Of Tony Abbott, Big Mal, pineapples, subbies, Fairfax, and the silliness of Ross Cameron, who thinks you can still catch a tram to Bondi ...

(Above: the cruel photo the Daily Terror used to illustrate its story of Tony Abbott the drunken snoozer. We much prefer the uplifting, enthusiastic, smiling one below, showing the pineapples that Mr. Abbott had earmarked for Malcolm Turnbull's behind).

What a good way to get on the road this Friday, by referencing Don (or is that Prima Donna) Churchill, editor of The Age, and his wondrous ways with customer relations ...

Confused?

Say no more, and rush off to Crikey's pdf of Churchill's email exchange with a disgruntled Salvo reader on the matter of subbies and sackings, here, wherein Churchill complains of being miss understood. (Crikey backrounder here).

Miss understood? Is she in the same family as Miss chievous and Miss apprehend and Miss take?

By golly the media remains the best entertainment outside the Mad Hatter's tea party, and it's only going to get better as the subbies hit the road. Sorry subbies, especially the ones who snipped the last two pars of my copy holus bolus to make way for yet another advertisement, the end is night, and so are all standards of literarcy. Put the pedel to the metul and hit the raod ... Oh it's a long time ago, but I have a long memory. Why I can even remember when Peter Garrett was a greenie and a socialist.

Sorry, is there a subbie in the house/?

Moving right along, we briefly turn to the matter of big Mal missing a vote. We are truly concerned and find it utterly reprehensible. Big Mal and his indolent gang of fellow travellers disrespected the opposition, its fearless leader, the whips, the people who voted for him, parliamentarians everywhere, and the Australian people, and quite possibly their hard working pets.

Naturally Mr. Abbott had to draw the line, and approve a reprimanding email. Discipline team, and take the ball up the middle, or else you'll end up like NSW (Liberals split by brawling).

On the other hand, it was perfectly understandable, and indeed quite proper for Tony Abbott back in 2009 to miss five divisions in relation to the key economic vote of the new Parliament - the $42 billion fiscal stimulus package - because he feel asleep after a night of drinking (Tony Abbott slept through key vote).

After all, he was merely consoling the Member for 'Iggins, and the member for Ming the Merciless, and it was a mere oversight that he forgot to request leave or a pair. Thankfully taxpayers had provided a crash pad for the honourable member - his office - because he was very tired after all his hard work. Not to mention the plonk. As usual, the pesky media simply refused to understand the necessity of male bonding:

Asked if he was drunk, Mr Abbott said: "That is an impertinent question. I had dinner with the gentlemen you mentioned, there's no doubt we had a couple of bottles of wine, I wasn't keeping count, maybe two.

This is an impertinent question. I'm going to politely hang up now.''

Polite! Always the honourable gentleman, and always happy to share a glass of wine with chums. Big Mal would do well to emulate his ways. Shame, big Mal, shame. Now feel free to go and have a nice glass of red or three ...

Meanwhile, the bubbling booby from Parramatta, Ross Cameron, offers his most excellent contribution to the scientific debate in Bid to stifle climate debate clouds history of scientific errors.

When making decisions about our country's future, we ought not to be dismissive of the wisdom of the traveller on the Bondi tram.

The Bondi tram? What century is the goose living in?

Oh that's right the nineteen fifties. Hang on, didn't they preach marital fidelity and fault and guilt in divorce proceedings in those long lost days?

Sorry, that's a cheap shot, about as cheap as all the shots Cameron takes at climate science, on the principle that if you know bugger all, make sure you spend all the time explaining how actual science won't blow air, or even squeaky helium, into your party ballon.

Cameron even goes as far back as 1841 to Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - and you can read it too if you head off to Project Gutenberg here - seemingly unaware that Mackay spends much of his time celebrating the madness of the crowds who catch Bondi trams.

That Cameron can manage to talk both of the madness of crowds and the wisdom of Bondi tram catching crowds says a lot about his capacity for contradictory thinking, and bugger all about climate science.

Then it's the usual repetitions by rote, including the East Anglia emails, and a further bid for intellectual window dressing by referencing Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But in trivialising Kuhn and in making the bald assertion that scientists defend the status quo long after the data shows an underlying thesis must be wrong, you have to ask exactly what data Cameron is relying on to show that the underlying thesis regarding climate change is wrong?

The one thing you can say about Cameron and all the ill-informed gits scribbling for Murdoch is that they don't get out and do any field work and observe what's actually happening and report back, not when they can happily sit at their computers in ill-lit rooms babbling like geeks on Cherry Ripe overdoses about the inaccuracies of computer models.

Well it seems that the main evidence Cameron has to hand from his field work is that Tim Flannery trousers $180k a year from the government, and is in bed with Panasonic, the producer of energy-intensive, carbon-rich electronic goods.

Yep, when you actually don't even the first clue about the science, always play the man. It's a bit like making jokes about marriage ... Flannery might be a goose, but he's not the only scientist in the game.

Meanwhile, if the notion that scientists are human and so as mad as tulip fanciers in Amsterdam doesn't satisfy you, how about a bit of paranoia, along the lines that the scientists really only are in the climate game because of all the taxpayer money to hand to pursue the anthropogenic thesis. This leads to a bit of intellectual dishonesty any Jesuit would admire:

It doesn't mean the thesis is wrong, but the transparency being practised by the scientists falls woefully short of that expected of journalists, politicians and company directors.

Would that be the transparency practised and expert scientific insights offered by the likes of Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt, Miranda the Devine, and all the other minions of Murdoch at war with scientists? Along with the idle minds of Liberal party hacks like Cameron and Nick Minchin?

Cameron wraps it up by dragging out the Club of Rome's The Limits of Growth - yes roll on nine billion people on the planet - and then resorts to the most desperate effort of all, the old Y2K routine.

But here's the thing. Once again Cameron dumbs down what the Club of Rome report actually said, and he gets agitated about the money spent on Y2K, yet there was a serious issue for many computer systems and users in relation to inadequate software. Risk management dictated precautions, and much nastiness avoided. Sure there were some charlatans who exploited fear mongering - a bit like the Ross Camerons of today who sees socialists and paranoia under every bed - but you really had to be a smug Macintosh user like the pond to escape some of the issues. (Hiss, boo, Microsoft).

In all this, Cameron purports that he only wants to keep the debate going, but when someone contributes such an ignorant pile of mush, what's the point?

Well I guess it brings us back to Fairfax and Don Churchill and his plea not to be miss understood, when in reality the Fairfax rags are deeply miss guided.

Sacking the subbies and instead hiring Ross Cameron to spout lazy paeans of praise to Bondi tram travellers?

Why not just send Cameron off to write a blog, and close the bloody Fairfax rags down, so little use they seem to be in this changing, difficult world ..

Finally, because seeing Fairfax join in the mass stupidity which is a key feature of the Murdoch press's war on science in recent weeks, and being as tired as you can possibly be of the whole relentless, monotonous one note hysteria and calumny involved, I just have to mention Nicholas Carter conducting Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra this week.

Carter - looking impossibly young, as if he'd been let out of high school for a special occasion, like much of the audience - stood in for Benjamin Northey, and took the baton with the Sydney Symphony, in a performance which will be broadcast on ABC FM on Saturday 11th June at 1 pm.

He didn't do half bad. I kept waiting for Gordon Kerry's Symphony to break into melody but the composer kept the staccato foreplay going for the entire piece. Still, you can't blame the conductor for that.

The ensemble got a little ragged in Percy Grainger's In a Nutshell, and the brass got up to their old wayward indolent tricks in the Introduction to the Bartok - what is it with Sydney's brass, when the wind and string and tympani sections showed up for the night - but short of jumping off the podium and cuffing them around the ears, what can you do?

Precise in his style, Carter looks like he'll have a future in the game, so naturally he's shortly off to Hamburg, and good luck to him. I'm sure he's had to tolerate endless jokes about how young he looks, but he played the right card by trumping the joke with good music making.

As Tim Blair would undoubtedly put it, he's a musical advocate who sees in a symphony orchestra the meaning of a free people.

Okay subbies, you can cut last sentence ...

Let's put in another advertisement. There's only so much tosh and hypocrisy to be swallowed in one life time ...

(Below: and since Ross Cameron, as part of his piece explained how we're in an ice age, as if somehow that proved anything, and celebrated how scientists once talked in the seventies of a coming ice age, as if that proved anything, and as if it had anything other than mixed support amongst scientists at the time, let's add to the general stupidity and generalisations on offer, by throwing in this bonus cartoon, an oldie but a goodie by Tanberg. How soon before the cartoonists follow the subbies into the void?)