Kevin Bracken and time to get out all the ingredients for an Xmas cake bedecked with all kinds of paranoid fear and loathing ...

(Above: Kevin Brownlow's It Happened Here. Lordy, lordy, is that David Hicks there on the right?)

There's a very good piece in The New Yorker by Sean Wilentz on the strange ways of the extreme American right, its origins and philosophies, under the header Confounding Fathers The Tea Party's Cold War roots.

You don't read that kind of think piece in the local media, unless it happens to be picked up and run in the AFR in its Friday or weekend edition, so they can bask in the reflected glow.

No need to quote it, just recommend it for its rich display of fruit and nuts.

But just when you think the political discourse, having got stranger by the hour, couldn't get any more Xmas cake by the minute - which is to say nuttier and fruitier - along comes one Kevin Bracken, apparently and allegedly President of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, to confirm that conspiracy theories are all the go in the antipodes as well.

Unionist's 9/11 comments stupid and wrong: Gillard was just one of a number of re-tellings of a radio encounter of the third kind, designed to remind us that loon pond is at times a very big pond, and full of the strangest inhabitants with the weirdest ideas.

"Well, the fact is that aviation fuel doesn't get hot enough to melt steel," Mr Bracken said.

Well the fact is that when the towers got burning there was more than aviation fuel doing the burning, but you never actually need reality when confronted by a paranoid conspiracy theory.

Usually this sort of nonsense is reserved for people who are on the outer, embittered with the world, or otherwise vulnerable to some kind of viral disease affecting the thinking.

The capacity of people to think strange thoughts is truly weird, and there's no point arguing with them, because once they get fevered thoughts on the brain, they cling to them with an intensity that can be alarming. Any attempt to dislodge the paranoia only increases it.

Of course smugness and complacency is never the go, because we're all subject to weird phantom thoughts and delusions. Any Catholic who has a go at Bracken might pause to consider the notion that each week at communion, they are alleged to swallow actual flesh (never mind that the wine turned blood is often reserved for the cannibalistic priest).

We could spend hours and hours bringing forth some of the stranger ideas that normal people holding down normal jobs take for granted as part of their world view. Loon pond will never go out of business.

That's not to say that paranoia isn't healthy or right. Take a look at Secretive Republican Donors Are Planning Ahead, to see how billionaires are weeping into their rum-laden Xmas cake over the fear that America's on the road to serfdom, and so are conspiring to do something about it.

Unrelenting attacks on freedom and prosperity? Serfs, throw off your shackles, and valiantly fight to save the fearful billionaires from an uncertain future.

Meanwhile, we've tended to lose contact with some of our local Xmas cakes. Now that Miranda the Devine has become an ordinary blogger at the furthest outreaches of the blogosphere, working the tabloid site of the street, it's hard to stay in touch. And these days she's receiving the kind of feedback most bloggers receive - zero comments.

It's not that she's trying hard. Here she is in Victim of boosters and bad advice on Kristy Fraser-Kirk:

... a conga line of pseudofeminist poseurs encouraged her in her absurd over-reach, calling her brave and strong and a role model for future victims.

Yes, that's desperate and pitiful enough, channeling Mark Latham, and substituting pseudofeminist poseurs for suckholes.

Then in Pull the other one, David Hicks, she accuses Hicks of rewriting history - a charge that might be sustained by a more reasonable advocate blessed with analytical skills - and then proceeds to offer this insight:

If events had transpired slightly differently, if he hadn’t been captured by the Northern Alliance, would he have been a sleeper agent inside Australia, available on call to do a Mumbai-style massacre? We only have his word he wouldn’t.

Indeed. And if Adolf Hitler had invaded Britain, would that noble island have experienced brutal occupation as outlined in Kevin Brownlow's It Happened Here (and a half dozen other dramatised documentaries following in his boot steps)?

My own thought is that David Hicks most likely - being the most cunning and well trained of terrorists, with a razor shaped mind - would have returned to Australia, assassinated the Prime Minister, seized control of the country, and declared Australia an Islamic republic. You may disagree, and so might Hicks, but I remind you that we have only his word that he wouldn't have tried this on ...

That's the fun of alternate (or alternative if you happen to speak English) history ...

Yep, the Devine is in stomach churning mode, but it seems that the good old days, wherein she churned the stomachs of Fairfax readers, are now but a distant memory, since either the comments section on her blog is kaput or zero people share her stomach-churning concerns.

Come on tabloid guys, you need to get the jewel in the crown working for you. Is it front page for the Devine time? Turn her conga line of abuse into something up there with Akker Dakker ...

Finally it would be remiss of us not to note Stephen Conroy's appearance last night on Lateline (here) taking a hefty swipe at the minions of Murdoch. It's to extended to quote in its entirety, but here's the nub of it in a couple of grabs:

TONY JONES: Finally, Stephen Conroy, you made a comment in Senate Estimates yesterday that The Australian newspaper doesn't bother reporting news anymore; they're engaged in regime change. What did you mean by that exactly?

STEPHEN CONROY: Well they've been waging a war since just before the election was finished, creating stories that are completely untrue. Let me give you a very straightforward example. The Australian newspaper have continued to perpetrate one of these - what is reaching urban myth levels, because of their constant repetition of it, that there's a $6,000 cost to rewire your home to get the NBN ....

That was the opener, and this the finale:

STEPHEN CONROY: I think it's fair to say that the campaigning that they're doing against the NBN doesn't meet any journalistic balance, it doesn't meet any journalistic accountability, if you were to look at the actual factual substance of the story. And it's very disappointing to see a newspaper losing its way in this way. And they have been maintaining this campaign to try and create uncertainty, to create falsehoods about the NBN and they are knowingly doing it.

TONY JONES: Well where does regime change come into it?

STEPHEN CONROY: You can only come to the conclusion that they are determined to destroy the NBN in the eyes of Australians because it was an important factor in us winning government. And you've seen the tantrum they threw after the election, and this just is part of an ongoing tantrum by The Australian newspaper about the outcome of the election.

Naturally we rushed off to The Australian, and after the false feint by Mark Day suggesting there was one NBN lover on the rag, sure enough, there was Henry Ergas saying yet again what he's been saying for weeks, months, perhaps years, which is to say ranting against the NBN, in Shield protects NBN from competition. And never mind that Telstra is anxious that the NBN bill actually pass the house ...

Same as it ever was, but it's disappointing that The Australian - which now fancies it's at war with almost everyone - hasn't responded yet to Conroy in its editorial pages, as opposed to running endless columns bagging the idea of the NBN.

Not good enough guys. If we want to get our own Xmas cake ready in time for Xmas, we need copious quantities of fruit and nuts. There can't ever be enough and it's up to the Murdoch press, as chief supplier, to do its work properly ...

And now, if you're in search of a recipe for an Xmas cake, this one is fairly close to the family tradition, and it needs to stand for at least a month, with rum the preferred blessing, though brandy will also serve, and whisky only if you anticipate being visited by Americans ...

Sure it means a visit to Reader's Digest, here, but remember fruit and nut season is coming up fast ...

(Below: more alternative history, when Orson Welles provoked fear with a radio show. That's what we need, more fear, more terror. Maintain the fear! By the way, did you know that David Hicks was in league with the Martians to mount a full Mumbai-style attack on the Opera House? What's that you say? He denies it? Sure, sure, but you realise we only have his word for that ...)