And so to the news this week, along with the fatuities of Paul Sheehan and Brendan O'Neill ...

(Above: Malcolm 'big Mal' Turnbull's incisive map demonstrating the remarkable similarity of New Zealand and Australia).

And so to the news.

In a major scientific advance for the Liberal party, big Mal has proposed that carbon dioxide does indeed have weight, and has devised an experiment to prove it ... drop a block of dry ice on toe from a fair height. (Malcolm Turnbull slams ignorant war on science).

This isn't rigorous enough for the pond. Only dropping a block of dry ice on Tony Abbott's head, from a very great height, and repeated a number of times to prove the results are replicable, will satisfy its rigorous high school science methodology.

In the meantime, big Mal has also noted that New Zealand is doing a national broadband network much better and cheaper, and to only 75% of the population.

We understand an even more incisive comparison to Singapore's roll out costs - a city state as vast as the Australian continent - or is it an island - or an island continent - will shortly be rolled out by big Mal. As the map above shows, apples is definitely apples, unless they have fire blight.

Still, it's pleasing to see that an NBN is now officially approved, and we're only arguing about the cost and the necessity of including agrarian socialists in the mix.

Frankly the pond was startled to hear that old home town Tamworth will cop fixed wireless connectivity next year. (Regional communities to get first wireless). So much for fibre to the home. Guess the need is to get it out quickly, so agrarian socialist Tony Windsor can cock a snoot at agrarian socialist Barnaby Joyce.

Well it's time all that nonsense stopped, and we cut 25% of rural areas out of the mix, and focussed on delivering the NBN to the inner west of Sydney! Now there's a policy viewpoint without the slightest hint of bias or special pleading.

Meanwhile, big Mal has proposed an incisive solution to the monopoly problem bedevilling the NBN. Hand it all back to Telstra, and make that august, hugely successful company the de facto monopoly. (Liberals up ante on internet).

Perhaps big Mal dropped a block of dry ice on his own noggin ... purely in the interests of science.

Meanwhile, the pond is wreathed in nostalgia with the news that Anthony Albanese has rolled out the very fast train vision thingie again (High-speed eastern rail link to cost $100 billion).

The pond was involved in some peripheral activities related to an earlier proposal a couple of decades ago, when it was fondly known to its friends as the very fast real estate scam.

Of course, with the federal government showing just how it can handle infrastructure - who can forget the enormous pleasure heading out to Sydney's brand new second airport, right up there with Singapore's - we look forward to riding on a VFT hours before departing this world for another one, or at least comfortable residence in a graveyard.

Was it the Whitlam years when a second airport for Sydney was proposed? And now, just look at it, a marvel of federal government ingenuity and planning.

Enough with the news, and on to the commentariat. These days the punters have a wealth of material on a Thursday. In a desperate attempt to save the national economy, Paul Sheehan has doubled his output, and so today you find him scribbling about Michele Bachmann in Motherly wrath for undisciplined US.

It almost goes without saying - but we'll say it anyway - that Sheehan finds much to admire in Bachmann and her telegenic, trenchant articulation of household values, and fully supports the right of conservative mothers to be angry.

It's like reading, instead of watching, a Dumb and Dumber movie, and as a corrective to aged eastern suburbs male writers infatuated with the telegenic Bachmann, we always suggest corrective spectacles, or a corrective cane, so as not to think and walk with a tilt to the ratbag world of teapartiers, or at least a little corrective reading, as can be found in Some History About Michele Bachmann's Radical Religious Right Agenda.

There's plenty more about Bachmann's extremism (and her love of government programs and the weird anti-gay world inhabited by her husband) on the intertubes, but in the meantime, can we suggest to Sheehan that he forget the productivity, and simply let the Australian economy collapse, by the simple expedient of producing only one column of gibberish a week?

But wait, there's more. It seems poor old Brendan O'Neill has been profoundly ravaged, and reduced to a simpering, gibbering wreck - much like Paul Sheehan - after being torn apart by the cardigan wearers on Q&A, as he explains at length in No job is lonelier than defending freedom of speech in Q&A land.

Apparently O'Neill was like a wildebeest caught in the headlights of angry lions intent on a casual kill, or a Christian in the colosseum, or whatever paranoid metaphor you can muster, as he suffered mightily from the looks of horror shot his way by his co-panellists.

Apparently Tanya Plibersek cast daggered looks at her tormentor, because he made her sick to her stomach, in her shameless way, but she was simply incapable of understanding the finery, frippery, subtlety and nuance of O'Neill's provocative discourse.

Lordy, lordy, it turns out that:

Q&A confirmed that, post-Norway, we're witnessing the rehabilitation of "media effects" theory, the stubbornly unproven idea that words directly cause carnage.

This will be a great relief to Islamic propagandists and terrorists, as they scribble away with fine sounding words urging carnage.

Sorry lads, you're wasting your time. Totally unproven, no way you can cause carnage, and so while you're at it, why not let a thousand web sites bloom on the full to overflowing intertubes.

That is the implication of Plibersek and Mayne's discomfort with provocative discourse: that the little Islamic people's minds are so putty-like that one shrill comment from an un-PC loudmouth, al Qaeda operative or suicide bomber recruitment officer might be enough to push them over the edge towards murder.

Damn you, unemployed Fairfax subbie, at least quote Mr. O'Neill properly.

The censorious implications of the idea that heated or experimental words and ideas provoke murderous behaviour are profound.

Yes, indeed, let a million fundamentalist ratbag sites bloom.

Or perhaps it's only J. D. Salinger, Brendan O'Neill, John Milton (such elevated company), and newspaper articles that can use the 'get out of jail' card, because it's simply impossible for newspaper articles to make men into mass murderers, as opposed to say reading the bible or the Koran.

O'Neill also offers a vigorous defence of the Murdoch empire, valiant card carrying elevated supporter of freedom of the press that it is - well his column is in The Australian, so what else do you expect him to say? Shut down the biased rag overnight?

O'Neill proposes a remarkable solution for anyone discontented with the state of the press:

Instead, if you really don't like what his papers have to say, you should set up your own post-Murdochian, pot-stirring paper. That's one of the great things about press freedom: anyone with the nous and the know-how and a fundraising sidekick can press their own ideas and offer them up for public consumption.

(Above: golly, is that Brendan O'Neill with cocked head tilted towards the left trying to look smart, alongside an utterly silly suggestion?)

Nous? Start a newspaper? Thank the lord O'Neill is a columnist, and not an investment manager or a business advisor, since starting a newspaper in this day and age would be the rough equivalent of pissing money against the wall. Even chairman Rupert only keeps his physical papers for the political influence they deliver, and certainly not the profits.

Still, it reaffirms O'Neill's willingness to offer bad business advice, along with really fatuous, stupid alternative solutions to current mainstream media monopolies, and the evils of phone hacking, corrupting police and so on and so forth in an empire notorious for its corrupt use of its power to further its agenda (shades of Berlusconi, and with a different page three kind of topless bunga bunga).

Yep, for such blessings, we can thank the freedom of the press, and the ongoing willingness of The Australian to print O'Neill's columns in support of chairman Rupert's empire. Now there's freedom. The right to affirm the rightness of Chairman Rupert ...

A whispered aside loud enough for the back row. No wonder the Murdoch press wants to kill off the NBN. Its columnists still think there's a future in newspapers ...

Can we propose an alternative? If you really don't like what Rupert's papers have to say, stop buying them.

Kill them off quicker, end the agony of actually paying to read the defensive mendacious posturing of the likes of Brendan O'Neill, and get on with reading all the information to hand on the intertubes ...

(Below: after all, we're with Chairman Rupert).