Gary Johns, and a little Thursday hackordnung to keep you going ...

(Above: Doonesbury on the new homeless. Click to enlarge).

Nothing to see today folks, keep the line moving.

Oh sure Paul Sheehan confesses to being a boofhead in Touch of whimsy to help shed light on the boofhead within us all, but that truism, a cliche in contemporary thought, is deflated by the artful way that Sheehan suggests he's just a boofhead amongst many, and we're all boofheads together.

As usual, Sheehan is never content to just speak for himself, but must abuse all his readers, which makes him an exceptional boofhead, a triumph of Australian exceptionalism.

Woollahra-style babbling about a couple of artists and a comic strip and lightness and humour and whimsies doesn't stop him from being recognised for his general hostility to sundry ethnic groups, which saw him promoted to Field Marshall Grumpy ...

Speaking of grumpy, what drives and devours Gary Johns? There he is, rabbiting away once again from his perch in the feral Australian, with Inflating homeless to fund lobbyists.

It seems being homeless is a giant conspiracy to make off with taxpayer funds and shove it in the pockets of welfare lobbyists.

The whole episode has uncovered a dark corner of the welfare game. Lobbyists seek to spin the numbers to place maximum pressure on politicians to screw more money from the taxpayer. All that stands between the taxpayer and the lobby is the ABS. Is it up to the job?

Now it's true when I drop into the local Vinnies every so often (or the cat people or St Luke's Op Shop) I'm shocked and appalled by the sickening and ostentatious displays of wealth.

There's little doubt that charities are making out like bandits and shamelessly exploiting their position to line their pockets, even if their pockets happen to be second or third hand ...

Exaggeration and lamentations and pitiful cries of woe are all the go, but Johns knows the truth about the shameless way charities screw the taxpayer.

In much the same way as being black is a sure fire way to live on easy street, which it goes without saying, is lined with taxpayer gold, being homeless is a sure-fire way to be a winner.

Why the only real way to get ahead these days is to put on a little blackface, pretend to be black, and indulge in a boondoggle exploiting the generosity of taxpayers, or lie idle in the street draped in newspapers, and wait for the charity lobby to turn up, and pave the street with gold ...

Then it came to me in a vision. Johns isn't a boofhead, so much as a chook, exercising the right of all chooks in the fowl yard, and that's to express aggressively, via the beak, the hierarchical system of social organisation in animals.

This means picking on the poorest elements of society - the blacks, the homeless - and blaming them and their supporters for rorting taxpayers.

It's by far the best way to establish, or re-affirm the pecking order:

Pecking order or just peck order is the colloquial term for a hierarchical system of social organization in animals. It was first described from the behaviour of poultry by Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe in 1921 under the German terms Hackordnung or Hackliste and introduced into English in 1927.

The original usage of "peck order" referred to expression of dominance of birds. Dominance in chickens is expressed in various behaviours including pecking which was used by Schjelderup-Ebbe as a measure of dominance. In his 1922 German-language article he noted that "defense and aggression in the hen is accomplished with the beak" (here)

Like any common or garden schoolyard bully, Johns is in the grip of Hackordnung - Hackliste if you will - and there's nothing like a little blood on some pretend victim or street tramp to get the blood lust going.

You see, the homeless are hopeless, and there's simply no point worrying about them.

When Opposition Leader Tony Abbott refused to endorse the Rudd goal he was roundly criticised. Abbott was, in effect, arguing that many causes of homelessness - broken relationships, broken minds, broken hearts and broken bodies - were not all preventable. While each of these may be "mended", across a large population they cannot be altogether prevented. To the extent these problems cause homelessness, homelessness cannot be prevented.

Yep, you can't do much to prevent it, and you can't do much for the broken and the ruined, except maybe toss them on the scrap heap. Probably aren't worth re-conditioning or even a paint job ...

So what to do with the unsightly homeless who litter the streets and the parks, especially in the inner Sydney area, like so many native ibis pecking away at the garbage bins, while cunning, sophisticated lobbyists use their plight to compile vast unimaginable wealth (well the only way to imagine that level of wealth is to think of the vast unimaginable wealth being assembled by the international conspiracy of scientists exploiting climate science).

Unfortunately Johns doesn't take the necessary step, leaving it all to the ABS to defeat the homeless and their evil lobbyists.

But astute followers of history will recall that Adolf Hitler spent three months in a shelter for homeless men in Meidling in south-west Vienna (Imagining a young Hitler), and so world war two can be directly attributable to long ago activities of the homeless lobby.

What needs to happen is that lobbyists and charity workers always banging on about the homeless, and so disturbing Gary Johns and his righteous sleep, should be shipped to a camp (perhaps we can call it Camp Joy) where they must be re-educated, and taught the virtues of doing nothing, and caring nothing, about the homeless.

Perhaps we should think about another camp for the homeless - perhaps we could call it the Gary Johns' Camp for Wayward Self-indulgent Folk - but hey, it's most unlikely we could rustle up more than 63,000 homeless, with a mere 8,000 actually residing in a comfy outdoor setting, complete with natural lighting and free newspapers ...

You see in the real world there's bugger all homelessness and if you happen to see a homeless person, likely as not it's only because the ABS got its definitions wrong, and included a "cultural" definition of homelessness in its statistics. And any way, did we mention, there's nothing you can do for these wretches:

At the time Rudd promised to halve homelessness, he also said, "In a country as prosperous as Australia, no one should be homeless." Why promise only half but want all? Was it a lack of political will or recognition that homelessness is not solvable?

Yes, homelessness isn't solvable, it's all the fault of the dropkicks and the boofheads themselves, what with their attitude to work, and their attitude to relationships, and their difficulties handling divorce and domestic violence.

You see Australia is the lucky country - employment is up (and amazingly as a result unemployment is down), low-income households have never had it so good, rents have only risen 17%, vacancy rates are high, domestic violence is down, divorce is down ... there's simply no excuse to be homeless, and attempt to rort indulgent taxpayers only concerned with doing good.

What's all this talk of Australia being doomed and the carbon tax rooning everything? Why are all these homed people whingeing and whining? Well it's because the homeless and their lobbyists are latched on to them like vampires, draining them of their precious bodily fluids, not to mention all their cash, yet the homeless have never had it so good, what with all the sunlight and the natural vitamin D they get to absorb ...

Let's face it, we're spending way too much on the homeless. If they can't get a gig flogging The Big Issue, then they should just go to a quiet corner of the park, and quietly die. Just stop causing consternation and misery amongst the homed, who naturally have to avert their eyes when they see some wretched homeless person fossicking through a garbage bin like a bloody ibis ...

Above all, we must not be sentimental:

In order not to despair completely of the people among whom I then lived I had to set on one side the outward appearances of their lives and on the other the reasons why they had developed in that way. Then I could hear everything without discouragement; for those who emerged from all this misfortune and misery, from this filth and outward degradation, were not human beings as such but rather lamentable results of lamentable laws. In my own life similar hardships prevented me from giving way to a pitying sentimentality at the sight of these degraded products which had finally resulted from the pressure of circumstances. No, the sentimental attitude would be the wrong one to adopt. (thank you Adolf, pdf here).

So there you have it. Next time some Xian wanders up to you with a story of woe about the homeless and asks for a donation (or perhaps a cat person bemoaning the fate of cats in the big city), give them a short, sharp slap about the chops and sending them on their way, with a stern warning that Gary Johns said that the homeless are hopeless, their situation unsolvable, and the only decent thing they can do is stop giving the lobbyists and the charity vultures an easy ride to indecent, sickening riches thanks to the sentimental generosity of unwitting taxpayers ...

Whatever you do, avoid empathy, and avoid reading the likes of William T. Vollmann's Homeless in Sacramento: Welcome to the new tent cities (especially as it's behind a paywall, so the homeless can't afford it, nah nah), and especially avoid any Xian claptrap about compassion and caring, it being important to remember that Christ was homeless, and look at the trouble he caused ...

Got keep that beak working, and the pecking order solid ... Take two Hackordnung pills before breakfast, and go about your business with good cheer, and if you see someone homeless in the streets, give him a kick for Gary Johns, while muttering under your breath how that'll learn the despicable lobbyists ...

(Below: and while you're at it, have a go at any disgraceful ibis you see demeaning themselves, as featured in Plight of the ibis a sign of the times).