former commonwealth Department of Industrial Relations in Melbourne, in some of the areas which are now covered by FWA. This was my first, and only, public service job and it took some time to learn how to pace myself.

The essential problem was that nearly everything seemed to take forever. Early on, I was given the deed of preparing a draft ministerial reply for the federal minister. I completed the job before lunch - after all, the letter was only about 400 words. But I was told such a response was too prompt and the task should take at least a week.

And that was with or without a Papermate Pacer, with .5 mm cassette, in blue only, even if an order in Melbourne needs to be placed!

Not to worry. Henderson interweaves his recollections of life in the public service with the slowness of the investigation into Craig Thomson and allegations of misuse of Health Services Union monies, berating Fair Work Australia as if it's all the fault of public servants.

But the NSW police - public servants all of them - have reached a finding (Police rule out Thomson investigation) and it's the Victorian police - public servants the lot of them - who have yet to return a finding that's hit the google button (Victoria Police to investigate MP Craig Thomson).

Henderson is chomping at the bit because after all Thomson still represents one of the best ways to offset the Slipper factor (the Slipper identity or the Slipper conundrum if you will), but sad to say FWA public servants are a poor substitute and a last gasp hope for what would have been quite a result if the coppers had come through.

The pond suspects that Craig Thomson isn't a nice person - though an ideal candidate for pond membership - and that the union involved has been remarkably untransparent, but then the same lack of transparency might be noted in relation to the funding of the Sydney Institute. Looking for details of finances on the public record? Go fish ...

Anyhoo, Henderson's fond memories of his public servant slacker colleagues - in contrast to his young gun ways, and his deep sympathy for restauranteurs arising from his running a pasta palace for a week and dealing with bolshie waiters, and his dismay about FWA and the complexity of awards and the delays in dealing with the Craig Thomson matter - build to an epic conflationary final par in which it all comes together:

The public servants and former union officials who preside at FWA and related bodies have the best intentions. It's just that they tend to look favourably on unions and with disfavour on business. What's more, as is not surprising for those in secure employment, time is of little moment. Which helps explain the Thomson delay.

Put it another way. The man who runs the Sydney Institute tends to look favourably on business, and with disfavour on those who work for a living.

They're just sheep to be organised according to the needs of business. Better a worker serving fast food to make the nation fatter and more quiescent than a stirrer moaning about the minimum wage rate.

Yep, it seems that workers just want to work, without any penalty rates, and without any regard to preserving the concept of a weekend in which to relax amongst family and friends, and certainly without regard to antiquated notions like the eight hour day or the five day week:

This reminded me of the mindset of my public service colleagues three decades ago. Workers who want to work weekends and customers who want to spend on weekends, including tourists, just did not matter.

Yep, there you have it. Workers can't wait to be done over by George Calombaris ... just so they can facilitate tourism Australia.

Meanwhile, the pond waits now for the ultimate tell all tale from Gerard Henderson:

My life as a waiter, and how it taught me that working a four hour shift on the weekend for base pay without any penalties or tips, and without any other shifts during the week was the way forward for small business, restaurants, tourists and above all waiters ...

Oh look, and there's the first five words and more done. Why the other 500,000 should be a doddle ...

Scribble on and on Mr. Henderson. The waiters of Australia need you to see things clearly ...

(Below: because you can't get enough, here's the rear cover, highlighting the special sections, like What is history? which turns out to be a very short polemic about the virtues of warfare from yet another armchair warrior).

And now for a minimum wage and no penalty rates for members of the commentariat ...

2012-01-16T07:19:00.005+11:00

Eating a meal in the United States is perplexing for anyone who's experienced paying a bill in an Australian restaurant.

The question of tipping always arises, because payment of wages has been outsourced to the private sector, which is to say the customer.

Tipping doesn't increase the quality of the service, nor does it increase the quality of the food, but there's no way to avoid it. One friend's favourite anecdote involves refusing to tip for appalling service and food, and being chased along the street by an angry restaurant worker demanding to know why a tip hadn't been offered ...

As wages and working conditions have slumped in the US, tipping culture has got out of control, run amok, but as only the reasonably well off can afford restaurant eating, the private sector has stepped up to the plate.

Where once you might have paid 10% of the bill, the benchmark shifted to 15% a long time ago, and now the range is 15-20%. Even for a well off private sector, it's clear that 20% isn't about service or food, it's about sustaining a most peculiar institution.

And if you want to avoid it, and turn up in a large group, forget it, because an 'autograt' will apply, that might get up around the 18% mark.

And that peculiar institution is the United States' flat minimum wage, without penalty rates, bells or whistles, and the capacity to treat employees as mere chattels, wage slaves to work shifts as determined.

The result is also a healthy black market economy - waiters, for example, are reported to fail to acknowledge at least 40% of their tips to the IRS - and who can blame them for a cash in the paw philosophy.

Ironically, fast food is the one area in the US where tipping need not apply:

Tipping at fast food restaurants and coffeehouses that do not offer table service is not necessary, despite the common proliferation of tip jars, which are considered inappropriate by many. (wiki Tip (gratuity))

So the poor get to serve the poor in a burger store, and the poor do the work of the service staff by cleaning up after themselves and putting their rubbish in the bin.

The funniest thing? Americans who deny there's any kind of class/monetary divide at work in the United States.

But the federal minimum award wage in the United States is $2.13 an hour for tipped workers, and $7.25 for non-tipped workers, with a median wage for restaurant workers of $8.90 (half of all workers earn less than the federal poverty line), and ninety per cent of a surveyed 4,300 workers reported not having paid sick leave (resulting in an inclination to work while sick). You can get more details and a pdf of that survey, by heading off to Guide: which US restaurants pay sick leave, living wages? Which have institutionalized racism?

There's been a bout of rhetoric about class at work in the recent Republican run offs. It ripples along, often below the surface, but then pops up when the likes of Rick Santorum announces 'there are no classes in America', or when Newt Gingrinch chides Mitt Romney for his wealth, and Jon Stewart chides him - 'Class warfare' against the rich - excuse me, job creators - is wrong, unless we're talking about Mitt Romney.

Gingrich got himself into trouble by proposing that poor (in invisible letters 'black') children as young as nine should work part time cleaning schools so that they could learn about work (no tipping required).

So where's all this heading? Well there's been an unseemly amount of penalty rates, union and award bashing in relation to restaurants doing the rounds down under in the antipodes, inspired by a first class git George Calombaris, whose main claim to a short fifteen minutes of fame is to turn up like a badly baked apple tart on MasterChef.

If there's anything more repugnant than the sight of a celebrity chef, it's the sight of a celebrity chef putting the boot into workers and what they earn (it's not like they go to uni for 15 years, moaned George about his serfs. No, the poor sods likely work all night so they can go to uni so they can escape the restaurant rat race, or work all day and study at night. Is the pond bitter at the ass-grabbing and the tit-groping and the general level of abuse and misery on offer working in restaurants? Of course not). (Out of the frying pan: penalty rates under fire from celebrity chef).

Oh okay there is something more repugnant, and that's the sight of a celebrity chef turning up in television commercials peddling a burger range for a fast food machine like KFC ('Try my burgers first,' celebrity chef Darren Simpson tells KFC critics).

Naturally dazzling Darren was defended by Neil Perry, who had himself made out like a bandit lending his name to the abysmal concept that Qantas airline food could somehow be made classy if it was designed by Perry ...

But we digress, because the real point is that in the Australian restaurant scene, casual labour rules, and workers are lucky to score 30-40k a year with 50k a year being the exception rather than the rule (Waiters hit back at MasterChef's George Calombaris after wage complaints). Put that up against a couple on a pension, with fringe benefits involving pensioner discounts, and some might rather be on the pension ...

Naturally all the usual suspects are outraged by the way restaurant workers are making out like bandits. There's the Daily Liberal, recording the suffering of restaurant owners, Weekend trading too expensive for Dubbo cafés and restaurants, and there's the Institute of Public Affairs (Penalty rates killing restaurants trade), and the news from the west is just as bad (Weekend restaurant closures forced by penalty rates).

Yes, the politics of envy and class warfare is always good for a run, seeing as how the restaurant trade is full of workers living high off the hog, while humble restaurant owners struggle to make a living, and usually make do by eating the left overs from customer plates alone at night to the light of a flickering candle.

High ended restaurants are suffering, and the well off who attend them are in a total tizz of shock, loss and suffering ... because, well because the servants are revolting, and worse, they can't be crushed, intimidated, or made to work for an even more pitiful wage.

Naturally at this point fearless, crusading Paul 'magic water and sourdough lover' Sheehan jumps into the fight with Labor's big job-killing machine:

My favourite local restaurant was packed on Saturday night, as usual. What was unusual was that its co-owners, who used to take weekends off, were hard at work.

Shocking, appalling. Restaurant owners being forced to work on the weekends, when really they should be able to hire peons to work on the weekends.

Just the weekends mind you, only casuals please, and at a decent lowly rate ... because you see the weekend offers precious time to relax and take it easy, and restaurant owners are entitled, not the bloody workers with their cry baby ways ...

The rest of Sheehan's utterly predictable union bashing wends its way to an inevitable conclusion, which is to blame the public-sector unions for everything ...

Which leads the pond to one fervent wish. Instead of the usual Chinese curse - may Sheehan live in interesting times - the pond would prefer a different curse afflict this eastern suburbs ponce.

May he get to work in a United States restaurant on a minimum wage and without health benefits, and rely on tips for a living.

Come to think about it, why not replace Sheehan's current wage as a rage-laden member of the commentariat with income derived from tips ...

How on earth would he make a living?

(Below: yes, yes, he could get a gig as a pretentious food critic).

The agenda-setting ways of the Daily and Sunday Terror commentariat ...

2012-01-15T12:30:00.006+11:00

(Above: now there's an agenda-setting pointer, but no link, it's a cap).

Remember when it was a thought crime to be an agenda-setter?

Agenda-setters were wicked leftists, often with a hidden agenda, and when the hidden agenda was unveiled, it usually turned out to be an agenda set by the ABC, the Fairfax press, Pravda by the Yarra, and similar co-conspirators, all at one with a furtive, despicable agenda designed to overthrow western civilisation as we know it.

Why experts even produced an "agenda-setting theory", handy to use to analyse the agenda-setting ways of the liberal media ...

So it's amazing to see how the Daily and Sunday Terror now loves to boast about its agenda-setting team of right wing loons, determined to undermine western civilisation as we know it.

On Miranda the Devine's agenda?

Why it's to see Rick Santorum elected as President of the United States, or perhaps better still, import him to Australia and run the show down under, because his 'values message' and 'flinty conviction' would do equally well here ... (Presidential hopefuls marry family with politics).

Now that's an agenda.

Even more amazing, you might recall that the Devine walked out of The Iron Lady, but she reveals an incisive understanding of the crucial, key similarity between Julia Gillard and Margaret Thatcher, which might even help explain why Gillard and partner liked the show:

Both are Librans, for those who follow the stars. (E xclusive: The PM reviews the Iron Lady).

Yes astrology as a form of political analysis and movie criticism.

Now that's an agenda, and by golly it leaves the pond Apple TV streaming The Queen as a test screening way behind. (Must take the lads out hunting to get their minds off things).

Then there's Piers Akerman's agenda:

Join Piers for a verdict on a Labor government?

How many ways can you write a column saying Tony Abbott two legged goooood, Labor party four legged baaaaad?

Didn't Akker Dakker first form a view on Labor governments, with or without the aid of cocaine, back in April 1904 when Chris Watson and his ministers formed the first national labour government in the world? (opens in pdf).

If you want the latest variation - why Beethoven could only manage thirty three variations on Diabelli's waltz theme - it's all there in Julia can't stop hurling good money after bad, and it's a perfect example of Akker Dakker's monomaniacal obsessive rhetoric.

He really can't stop hurling bad words after bad ...

And then there's Tim Blair's agenda.

Now you might think Tim Blair is too dumb to have an agenda, but it seems - to judge by his reproduction of US radio host Mark Levin's 'remarkable' comment - without hint of reproof or demur or objection - that his agenda is for United States Marines to piss on the enemies of the United States, because Blair gets it:

Let this be a lesson to every one of you subhumans who plots against America and tries to kill American citizens. We don’t give a damn who you are! We don’t give a damn what you believe! And we don’t give a damn if you’re offended! Because we’re going to hunt you down and kill you and then humiliate you after you’re killed!

Now it's true that it's probably better to be pissed on than to be killed, and perhaps that's all Blair is suggesting. That he'd rather be pissed on, though perhaps not from a great height ...

Oh yes it's going to an astrologically insightful, Santorum gay bashing, Akker Dakker lefty gutting, Tim Blair pissing on sub-humans future, thanks to the Terror commentariats' wondrous agenda-setting ways ...

Yeay, go western civilisation as we know it ...

Hang on a tic, astrology?

Oh no, you twitterers, that can't be true. Say it ain't so.

And yet, and yet ... how on earth did she know, why on earth would she care, that both Margaret Thatcher and Julia Gillard are Librans?

Does she think it has any meaning whatsoever, even on the level of factoid gibberish?

Is this the sub-text to all the Devine's commentary on climate science?

Now that's an agenda ...

What's worse on a Sunday? A hearty dose of Sydney Anglicans or a tablespoon of cod liver oil and the IPA's Chris Berg?

2012-01-15T09:04:00.010+11:00

(Above: A Sydney Anglican cartoon found here).

For a treat the pond planned to spend a little Sunday time with the Sydney Anglicans, but it seems that the silly secularists are at it again, ruining things, and the result is an important mission statement ...

2. Unmasking the lies of secularism

‘When God rules, humanity flourishes.’ So Peter Jensen summarised Genesis 2. Noting the false promises of ‘freedom’ trumpeted by contemporary secularism Peter commented, ‘Secular ideology is an attack on humanity and our flourishing.

Secularism attacks the flourishing of Sydney Anglicans, and is an attack on humanity? And that's the message of Genesis 2? Adam and Eve, and nakedness is no shame?

On the fourth day, God created stars, to divide the light from the darkness. He was almost finished when He looked at His cell phone and realized that it was almost nine-thirty.
“Fuck,” He said. “Kate’s going to kill me.” (here)

Is that the same as keeping women out of power in the church? Because a rib's only a rib? And standing idly by in Africa while attacks on gays flourish? Because they're the wrong bones?

What to do, what to do?

'We must out-think, out-love and out-live our secular contemporaries.’ (A cracking inspiration)

What, like Mother Teresa outliving Christopher Hitchens? Sydney Anglicans won't be happy until retirement homes are full of worshippers who outlived the secularists because of a healthy fruit and vegetable diet?

But shouldn't they be eager to head off to paradise licketty split? Is out-living the secularists a way of avoiding death, and dodging a meeting with god in paradise for all eternity? Shame on them, and their anti-god ways ...

Oh you mean it's 'out-live' in the other sense? Sydney Anglicans are going to show secularists how to live, with sex, drugs, rock and roll, and wild party times, with cocktail mixing 101 instead of evangelical theology classes?

Pull the other one ...

Never mind, it seems that if the secularists of Sydney are too tough a set of walnuts to crack, the thing to do is to head off overseas on an international gig:

In a world of gospel need, from Sydney to Slovenia, are we as Sydney evangelicals too Sydney-centric? (Open doors - will we walk through?)

Sydney Anglicans rulez, and with a bit of luck, the whole tribe might just pack up and head off to Slovenia ...

Meanwhile, on another planet, the pond was astonished to read Chris Berg's all-out assault on his commentariat colleagues in Repeat after me: all tyranny is evil and wrong.

There is a long history of right-wing intellectuals apologising for the worst excesses of so-called capitalist democracies. And it's always been less about the people they've venerated, and more about the intellectuals themselves: their deep, unshakable dislike of inner urban elites, and their belief that Western war-making results in wondrous democratic make-overs.

Astonishingly Berg assaults war criminals George W. Bush and Tony Blair, moans about the uselessness of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (where violence continues to bloom), and attacks the worst excesses of consumerist indulgence, and in particular the willingness of the commentariat to encourage an indulgence in tobacco and alcohol and gambling, especially by way of mind-numbing, ruinous poker machines, as opiates for the people, while at the very same time said commentariat refuse to accept the current state of climate science and the need to do something about it.

It seems Berg is particularly affronted by the cult worship of billionaires like Rupert Murdoch.

Perhaps many Western writers are so desperate to blame communism for the world's problems that they're willing to forgive, even support, non-communist tyranny. And News of the World ...

Hang on, hang on, the telegram boy has just arrived at the front door with an urgent message.

What's that?

Berg will be attacking the right wing in next week's column - yet to be written - and these quotes have been made up by some malicious person wanting to mislead the pond.

It seems this week's column is an easy attack on the left wing, involving cheap out of context shots at worshippers of North Korea, socialists like Charlie Chaplin, and so on and so forth and such like ...

Now repeat after me, all tyranny is evil and wrong, except when it comes to giant multi-nationals peddling tobacco, grog and gaming, and digging up third world countries and fucking them over. That's merely freedom of choice and sound business ...

If you want more on the IPA and smoking, why not head off to Media Watch: Smoking Out The Spin, and if you want more about the contradictions of the ABC in relation to the IPA, why not head off here, and if you want more about the IPA in relation to climate science why not head off here.

Now it might be just that Chris Berg is a patsy and a stooge, who believes it's only fair tobacco companies should be able to kill people in the style of a North Korean dictator, but remember it's easier to adopt tricky North Korean tactics if you provide a smokescreen by writing columns deploring tricky North Korean tactics ...

And what better way to spread the word than to take over that socialist arm of government, the ABC, and use that to peddle your propaganda, propaganda which bears a distinct methodology and heritage, as if adapted from communist techniques ...

(more here).

Ah you have to thank the long absent lord for Sunday. Such a mellow time for meaningful reflection, and the cultivation of self-awareness ...

(Below: now make sure you get your IPA T-shirt and wear it with pride. Alternative wording - George W. Bush, open the gate to peace by ending US international colonial military adventurism, Barack Obama tear down Guantanamo Bay - will be available thanks to the even-handed attitude of the IPA, but has been held up at the printers, and orders should be filled by the IPA no later than 2060).

Cardinal Pell, and a review of the year for rapturists ...

2012-01-14T16:17:00.008+11:00

It's about time to get things underway in the new year with a bloody good frock.

I mean carry on about greed all you like, but where's the harm wearing a bloody good frock while you're doing it?

Catching up on the week old homilies of Cardinal George Pell for the Sunday Terror reminded the pond that splendid frocks and an absence of greed go together like a horse and cart with a fringe on top:

The ancient teachings against greed are also endorsed by Christians, and everyone suffers when these lessons are ignored. (2011).

But please, whatever you do, don't fret about the astonishing loot assembled for tourists to marvel at in Vatican City.

As for Cardinal Pell's splendid work on climate science, it doesn't seem to have fixed the climate:

The Catholic bishops of Australia reported into Rome on their activities and were commended for their hard and consistent work in a climate that is hostile to regular worship.

So it's the climate that's hostile. And where would we all be without a dose of insufferable condescending piety of the gloating kind?

The noisy atheists of previous years were quieter and Christopher Hitchens died to meet his Maker, accompanied by the prayers of the Sisters of Mother Teresa of Calcutta whom he had attacked.

Well played Mother Teresa, you outlasted the noise-maker, and now he's writhing in hell for his noisiness. Of course, precise evidence that Hitchens went off to meet his Maker, and that the prayers of Mother Teresa made a sod of difference are still travelling to set ...

If only Hitchens had got up to speed on Pell's exemplary scientific refutation of climate science, because the noisy Catholics babbling on about science get noisier every year, and all they seem to offer as an alternative theory is an imaginary friend (Cardinal Pell needs to practise what he preaches on climate change).

As for the dismal art of economics, it turns out that Pell is dab hand at art as well as science, up there with Friedrich Hayek:

We hope this is a good omen for the New Year, but the world wide economic scene has no equivalent to our new pace bowlers, as nearly everyone acknowledges that the economy across Europe will be worse in 2012. The situation there and in U.S.A. is worse than ours and it is unlikely that all the countries in the euro zone will be there in twelve months time. We can only hope that this Western sickness does not provoke a massive Chinese hiccup.

Don't you just love the common touch of pace bowlers as a metaphor for what's lacking in the European economy?

But that's nothing up against Western sickness provoking a massive hiccup for the Chinese.

Not that we should really worry, because greed is bad, and so a hiccup might be good. Seeing as how Apple has been naughty in its greediness (Apple opens factory doors to rights monitors), as have plenty of others, but it's Europe that cops the righteous wrath of the Pellist Standard and Poors.

Hang on, hang on, this just in. We shouldn't be following Hayek, we should be following B. A. Santamaria:

B.A. Santamaria was a Labor man from Melbourne, who split from that party in 1955. By the time of his death in 1998 he was to the left of both major parties on economics as he was strongly opposed to economic rationalism. While he might have been surprised by First World prosperity and the improved living standards everywhere except in some parts of Africa which the market produced, he was right on the damage caused by excessive debt.

Indeed. And it wasn't just excessive debt. Santamaria thought that pro-market forces and working mothers had led to the breakdown of the family unit, and thought that credit creation and the private ownership of major banking institutions were fundamentally deleterious to good order and government.

Ye ancient cats and barking mad dogs, he was a Catholic maddie of the first water, of a European national conservative kind (or so his wiki tells us here). And we know where that leads you ... back to the gold standard and the nineteen twenties.

Not to worry Pellism is wondrous at embracing contradictions. Isn't it grand to read anti-market heretics doing their thing, scolding markets for being greedy and usurious, and at the same time scolding markets for failing to grow and be profitable and so causing hiccups, or perhaps even flu.

So where are we heading?

Because of our minerals and wise economic management, Australia's situation is not too bad, but it is difficult to see the U.S.A. or Europe ever diminishing their debts significantly, while present levels of expenditure are maintained. The time of reckoning is near.

Wise economic management? Thank heaven for John Howard and Peter Costello, and how fortunate Tony Abbott has been running the economy these last few years.

Second thoughts, eek, we're all doomed, the end is nigh, the time of reckoning is near, the four horsemen of the apocalypse gallop towards us, as they've been galloping towards us for some two thousand years, and the only thing that will save us as the world economy goes down the gurgler is the beginning of the rapture.

(more here).

Thank the long absent lord the Catholic church will auction off most of their high on the hill Aussie real estate, a swag of Vatican city treasures, and Cardinal Pell's frock collection to help the poor and needy, and so carry out Christ's injunction:

Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. (KJV Matthew 19:21)

What an optimistic gherkin he was.

Never mind, seeing it's the year in review, how are things going in the church?

A new translation of the English prayers of Mass was introduced around the world to little opposition, while attendances at the Christmas Masses were as high as ever.

Hmm, it must be that the Xmas masses are different to the average masses, according to a US survey back in October 2011:

The survey finds it (attending mass) has declined from 44% attending at least once a week in 1987 to 31% in 2011, while those who attend less than monthly rose from 26% to 47%.

And as for core beliefs?

40% say you can be a good Catholic without believing that in Mass, the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Christ — a core doctrine of Catholicism. (here)

Oh no, the cannibals are revolting.

Still, there's time for some quiet pride in what was accomplished in the world of Catholicism in 2011:

The church scene was quieter than the world economy.

At last a hint of a fact, though whether it should be a matter for boasting will only be an issue for those interested in a comparison of church attendance trends in the UK and Australia:

... one might say that those churches that depend on cultural heritage as the basis of attendance, such as the Church of England and Catholics, are declining rapidly.

Could Christopher Hitchens have the last laugh on Mother Teresa?

I suppose Cardinal Pell is writing for the Sunday Terror, so we shouldn't expect substance or depth or any particular actual insight, of the kind you can find in Simon Rich's Center of the Universe in The New Yorker (outside the paywall).

Turns out in Rich's story that, during his seven day stint making the universe and the world, god has trouble with his girlfriend Kate, and he disrespects her work in retail, and she gets narky, and they have to work very hard at the relationship, what with god spending all his time at work, and it turns out that the difficulties in the relationship explains why quality control for the earth product is a bit like quality control for Apple products in China:

“You know what I kind of want to do right now?” Kate said. God tensed up.
“What?”
“See a movie,” she said.
And God laughed, because it was exactly what He wanted to do.
They decided to see “The Muppets,” because they had heard that it was good. They had a great time, and when it was over God paid for a cab so they wouldn’t have to wait all night for the L train.
“I love you,” Kate said, as she nodded off in the back seat. “I love you so much.”
“I love you, too,” God said.
And both of them saw that it was good.
On the seventh day, God quit His job. He never finished the earth.

Bloody women. No wonder the Catholic church refuses to allow them into positions of power.

Now let's put on a frock and party like it's nineteen ninety nine ...

On the topic of the Punch, the Drum and the shrill bleating of partisan sheep ...

2012-01-14T06:55:00.009+11:00

(Above: from the days when The Punch was the Melbourne Punch).

At last we have a definitive date for the decline and downfall of Julia Gillard.

... if February brings no significant improvement for the Government or Gillard, then the Ides of March may beckon for the PM.

The good old Idus Marti, 15th day of March. The day that big Julie copped a stabbing, and as we know we live in Shakesepherian times - thanks to Elizabeth Farrelly - and as the Labor party is steeped in awareness of historical and theatrical traditions - keeping the script under the pillow - the definitive date is now set by a Murdoch hack.

Said Murdoch hack is Simon Benson, and he weaves a fine golden tale of treachery and woe out of a dinner between Robert McClelland and former dear leader Kevin, because they got together in a very fancy restaurant, and everyone just loved the Ruddster, and like a shark needs to keep swimming, the Ruddster is on the move.

Yes Benson in PM beware former foes dining in fancy restaurants is carrying out the cryptic instruction embedded in the title of the British movie We Need to Talk About Kevin, the profound prophetic insight of its title first revealed in Lionel Shriver's novel, curiously and prophetically titled ... We Need to Talk About Kevin.

That's all anybody does these days, talk about Kevin, which must be a relief, because it means Kevin isn't the only one to keep on talking about Kevin.

And it was only on the 17th October last year that Christian Kerr announced to Phillip Adams, deep in man love for Kevin Rudd, that we were in the final days of the Gillard government. At last we're shifting from the final months - barring February - to the final days!

And yet what's this? Is Benson having doubts?

The problem for Rudd is that there is no consensus among even his supporters about what to do, when and how to actually achieve a change. And there is still entrenched opposition to the idea of his return among many senior MPs.

What a disappointment. To read the whole gossipy gossamer web of intrigue and arrive at this penultimate par. A fancy conspiracy unravelled in a few cruel sentences.

Will the man love of Phillip Adams ever triumph, not that there's anything wrong with man love ...

Lordy, speaking of man love, who'd ever have guessed it. Tony Abbott was right three years ago, and he's still right, and he'll be right in the future, perhaps until the twelfth of never ...

Well, here's a pond prediction. Gillard might well be in a spot of bother this year, but if you rely on the hacks at News Ltd to call it right as to date and detail, you could be waiting a very long time, as they search through the runes and the entrails and the tea leaves.

You might recall it was in the Herald - courtesy Rudd's secret polling on his leadership - that the wheels began to fall off the Rudd machine.

But wait, there's an even better guide, what the pond calls the Latham Principle (or Factor if you will):

MARK LATHAM, FORMER LABOR LEADER (excerpt from Sky News National): Any party that made me leader could do anything in the future. (Richos big scoop).

But is there anything that makes March and its ides more or less likely than all the pundit predictions that littered the second half of last year as they fell by the wayside?

Who knows, but you certainly get more substance from a meal of rice bubbles than you do from munching on Simon Benson's contradictory speculations ...

Meanwhile, it being Saturday, and having punched up the punch drunk ramblings that are a routine feature of The Punch, what better time than to maintain the rage by helping to drum up a din about The Drum.

The movement began to gain momentum when an outraged blogger drew attention to the inordinate number of gherkin politicians who'd strutted their stuff on The Drum, which all too frequently acts like a paid political advertisement site.

By golly, what a list of names it is, and the conclusion?

All these elected officials, former or current, have been published on the Drum. Why? What contribution can they make that’s new and relevant? They bring us no new facts, no insight – just the opinion of one side of politics, which we already know. These people don’t need the ABC as an outlet to get their message across. Their message is already articulated. There is nothing they can say that could possibly make us better-informed or more understanding of issues. All we get is an obvious statement of the party line. (Beating the Drum)

Citizen Cam was outraged in particular by a piece by Peter Reith:

So we have a former LIBERAL minister, saying that the government should follow LIBERAL policies and that everything that’s wrong is the government’s fault.

And to prove he was being even-handed, he took a swipe at the Ruddster:

So we have the Foreign Minister telling us that Australia’s government is engaging with the parties in the Middle East and trying to find a solution? Gosh, is it? Surely the Australian Foreign Minister wouldn’t be saying the Australian government has a good foreign policy? Wow! What were the odds?

Citizen Cam also took exception to Bob Ellis - who wouldn't - and the assorted bunch of no hopers and panel beaters with an agenda that regularly turn up, most important amongst this motley lot columnists from the Institute of Public Affairs offering cheap copy.

For the record, the IPA launders money from big business - unrevealed and unaccounted - in the quest to peddle the views of big tobacco, climate change sceptics, and sundry other themes too bold for the sponsors to adopt publicly themselves (and there's more here in the wiki on this).

It's one of those bold brave new libertarian, free thinking machines that just can't quite manage to be free and informative about its financing and its internal mechanisms ...

The ABC and the IPA seem to have reached an understanding that the broadcaster will give them a voice every opportunity it gets, either in print on the Drum website or on the eponymous TV panel discussion program. IPA regulars Chris Berg and Tim Wilson, and their spiritual, if not literal, colleagues Tom Switzer and James Paterson are constantly bombarding us with either a line from the conservative cliché book or, more commonly, a conspiracy theory that defies logic and follows the general IPA view that the government is an evil Stalinist monster.

Now you might think Citizen Cam is exaggerating, but on an almost daily basis, the Drum proves his point. Take this recent effort from Chris Berg, What's wrong with 'no'?, which sent the punters into a commenting frenzy (over four hundred), and which concluded thusly:

There's nothing wrong with no. Abbott just needs to say it more often.

It was an ever so cute flip on the noalition routine of the naysayers, and a clue to Berg's usual routine perverse style, a contrarianism, which somehow strangely always ends up conforming to the IPA line on everything. Kind of the contrarian Claytons you drink when you don't really want a contrarian drink ...

In particular, Berg wanted Abbott to say yes to the right to importers to import, without having to prove they're selling in Australia below cost, because ... well because dumping is a damn good thing. Oh and Abbott should say yes to the right for Chinese companies to buy up Australian farms around Australia, willy nilly, no doubt because selling off the country will give the Chinese people food security.

Of course he didn't quite frame it this way. Instead he proposed that Tony Abbott should say no to Jolly Joe Hockey and the National Party, and say no to Tony Abbott's very own set of policies ...

You see, you can never say no or neigh enough.

And in the process of criticising the right from the right, Berg manages to get in some standard pro forma IPA shots about climate change, carbon pricing and workplace reform ...

The result? The ABC's The Drum routinely now peddles outlier scribbling, and this translates - because of the ABC's cross-platform approach into every branch of its outlets - into Berg babbling on about Berg columns in The Drum in television, and you can also listen to Berg delivering expert opinions on radio, and Berg peddling IPA thoughts and notions in every nook and cranny of the ABC ... in a veritable Bergarama ... until you want to join Citizen Cam and shout I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more ...

Nothing is gained by the shrill bleating of partisan sheep, all baaing the same tune. It adds nothing to the debate, it adds nothing to our understanding of the issues, and it sure as hell adds nothing to the level of public discourse in this country.

Put it another way, as we head off to our favourite collection of koans for a little relief:

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?" (here)

It's beyond time to empty The Drum which doesn't have the money to do its job well - contrast the work on view in The New York Review of Books, or The New Yorker - and so it settles for political giveaways and glad hands, and deadbeat lobbyists ...

... which in its new incarnation on ABC1 attracted 149,000 viewers in the 6 pm slot on its first night. May the ratings continue to slide, and may people continue to ...

Miranda Devine, and sundry acts of whale, shark and NBN bashing ...

2012-01-13T06:41:00.010+11:00

(Above: Reservoir Dogs and the ear removal scene).

For dental torture the pond always recommends viewers look no further than Marathon Man - why we even feature Larry in our banner.

For genuine sicko perverted disgusting torture of the most out there kind, see Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

Of course back in the day Miranda the Devine loved the sicko whipping and the SM and the blood, as she kindly explained in Critics fail to crucify Jesus again, lashing and bashing the dissidents for their wicked response to that uplifting, pious show. Get your thrills where you find them ...

First, the movie was slammed as anti-Semitic. Then, after people saw the movie for themselves, the anti-Semitic line became difficult to sustain, unless one were to damn all Christianity. Then it was too violent (from critics who appreciate the violence of a Tarantino film).

You see, nothing wrong with splattering blood, if it's in a good cause.

But what's this? Has the Devine lost her taste for tickle and gore? Is it time for her and the commentariat to harden the fuck up or what?

Here's a distressed Miranda the Devine forced to leave the cinema, as reported in Iron Lady's leaden premise:

The last movie I walked out of was a Reservoir Dogs video, during the dental torture scene. But I was pregnant at the time and squeamish.

Dental torture?

This time it was Iron Lady, though I stayed too long.

It turns out that the Devine wanted a worshipful, heroic movie, perhaps more along the lines of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, a sure fire way to upset the luvvies, and embarrass and reproach the left for their wicked ways ...

Meanwhile, bizarrely, the Devine yesterday featured the scribbles of her father in Quadrant (Flashback: the origins of the Green rot) to expose the source of the green rot, and naturally joined in the whale bashing (Bob's heroes should catch next whale home), along with expert whale basher Paul Sheehan (Eco pirates deserve a long haul, not a free trip home).

Oh it was a bloody day of flensing, but by the end of it, the world had been made safe for the sperm oil and whalebone corset trade, and scientific research and whale meat nosh ups ...

And yet blow the pond down, what's the featured splash in the Daily Terror today?

"My five-year-old daughter was in tears. It was horrible, with this guy beating the shark to death with a long metal pole," one of the witnesses, who asked not to be named, said yesterday.

"There were dozens of people there and people were pleading with the men to stop it, but they just killed it in front of everyone." (here)

Frank Devine would be rolling in his grave, at all the greenie blather about the fines, and the jail sentences and quoting a department of primary industries spokesperson about how ignorance of the shark's species is no excuse.

Let's face it, all the man wanted was a little flake with his chips, and okay it might have been a protected species, but where's the harm in culling, unless of course you're part of the greenie rot that's ruining this country. As if this land will ever be great, until we've chopped down the very last tree, and killed off all the sharks, the snakes and mammalian rivals.

Funny how it's hard to deal with the death of a creature up close, but closing the mind to the death of whales is easy peasy.

Was it only a couple of days ago the Daily Terror was explaining how sharks were dangerous predators, intent on robbing Australians of Tony Abbott's glorious prime ministership? How times change when the greenies take over editorial ...

Come on Miranda, show the rage, do the right thing, resign from the wretched hand-wringing greenie rag this instant!

Meanwhile, can we just offer a technical correction to Piers 'AC/DC' Akerman's vital piece We all pay the penalties for a casual attitude to work reality.

Judging by Akker Dakker's physique - which seems a testament to a fine expense account, or perhaps a fine pay cheque for scribbling foaming columns of fury, which allows for a lifestyle involving nosh ups in quality eateries - shouldn't the header have read We all pay the penalties for restaurant penalty rates, but why should I keep on paying even more for my nosh ups when the peasants can get fast takeaway food any day of the week?

Meanwhile, The Australian's anonymous editorialist maintains the NBN rage:

No link, if you must embrace the counter-revolutionary spirit, it's best to do it by googling the text (okay, the anon edit is free access, but why not practice on ways to evade the paywall?)

It seems as good a time as any to report on the pond's progress into the twenty first century, which saw the installation of Apple TV as a streaming device. The result was an ability to sit in the lounge and watch a streamed image as good as DVD on a sixty inch screen. The sound wasn't up to the mark, but a firmware hack and a streaming of the original mkv file will fix that.

The side-benefit? We watched an indie flick Margin Call, written and directed by J. C. Chandor, and what a well written, directed and performed drama it was, as a group of employees go about the business of dealing with their firm's financial collapse.

Agreed, it was alarming leftist propaganda, because somehow it thought financiers might be a tad short in the ethics department, except when burying their pets, and it had no advice to offer on the matter of whales, except the fine sight of a whale financial institution copping a flensing, but still it was good fun and very well made ...

Its streaming was more a technical experiment than anything naughty - we also ran some 700 mb and 1.4 gb files, and it was surprising how well a H264 file held up on a big screen. It was quite distracting to see Paul Newman and the Hanson brothers go around again in George Roy Hill's great ice hockey comedy Slap Shot - transcoded from the pond's DVD copy - and we stopped technical experiments to watch the Charlestown Chiefs do their thing ... while the bouffant hair styles are amazingly quaint, the movie held up quite well.

More to the point for the movie industry, the future had at last arrived in the lounge room for the pond. If movies can be streamed within the house, then they can be streamed to the house, especially with benefit of NBN.

So why does The Australian and the rest of the Murdoch press in Australia maintain the NBN rage?

Do they think that technology is there to be defeated, resisted, deflected, so that the old business of territorial restrictions, windows and such like can be maintained - by vigilant lawyers - for all eternity? Do they somehow think this will assist the likes of Fox News and Foxtel and Twentieth Century Fox going forward?

Do they think it's only about movies, newspapers, and music? And this is a luxury we can do without, and anyone who thinks differently should be sent out into the snow, Sparta-style?

Do they think putting the intertubes infrastructure into private hands will ensure that the sheep can be clipped in the way they're shorn each time they hop into a car and head out on to a motorway?

Do they think having a decent broadband infrastructure is pointless? In much the same way as flooding the entire continent with copper cable was completely useless, and retrograde, back in the old days when no one blanched at words like infrastructure and nation building, and Ming the Merciless was at the head of the nation building pack?

Who knows, but beneath all the allegedly rational arguments against the NBN, there is a deeply irrational fear and a failure to adjust.

It's old news that Google and the browsers have already got together to make sure that the provisions of SOPA can be circumvented, if need be (Stay on top of the fight against SOPA/PIPA with these tools). And it's even older news that the old media is fighting a rearguard action against broadband that it will inevitably lose ...

So here's the thing. The pond understands the need to support suppliers of product. That's why we subscribe to magazines, that's why we'll keep heading off to rent DVDs.

But equally the pond is happy to boycott suppliers of drivel, maintainers of rage, and natterers who love negativity, which is why hell will freeze over before a shekel heads the way of the NBN- denying Murdoch press ...

(Below: Slap Shot, a movie featuring shocking dental torture).

Dr. Richard Stanton, Elizabeth Farrelly, and beware cognitive hazards ahead ...

2012-01-12T06:48:00.011+11:00

(Above: Warning signs found on Flickr here, and Socratic dialogue sign here).

It seems about the right time to do a rant about the relentless ambulance chasing of the seven o'clock news service delivered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in imitation of commercial rivals.

It's not just lawyers who chase ambulances to fill in a voyeuristic minute or two, and the pond is heartily sick of the parochialism and simple-minded way the news service routinely goes about its business.

It doesn't have to be this way - cf SBS, the PBS Newshour, and the BBC - how nice to have the BBC on Radio National rather than Radio National - but the ABC is now such a flatulent, failing organisation that the only way to access alternative news within the bowels of the beast is to switch on the 24 channel at certain times when international correspondents are given an outing.

But where's the joy in ambulance chasing the ambulance chasers?

Better just to say 'bah humbug' and move on, and so we've said farewell to the seven o'clock news this year.

So rant done and dusted, this morning it's back to the usual beat, looking at the opinion makers making opinion, and once again a truth becomes a truism, which is that invariably the opinions expressed reveal more about the opinion soothsayers than about their subjects.

Take this bizarre effort by Dr Richard Stanton on the subject of Tony Abbott, in Fleet-footed Abbott needs to be a playmaker:

There's a big space out there to be filled by a polymorphic heterophil who can play at five-eighth.

Say what? What's more confusing to the world? The bum-sniffing rugby metaphor or the polymorphic heterophil?

Well in case you can't get enough of polymorphic heterophil, here's another go:

This is why Malcolm Turnbull looked attractive. He gave the appearance of being polymorphic and heterophylic when, in reality, he may be mildly heterophylic but he was no more polymorphic than Abbott. Which is why Turnbull has been unable, in reality, to transform his monomorphic success in business and banking into politics.

There's more 'hics' and 'lics' in that lot than in a shearer after she's downed a bottle of Beenleigh rum.

Can't get enough of it? Do go on Dr. Richard:

We looked at Kevin Rudd through a similarly optimistic lens. As prime minister, Rudd gave a public appearance of being a polymorphic heterophil but history illustrates that the image was powder-coated in spin.

Naturally the tendency is to look at the byline for the piece, and at once the pond discovered that Dr Richard teaches political communication at the University of Sydney, with a twitter tag @silvermullet.

Why do academics have to present such easy caricatures and stereotypes of the academic way with words and concepts? it's like shooting fish in a homophilous barrel where the only target is monomorphic thought leadership ...

Yes, Dr Richard is big on thought leadership, and on rugby metaphors:

Where Abbott fails is in his capacity to accumulate two additional characteristics that could turn him into an electable polymorphic heterophil.

Yep, you and the drover's dog might well think that Abbott is well on the way to winning the next election, but Dr Richard thinks he's dangerously short of a hearty dose of heterophilia.

No wonder Edd Aragon enjoyed illustrating the piece with a swirl of gibberish:

Well played Edd. Amazingly Dr Richard thinks Malcolm Fraser was big on thought leadership because he spoke of the need for diversity, and that thought leadership was lost when Bob Hawke and Paul Keating turned up on the Treasury benches ... and so the Nareen years endured by Australia somehow becomes the golden years.

Well truth to tell Dr Richard provides a valuable communication service, because he had the pond in stitches ... and we could have gone on quoting his piece until the cows came home, or at least until the copyright laws intervened, but why bother when you can hare off and admire it in its entirety yourself?

Just a pre-emptive warning: you'll learn a lot more about Dr Richard than you will about Tony Abbott and what he should do to gain power (apart from avoid being eaten by a shark) when you read the piece ...

But suddenly the pond was in the mood for political metaphor and craved some more, like caviare for breakfast, and who should oblige than Elizabeth Farrelly, ostensibly an expert in architecture, but this morning a movie reviewer in Wanted: leaders with principle and purpose, whether right or wrong.

Uh huh. It's more promotional puffery for Meryl Streep and the Iron Lady.

And what do we learn from the Iron Lady? Well it seems if you're a principled leadership lemming, stern of purpose, inflexible, unyielding and righteous, never mind if your policies might be right or wrong, or lead the herd off the cliff, just do it.

Yes it's a Nike slogan as a political philosophy.

Oh okay Dr Karl, the Lemmings Suicide Myth is a myth, but why should a myth stand in the way of lemmings and strong leadership? Like Margaret Thatcher:

It thrills me now, and it thrilled me then, how the mere fact of conviction put backbone into the democratic flab, rendering politics interesting. Imagine if we had some here. Anyone, anyone?

Could someone please clone Adolf Hitler or perhaps Mussolini from DNA for Ms Farrelly?

Oh dear, another penny for the Godwin's Law swear jar, but really what's to be made of this kind of nonsense?

Thatcher was smart, muscular, intellectually honest and hugely brave, even when she was also hugely wrong.
And she was hugely wrong. To shrink the whole of Britain into London, then remodel that vast relocated wealth into something as ugly and brittle as Canary Wharf was bad policy, pure and simple. To require the selling of council flats was also wrong, in social as well as urban terms.
Yet she changed history.

Arise Sir Tony Blair. Sure you might have participated in a wretched colonial venture in Iraq, and set Britain on the path to financial ruin, but you surely changed history, and that's more than enough.

Petty minded people might mutter about a war criminal's finances - Blair Inc's 'baffling' increase in earnings - but you changed history, and that's more than enough. Long may you go on changing and fucking up history, because that's more than enough ...

But hang on, let's keep that metaphor running:

Yet she changed history. You might argue that if it had not been her it would have been someone else. But it was her. A grocer's daughter from Grantham, revolutionising not just her own party but Labour. Thatcher shifted the ground. Without her, Blair would have been unthinkable. Without her, Britain would have been Portugal. Thatcher paid the price.

Oh the depth of the thinking. Let's give that another run:

Yet he changed history. You might argue that if it had not been him it would have been someone else. But it was him. A vegetarian son of a beekeeping farmer from Ranshofen, revolutionising not just his very own party, but Germany itself. Hitler shifted the ground. Without him, Churchill would have been unthinkable. Without him, Germany would have been Soviet Russia. Hitler paid the price.

Uh huh. Well that might be what passes for international historical insight, but let's apply it to the domestic scene:

We have no such leaders here. They pop up, we behead them like weeds. Julia Gillard has her Iron Lady rep and I suppose she has her principles - mainly ambition and survival. On the toothless carbon tax, and the mining tax, she talks brave, cops the flak, but she does not actually do the deed.

Do the deed? Uh oh, metaphor alert, fresh metaphor approaching, and coming up fast:

Gillard suggests more farce than tragedy - Shampoo, perhaps? - but if it's Shakespeare we're talking, she's more Macbeth than Lear.

Oh that's so witty, so clever. Tim Mathieson played by Warren Beatty ...

But not Lear? How passing strange. Why the resemblance is most striking, seeing as how it's about a king dividing up his estate, and there's Bill Shorten and Mark Arbib and the illusory polymorphic heterophil Kevin Rudd playing the three daughters waiting to squabble over the spoils.

But do go on:

This ambition-driven knifing of a loved mentor and colleague casts Kevin Rudd as both the murdered Duncan and Banquo's vengeful ghost.

Gillard has no teacup, but she has red hands. We are her witches, prophesying and catalysing her fate, and Alan Jones is her (cane) toad, first into the pot.

Thank the dear absent lord Farrelly isn't a theatre director.

So where have we arrived, after passing through rugby, verbiage, and Lady Macbeth?

Well Dr Richard scores the prize for gobbledegook, and the first cane toad into the witches' pot is Elizabeth Farrelly, for hero worship of the Thomas Carlyle kind, and such a loose way with metaphor that no amount of metaphorical hand rubbing could remove the metaphorical blood ...

Kevin Rudd as a loved mentor? Margaret Thatcher right or wrong? Is this some kind of dagger or abject gibberish which I see before me? (Litigation lawyers, please note: at no point has the pond drawn a parallel between Elizabeth Farrelly and Unity Mitford and Unity's thrill at seeing power in motion).

For this Fairfax expects people to shell out shekels and kill forests?

Please could someone pass the pond a copy of the documentary Page One, about the New York Times, where people take words and the business of words seriously ...

Oh dear, does this mean it's back to the ambulance chasing?

No way, Mark Scott, no way ...

(Below: John Singer Sargent's portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. Please note the red hair. Julia Gillard and Lady Macbeth? Rangas, gingers and carrot tops together? Affirmative. Metaphorical case and insights firmly closed!)

Teresa Gambaro, and see how the sharks circle such a swell smeller ...

2012-01-11T06:32:00.006+11:00

(Above: read all about it here. Oh yes, there's a "sharks interactive" featuring hot spots, tips to avoid an attack, stories of survival, and the three deadliest sharks of all, not including News Ltd journalists and members of the commentariat).

And behind the headline, what have we learned?

(a) respect for the political awareness and insight of Australian sharks continues to grow;

(b) nothing happens in Australia in January;

(c) AAP and the Australian media conspire to revive the Golden Eggbeater award for reporting of coincidences.

(d) where would the Murdoch press be without sharks and crocodiles, and possibly Lara Bingle?

The pond is now in a position to report that moments after the pond drove through south western Sydney a drive-by shooting took place. Now you might retort that as drive-by shootings are scheduled to take place daily this means absolutely nothing, but likely that means you're the sort of cynic who suggests with a sly, hollow laugh that can find politicians and sharks and reporters in the ocean any day of the week.

Meanwhile, the pond is ecstatic that the coalition has discovered a new contender for the Sophie Mirabella hot seat, because sad to say, Mirabella has not been up to the job lately (perhaps she read Vexnews vexing Losing it: Sophie Mirabella gets a much-need holiday).

Step forward Teresa Gambaro, opposition spokeswoman on citizenship, and speak on the urgent need for wogs, spics, spivs, foreigners, outsiders, strangers, itinerants, boat people, bludgers, ne'er do well non Aussie noi nois, and such like to fit into Australian culture on issues such as health, hygiene and lifestyle:

"Without trying to be offensive, we are talking about hygiene and what is an acceptable norm in this country when you are working closely with other co-workers," Ms Gambaro told The Australian.

Without being offensive, we understand only too well how foreigners stink up the workplace with their armpits and their crotches and their pushy ways ...

She said practices such as wearing deodorant and not pushing in when lining up were "about teaching what are norms in Australia". "You hear reports of people using public transport (without deodorant) and I think Australian residents are guilty of this too," she said. "I think we all need to be mindful of our fellow traveller. Sometimes these things are not talked about because people find them offensive but if people are having difficulty getting a job, for instance, it may relate to their appearance and these things need to be taken into account." (eek, it's a link to The Australian, but we have to source the quote to its native home here).

Teresa Gambaro? She's from Queensland, don't you know, shopped direct to the public ...

Up until this very day, the pond confesses to having not the faintest clue about Gambaro, but we like the cut of her jib.

The sweet, heavily perfumed and powdered spokesperson was just doing her level best to help Scott Morrison kick the multicultural can along the road a little further:

Ms Gambaro's comments came a day after Coalition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison told The Australian temporary immigrants were not integrating into the broader Australian community. Mr Morrison said the government's multicultural strategy was failing because it was too obsessed with "symbolism" and government-funded English language courses were not teaching immigrants properly.

Indeed. For a start, none of them seem to have the first clue about the use of soaps, unguents, perfumes, and at a pinch, baby powders ... and not one has read the Song of Solomon!

Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;
your name is like perfume poured out.
No wonder the young women love you!

Yes men, it's okay to fragrance up, though if it's with Brut, the exit door is just to your right.

Ms. Gambaro was full of incisive plans:

... Ms Gambaro said cultural awareness training was desperately needed for immigrants to help them enjoy life in Australia more fully. "The detail of this has to be worked out -- whether it's included as part of a visa charge for certain industries or done through a labour-hire firm," she said, adding there were going to be problems as more workers arrived in Australia. "You are going to have a whole pile of people coming in," she said. "If you're a mining company you'll have a whole pile of people coming in from India or China or anywhere else you need to have socially skilled workers.

First up mate, forget that several thousand years of curry eating and exquisite Chinese cuisine, they make your farts smell kinda funny. Why not try a dead fly with lashings of dead horse? That'll get your farts fit for an Australian sitcom ...

Yep, the pond is standing by, ready to inculcate into foreigners the Australian conception of pong.

For some bizarre reason, the Oz report felt the need to note that in the last financial year some 90,120 457 temporary visas were granted (up there with the 113,725 visas issued for permanent skilled migration), thereby conflating Gambaro's comments with people turning up to work and an actual job, and compounding Gambaro's vision of the scum littering the street without a suds soap with gainfully employed folk where the HR people could take a view on bathing habits.

But never mind, the hapless Gambaro was soon caught up in a foul-smelling storm, and was soon forced into fetid swamp of apologies.

You could fill yourself full of Gambaro follow-ups:

MP Teresa Gambaro sorry for saying migrants don't know how to wear deodorant or queue

Skilled migrants need to be taught about hygiene, says Liberal Teresa Gambaro

Oh it brough Madhu Bhatia out of the closet in Migrant remarks on the nose (forced ad at end of link) and Jill Singer kicked in with Hysteria stinks to high heaven, and naturally Tory Shepherd gave Gambaro a left upper cut at The Punch in Using deodorant and other great Aussie traditions.

Naturally SBS chipped in, with Gambaro 'sorry' for offending migrants, digging up an Indian taxi driver who's meticulous about his cab's cleanliness, and who's forced to deal with late night dinki dis going the barf in the back ...

Oh there was idle chatter about the bathing habits of English folk, who are high on the list of 457s - as if there was something wrong with a bath a week and once a fortnight in winter - and lordy the story even reached the New Zealand Herald, MP says migrants should be taught to wear deodorant, where rumour has it that in the south island, a coating of kiwi oil will keep away the smells for a year ...

Dammit, even Warren Truss got into the act in Migrant comments earn MP a rebuke, as if somehow smelling of sheep dags was un-Australian ...

And all this fuss for Gambaro valiantly drawing attention to a growing crisis in the Australian way of life! And for doing her little bit to promote the use of perfumes and powders, as prescribed in the bible!

What she needs is a steadfast member of the commentariat to point out the usefulness of her insights. Perhaps Jacqueline Maley might come forward in the Sydney Morning Herald, given the skills and insight on view in Keep your cool to give tolerance a chance (forced ad at other end of link).

Ever vigilant, Maley is on hand to defend the Libra advertisement sending up trannies to promote its product amongst women.

It seems that sending up trannies shitless is perfectly fine, and certainly not offensive and homophobic - more a payback for The Adventures of Priscilla - but Gambaro has jumped the shark:

No one denies that bigotry exists, and that it is uncool. Also uncool are ill-considered statements by otherwise well-meaning people that nonetheless stereotype certain social groups (Teresa Gambaro, I'm looking at you).

Oh dear Teresa, it's looking bad. Why even the valiant Maley, ever ready to attack the war on Father's Day, which is just as bad as the war on Xmas and Sant sand the replacement of traditional Yuletide greetings with the anodyne 'Happy Holydays' has to draw the line somewhere, and you, Teresa Gambaro are the line.

Here's a thought Teresa. Next time you want to remark on people smelling, restrict yourself to trannies and all will be well with Mabey at least.

And yet, and yet. Here at the pond, we understand. We know you were really only continuing on a grand Liberal party tradition, which we can trace back to Ming the Merciless, and while your actual name and family status is a tad awkward, we were at once flung back to the grand days of They're a Weird Mob.

Here he is, Sir Robert Menzies himself, explaining why we need a homogenous society, in a YouTube history of the first thirty years of Australian television.

Happily Ming the Merciless starts off the clip - the rest of the clip is about Australian television, so nod off or switch off as you like, and who knows, the link might only be up and smelling sweetly for a short time ...

Roy Williams and yet another dose of atheist bashing by pesky, bolshie, outspoken, in your face, assertive, evangelising god botherers ...

2012-01-10T10:22:00.010+11:00

(Above: more Xkcd here).

The pond decided that this would be the year where idle provocations by stick-and-word wielding god botherers would be left alone ... to rest, along with mad dogs and Englishmen and conspiracy theorists, in the noonday sun.

On the Bear Grylls principle that if you spot a sleeping snake, you should leave it alone and it won't bother you, nor even offer you a juicy apple.

But dear sweet absent lord it's hard when - in a stray moment - you cop a serve like Roy Williams' Why God botherers bother.

Not that he ever answers the question why they bother to bother the pond when it's just a botheration, but you can see why the editors of The Punch bother. With comments heading to over the four hundred mark, the column's hit city - right up there with Barney Zwartz. It's an advertising nirvana, cheap controversy of the Punch-drunk kind ...

There's nothing like a Williams to get the Rikki-Tikki-Tavis going.

You hear many complaints nowadays about pesky, outspoken Christians. Across the West, a fashionable attitude has emerged: Beyond the doing of charitable works, and perhaps the soothing of the bereaved at funerals, “religion” should be an entirely private affair.

The so-called New Atheists are vocal advocates of this position. One of them, Michel Onfray, has admitted that his atheism “leaps to life when private belief becomes a public matter”. Onfray hates it “when in the name of a personal mental pathology we organise the world for others”.

Oh sweet Jesus, it's the vocal Xian Roy Williams shouting in The Punch at every and anyone who drops by about the way the New Atheists are vocal ...

But is it the new atheists or the newly enraged Xians who've ruined the Republican party and the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, and are presently ruining the United States on a daily basis?

And lordy lordy, lah de dah, is Williams a paranoid example of the breed, or what. You see, it's not just the new atheists, it's everyone who's out to get the Xians:

What the Right and the Left have in common is an ugly tendency to rebuke Christian spokespersons with whom they disagree. Rather than engaging with the substance of counter-arguments, their instinct is to dismiss them as irrelevant or illegitimate, purely because of their source.

Now in the old days this would have been dismissed as an argument of the purest tosh, a straw man argument which is purely drivel (especially in relation to the United States, where both right and left kow tow to the Xian vote).

Does Williams actually have any evidence of anyone failing to engage in the substance of counter-arguments, and dismissing arguments presented by Christians purely because of their source?

Purely? Has anyone noticed anyone going around town saying look, I hate to tell you this, but your argument is irrelevant and illegitimate, purely because you're a Christian?

Oh okay, maybe if Fred Nile is involved. But really what's wrong with dismissing anything Fred Nile says, purely because of its source? Or Pat Robertson, at least when he says god has told him who's going to be the next president, and then like a yah yah spoilsport, won't tell us what god told him. Hard to argue with that, or check up when the election takes place (here, with bonus video).

Speaking of straw men slippery slope arguments, the paranoid Williams likes to go the full hog:

Of course, there’s nothing new about this phenomenon. In 1170, Henry the Second famously denounced the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, as a “meddling [or turbulent] priest”. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union tried to silence the churches altogether.

Uh huh. But strange, no mention of Orwellian, or Godwin's Law, communist sub-section. Still, it's nice to see Stalin doing the hard yards. Let's not worry about the times the churches tried to silence the atheists and the secularists and the witches and the weirdos altogether ...

And Williams is a dab hand at cliches too:

In the West today, opposition to public Christianity is of a different sort. It is usually based upon ignorance of Christian history and doctrine, and a misunderstanding of one of the most basic of human rights. In Australia we enjoy freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

That's two cliches and a straw man argument, all in one noble sentence.

In Australia of course we enjoy the freedom to argue stupidly, and we know this will always lead to stupid arguments, but how is opposition to public Xianity usually based on ignorance of Xian history and doctrine, and a misunderstanding of human rights?

That's as fatuous as suggesting Xianity is forever forgetting the huge number of people outside its particular corporate tent, when we all know that Xians know that Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Confucians and such like are misled muppets ....

And where would we be without a martyrdom fantasy, of the kind that sends Islamics off to martyr heaven?

Most Christians who speak up for their faith do not do so in order to annoy or impress, still less (a few American televangelists aside) for reasons of worldly self-enrichment. The Bible denounces such people harshly.

Uh huh. Tell that one to Hillsong ... and its fellow traveller Peter Costello.

The real reasons why so many good Christians speak up – why some become ministers or missionaries or martyrs – are quite different.

Yes, they're doing it for you and me, for us, even if we don't want them to, and even if we tell them just to bugger off, ever so politely.

You see there's no brownie points in Stalin trying to suppress religion - it will bubble up like shale oil in sand - but equally there's no brownie points in attempting to convert people who don't want to be converted.

Why bother trying to turn an Xian to atheism if they're happy with an imaginary friend? And why see the need to hector and harass and convert atheists happy to accept there's no pie in the sky bye and bye ...

But no, never the simple life, because then comes the bible bashing. There's the peerless Jesus of Nazareth, and John 15:27, and Matthew 28:19 KJV, and Romans and Corinthians and Timothy and Hebrews and Peter and Paul and his second letter to the Corinthians:

Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.

Uh huh, some kind of kinky submissive thing going down.

So it's on to Ephesians, and then more of the message and more from John 5:22 and then an explanation of the meaning of the word 'Gospel' - as if no one's ever been made to sit in a state government school and hearan Xian rabbit on about the meaning of 'Gospel' and 'good news' - and then it's even more of the good boook via Acts 2:1-5, and oh for the love of sweet Jesus and the long absent lord will he never shut up, enough already of the bible bashing ...

Okay, okay, time out. Here's an upside view of god:

Oh and along the way you get a caveat, kind of standard operating procedure in these troubled times, because it turns out that, at least according to a Pew survey, atheists do tend to know more about religion than Xians (Why Do Atheists KNow More About religion?).

And right before these troubled times, it turns out Xians haven't been the victims, because for a very long time in western societies, they had the upper hand, and they let everyone know it, delivering a hell on earth while promising hell in the afterlife to anyone who disagreed:

Things changed, of course, once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. It’s impossible to deny that, ever since, evangelism has too often been conducted in a forcible and non-Biblical way.

Oh no Joe, say it ain't so ...

Even so, modern critics of religion tend to overstate their case when invoking this argument. Ever since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which entrenched the system of sovereign nation states, most armed conflicts have not been waged even notionally for purposes “religious”.

WTF? Well it's a relief to know that the civil war in Lebanon had nothing to do with the Christians, Sunnis and Shiites getting up each others noses 1975-90, and it's even more cheerful to understand at last that religion had nothing to do with the troubles in Ireland these last four centuries, and what a pleasant surprise to discover that any tensions in the middle East between the Arabs and the Israelis have absolutely nothing to do with religion, and how comforting to learn at last that the brutal division of Pakistan and India was utterly unrelated to religion, and surely it will greatly please the Somalis that their state is currently undisturbed by notions of religion ...

Got a few more hours? We could go on and on. What a tragic, ignorant, Eurocentric misunderstanding of world history since the treaty of Westphalia ...

Williams even tries to get the Crusades off the hook:

The Crusades, fought sporadically from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, are frequently held up as the archetypal example of violent Christian evangelism. Even that charge is true only in part, because the Crusades were fought for a combination of reasons – ethnic, dynastic, economic, political, historical and military.

Yes, but of course religion is always conflated with dynastic, economic, political, historical and military issues.

That's why the Pope, still even to this day, has an army on hand, even if it's only to keep the tourists out, because even as late as 1870 the Pope was fighting to retain the Papal States, and instructed his tiny army to put up a token resistance so he could say that Rome was being acquired by force and not consent ... (Italian nationalism and the end of the papal states).

The point about the Crusades is that the dominant reason, the dominant excuse, offered by the Crusaders, always started with religion, and the need to defeat the Muslim hordes, as even the most cursory reading of the history reveals, and which is signalled in the opening remarks of the Crusades wiki:

The Crusades were a series of religious expeditionary wars blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church, with the main goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem.

Sure there were crusaders who were bandits and louts out for loot, without care for Xian pieties, in much the same way as the Irish troubles provided a convenient cloak for IRA and Unionist gangsters and thieves, but a wave of the historical hand doesn't take religion out of the equation, or deny its pivotal role in such sordid affairs.

Why must Xians re-write history, deny what has happened, deny what is happening right now in the name of religion, whether Xian, Islamic or Calathumpian?

Never mind, Roy Williams insists on the right of Xians to evangelise, which presumably means he's also happy with the right of Scientologists, Islamists, Jews, atheists and Calathumpians to evangelise, so here's the deal.

Turn up at the pond's door in an evangelical frame of mind, and you'll be gravely informed that a nest of Satanists lurks inside, and unless you're off the property licketty split, you're certain to lose your eternal soul. Always works like a charm ...

And now to the godspell good news. It turns out that there is one godforsaken country that has no truck at all with the Christian religion, and yep, it's the good ol' United States of America:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. (Treaty of Tripoli, 1796-97)

Lordy lordy Uncle Sam as a secular state.

Now who's going to break the bad news to Roy Williams? And to the Republicans? And to fundamentalist Christians throughout the land?

Gosh darn it, those vocal atheists have done it again, and what's more, in the eighteenth century ...

(Below: another xkcd riff on god. Well we've got to spice up things somehow because if there is a god, surely she's a super geek).

Gerard Henderson, Mark Latham, and why the freedom to be silly should be severely curtailed ...

2012-01-09T15:48:00.008+11:00

(Above: the good old days of British seaside postcards, and the banning of Donald McGill here and here. Sure it's got nothing to do with what follows, but after what follows, you'll need a distraction).

The pond simply hasn't been able to shake the image of Gerard Henderson lost on a beach on Xmas day, maddened and enraged at the left-leaning ABC as he listened to a repeat of Yarnbombing: when Granny gets punk, then in outrage scribbling ABC's leftish drill still needs to be corrected by its deeds.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach

Listening to yarnbombing.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me. (here).

And the unrepentant Craft Cartel so gleeful about his suffering. Oh the inhumanity. Likely the image will haunt the pond until the end of time, or at least the twelfth of never, and that's a long time ...

So what's got up Prufrock's nose this week?

Well, it's entirely predictable, and it takes the shape of Eric Beecher, Crikey and Mark Latham.

Apparently no one at Crikey can be bothered actually reading Henderson's mighty missives and so was unaware he was on a grand poobah tour in November and December, suffering mightily at the hands of unions, and attending important events ("I have just returned from a series of meetings in Britain and the US", he announced on December 13th here, which is much more important and grand than the white rabbit admitting he was late for a very important date).

Instead naughty Crikey placed Henderson elsewhere, enjoying a night of taxpayer funded frivolity, without fact checking or email exchange, and the righteousness wrathfulness of a wronged Henderson is mighty to behold:

... Beecher's Crikey newsletter is not the embodiment of quality journalism. For starters, it does not engage a fact-checker. Indeed, the online publication actually proclaims the fact it publishes undocumented ''tips and rumours''. Crikey also, on occasions, publishes the home addresses of people who are targets of its occasional contributors.

Indeed. And no doubt victims of the press would love to have a column in the Fairfax press to complain about the lack of quality journalism, essential for a civilised society when some dumb bunny reporter sticks foot in door, and gets facts wrong, and proceeds to publish, because after all there aren't that many opportunities for your average punter to deliver payback by way of a grandee column ... or an expensive defamation action ...

And then there's that other irritant mosquito Mark Latham.

Henderson gets indignant that Latham got indignant about the Sunday Terror's reporting of his behaviour at a Camden swimming pool, and the news that Latham has lodged a complaint about the affair with the Press Council.

Uh huh. But who's to say the Terror was right and Latham was wrong, or vice versa for that matter? Was Henderson there? Who knows what happened, apart from the breathless 'he said, she said' accounts?

What's wrong with a private citizen lodging a complaint with the Press Council, the only feeble toothless tiger mechanism available to punters? (unless you count silence, lofty dismissals or unpublished letters to the editor).

That's when Henderson, in his usual inimitable way, jumps the shark:

These days Latham apparently believes he is a victim of media intrusion and that his utterances in public places should not be reported. If the Press Council upholds this complaint, media freedom will be severely curtailed

Oh what a pontificating goose. If Latham's complaint is upheld, media freedom will be severely curtailed?

What, in the way three adjudications in relation to errors reporting on the NBN has severely curtailed the freedom of Murdoch publications to carry on their crusade about the NBN, as they were forced to publish a correction on page 104 on Boxing Day (yes, the pond has already ranted about this, but after all the pond is just a daily rant).

Lost without a daily bout of nattering negativity about the NBN? Here you go:
Oops, it's got The Australian's fickle gold finger bar of doom, so back to Henderson:

Severely in the sense of unsparingly harsh and strict treatment? Because of whatever might be ruled in relation to a barney at a Sydney swimming pool?

Surely Henderson jests, but in reality it's just a bit of payback, allowing Henderson a chance to maintain the rage about Latham:

Latham is a columnist with The Spectator Australia and The Australian Financial Review and appears as a commentator on Sky News (part-owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd). In addition, Latham receives an indexed superannuation benefit of around $75,000 a year, due to his time as a federal parliamentarian. In other words, he is the beneficiary of taxpayer funding.

Yes indeed and every pensioner and politician in the country - right down to the local council - is the beneficiary of taxpayer funding, as is Henderson when he pockets a cheque from the ABC, so Henderson proceeds to mightier matters, pinging Latham for talking about affairs and flings in his private life, and then showing a double standard by turning to the Press Council:

And now Latham is pleading with the Press Council to prevent a newspaper from reporting a public exchange he had with a swimming coach.

Actually it's not a plea, or pleading, it's a complaint. If upheld, the Sunday Terror might have to run something at the bottom of page 104, and if it's dismissed, Latham will have missed out, but is there some sort of school rule that says that what happens on the field must stay on the field when it involves hacks, members of the commentariat, and ex-politicians of a dubious kind? Or that a public exchange is fair dibs? But what if it's been misreported ...

Naturally Latham's wretched behaviour in relation to a Sydney taxi-driver is also given a run for a par by Henderson (even allowing for the pond's fear and loathing of Sydney taxi-drivers, breaking arms is a step too far).

Lurking behind all this? Well Latham knows Henderson only too well, and knows how to tweak the beard of our prattling dull and tedious Prufrock.

Latham was in fine form, for example, in Latham's Henderson Watch V in that digital rag Crikey:

Gerard says the new divide in Australian politics is between inner-city-types “who regard themselves as morally superior beings intent on saving the planet” and suburban and regional families. But he has no association with any form of life west of Sussex Street.

The closest he came, I’m told, was driving along George Street one day, listening to morning radio. He was, as ever, mesmerised by 2BL’s Deborah Cameron and before he knew it, he was in Annandale. That really was a Deborah Cameron moment.

Ah well, Cameron is gone now, so Henderson won't have her to kick around anymore - guess he'll just have to keep getting shocked by Radio National - but Latham also delivered more substantial jokes, in relation to the funding of the Sydney Institute:

Hendo loves to lecture his targets about accountability, but the institute itself refuses to make its financial details public. We only know about Philip Morris, James Hardie and the Adlers because controversies surrounding these companies spilt over into the public arena and implicated the institute. Otherwise, when it comes to financial disclosure, the Hendi are a secret society.

And then Latham takes to quoting Henderson:

(Rupert Murdoch’s) contribution to journalism has been a positive one. On the present evidence, the reaction to the News of the World scandal is over the top.

At vast personal expense, the pond has googled that quote, and can assure you - in a fact checking way - that it does exist, and appears in a story headed Murdoch critics bury the lead in premature obituaries, which starts off with Henderson quoting ... 702 presenter Deborah Cameron ...

Isn't that quote a fine one for someone penning a piece about press standards?

On the present evidence? Would that include the latest postings of present evidence, including Murdoch 'angry' over Elton John settlement, and the level of fact-checking at work in Murdoch rags?

Mr MacKenzie, questioned about his views on accuracy, defended his record and said, "there is no certainty in journalism, in the same way there's no certainty in the legal world". He told the same inquiry in October that he checked the source of a story one time in his 13 years as editor of The Sun - for the Elton John story.
"I never did it again," Mr MacKenzie said in October. "Basically my view was that if it sounded right it was probably right and therefore we should lob it in."

Now there's fact-checking for you News Corp style. Now stand by for the wrath of Gerard ...

If a fact checker falls silent in the forest, does anyone hear?

Never mind Mark Latham and Crikey, there you go, it's okay, let's just lob it in, even as the story gets weirder (News Corp lawyer says Murdoch is 'serious', and weirder Sun's switch to Tories was 'group decision', says editor , and you can always rely on The Guardian for coverage of the ultra-weird beyond the valley of decent journalism Leveson inquiry).

Anyhoo, before we go over the top like Deborah Cameron, let's revert to Henderson, who in his penultimate par finds it in his heart to defend Andrew Bolt, and to make the most pathetic excuse yet, which is to imply that the judgement was based on inferences rather than factual matters, when front and centre, one of the key aspects of the Bolt judgement was that he got his facts wrong.

The HUN had the opportunity to appeal the decision, but the only appeals we hear are the appeals of fellow travellers like Henderson ...

As always punters are better served by reading the full judgement and making up their own minds (there's a pdf here), rather than reading a par of special pleading by Henderson ...

So where have we landed?

There is good reason for the media to act responsibly. But there is also good reason to preserve a free media, independent of excessive regulation. And there is no reason to listen to the likes of Beecher and Latham on what constitutes responsible media behaviour. It's just not bearable.

And there's good reason to have an effective, functional Press Council, unlike the current toothless tiger, to whom citizens might turn if they've been given the rough end of a pineapple, or if rogue newspapers of the Murdoch kind confuse crusades with reporting the facts of a matter.

Meanwhile, it has to be said. It's just not bearable to read Gerard Henderson pontificating about the likes of Beecher and Latham and the glories of the likes of Rupert Murdoch and the leftiness of the ABC on which he often appears ... from the shadowy battlements of the inner city elite Sydney Institute ...

Does it, or did it, really take funding from Philip Morris, purveyors of poison, and James Hardie, purveyors of poisonous asbestos to the world?

The conclusion? After reading this piece, it seems there's no current recourse for the average punter, since an appeal to the Press Council is somehow unsporting, and taking the likes of Andrew Bolt to court for getting it wrong is reprehensible, and anyway that action was reliant on a very specialised part of the law, and defamation actions are damned expensive, and don't have anything to do with misreporting of the NBN or other matters, and corrections might turn up on page 104 on Boxing Day, and letters to the editor might or might not get published, and the only solution seems to be getting a column in the Fairfax press, which allows the righteous to smote enemies mightily while making severely silly statements ... or start a blog and start ranting about said silly statements ...

Like this one:

If the Press Council upholds this complaint, media freedom will be severely curtailed.

Only a man who listens to Deb Cameron and ends up in Annandale could scribble that sort of nonsense ...

(Below: dear sweet absent indecent lord, here's to you Gerard.

Now that the AFR's paywall has been punctured, you can read how Tony Walker spent $126-00 at Bibendum, Harrington Grove Country Club listening to the thoughts of Mark Latham, in Lunch with Mark Latham. The pond feels a complaint to the Press Council coming on. Will they handle a complaint for nausea?)

The Toothless Tiger known as the APC, and the toothless ambition of Delimiter ...

2012-01-09T12:52:00.005+11:00

(Above: an actual visible correction, with a lovely juxtaposition, more at Crikey).

Speaking of catching up with the Daily Terror's nefarious doings, a kindly reader sent the pond a link to Mumbrella's story For proof the Press Council is a toothless tiger, see the bottom of page 104 of the Tele.

Mumbrella's story hit the intertubes on December 26th last year - oh it seems a lifetime ago - and the Terror's publication of the APC adjudication hit page 104 of the Boxing Day edition of the Daily Telegraph.

And the APC facilitated this cavalier treatment by publishing its adjudication three days before Xmas on 22nd December 2011, when the silly season is in full flight.

It turns out the Terror produced three stories in June and July of 2011 which contained errors deserving a reprimand:

The Council expressed concern that within a short period of time three articles on the same theme contained inaccurate or misleading assertions. It considers that this sequence of errors should not have occurred and that they should have been corrected promptly and adequately when brought to the newspaper’s attention.

In the good old days, people were fond of quoting William Gladstone's old saw Justice delayed is justice denied, but truth to tell, on a daily basis you could discover the Murdoch press getting facts wrong in their relentless campaign against the NBN, knowing that all they face - six months or more down the track - is flaying by lettuce leaf, or the odd tut tutting or cluck clucking tucked away at in a spot entirely unrelated to the prominence given the original crime, perhaps with bonus Xmas season tinsel.

The kicker that got the pond really agitated?

Well it was Renai LeMay's righteously goose-laden response on 27th December to Mumbrella's story, in a way which is more thinly veiled self-promotion than articulate understanding of the situation at hand:

hey Tim,
you’re right that the Tele buried this one, but I don’t think this is evidence that we need more regulation of the press.
I argued in my submission to the Media Inquiry (here in PDF format: http://bit.ly/s2qV1M) that independent media is playing a strong role in editorially correcting the mistakes of mainstream media. The publication of your article and mine about this issue, in my opinion, go quite a ways towards indicating that this kind of ‘industry self-regulation’ is functioning at some level.

Hey Renai, thanks for the link to your submission, but actually the point is that the APC is a toothless tiger, and the Terror a rogue rag, and there actually is already regulation of newspaper behaviour, of a soft-core self-regulatory kind, and it isn't up to the readers of the Daily Terror to head off to your online rag the Delimiter - much as you'd love the hits - to find corrections to the garbage they consume daily, but instead to find the corrections in the Daily Terror.

And damned if it wouldn't help if the corrections were published somewhere other than page 104 on Boxing Day - you know, like an actual prominent position saying We Wuz Wrong - and a helluva lot closer to the actual date of the crime.

But do go on with your feisty if profoundly foolish self-promotion:

Delimiter’s article on the Tele’s NBN inaccuracies can be found here: http://bit.ly/sXguCg

Do Delimiter and Mumbrella have the Tele’s audience? No. However, Despite the fact that it was published on Christmas Eve (a Saturday), our article alone has pulled in more than 4,500 page impressions over the Christmas period and 36 reader comments — indication that people are indeed interested to see what the Tele got wrong.

We see this behaviour quite a lot in the much more mature new media market in the US as well.

Renai LeMay

Editor + Publisher, Delimiter

Hey Renai, thanks for that link on the Tele's inaccuracies in relation to the NBN, that really hit the mark and thank the lord, the pond has finally caught up with it in the New Year.

By golly that's really put the Murdoch house in order, and by golly, the mature new media market in the US is doing a wonderful job correcting all of Fox New's egregious errors.

4,500 impressions and 36 readers' comments. Wow.

By golly, the pond can feel chairman Rupert shivering and quaking in his boots. Who needs the APC - or an effective regulator to hold the minions of Murdoch to telling the truth in newspaper stories - when Daily Terror readers can rush off to Delimiter for their corrections, and all's well in the world ...

cheers

Dorothy Parker

Editor + Publisher Loon Pond

For what it's worth, the three stories published by the Terror are Australian taxpayers' latest NBN horror show (by Gemma Jones), Join the NBN or you'll be digging deep (exclusive by Geoff Chambers), and Low interest in high speed internet (also by Gemma Jones), but where would Delimiter, the APC and the general reader be if Jamie Benaud hadn't bothered to go through the onerous process of complaining to the APC?

Jamie Benaud? Would that be the same Jamie Benaud who turned up on Big Mal's blog to provide 10 Responses to "Labor's Budget Misleads on the NBN".

There's a link on that name that takes the reader to Jamie Benaud, Blue Mountains photographer.

And it turns out this same Jamie Benaud is the son of cricketer John Benaud and a firefighter fed up with the flaming News Limited papers have directed at the NBN. (According to Press Council finds News Limited misled over NBN, at itnews).

Why you can even find this rare feisty Benaud bird firefighter/hazmat technician/photographer at Australian images at Linkedin.

Who knows if it's one and the same - the pond takes to investigative reporting like a loon to water - but whoever Jamie Benaud is, he's the real hero of the story, and not the self-congratulatory Renai LeMay.

Without Benaud bunging on a do, Delimiter would have let these NBN balls (Murdoch balls-ups if you will) go through to the keeper.

Well played sir.

And now because only Sydney siders understand the true horror of the Daily Terror, and because we always like to look on the lighter sight of life, Sydney siders will be shocked and appalled to learn Monorail likely to go in tourism revamp.

Time for a song, and if you like, instead of monorail, insert the words 'Daily Terror' into the lyrics. You know, like what this town needs is a Daily Terror ...

Paul Sheehan, and time for yet another catastrophic crisis of the first water ...

2012-01-09T07:30:00.005+11:00

(Above: today's thought bubble. If you read a Paul Sheehan column this morning, it might interest you to know you possibly lost 190,000 neurons today, as part of the process of losing 1 gram of brain mass per year, or 70 million neurons. That's right, you're doomed, we're all doomed, quick Chicken Little ring the bell - How Many Brain Cells that Die Each Day?).

If you read Paul Sheehan in The Sydney Morning Herald this morning, it might interest you to know that it takes 140 litres of alarmist gobbledegook to produce a single column. Such a simple but a profound equation.

Here's how Sheehan kicks off Energy use sucking up a precious resource (as shown in the 'Thought Bubble' above):

If you enjoyed a cup of coffee this morning, it might interest you to know it took 140 litres of water to produce that cup. Such a simple but profound equation.

It doesn't take much by way of science to spot that Paul 'Magic Water' Sheehan must be in the grip of yet another meme, and sure enough, a minute's googling led the pond to Remember That '140 Liters Of Water In My Cup Of Coffee' Theory? Here's Why Virtual Water Is Bogus.

It was written back in 2008 - clearly memes take awhile to reach Sheehan - and please pardon the pond for asking Hank Campbell to do the heavy lifting:

... a few days ago people were aghast and outraged when they saw a number stating that 34 gallons of 'virtual water' went into a cup of coffee. I understand their panic. That means we only have about 9,588,235,294,117,647 cups of coffee left before all the water is gone.

Except water doesn't actually disappear. There is the same amount of water on earth now as millions of years ago. That's right, you're drinking water a Neanderthal peed in. Water recycles. I understand that only 2.5% of all water is available 'fresh' water but that is why the outrage over coffee and hamburgers is unjustified.

Trees, for example, give off 70 gallons of water per day just in evaporation. That's two cups of coffee right there coming back to us. So water evaporating from trees provides enough water to result in 392 cups of coffee for every man, woman and child on the planet. Humans use, on average, 50 gallons per day directly, so we'd have to scale that coffee back to just over 390 cups per day.

My diatribe here is not about the water conservation industry. I am all for clean water. 2 billion people live without proper clean water and even in civilized areas there are 70,000 known chemicals in use that can contaminate water. I am very much against bad water. I am also against bad math.

Naturally Campbell got himself into trouble by making a joke about drinking Neanderthal pee, and he throws in a lot more about claims of 633 gallons of water needed to make a hamburger, and the 120 gallons of water needed to produce a single egg (so quaint to read of gallons in this litre-led world).

Meanwhile, the notion that drinking one coup of coffee costs 140 litres of water can be found in all sorts of places - as a header for a UNESCO-IHE press release, at a wiki on coffee, at an environmental forum, and then a link back to the motherlode, the source of the data at Waterfootprint.org

The world population requires about 120 billion cubic metres of water per year in order to be able to drink coffee. This is equivalent to 1.5 times the annual Rhine runoff and constitutes 2 % of the global water use for crop production. International trade in coffee products is responsible for 80 billion cubic meters of virtual water exports, which is about 6% of the international virtual water flows in the world. Among all the crop and livestock products coffee stands at the top position in the list of global virtual water flows.

Now there's a flurry of fine virtual statistics ...

Virtual water?

Virtual water is the water that is virtually embedded in traded commodities. It refers to the water footprint of a commodity in the place of production. (here).

It turns out that this kind of ersatz calculation has been doing the rounds long before Sheehan got hold of it, as can be seen in a Guardian piece in April 2010, UK relies on 'virtual' water from drought-prone countries, says report.

In that outing, it was beef and a cotton T-shirt that copped the pounding, not coffee, and down below in the comments section, a few dissenting voices could be heard:

Water, unless electrolysed or otherwise broken down (high in the upper atmosphere, in photosynthesis) is generally conserved. Even in the case of photosynthesis, carbohydrates generally end up being 'burned' by one process or another returning to the carbon dioxide + water + energy from which they came.

By and large then, any water in a product will ultimately find its way back into ground water or the atmosphere. Ground water also ultimately returns to the atmosphere via rivers, oceans and evaporation. The atmosphere and the oceans are a global, shared resource. The notion that you can somehow package water, ship it across the world and then permanently sequester it there is ludicrous.

There is no sense to be seen in this article beyond the observation that industrial and agricultural development put strains on the infrastructure - including water retention, treatment and distribution - in developing countries. Very true and we ought to be doing more, much more, to help.

But back to Sheehan, because you see he can't get enough of statistics:

Think of that cup of coffee and its 140 litres. Or a single steak, which requires almost 10,000 litres of water to produce.

Think of that columnist regurgitating data. Why a single column requires almost ten thousand litres of blather to produce.

So let's cut to the chase. Sheehan is an eco catastrophist of the first water (no pun intended, we just love thinking of Sheehan as a a stone, or if you will a diamond).

In the course of the column, he manages to produce an energy-water nexus crisis, a population crisis, an industrialised world crisis, an alternative technologies failure crisis, an oil recovery crisis, a water-intensive recovery of marginal and shale-based unconventional fuels crisis, a counter-intuitive crisis regarding water shortages after the two wettest years in a century in Australia (yes Sheehan has at last discovered we're in a La Niña pattern), and a peak soil crisis, hidden only by the use of fertilisers.

Throw in a mega-wather pattern crisis, the hottest decade in history, land clearing, a third of the world's natural disaster insurance costs, $20 billion in losses, and a prediction by insurers of more disasters, and where do we land?

Insurance Australia Group, which owns NRMA, among other brands, predicts that floods, fires, heatwaves and drought will grow more extreme and Australia will be one of the countries most affected by climate change.

Climate change? Dear sweet absent lord, could this be the very same Sheehan who wrote Beware the climate of conformity in praise of Ian Plimer and his book Heaven And Earth?

Never mind, there's even more. China and India are under water stress, and in crisis, China has a woeful strategic water shortfall, and so faces a crisis, India is worse off, depending on Himalayan glaciers which are retreating, with a crisis close at hand, and the strain is showing and saltwater is seeping into aquifers wherever we look, the Ganges is polluted, Pakistan is in trouble, India's middle class is growing rapidly, water consumption is soaring, and something has to give - wealth or water - and did we mention a crisis?

Could it be that sourdough bread prices in Woollahra will skyrocket to catastrophic levels? What a crisis ...

The world's growing freshwater stress makes the debt crisis in Europe look trivial by comparison, yet it barely rates consideration.

Yep, Europe was last week's catastrophe, but that was a trivial crisis. This week it's the amount of water in a cup of coffee, as crisis piles on crisis ...

Put it another way, in a calm, considered way. We're all doomed, we're all rooned, quick, run to the nearest exit:

"We'll all be rooned," said Sheenahan,
In accents most forlorn,
Outside the church, ere Mass began,
One frosty Sunday morn. (apologies to John O'Brien, his full poem here)

The funniest thing? Well if you step back apace, the use of faux statistics, and alarmism about the environment, and concepts like Peak Soil are the purest green of green tactics.

Sheehan's column could have been written by Clive Hamilton.

And yet when it comes to the Greens, Sheehan is pure schizophrenic, which explains how he can scribble Labor now practises what Greens preach. Or if you like Greens Policies are Flaky.

In that piece, you can find the ghost of Sheehan past dismissing the hysteria of present Green Sheehan as simple-minded scare mongering.

Take, for example, in his alphabet, the letter 'D', and gibberish spoken about global warming:

D: Decadal Oscillation. A major complication for climate alarmists is a weather pattern known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Decadal Oscillation. Their cycles have been measured for 1500 years. Every 24 to 31 years they alternate global warming and global cooling phases. Australia was due for a cooling phase, and this year's flooding rain is consistent with the onset of a cooling phase.

Phew, that's a relief, everything is Plimerish again.

As in U:

U: Urban heat islands. Another complication for climate action alarmists is the general rise in temperatures measured in urban areas, reflecting the huge trend in global urbanisation.

Alarmist? Don't you just love it when an alarmist ridicules people for being alarmist?

Does Sheehan ever have the first clue about the confusions and contradictions that teem from his festering brain? Do his editors? Do they think they're spreading enlightenment, rather than panic, alarmism, fear and loathing throughout a crisis-riddled world?

A flurry of words spring to mind, but we'll settle for the variant on his column header Sheehan by name, flaky by nature.

The man hasn't got a coherent, consistent bone in his body. He is the perfect exemplar of a columnist driven by thought bubbles of a panicky catastrophist kind.

Well at least the Herald labels its thought bubble producers correctly.

Thought bubbles come in two forms: the chain thought bubble and the "fuzzy" bubble.

The chain thought bubble is the almost universal symbol for thinking in cartoons. It consists of a large, cloud-like bubble containing the text of the thought, which is connected to the area next to a character by a chain of increasingly smaller circular bubbles. (and the rest at the wiki on speech balloons).

Read Sheehan, enjoy the bubbles - chain thought or fuzzy - and leave your innocent desire for calm, measured, rational, reasoned thinking behind ...

Now remember, before you get too anxious about the world, and its crises, and the way we're all doomed, that big business is good, and wealth creation vital:

P: Profiteering. The Greens' website features the word ''profiteering'' 295 times (thank you, Chris Berg). Big businesses equates with greed.
V: Voodoo economics. The Greens have a long list of demands on the public purse but a short list of initiatives for wealth creation.

Uh huh. But it takes 140 litres of water to make a cup of coffee. Will someone bring the pond a list of initiatives for wealth creation, or at least coffee-making ...

(Below: Paul Sheehan goes green. Click on to enlarge).

And so we turn to the Sydney Anglicans to carry us into the new year ...

2012-01-08T07:19:00.010+11:00

(Above: important news for dissident Catholics thinking of turning Anglican here).

Bénissez-moi, mon père, parce que j'ai péché.

Put it another way: Bless me father, for I have sinned. It is a whole month since I visited the Sydney Anglicans website. For this sin, I am deeply sorry. Whack me with a recitation of the rosary, but please, oh please, not all the beads ...

Hang on, hang on, as usual the pond is garbled and cross-wired, the pernicious confession routine has no place in the spiritual life of Sydney Anglicans, and it's time to convert those pagan Catholics to the joys of vicardom.

Yep, the pond almost missed Mark Gilbert's Would You Invite Jesus Home for Dinner?, wherein he explains the theological wickedness of the Catholic church and its recent windy, wordy alterations to the Mass, with Christmas a handy time for attempted conversion:

Why not ask your Catholic friend what they think of the changes in the Mass this Christmas, and then ask whether they think they are worthy for God to come under their roof? You might just get the chance to tell them how they can become worthy.

There's nothing like the unseemly sight of Xians squabbling over minor wording and theological niceties at Xmas time to remind the pond why a decent sturdy atheism (or even nonchalant agnosticism) allows for a much quieter life ...

One can just imagine the Anglican and Catholic friends getting into the liturgy and a barney after a sherry or three ... There's nothing like Xmas for a domestic.

In much the same way, Dr Jensen devoted part of his Xmas message to the controversies and scandals of BC/AD dating system. Well it's a scandal in the minds of some Anglicans. (Celebrating the 'world's greatest inspiration').

Will Xians ever get over their eccentric, arrogant, self-centred view of the world and its history?

... the use of BC and AD causes more problems for Christians than it solves. For one, it perpetuates the stereotype that Christians are arrogant tyrants who insist on couching all of human history (including Jewish, Islamic, Indian, Chinese, etc.) as relative to the birth of Christ. Rather than living the lives of humble servants that their Bible calls them to do, many Christians maintain that all history should be subject to their own religious claims. Even the period of history that took place before Jesus supposedly came to earth is relegated to mere anticipatory events prior to the birth of Jesus. (Why Christians Should Adopt the BCE/CE Dating System).

Arrogant tyrants? The Sydney Anglicans? The pond merely reports and you decide ...

Meanwhile, there's splendid news of how Sydney brings Morogoro to its feet.

Tanzania is of course tremendously anti-homosexual:

Any person who- (a) has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature; or (b) has carnal knowledge of an animal; or (c) permits a male person to have carnal knowledge of him or her against the order of nature, commits an offence, and is liable to imprisonment for life and in any case to imprisonment for a term of not less than thirty years. (2) where the offence, under subsection (1) of this section is committed to a child under the age of ten years the offender shall be sentenced to life imprisonment. (wiki LGBT rights in Tanzania).

No wonder Sydney Anglicans can dance with delight in Morogoro, but you'll find little cause to dance if you happen to be gay and turn to them for a little Xian fellowship.

Campaign against prejudice and bigotry? Moi?

And now for another confession.

The pond really only wanted to take note of recent developments at the Sydney Anglican website for one quintessential reason.

Try as you might to take the Queen away from the Anglicans, you can't take the Queen out of the Anglicans, not even the dissident, 'anti-female in any position of authority within the church' Sydney Anglicans.

Naturally they provided a splash at the top of the page, along with a link to the Queen's Channel at YouTube and her 2011 broadcast, flag fluttering in the breeze, as she spoke to the value of the Xian faith.

The Queen? Long may she rule over us, happy and glorious?

The reason for Sydney's strong opposition towards the ordination of women to the presbyterate is based partly upon their interpretation of the teachings of the Apostle Paul in respect to the understanding of the Greek word kephale (κεφαλη) mentioned in Ephesians 5:23, as well as the prohibition given to female teachers in 1 Timothy 2:11 and the roles of men and women outlined in his first letter to the Corinthians. (wiki Ordination of women in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney).

Dammit, and there the Queen was, as cheerful and flush royal purple as beetroot in a salad, sounding for all the world like a female teacher to whom Sydney Anglicans should pay heed, without regard for the advice of the good book:

Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.

And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church. (1 Corinthians 14)

Of course in the very same text there's a lot of jibber jabber about speaking in tongues, so who's to make sense of it all.

And of course YouTube isn't a church, nor television networks, unless, in the Emily Dickinson-Walt Whitman - William Blake way, you take the view that the world is a church:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,

I keep it staying at Home -

With a boblink for a Chorister,

And an Orchard, for a Dome.

Some keep the Sabbath in surplice;

I just wear my wings,

And instead of tolling the bell for church,

Our little sexton sings. (Dickinson)

So maybe the Queen was singing with a palace for a Dome.

Bow down Sydney Anglicans to the Queen - on your knees thank you - and acknowledge the supreme governor and defender of the faith - a woman - and designated appointer of archbishops and bishops, opener of the Synod, Royal assenter to Measures and the promulgation of Canons ...

And by the way, where is your apostle Paul now?

Long may she rule over you and instruct you in the many errors of your many GAFCON ways ...

(Below: the Queen makes a splash, because you simply can't take the Queen out of the Anglican).

The Chinese model, and persecutory times for the church of Kopimism ...

2012-01-07T11:48:00.010+11:00

(Above: click to enlarge).

Amongst the joys of the intertubes is the way you can stumble across something new everyday, even an abundance of variants on cliched opening lines ...

The China Digital Times is currently blocked in mainland China, but you can head off to its site here.

It's a rich source of information about China, but it also has a sense of humour, reprinting examples of censorship instructions issued by various central or local government authorities (naturally referred to as directives from the Ministry of Truth).

From the directives for July 5 - September 28th 2011, there are any number of prime cuts:

From the Propaganda Department of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee: In order to demonstrate the superiority of Chinese socialist democracy and people as the master of the country, all media outlets are to actively publicize local election for representatives of the People’s Congress. Please note: News reports regarding independent candidates or election workshops are strictly prohibited.

No stone is left unturned, no detail considered unworthy of investigative reporting:

From the Central Propaganda Department: Do not report, comment on, or hype up the series of vicious murder cases in Guiyang county of Hunan province or the homicide case in Botou city of Hebei province.

There are dozens of other examples, and if you hunger for even more, then you can take a look at the latest directives from the Ministry of Truth, April 11-April 19th 2011.

From the State Council Information Office: Websites are not to report or hype the story “At Guangdong Petrol, ‘Alcohol purchased at sky-high prices.’” Reports that have already been posted must be deleted immediately. On-line forums, blogs, micro-blogs, and other interactive spaces are not to circulate the story. Delete harmful information meant to attack the Party, government, and social system.

And how about the directives from the Ministry of Truth for June 6-29 2011?

Shanghai: netizen Xia Shang

From the Propaganda Department of the Shanghai Municiple Party Committee: a certain netizen, Xia Shang, has claimed online that he will take part in the National People’s Congress election. No news unit will interview this person, report or propagate [the story]. Journalists will have no contact with this person.

On one level - outside the madness - it's amusing, unless you suddenly imagine yourself as a netizen deemed a non-person.

And what to make of this one?

State Information Office: “Cherishing Chiang Kai-shek”

From the State Information Office: All websites, especially interactive links, will immediately delete the article “Cherishing Chiang Kai-shek” and all related commentary.

The pond has long been a fan of Chiang Kai-Shek, ever since visiting his mansion in Shanghai. The general might not have done much for China, but he knew how to live in style with his wife (and some allege, a mistress or two).

It turns out the mansion is something of a tourist attraction, especially for Taiwanese, but in China, you can go too far, and so the thought police disappear your most cherished thoughts of Chiang.

It's all good fun so far as it goes - a reminder of just how totalitarian the Chinese government remains and how it is from providing a free flow of information to its citizenry - but there's a non-Chinese fly in the ointment, and an American sting in the tail, because thanks to the MPAA, the American entertainment industry, Chris Dodd, entertainment lawyers, and SOPA, the Chinese variety of internet censorship is now all the go.

SOPA?

If you're wondering why lawyers and Hollywood folks would get behind legislation to censor the Internet, you only need to listen to former Senator Chris Dodd, now the head of the MPAA, who last week explained to Variety that the lobby is only asking for the same kind of power to censor the Internet as the government has in the People's Republic of China:

"When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn't do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites." (here).

Ah yes, China as the model.

This has led to some concern in the United States:

(and more here).

Well it took a lot of persecution to give the Christian religion impetus, and it seems that the American entertainment industry is hell bent on doing the same for the Church of Kopimism ...

Hmm, before time runs, must perform an act of Kopimism with the remaining episodes of Portlandia.

Oh sure the show has been released on DVD, but in region one, and of course if you obey the laws of the luddite industry, you'd never attempt to screen a region one disc in region four. And it screens on Netflix, but Netflix is geo limited. And you can catch it on IFC, that's if you can catch IFC ...

Second season's running right now in the United States. Oh what to do, what to do?

Never mind, there will always be scolds with bridles, and explanations of financing and release models, and the importance of territorial restrictions, but in this inter-connected age, the pond prefers a simpler explanation:

SOPA Is a Symbol of the Movie Industry's Failure to Innovate.

Read it and weep.

Just last night the pond caught an advertisement wherein Sony urged punters to buy tunes from iTunes. And to think, it was only in October 2005 that iTunes launched in Australia, to the gnashing and wailing of music industry teeth ... and finally Sony, which has always been run by a siege lawyer mentality, seems to have caught on ...

Meanwhile, the Chinese model beckons, and there in the background, willing to help out the American entertainment combine, are US legislators, and an industry run by dinosaurs and entertainment lawyers ...

Sadly in a sordid, chequered career, the pond has met way too many entertainment lawyers, and truth to tell, the best thing about being an entertainment lawyer is to devise a hundred page contract explaining in detail that there will be NO net profits. So your share of nothing will be ... nothing ...

Meanwhile, lurking in the antipodes, ready with his giant internet filter, and anxious to do the bidding of his Hollywood and Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement masters lurks Senator Stephen Conroy ... the Aussie oi oi answer to the Chinese government ...

Can you buy a sense of humour on iTunes?

(Below: click to enlarge).

Cardinal Pell, volcanoes, cribs, kopimi and the power of broccoli ...

2012-01-07T10:15:00.013+11:00

(Above: the new theology, more below).

To the pond's eternal shame - and who knows, possibly eternal hellfire and damnation - thoughts of Cardinal George Pell have been absent for weeks and weeks, replaced by a troubling carnality, a lust for popcorn and chocolate, and sob, chocolate-and-popcorn saturated sex ...

As a result, the pond almost missed Pell's apparent conversion to scientology in his January 1st homily for the New Year in the Sunday Terror:

Naples has its own volcano Mt. Vesuvius, which destroyed Pompeii in 79 A.D., erupting 30 times since then, most recently in 1944. Neapolitans acknowledge disaster is inevitable at some stage. God's judgement is recognized as explicitly as the sins of the flesh and one popular image features a cross planted in the fires of purgatory, surrounded by the faces of those being purified for heaven. A bishop or priest and a nun are always there. (Naples)

Let's do the math: volcano + Mt. Vesuvius + 30 eruptions + Neapolitans + inevitable disaster = God's judgement = 23.

Now as any student of scientology knows, volcanoes are a sure sign of trouble:

In the OT levels, Hubbard explains how to reverse the effects of past-life trauma patterns that supposedly extend millions of years into the past. Among these advanced teachings is the story of Xenu (sometimes Xemu), introduced as the tyrant ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy." According to this story, 75 million years ago Xenu brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs in the volcanoes. The thetans then clustered together, stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to do this today. Scientologists at advanced levels place considerable emphasis on isolating body thetans and neutralizing their ill effects. (here at the wiki).

Hang on, what would L. Ron Hubbard know up against climate expert George Pell? As anyone knows, the real problem is that volcanoes are the cause of climate change:

"The influence of various solar mechanisms (such as sunspot activity) and changing ocean circulation, which are poorly understood, are "omitted from the climate models", as is the influence of major volcanoes …" (Cardinal Pell lecture peddles misrepresentation of climate science).

Thankfully Pell junket tour of Italy is on hand to remind us that god takes the form of volcanoes - most notably Mt. Vesuvius - to mete out punishment and justice to the wicked and the dissolute - and it seems that the dissolute are most notably Neapolitans, and thank the lord he's been dishing it out since he gave Pompeii a good going over in 79AD, before the Xian message could reach the decadent Romans. That's when he's not arranging for climate change via sun spots and volcanoes ...

Oh wicked Neapolitans, ruin of us all.

Is that graffiti on a Pompeii brothel we see before us?

Now you might think that thinking that a volcano is god incarnate, meting out lava, ash, fire and brimstone to the wicked, is a tad animinist. Or is it animatist?

Animatism is a widespread belief, especially in small-scale societies. Among the Polynesian cultures of the South Pacific, this power is commonly known as "mana". For them it is a force that is inherent in all objects, plants, and animals (including people) to different degrees. Some things or people have more of it than others and are, therefore, potentially dangerous. For instance, a chief may have so much of it that he must be carried around all of the time. If he were to walk on the ground, sufficient residual amounts of his mana might remain in his footprints to harm ordinary people if they later stepped on them. Volcanoes and some other places were thought to have concentrated mana and were, therefore, very dangerous. (here)

Dammit, Pell goes theologically deep, flinging the pond into wild thoughts of totemism, shamanism, polytheism and other forms of primitive -isms (all mentioned in the wiki on animism).

Could this because of the Neapolitan love of cheap stereotypical jokes, a taste apparently shared by Pell?

...mischief makers claim that Africa begins at Naples and a cynical Neapolitan priest once told me that Naples is the only African city without a European quarter!

And as for Palermo ... whoever thought Sicilians were European?

What a card and a mischief maker Cardinal Pell is, a real joker in the pack.

How about an amusing anecdote about drunks?

Neapolitan cribs depict the Holy Family in tatty ruins, often around a broken classical column. The three wise men are handsome and elegant in 17th century costumes, while the shepherds are ugly and old, caricatures of dismay or surprise, with their sheep and bagpipes. Often an old drunk is nearby sleeping it off.

Naples' cribs are regularly beautiful, like the one for Domus Australia, but they all demonstrate that salvation is offered to everyone, not just the staid and respectable.

Yep, you too can get pissed as a parrot, and drunk as a skunk, but provided you nod off near a crib presenting images of rough-hewn lumpenproletariat shepherds, you too can be offered salvation (speaking of drunks, if wine turns into blood in the mass, what happens to the alcohol content? Does the blood become a non-alchoholic brew with a touch of spritzig?)

Never mind. Over the break the pond met the gay Catholic priest in the family - there's a reason this blog is confidential - along with his long standing faithful and engaging companion.

No doubt he'll be pleased that Pell is offering salvation for everyone, not just the staid and the respectable, but truth to tell, the gay priest showed less of an inclination to offer the pomposities of Pell safe passage to the afterlife.

Hey ho, on we go, and the good news is that the pond has at last discovered a religion it can commit to fully.

How splendid and fitting comes the news: Copying and file sharing recognised as a religion in Sweden.

The pond has long been an informal member of the kopimi community, and it could well be that this new church will replace the church of the flying spaghetti monster in census mentions, especially as the FSM has become a tad mainstream, commercial and noodly of late. A Pastafarian T-shirt? Not really ...

Unfortunately the official Church of Kopimism has been slashdotted because of excessive interest, so all the pond copped on its visit, was a temporary static webpage here (service might be back to normal if you click through). Seems like kopimism is booming ...

Naturally the first thing the pond was inspired to do, after its visit to Torrent Freak, was to head off to the Pirate Bay, and download the sacred text (yes you too can visit the Pirate Bay here, all you need to know is how to kopimi).

Sadly there wasn't any mention of volcanoes, but somehow broccoli crept into the discussion, and there were more than a few theological points worth mentioning to the Pellists, even if they did on occasion sound strangely Swedish:

050. Broadcast radio from Skäggetorp.

WTF? Would Tamworth do?

But then there were the deeper spiritual points:

040. Participate in lively Internet discussions that don’t interest you.

079. Express yourself vaguely if anyone asks you, “How much is a bandwidth?”

086. Have a liberal vision of hell.
100. Stop using IRL. Use AFK instead.

But the killer?

046. See "23" in everything.

It brought it all together. Pell, scientology, animism, volcanoes, climate change, Neapolitans, Africans, the whole damn lot, pain and love and ... 23.

Go on, admit it, you thought the pond had got its math wrong. That the answer was '42' ... or some such naive calculation ...

At this point, the pond felt extremely moved, and decided to get away from the keyboard, and experience in real life the potent power of volcanoes ...

Or at least eat broccoli for dinner.

Hell, anything to avoid Cardinal Pell musing about cribs in a church dedicated to the notion that priests can't participate in family life, gay or straight ...

(Below: the front page of the pdf, but please remember to start reading from the back page, in much the same way as you might begin writing a book).

Plus a few bonus Rick Santorum items ...

2012-01-07T09:19:00.004+11:00

Inspired by thoughts of Rick Santorum, a reader kindly sent the pond a link to BuzzFeed's Rick Santorum Quotes As New Yorker Cartoons.

There are fifteen in all, fine mash ups for the mosh pit of life. The only question is whether Santorum as a cartoonist, or David Brooks celebrating the thoughts of a cartoonist, is the funnier sight ...