Paul Sheehan, Marcus Kuczynski, and a little Thoreau to help appreciate the unearthly cries ...

(Above: yes we know this is a poster for an adult film. Your problem, or your point?)

First a confession and an apology.

We've been remiss. Not once can we recollect quoting that great man Henry David Thoreau, so here he is:

This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.

Could you get a better scene setter, or scene stealer than Thoreau this wet Sydney Monday as we contemplate the halloing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head, which is to say Paul Sheehan furiously scribbling The past, forgotten, can creep up and bite (and no, it's not about the joys of magic water coming up to creep and bite).

For the most part, Sheehan is content to regurgitate evidence led in the Supreme Court in the matter of Ballard v Multiplex Ltd (2010), until we come to this:

What has happened since the removal of the Labor government is akin to the peeling of an onion as layer after layer of institutionalised comfort for the union movement is removed in the context of a new and very different government.

No doubt Barry O'Farrell and his new and very different government are, at this very minute - and even on the day republicans celebrate the Queen's Birthday by accepting dinkum honors - in the process of doing many different and wondrous things, but it only takes a second to trot off to the Supreme Court of NSW records, to discover that the matter was listed in October 2008 here, and further paperwork diligently updated on the 23rd December 2010, here.

Exemplary and industrious legal work for a state government elected on the 26th March, 2011.

Sheehan knows this perfectly well - see his June 9th report here tracking a matter fifteen years in the making - but as always, he can never resist going a bridge too far in drawing a conclusion. Don't give him a pencil, or next thing you know he'll be drawing the blinds (sorry Spike Milligan).

Who'd have thought that there's always corruption Sydney, especially in the construction game - a noble tradition since the Rum Rebellion - and then there's the matching idle-minded rhetoric - a noble tradition since John Macarthur started humbugging authority - and then there's the sound of high pitched hallooing, an artform Sheehan has made all his own ...

Moving right along, for sheer unadulterated laziness, it doesn't get much sloppier or lazier than Marcus Kuczynski's piece for The Punch, Carbon tax: Labor's not listening to the people.

Kuczynski's methodology?

Comments to online news sites have consistently shown massive opposition to a carbon tax.

And so Kuczynski proceeds to assemble a range of comments from online news sites, including ABC Online - no doubt to provide cardigan-wearing respectability - and the Daily Telegraph, fondly known to its devoted followers as the Daily Terror, and The Australian.

As well as the thoughts of Steve C, you get to learn the views of DT (no it's not that excellent chappie Delirium tremens), Nicole of Sydney, Alan of Brisbane, and the dissenting voice of Seon scribbling a comment on ABC Online in favour of actually doing something about climate change (amazingly just like the anonymous editorialist at The Australia).

At the end of this abysmal cut and paste effort, Kuczynski has the cheek to deliver this closer:

Somehow Senator Faulkner’s call for Labor to listen to its inner voice sounds a bit hollow when one considers the clang of public opinion opposed to a carbon tax.

A bit fucking hollow?

Well not so hollow as a hack doing the rounds of the commentary sections of online web sites in a quest to understand the world.

Talk about the clang of fatuous stupidity.

I swear to the absent lord I can feel the brain cells dribbling into the ether each time I wander anywhere near The Punch, and watch as minions of Murdoch, running short of hay or strawdust or anything else to hand, cobble together whatever they can find online, as they desperately pump out filler for the daily debrief ...

Okay, enough. Time for a little more Thoreau, somehow evocative of Kuczynski:

In the middle of the night, as indeed each time that we lay on the shore of a lake, we heard the voice of the loon, loud and distinct, from far over the lake. It is a very wild sound, quite in keeping with the place and the circumstances of the traveler, and very unlike the voice of a bird. I could lie awake for hours listening to it, it is so thrilling...

Sorry Thoreau, you got that wrong. I could drop off to sleep for hours after reading MK of Brisbane, it's so mind numbingly tedious ...

Then at night the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an owl farther or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semihuman cry of the loons at their unearthly revels...

That's more like it. Let's see some semihuman cries and unearthly revels at The Punch.

I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray?

Oh the lonely laughing, so much better than the lonely crying ...

(Below: yes we know that 'donkey punch' can mean other things. We're going with this one).