Grahame Lynch, the intertubes, The Australian strikes again, something different with Newt Gingrich, and a dash of barbed wire ...

(Above: here at the pond we once owned three of these machines, right marvels they were, with their little white ribbon to remove the errors, but these days you'd need a bush mechanic to keep one working, and that's why the Liberal party stands full and forthright and ready to help out with a few stockings and sealing wax. Oh and that'll get the intertubes to its full potential too).

Chastened by the understanding that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and certainly no right to have potable water, we plunged once more into bizarro world, aka The Australian, for this splendid opener:

After a $20 billion investment with little or nothing to show for it, the stark reality is the company has to start all over again.

$20 billion? Who might have done that? The Federal Government? That sounds exactly like the profligate waste we've come to expect from the NBN.

Telstra chief executive David Thodey lowers benchmarks after profit fall, scribbles John Durie.

Ah yes, Telstra. These days we use our share certificates as wallpaper in the outdoors dunnie. And fondly remember the days when John Howard sold the biggest dud, the biggest lemon into the marketplace to mum and dad investors, with a style and panache that makes the average Parramatta used car salesman look sheepish, shy and reticent.

Why at $20 billion, the amount to be spent on the NBN is almost a sneeze.

Chief executive David Thodey was right to draw a line in the sand and set new, significantly lower benchmarks for the company. But the near 10 per cent fall in the share price, wiping $3.9bn from the company's value, tells you shareholders have had enough.

That's more than $1bn the company has vowed to spend in product promotion and customer service to put an end to sustained market-share erosion.

Yep, it was under the Howard government's watch that Telstra hired a cowboy, alienated its small customers and the big end of town, and acted very badly in defending its monopoly.

As a seller of the internet, Telstra's performance stinks, with just 6 per cent of sales online against the international peer average of 25 per cent.

Nason will lead a push to dramatically change Telstra's approach to the market, working with customers by helping geeks trawling social networks to help other customers.

Yep indoody, for all its grandiloquent babble of building a faster intertubes in the city, Telstra has singlehandedly held back its development, and now faces a moment of truth:

The fixed-line monopoly is gone, whether NBN comes in or not, because already 12 per cent of homes have chosen to drop fixed-line services. It's just a question of how quickly the margins fall.

As a company, Telstra is arguably indifferent to the fate of the NBN. But with the NBN will come $2.7bn in payments for its empty copper wire ducts, a further $1.3bn for access to its exchanges, a further $4.5bn to migrate customers and a $2bn sweetener courtesy of the government as the price of peace.

Well that sets the scene for Grahame Lynch.

Come on down with NBN is welfare for tech-heads.

There is considerable criticism of the Coalition's minimalist broadband policy.

Minimalist? What, is it some kind of Phillip Glass musical score? Or perhaps the Ross Edwards' violin concerto I saw last night (and good fun it was too)?

Gizmodo Australia described the policy as a "whole heap of nothing". Industry advocate Paul Budde said: "It is like having many parts of a car spread out on the floor, with no plan on how to put it all together." Tasmanian Premier David Bartlett called it a betrayal. But let's get some things in perspective.

Perspective? Well the only perspective Lynch offers is a "Liberal party policy sensible and cost effective" bit of blather, and "NBN unsustainable white elephant" debunking, of the kind usually reserved for Henry Ergas in his once a week bashing of the NBN. The welfare for tech heads sets the tone, and suggests that there's no need to read any further, but of course we read on.

You have to hand it to The Australian for digging up another expert happy to argue that electric typewriters are perfectly acceptable, a great advance on the old manual keyboards and more than enough for antipodean diggers, and careful, no need to use our current mineral wealth to get ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to technology. Let's not lose our heads, let's just keep it cheep, cheep, cheep. At knockdown bargain basement prices, and never mind the vision thing.

But when it comes to elaborate conspiracy theories, Lynch really takes the cake:

For those in the telecoms industry who wonder why the Coalition simply doesn't get it and jump on the fibre bandwagon, I would politely suggest they have themselves to blame.

Yep, it's the fault of the telecom industry that Tony Abbott is a clunky noob, all because they didn't insist on a credible cost benefit analysis, and gasp, uses Seattle as an example of how things might pan out by way of benefits, when we all know Seattle is full of tech heads, nerds, Boeing builders, and sleepless Meg Ryans.

Lynch delivers a lot of blather, about how the coalition is a responsible economic manager, and rounds his piece out thusly:

To defend an NBN policy that, among other things, is the world's most generous telecom industry welfare scheme by reference to a small US city's economic analysis strikes me as a spectacular cultural cringe.

Okay, so how about this? Where's the credible cost-benefit analysis that's been done on the coalition's half assed, half cocked plan?

Just because it's miserly and shrimpish doesn't mean it will prove useful or a sensible way to drop government money.

The likes of Lynch simply assert that it's cheaper, and that's good enough, and we'll muddle through and the market will help out and we always have a few stockings and barbed wire in the back of the ute to help out, and Telstra has shown how incredibly good it is at patching together pieces of crap and calling it a network, and so don't you worry about all that, she'll be right, and never you mind that you can piss a couple of pennies against a wall just as easily as a couple of pounds, and never you mind that Telstra has already pissed $20 billion of mum and dad and Future Fund hard cash against the wall.

Let's re-phrase that last outburst a little shall we:

To defend a half assed half cocked Liberal party policy that, assumes amongst other things, we can just muddle through in a miserly way, without reference to any kind of economic analysis, but just an assumption that we need to do something, and provided the something is cheap enough, she'll be right, strikes me as a spectacular cultural and technological cringe.

Sheesh, there's a lot of rubbish written about policy matters, but why and how has The Australian become such a repository of it? You know, experts accusing other experts behaving improperly, in a way demonstrating that they're quite incapable of rational debate themselves.

It makes me so mad, I feel the need for something completely different.

So now here's something different, with a twist of soap and lemon:

"There's somebody else, isn't there?"

She kind of guessed it, of course. Women usually do. But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed?

She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. "'I can't handle a Jaguar right now.' He said that many times. 'All I want is a Chevrolet.'"

He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.

He'd just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he'd given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.

The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, "How do you give that speech and do what you're doing?"

"It doesn't matter what I do," he answered. "People need to hear what I have to say. There's no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn't matter what I live." (here)

Well we dedicate that thought to all the deluded Christians and politicians out there in la la land.

Let it be inscribed above their heads for all to see: It doesn't matter what I live.

Oh I know, I know, it attributes the words to Newt Gingrich, but they're as remembered by an ex, and they're delivered by way of a strikingly effective hatchet job in Esquire.

Speaking of which, you can read the full Esquire profile of Newt at Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican, but be warned a strong stomach is a prerequisite.

Which is not to say I have a problem with anyone who likes marriage so much they try it a number of times. I've tried it a number of times myself. Nor do I much mind if someone disses their partner or acts in an ill-mannered, personally deceptive way, provided they don't cross the law. Lie down with dogs, expect fleas, and then get the hell out.

No, it's only the cant and the hypocrisy, usually accompanied by a lecture on family values and compassion, that gets my goat. Don't go lecturing the world or setting a moral compass for the world if you're own moral compass is totally fucked, such that you think north by north west is an actual compass point, or that it doesn't matter what you live.

Now don't get me started on Christians or other religions and their moral hectoring or we could be here all day.

Well at least it got my mind off half baked discussions and plans for the full to overflowing intertubes, Telstra, the share certificates I see each time I visit the dunny, and preening experts arguing that she'll be right with a few stockings and a bit of barbed wire fence ....

(Below: not that we've got anything against Bush Mechanics. We love 'em and have known quite a few in our time, and we really enjoyed the TV show. Now if only someone would offer them a job to fix The Australian, and get a few more miles out of its stuffed up neocon free market Maggie 'no right to potable water' Thatcher 12 cylinder engine which chews up the gas and spits out noxious fumes in a shocking way ...)