Janet Albrechtsen, a load of deep black coal, and paint that red door black ...

(Above: a gift for you, from Janet Albrechtsen and The Australian).

Here on the pond, there's a fierce strand of secular intellectuals who think that know means know.

You know, know in what context 'know means know' is usually deployed these days, though it's jolly good 'Joe hockey sticks' Hockey knows how to tell his kids know means know.

Meanwhile, it seems we owe Geoff Elliott and The Australian a profound apology. Yesterday we berated Elliott for his surreal suggestion that The Oz was fair and balanced in both its reporting and opinion pages. What sort of crack was he using, we wanted to know, because we'd like to smoke some of it, and thereby put an end to all our worldly woes.

And then lordy were we startled to see Janet Albrechtsen come out all guns blazing this morning, with a savage attack on Tony Abbott, and not just his policies but his personal lifestyle and philosophies ... replete with snide remarks about his children and his religion, and his bourgeois conformity to suburban norms.

You could have knocked us down with a feather, and you wouldn't need a bloody big feather from an archaeopteryx or some other feathered dinosaur.

It was particularly pleasing to see her launch a vicious attack on Abbott's middle class welfarism, as exemplified by his paid parental leave scheme, with its great big tax on big business, against everything a free market dry knows is sound policy.

Sure at one point in the distant past she was agin it, worried that Abbott was outgreening Bob Brown, and being more lavish than other countries with his welfarism, and concerned he didn't understand the need to continue Howard's legacy of prudent economic management, but then she changed her mind, and hailed it as the work of a top bloke, providing a very personal commitment to paternity leave.

What a relief she's changed her mind again, and called it out for the bullshit vote buying bit of middle class welfarism it is.

Hah! April Fool. Got you going eh?

What's that? It's August. Sorry I must have nodded off there for a moment, after spending all yesterday chortling at the cheekiness of Geoff Elliott.

I know, I know the rule. If you call out April Fool and it's past noon on the day, it's bad luck for the perpetrator. But hey, this is August. Show me the rule about that. New rule: any day reading The Australian must be April Fool's day ...

Let's start again. Of course Janet Albrechtsen is to hand, and she's scribbled her usual piece, and what do you know, it's called Fear and loathing inside Labor House of Horrors, and the header is a fair indication of the tone and manner of the piece.

It is of course a thought and policy free zone, but it's splendidly full of bile, viciousness and fear and loathing, quite up there with Hunter Thompson.

Oh sorry Hunter, you showed a sense of humour and a decent love of drugs and grog and a freewheeling lifestyle.

In her usual way, Albrechtsen plays the man, and the man, and the woman, and in the process, spends much of her time demolishing Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd. You can just imagine any birthday party she stages. It'd surely feature a giant piñata. What fun to hand out all the whacking sticks.

And no doubt Albrechtsen's first to hand each time her suburb puts on its annual festive snake-whacking day, in honour of The Simpsons. Snakes are caught, and garbed in gaudy colours and vivacious signs - Labor rat, Labor fink, Labor double dealer, Labor warrior, snakey rat in the rank, and so on - and set free. The first to whack a dozen Labor snakes wins a year's subscription to The Australian, and so entry to her esteemed column ...

Oh wait, it's free on the intertubes. Never mind, it's the spirit of the whacking that counts.

We usually delight in selecting words from good old Akker Dakker, that's Piers Akerman, from another corner of the fair and balanced Murdoch stable, to convey the spiteful quality of the scribbling, but really Albrechtsen makes him look like a total loser, a tosser, a wanker, a try hard, not up to the job ...

Here we go.

Blew up, fizzed out, campaign mess, rip apart the party, bitter spirits, culture of hatred, formidable warriors, circumstances sour, warriors turn into nasty rats in the ranks, ghosts of Labor's past, wreck Gillard's election, deep-seated loathing, betrayed these credentials, old-fashioined class warrior, unreconstructed big government Keynesian, tiresome, brutally dumped, crudity a public extravaganza, foul mouth a private affair, boorish chip on shoulder, juvenile huff in Ingleburn paddock, humiliation, hatred, bitterness and revenge haunt Labor, invective-laden insights, hurt Labor, Left's vacuous claims to social justice, Right's obsession with personal aggrandisement, "scab-lifters", bereft of ideas, feeding off discomfort of governments engaged in economic and social change, silent treatment, real damage, laws of nature, pitter-patter on the roof at night, leaked, minion, dumping, conned voters, complicit in the fraud, second bomb, invective, valuable whistle on a poisonous factional world,"tin-pot" union officials, clique, hating one another, power for power's sake, risk-averse, poll and media-obsessed apparatchiks, factionalism, toxic culture, poll-driven policy, two poltergeists, full of revenge, venom that infects the ALOP culture, internal loathing, Latham debacle, loathing defined their response, empty public utterances, internal destruction, wickedly kind, brutal and perhaps futile execution, cracker of a night.

Surely that entitles me to consideration for a job at Reader's Digest? Oh okay, I understand. A decent Digest subbie would have just shortened it to "Here's why the fear and loathing in Labor inspires me to an inspirational level of fear and loathing scribbling."

Yep, the funny thing is, of course in brooding at such length and in such a nasty vicious way about fear and loathing in Labor ranks and in scribbling furiously about all the rats in the ranks, Albrechtsen shows what a deep festering fear and loathing she has when it comes to rational consideration of politics.

Talk about a feral keyboard. It's the mother of all rants, a rave on steroids, so far over the top and faraway and such a grimly absurd diatribe that the only response can be delighted laughter. If Albrechtsen believes everything is so rampantly fucked, how can she bear to go on living. Imagine the ruination of the country if Gillard squeaks in?

As with all extremists, there's only one angle. Paint it black.

I look inside myself and see my heart is black
I see my red door, I must have it painted black

Maybe then I'll fade away and not have to face the facts
It's not easy facin' up when your whole world is black

I see a red door and I want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black

I wanna see your face, painted black
Black as night, black as coal

I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky
I wanna see it painted, painted, painted, painted black
Yeah!

Yes, it's much more fun to quote an old Rolling Stones number, lyrics a little scrambled, than to dwell too long on the dark visions of the Sauron scribbler. So much hostility, so much hatred embedded therein, so much frothing and fuming and foaming that it comes across as quite unbalanced, a tad unhinged, a tad ... dare we say it ... Mark Lathamite.

But at least as a result we've made it through without once quoting Albrechtsen in a lump. Why there's so much dark black coal, you have to plunge into the coal tender yourself to savour it to the full, but be warned, when you emerge you'll have grit and soot and blackness and anger and fear and hatred and loathing and a sense of an impending imploding of the world all over your face ...

There's only one predictable thought arising from this piece.

That thought of an apology to Geoff Elliott. Retracted.

Instead here we are mid-week, and there he is at the head of the field for the goose of the month award ...

That's it, Oz scribes, get back to work. Go hard, grab that red door, paint it black.

And now as we move forward and embrace Action Jackson, let's celebrate the benefits of knowing. As always there's a wiki to help out those who know they know but don't have a clue about unknown unknowns, with a number of splendid examples, though none better than this:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know. ”
—United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld