Take a whole bunch of chick peas and fava beans, pound and blend them, and fry them until they go crazy mad and show the Dunning-Kruger effect ...

Miranda the Devine opens her latest piece A tough act to swallow in excellent form:

Eddie McGuire's joke about "falafel land" in western Sydney may have offended sensitive types, but it accurately reflects the contempt held by much of Australia for NSW and its largest city.

And you have to admit, they do have a valid point.

The valid point? Somehow the mighty falafel, food of champions (get your Jamie Oliver My way Falafel here, get a couple more here) gets linked, in the Devine's fevered, tortured mind to venal misfits and perverts masquerading as ministers of the Crown in NSW, and in particular to a matter of paedophilia?

Yes falafel land = Milton Orkopoulos. See how that works? Kinda funny name? A valid point?

Well Orkopoulos might have been a contemptible figure, but how contemptible of the Devine to link the favourite dish of Israel and the Arab world with paedophilia.

What next? The humble hamburger to stand as a symbol of serial murderers, beltway sniper attacks and random crazed gun attacks in the United States?

At least Eddie McGuire was attempting a jest, as feeble a jest as could be expected from a pie eater who supports Collingwood, and he did attempt a feeble kind of backdown by calling his words a "term of endearment" (Eddie McGuire apologises to Western Sydney over falafel slur). Forget it Eddie, no Collingwood supporter can ever be endearing ...

But the none too subtle ethnicism and implicit racism and distorting prejudice in the Devine opener has no excuse.

Will she ever apologise, like McGuire, at some point, as she realises the damage she's done to the humble chick pea and a great cuisine (given not a half bad and economical outing at Emma's on Liberty, just down the road)?

Don't hold your breath, and more to the point, don't let that falafel in your hand grow cold ... you never know, you wouldn't want to be caught dead with a cold falafel in your hand ... it might lead to a sequel.

Meanwhile, our very own Chicken Little, who goes by the fond names Akker Dakker and Billy Bunter, is also in fine form with Why freedom's at risk if the romantics hold sway. Here's his opener, the only perceivable issue being a failure to mention the deadly falafel as the most likely reason for the downfall of western civilisation within months, if not weeks:

Tnere’s an inherent short-sightedness in the growing tendency of many in Western cultures to adopt a Green-Left perspective of world events, from the crisis in Egypt to the misguided embrace of Julian Assange as a principled whistleblower.

This approach is not merely a phenomenon of youth. It is also found among superannuated hippies.

What? No mention of dinosaur dodos scribbling furiously as minions of Murdoch?

Naturally the fat owl of the remove - Piers Akerman to his editors - takes the dimmest of dimmest views of recent events in Egypt. So much better for the Egyptians to have continued living in abject poverty under a dictator tucking away squillions in real estate and bank accounts than actually seek an actual democracy.

After all, which state will now handle the outsourced American torture and disappearing program, as conducted with such skill and relish by the Egyptian secret police, and so adeptly applied to the civilian population to keep them in line.

Besides, unless the United States has bombed the shit out of a country in a forced march towards democracy, can it really be called a genuine democracy, forged in the intense heat of fire, and battered into shape by a skilled western blacksmith. Such wondrous examples in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sssh, someone shut up Ron Paul:

“The people don’t like us propping up their dictators,” Mr. Paul said. “No more than we would like it if a foreign country propped up a dictator in our country.” (here).

Paul is of course an isolationist and against all foreign aid, humanitarian libertarian that he is, but you do have to wonder how cost effective it was to spend some seventy billion or so propping up Mubarak so that Israel could have a quiet life, and the citizens of Egypt could suffer ...

But back to the delusional Akker Dakker and the second half of his piece, wherein he cheerfully and contentedly adds to the demonising of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and in the process stridently denigrates his supposed craft, which is to say journalism.

Now I'm hazarding a guess here, but I'd say the vast majority of WikiLeaks news and stories imbibed by the average punter - and certainly here at the pond - has landed by way of mainstream media going through all the revealed material, and separating the nuggets from the immense amount of quartz.

How many faithfully head off to any of the many WikiLeaks mirrors (available here) and do their own investigative reporting?

That's why WikiLeaks has used the mainstream media ... including the fat owl's News Corp, even if they have regular petulant fits about the way the Guardian, the Fairfax press, and the New York Times have been given the nod ahead of them.

But in the bizarro world of the fat owl's logic, you end up with this:

Making public the conversations and negotiations of diplomats will drive people to be a lot less candid in the future.

That will lead to a more closed society, with a whole lot more decisions being made on the basis of distorted or incomplete information.

Yep, WikiLeaks single handedly is going to produce a more closed society, and journalists should right now stop reporting all those leaks, because it's ruining everything. And the secrets that have been revealed aren't the work of a closed society because only when WikiLeaks reveals the secret workings of a closed society will a closed society actually be implemented.

And there's a capper:

WikiLeaks, Bleich said, targeted the diplomatic communications of what is arguably one of the most transparent and democratically accountable governments in the world, and one of the strongest champions of free speech.

Yes, and one of the strongest champions of a dictator, recently overthrown, who spent thirty years repressing freedom of speech (and let's not mention that other elephant in the room, Saudia Arabia, proponent of the fiercest forms of Islamic fundamentalism).

Oh cry me a river.

It did so because it couldn’t get access to information from closed, repressed, brutal societies that have shut down the flow of information.

WikiLeaks is merely placing open societies at a great disadvantage to closed and repressive societies.

Well if you can follow that logic you're better than me, because it seems that open societies should remain closed because if they open up, especially via leaks, then they won't be able to match, in a closed and repressive way, the doings of closed and repressive societies.

QED. Bring Mubarak to Australia to run the show and bring those superannuated hippies into line. What we need is a good strong dictator, backed by a damned good secret police.

You see, freedom's just another word for keeping Rupert Murdoch rolling in the hay, and Piers Akerman living off the swill in the feed tray.

Lay it on 'em Piers:

Our homegrown Green-Left revolutionaries, suffering on their bounty of welfare payments and student loans, may feel solidarity with the striving masses, but they should know better than to bite the philosophy that feeds them.

Actually you don't get much feeding from the bounty of welfare payments these days, and by definition a student loan happens to be a repayable loan, assuming you survive the grind of doing a part time job to stay alive while completing your part time studies, and manage to get a job, things being tough in the youth market.

Thanks of course to the humbuggery, envy and spite of the 'toughening up' of the youff of today urged on by the commentariat ...

Talk about a superannuated, indulgent, self-satisfied Murdoch fat cat ...

If there was a vote for top contender for the antipodean Glenn Beck trophy, surely Miranda the Devine and Akker Dakker would give Andrew Bolt a close race ...

Meanwhile, it being a Sunday, we thought to round out things by reporting on the state of the churches. And what do you know, George Pell is in Rome on a two week junket, so that only leaves the nepotic Jensenists, and happily Phillip Jensen obliges with New Atheists and the Dunning-Kruger Effect:

In 1999 two psychologists of Cornell University (David Dunning and Justin Kruger) put forward the hypothesis that people of lower competency in an activity tend to overconfidence. This overconfidence comes from the inability to do a particular task while at the same time recognising their level of incompetence. On the other hand those with sufficient competence to undertake the task, tend to lack confidence because they are aware of their own deficiencies, especially in comparison with others ...

... Coming to a beginners understanding of this field of study, it occurred to me to ask the question: “Are the new Atheists suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect?”

Yes, that makes perfect sense. Blather on about others being over-confident, and failing to recognise their level of incompetence, by - in a rank way worthy of a novice or a beginner - applying the alleged Dunning-Kruger effect to atheists in a completely nonsensical way, and you have a lovely opening gambit, roughly equivalent to Fool's Mate.

Let's forget the "new" please - there's nothing about "new" atheism that hasn't been said by "old" atheists, except that the new atheists refuse to be silent, and go stand quietly in a corner, or weigh things quite the way Bertrand Russell did in Am I an Atheist Or An Agnostic?:

There is exactly the same degree of possibility and likelihood of the existence of the Christian God as there is of the existence of the Homeric God. I cannot prove that either the Christian God or the Homeric gods do not exist, but I do not think that their existence is an alternative that is sufficiently probable to be worth serious consideration.

But then Lucretius was doing much the same way back when in Rome:

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.

Never mind. We look forward to Jensen's expert advice as to why the Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't turn up in east Asian subjects. Could it be that Asian culture has largely avoided the pox of Christianity, preferring other religions, even if they lack a Homeric dimension (and a little more on the Dunning-Kruger effect here at its wiki).

Yes there's nothing like a beginner flapdoodling away beyond his level of competency, and you'll find plenty more treasured nonsense in the rest of the Jensen piece for meditating on a Sunday.

So let's give Dawkin's the final word:

"Look," he told Laurie Taylor, "somebody who thinks the way I do doesn't think theology is a subject at all. So to me it is like someone saying they don't believe in fairies and then being asked how they know if they haven't studied fairy-ology."

Well of course that's going to get an expert fairy-ologist like Jensen upset. Oh okay, one last final word:

"Religion," Richard Norman writes "is a human creation … a mirror which humanity holds up to itself and in which it sees itself reflected. Human beings attribute to their gods all their own human qualities – cruelty revenge and hatred, but also love and compassion and mercy. That's why you can find a justification for anything, good or bad, in religion." (both quotes found here Caspar Melville's provocation, Beyond New Atheism?)

This would of course help explain why Jensen shows all the signs of suffering from a bad case of the Dunning-Kruger effect ...

So many loons on the pond, so little time ...

(Below: the Jensen effect in action).