Pay for drivel? They must be dreaming ...

Is it true?

Is it possible that if you follow Émile Coué de la Châtaigneraie's prescription - repeating over and over Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux, or in English if you will Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better - things actually do begin to pick up? (more on the Coué system here at his wiki).

Who knows, but suddenly it feels like the world has become a little safer and cleaner.

Yes, today the HUN goes behind a paywall, and naturally the pond felt the need to celebrate.

You see, it's the dawn of a new digital era, closely resembling the move by Thomas Crapper to perfect the siphonic flush toilet. Oh sure others came before him, and crap doesn't come from Crapper, and there are other assorted mythologies around the man, but he does fine as a metaphor (why not visit Thomas's wiki here).

The pond is bemused at the notion of paying for drivel. Let's face it, Andrew Bolt writes drivel of the purest ideological snowy kind.

Why pay for drivel, let alone read it?

It turns out, for example, if you want to pay for good reading, you might want to think about a host of alternatives. It turns out that some of these alternatives even let some of their interesting pieces emerge on the intertubes without intervention by paywall.

The pond, for example, has recently been engaged by Diane Ravitch's exemplary insights into education and the Finnish education system, and it's only a click away for you here under the header Schools We Can Envy (there are two parts, this is the first).

You won't read anything like it about the current delusional education policies being pursued in the United States or in Australia in any Murdoch publication ...

And then there's a piece by William D. Nordhaus, explaining Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong.

Amazingly, the sixteen scientists who wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal had the cheek to quote Nordhaus, and get it wrong, along with a number of other matters, and Nordhaus takes to them like paint stripper to a particularly obnoxious form of wretched orange paint. So you can read the ning nongs in the WSJ, or you can just settle for the rebuttal, outside the world of Murdoch.

In any case, you won't find any of the Nordhaus level of thought emanating from the likes of Andrew Bolt - why Nordhaus even uses footnotes, and as we all know from Ian Plimer, footnotes prove a case conclusively - but you will find a lot of drivel. Drivel on almost any and every subject under the sun.

Vanity, all is vanity, saith the Bolter.

And that's the best news of all - the news the pond has been waiting for months to hear - because at last the fickle finger of gold fate has struck at Andrew Bolt:

Oh gold bar, sweet bliss and joy.

Sure the Bolter's blog is still free, so you can still get all the drivel you like free of charge.

And that's the thing ...

Why pay for drivel when the drivel remains free in other locations?

Why pay for drivel at all when you can find other things to do with your time and your money?

Well as the HUN scrabbles around for money, the pond was reminded of a Koan:

Ikkyu, the Zen master, was very clever even as a boy. His teacher had a precious teacup, a rare antique. Ikkyu happened to break this cup and was greatly perplexed. Hearing the footsteps of his teacher, he held the pieces of the cup behind him. When the master appeared, Ikkyu asked: "Why do people have to die?"

"This is natural," explained the older man. "Everything has to die and has just so long to live."

Ikkyu, producing the shattered cup, added: "It was time for your cup to die." (here)

Now's the time paying for drivel should die.

Take it away Clark Kent: