The Australian and living in a world infested with trollumnists ...

(Above: it's got nothing to do with anything below, and you need to click to enlarge, but have you checked your super lately, especially if you're with the likes of AMP or Colonial? Trust the Labor party to legislate a way to feed the blood money leeches to bloat point. More First Dog here).

Now where were we First Dog? Oh okay, behind the paywall, but a little snippet of I was considering resigning as a News Limited trollumnist wouldn't hurt, and it would set the mood.

Ah that's better, and the rest behind the paywall. Now on with the show.

Ignorance is always bliss - it's why the world is so blissed out - and so the pond was completely unaware that Andrew Bolt had taken umbrage, indulged in a gigantic dummy spit and sulk, and threatened to take his bat and ball and go home ... at least until a friend prodded me with a link.

You see quietly, and without much of a fuss, the Australian Financial Review has been letting readers peep behind the wall, and so you can read Laura Tingle's account of the saga in Cabinet holds war briefing over News.

For a brief moment, the pond dared to dream, to hope, that Bolt might have done a bolter.

Reading (or watching) Bolt is a chore way beyond the strength of the pond, just like listening to the incessant screeching of Alan 'the parrot' Jones makes the notion of Laurence Olivier drilling into Dustin Hoffman's teeth shouting 'we have to make the world safe from leftist conspiracies' seem like relative paradise (yes, yes Larry was playing an ageing greedy fascist, so apart from Godwin's Law, your point is?)

But of course it was all a tease, because Bolt was never going to go out on his own.

As usual, Crikey is the place to be when News Corp gets agitated, and so you can catch up with Andrew Bolt sulks then fires back, followed by Mayne: it all goes back to Bolt's unhinged resignation prediction.

Ever since he became a minor television starlet, Bolt has been exhibiting signs of wanting to become an antipodean Glenn Beck, but just at the moment, he doesn't have the base, and free to air is a fickle platform, and so the marriage of convenience between his blog and News was always going to continue, and his preening and posing and bunging on a do was just a little bit of the theatrical ham you might expect from a temperamental starlet.

The funniest thing, as always, is the way that News has, under its various banners, helped cultivate fetid bloggers of a manic kind, including but not limited to Bolt, Blair, Akerman and (aspirationally) Miranda the Devine.

Now that John Hartigan, CEO of the local branch News Ltd, has become involved in a skirmish with his very own feral head blogger (lightning rod for discontent, ratbags, crazies and conspiracy theorists), what are we to do but remember Hartigan's poignant speech, which you can still find at Mumbrella under the header Hartigan: Journalism, not the limited intellectual value of blogs, is the future of the web.

Limited intellectual value of blogs!

Uh huh. Well we'll believe that when the limited intellectual value of Andrew Bolt's blog (and Blair's and ... you know the list) is expunged from the world of News Ltd.

Truth to tell, they need the hits, and so they sup with the devil, and when the devil gets restless, they - and in particular, it seems Hartigan - eat humble pie ...

Which is why we cherish that long ago rhetoric:

Then there are the bloggers.

In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for – something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.

Uh huh. Massive ignorance.

Was he thinking of Andrew Bolt back then, or perhaps Akker Dakker, or perhaps The Punch, which has swiftly built up its own manic feral maddie constituency by trawling and trolling?

Or was he foretelling this exchange, as outlined by Laura Tingle in her AFR piece, in response to a question to Julia Gillard about putting pressure on News Limited?

"What a completely absurd question," she said. "The only issue here yesterday was one I dealt with personally and that is that News Limited - actually, The Australian newspaper - had published a false report in breach of all known standards of journalism They'd made no approach to me to seek a comment or to check what was asserted," she said.

"They clearly realised they had done the wrong thing and published a retraction as a result. So the only question here, really, is how is it that a false allegation about the Prime Minister is published in The Australian newspaper without anyone from The Australian contacting me or my office for a comment?"

Mr. Hartigan said yesterday the Prime Minister's comments were "disappointing" and "pedantic".

Talk about a pathetic response. Truly disappointing, and incapable of even being called pedantic, since at least a pedant might have a defensible point.

And then Hartigan compounds the sin:

All of the company's journalists abide by a code of conduct which is enforced strenuously by editors.

Uh huh. So which editor is responsible for strenuously enforcing the stream of bias, rage, propaganda and insults emanating from Andrew Bolt and his blog on a daily basis?

It's fair to say that the blogs now set the tone for much of News Ltd's publications, especially the tabloids, but the same fetid atmosphere is now daily on parade in the allegedly upmarket The Australian (nobody can tell if you're a pedigreed broadsheet or a tabloid mongrel on the digital free form internet).

But one question does arise, especially as we now have benefit (dubious though that benefit might be) of free access to some of the AFR peeping out from behind its paywall like the sweetest blossoms in the dew-saturated dawn ...

Where is the paywall that was going to be brought down around News Ltd in the antipodes, like a gigantic bamboo or iron screen?

Do we truly rooly only have a month to wait before we wake up early, rush to the sweet-smelling pine tree butchered in its youth, and ferret amongst the wrapped presents, including The Australian to adopt paywall in October. Only a month of sleeps to go?

And what then of the free blogs, that generate so many hits along with routine malice, baying for blood hysteria, and this kind of wounded pride nonsense?

No politics until further notice. Principles to weigh up. Faith to keep. Sorry. (hold your nose, wash your hands, it's here).

On the upside, the storm in a teacup (with tea bag of your choice) suddenly brought to mind memories of a long forgotten, half-baked science fiction writer A. E. Van Vogt, and the ideas behind his novel The Violent Man (amazingly enough still available at Amazon, as well as thankfully lost on my bookshelves).

Van Vogt's jumbled confused ideas was given further currency when picked up by that other confused jumbler of ideas, Colin Wilson:

Essential here is that the "Right Man" must always have his way and is afraid of losing face above all ("How dare you talk to me this way?"): anything that might be an indication of his infallibility or erroneous ways, something that he can never admit.

That'd be Andrew Bolt, complaining how Glenn Milne was 95% right! And bugger the 5%. What are ya, some kind of minorities lover?

Well if you want a quick guide to Wilson's version of these notions, there's a series of excerpts here under the header The Right Man And The Fear of Losing Face (and if you want to read a proposal that "right men" - and let's not be sexist, there are more than a few "right women" in the world - are over-represented on the web, you can head off here).

Or perhaps you could become a regular reader of Andrew Bolt ...

Well that's the feeble pop psychology done and dusted for the day, and luckily there's no copy of What Makes Sammy Run? to waste even more time.

Meanwhile, thanks to Optus, the pond was offline most of yesterday, and yet there are mug punters in the world who will look you in the eye and assure you that connection via hybrid fibre coax (as opposed to the copper wilting underground waiting for the next rain) is a doddle.

Roll on the NBN, at least to this neighbourhood, before the wretched "Malaysia is the solution" Labor government falls, and Malcolm Turnbull decides to offer inner city elites the benefits of wireless ...

If the NBN does roll past, we'll be in a much better position to provide a rapid response declining The Australian's kind offer to sojourn behind its paywall with the likes of Glenn Milne ...

(Below: okay Colin give us a good title to describe the mood after spending too much time on News Ltd sites).