The Australian, and a cavalcade of loons promenading on the pond ...

(Above: notice the uncanny resemblance of Ned Kelly to former chairman Rudd, especially in the face).

Thursday's usually a quiet time for the pond - what with mid-week fatigue and an election campaign, there's only so much a loon can bear to do.

But when the going gets tough, the tough remember Joseph P. Kenny's phrase and Billy Ocean's song and their fondness for cliches, and get going.

Splendid serial lurker and stalker Mark Latham has now - thanks to network Nine - stalked Tony Abbott, as covered in Latin language of love for Liberal-lurker Latham, and while the main question he asked is a little more astute than the moan he delivered in a finger-pointing way to Gilllard, the chief reward is for circus lovers everywhere.

Remind me to boycott Nine for a week. What's that? I never watch Nine? True, so remind me to apply a boycott as if I watched them ... There, that'll learn 'em.

But if asking Abbott about how he done Pauline Hanson down - et tu big Tony? - is a passing frivolity, how about Niall Ferguson's latest contribution to informed debate in The Australian, by way of ALP's knight is as thief in rusty armour:

Stimulus? Yes, sure, Labor has stimulated the Australian economy, in the same way that Ned Kelly used to stimulate the economy of Victoria.

Remind me to boycott The Australian if I ever start to buy it...

No doubt the learned professor thinks this is some kind of bon mot, or witticism in the Harvard manner, matching Alexander Pope in spreading a little literary sunshine in the antipodes.

My immediate thought involved an involuntary sigh, and the sense that a gherkin strides amongst us, as it seems that the original Godwin's Law simply didn't cover all the circumstances involving ill-informed invocations of historical figures.

Yes, it's time for a very specific dinkum digger corollary to be added, and we claim it as our own:

As the probability of Godwin's Law being invoked approaches one in the antipodes, the probability that 'Ned Kelly' will replace 'Adolf Hitler' also tend towards one.

You can read more about Godwin's Law at this alternative to its wiki, and I must confess I found it vastly more entertaining than reading the rest of Ferguson's predictable tilt to the right.

Oh there's Gillard's Fraudulent Claim, and unthinking ABC interrogators and ill-informed Nobel Prize-winning economists (not to mention pandering condescension about how Joseph Stiglitz is a likeable sort of jolly good chappie when he's not being a doofus), and a little backhand to the Fairfax press, and an invocation of Lady Luck, the Howard government, China, the RBA and the mining industry, and sundry other dry thoughts capped by the Ned Kelly reference, such that I thought why doesn't this tosser just bugger off back to Harvard and stay there.

Yes NIMBY-ism is a potent force at the pond, and there was just a passing thought that perhaps the good professor might spend his time working out how to help Republicans redeem the mess into which they plunged the United States, without once attempting to blame it all on Bill Clinton (who somehow gets a guernsey in the piece as showing the dangers of bad government, if the Clinton administration had suddenly been tempted to tax dot.com companies on their market evaluations in 1998. Somehow this ends up as part of a rant about a mining tax, as if no one taxes mining, and if in the end we aren't arguing about a rate, rather than some totally arbitrary change in direction, as alleged by Ferguson).

Yes, it's just another ideological rant dressed up with a thin veneer of economic theory chipboard, and you take your pleasures as you find them. Which might or might not be Michael Stutchbury ploughing the same ideological field in BER program not 'timely' in averting slump.

But we have to mark Stutchbury down for this typical effort in The Oz. Not one mention of Ned Kelly! Talk about lacking credibility and astute historical metaphors.

No, that's left to Greg Sheridan celebrating this remarkable insight Seen from the US, Rudd is a Westminster Obama.

I do cavil a little however. How much better if the header had read Seen from the US, Ned Kelly is a Victorian Jesse James.

For an exemplary hearty dose of blather, seeking to draw parallels and significance from random speculations, you'll be able to spend a full pleasant minute or two with Sheridan, who takes all due care to celebrate the "genial" Tony Abbott, while deprecating Rudd and Gillard as antipodean Obamas. Oh and to celebrate this wonderfully effective approach to climate change:

The ETS grassroots campaign, which Abbott understood and then co-opted and led, did something similar for the Liberals and Nationals. It allowed Abbott to unify his party, fire up his base, and smash a hole in the government.

Never mind whatever hole he might have helped smash in the planet.

Meanwhile, The Australian excels itself with a splendid editorial headed Safe drinking is not a right.

To which we can only say hear, hear, and demand that unsafe drinking of water be implemented forthwith around the globe. We also believe that eating and sanitation isn't a right, and that the black helicopters are circling, filled with dangerous socialists and UN bureaucrats in search of world government, as we speak:

The right to clean water and sanitation is far less definable and depends on economic development, technology and infrastructure. Above all, if people have a right to water and sanitation, other people must provide it -- in practice, governments using public money.

So this is really a call for state intervention, at the expense of other priorities and freedoms -- and water is no more a practically enforceable human right than other essential commodities such as food, clothing or shelter.

Yes, starve you buggers, or die of thirst, and preferably naked out in the wilds without any shelter, you grasping socialist pinko commie perverts and bludgers. Unless you pay the man and pay the man handsomely for the pleasure of helping you out, you can just bloody die. Snort! As if the right to drink water is a right ...

This resolution follows naturally from activists' ideological resistance to the privatisation of water. This ignores the countless examples from Bolivia to Egypt where governments have failed to provide clean water because of corruption, cronyism (usually including massive subsidies to inefficient farmers), mismanagement and waste. It also ignores successful private models in Bolivia, Chile, Denmark and elsewhere.

Yes, yes, and governments put fluoride in the water, which is why my teeth ache, and the fluoride crust provides conductivity and connectivity to the aliens seeking to take control of my mind, and no matter what kind of aluminium hat I wear, the signals get through, and now they're coming to take me away hah hah ...

Yes, there's collective evidence and knock down proof in The Oz of dangerous radicals and activists and ideologues and western charities ...

What? You want a right to drink safe water you upstart? Only if you kneel down and pay homage to Chairman Rupert, and subscribe to his newspapers, either by way of a donation of a litre of blood a week, or perhaps a 10% tithe of your total wealth ...

If it's good enough for the chuch, it's surely good enough for a little cool, clear water ... water ...

Yep, governments are evil, and big business so caring, so let's privatise.

What's that you say? What about Coca Cola and Fanta and the Nazis? (Why Do Foreigners Like Fanta So Much). Oh no, you're not trying to tell me big business isn't entirely honest and upright and stalwart?

Now if someone could only explain to me why the Romans and the Victorians both relied on the government to help out with fixing up their water supply and their sewerage ... What's that? Because in the case of the Victorians rampant big business fucked over the cities and the environment such that there would have been even more rioting, disease and ill-health than there was, forcing the government to take steps, do things, become action Jacksons and move forwards? (Victorian era technology and engineering).

Well I never.

But you'll have to be as game as Ned Kelly to explain it to the Oz ...

(Below: and since we love to break Godwin's Law ourselves, here's a Coke trinket, and you can find out more about it here in Why historians say Coke invented Fanta to enliven Nazi soldiers).

And now here's a song for those oldies who, like my father, loved Frankie Lane. Not to mention Marty Robbins and Sons of the Pioneers, who are also up on YouTube. Me? I'm off to see the SSO do over Edwards and Scriabin ...