Glenn Milne, North Korea, Orwellian implications, a new law, and the road to Pyongyan and quarkdom

(Above: Team Australia plotting Question Time).

Time to establish a new law?

Or perhaps a corollary to Godwin's Law?

How about these two?

(a) The boldness of any given claim is inversely proportional to its stupidity, and may be squared by reference to the media in which it is published.

Hence a boldly stupid claim may be squared if published in a tabloid. Like the Sunday Telegraph. I'm thinking something like:

Any confusion with bachelor and spinster balls will see marks deducted. Any other BS jokes will see candidates asked to leave the examination room.

(b) Now bear with me. This will take a little time. First the hypothesis:

Any boldly stupid work referencing North Korea may in the future be examined in detail to see if it conforms to Milne's Law, following Milne's sterling scientific work in Time to question our democracy.

Wait, I've got a further idea, one that perhaps we could see a gold star with bar awarded to any journalist who manages to conflate the terms Orwellian and North Korea, while writing about Australian politics. (We would of course either have to give Piers Akerman a lifetime award of gold stars, or disqualify him, so that prizes could be kept safe for Glenn Milne and others).

Meantime, let's get on with the hypothesis for Milne's Law and how it came into being:

This Government, like all those before it, specialises in Orwellian titles for what it regards as its policy triumphs.

So we have, for example, the grandiose "building the education revolution for the 21st century'', presided over by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

One of my colleagues says it's nearly always a temptation to put the word "gloriously'' in front of this authoritarian phrase when it appears.

North Korea might even think about adopting a similar program name - if it hasn't got one already.

Gloriously adept and excellent work.

Milne tries to dress up his metaphor by pretending the Howard government was just as bad as the current Labor mob, but we know he doesn't really mean it. He's just trying to show how a putative Milne's Law has universal application and appeal.

Before we reach any final conclusion, we have to endure a little scientific gobbledegook as Milne spends the rest of his indulgent - and our precious wasted - time rabbiting on about Speaker Jenkins and Question Time, and last week's follies.

But then the final para arrives and the Law is unveiled.

You may ask why the antics of Question Time are important.

Well, if the Parliament becomes a rubber stamp for the executive, you're headed well down the road of authoritarian government. If you don't believe that, take a visit to Pyongyang.

Well we might be on the road to North Korea, but my bet is if you read the Sunday Telegraph for anything more than short bursts, you're well on the highway to Susan Greenfield plastic brain stupidity.

But never mind, there it is.

Incontrovertible proof, and so a new Law is born:

(a1) As a tabloid column grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving North Korea approaches 1.

(a2) Additionally, the probability of the comparison being valid will approach zero (unless by a quirkish inversion of the law, the comparison is being made to establish the lack of validity in the comparison, which nonetheless may also approach zero).

(a3) Further, a reference to Orwellian and North Korea in the one column ostensibly about another subject - say Australian politics - guarantees that the columnist will turn into a quark.

So there we have it. Glenn Milne = quark. QED.

Thank the lord, now I can move on safely to my own regular and reliable comparison of Senator Stephen Conroy's interweb filter to the devices deployed by North Korea, China and Iran. Yep, the filter grows more Orwellian daily in its implications ...

Yeay, Milne's Law! It's aliiive! Gold star time. Hooting quark quickly disappears over the horizon ...

(And why you ask, doesn't this site write about the likes of Annabel Crabb? Well she actually has a sense of humor, which isn't the same as being funny. Questionable logic all round).

(Below: Glenn Milne valiantly battling an apparatchik, who according to my sources, might well have been attempting to put us all on the road to Pyongyang.)

(Below: rare picture of elusive quark variant discovered on the planet Kronos in the beta quadrant of the Klingon system).