And now for some Pellist lint and fluff ...

Oh sorry.

We were busy hacking emails because in our spare time the pond fancies itself as a crime buster and an investigator, as a kind of professional plod or trap, if you will.

A bit like a Sky reporter going abut the business of journalism, as in Sky News admits hacking emails of 'canoe man'.

Yes there's no limit to our breaking the law to protect the law, but let's put that aside, and give credit where credit is due. You won't be reading this in the Murdoch media anytime soon:

The Australian rocketed to hitherto unscaled heights of fury, a remarkable feat in a newspaper whose daily adoration of the lint in its own navel has no match in the English-speaking world.

Yes, it's the inimitable Mike Carlton, mocking Murdoch's myrmidons wheeling loyally into line, lining up in the maw of the media octopus to decry Fairfax and the AFR's coverage of PayTV hacking, in Scandal was always written in the stars.

Myrmidons, you might recall, depending on whether you fell asleep in ancient history classes, first featured in Homer's Iliad as fierce warriors with an excessive loyalty (wiki here), but in due course the word came to mean hired ruffians, loyal followers who execute without question or scruple a master's commands.

Myrmidons of Murdoch! Why the pond tips its lid to Carlton, since it's so much a superior form of alliteration than molochs of Murdoch (though we'll always be fond of Moloch and his penchant for propitiatory child sacrifice. James, are you there James?)

But back to the subject of lint, and here's some of the lint we won't be reading in The Australian this weekend:

Why we'd quite forgotten Christopher Pearson existed, and what joy to know there's simply no need to invent him.

And then there's this lint:

Brendan O'Neill and "why gay marriage is bad for us all"!

Of course if a liberal elitist had dared in such a presumptive way to speak for all of us, with a rampantly condescending arrogance, O'Neill would have given him or her no end of grief.

Actually, the pond's experience of gay marriage hasn't been bad at all. Our internationally based gay friends are happily married and now embroiled in house renovations. That'll teach them about the joys of marriage. As for O'Neill, what a goose. Will he ever write a column explaining why Brendan O'Neill is bad for us all (well at least it isn't same as talking about "you people").

Pay for drivel and lint? Tell 'em they're dreaming.

Why you can pick up O'Neill for free at at Spiked or your ABC's The Drum, but truth to tell, all that proves is that even free needn't be much of a bargain.

And speaking of audio-visual lint, it seems that The Australian is deeply involved with Cardinal Pell this easter:

Sorry, you can't click and play, it's a screen cap. What do you think the pond is? A myrmidon of Murdoch spreading pompous Pellian prose?

We avoided listening - there are some things too hard to bear - but we couldn't resist a sneak look behind the iron bamboo curtain great wall of myrmidon Murdochists to read Nick Cater's interview with Pell in A call to cardinal virtues.

Now if that link doesn't work, you know how it's done. You just take the first few words, insert them in google, and lo and behold, it turns up free, no matter what the fickle finger of gold fate might insist. And the opener is a ripper:

On paper at least, Cardinal George Pell has failed to halt the advance of paganism since the latter day prophets of Baal now hold the balance of power in Canberra.

Roll that one around on your tongue. Ignorance, superstition, and stupidity all in a fabulous short Nick Cater sentence, catering to the dumb. Does the lad have the merest understanding of what the word "pagan" means? If so, how did it get linked to prophets of Baal?

There were, of course, many Ba'als, as you can find in the wiki, but presumably Cater doesn't mind calling the likes of Tony Windsor a Ba'alist.

Personally I like to think of Nick Cater as a Satanist since he's rollicking around with one of the leaders of that whore of Babylon, the anti-Christ church of Rome, and what fun jolly idle terms of abuse can be.

I suppose Cater can claim an excuse, since he's simply borrowing from Pellist rhetoric:

Pell marked his reception as Sydney's eighth Catholic archbishop in 2001 with a call to arms against the aggressive forces of secularism, cautioning that the rise of the Baal worshippers at the time of Elijah, in the 9th century BC, nearly overwhelmed monotheistic Judaism.

He called on Christians, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs to defend monotheism, to keep the spiritual waters flowing strong and deep, "so it would not be lost in billabongs -- closed backwaters without escape, where the water can only eddy in circles, as it evaporates or seeps into the sand".

Today, Pell's campaign to prevent catastrophic spiritual climate change has a more focused target: the Greens, whom he accuses of leading the charge to banish religion from the public square.

Oh dear, he got Pell wrong, since it turns out he's referring to the ninth century B.C. - always a handy point for climate science - and don't you just love it, catastrophic spiritual climate change is now all the go. How fey, how utterly gay (in the Noel Coward sense of the term).

It seems Bob Brown is roughly equivalent to the anti-Christ slouching towards Bethlehem.

Naturally the talk with Pell quickly turns to the chattering classes, and to the intelligentsia. Yes, as always, talk of intelligence is a form of abuse - it seems being intelligent is way worse than being dumb -,and it seems that out in the western suburbs of Sydney and in Queensland, intelligence isn't valued at all. They'll learn the chattering classes about gay marriage.

But let's keep on with the lint:

"Australian common sense is still deeply imbued with many Christian notions. The notion of a fair go, I think, is impossible to understand without Christianity," he says. "If you go back to the ancient Greeks, Aristotle and Plato didn't give human rights to slaves or to foreigners.

"They instinctively, primarily limited their first loyalty not to everybody -- that is a Christian notion -- but to their own people or tribe."

Oh dear. Well you only have to trot off to the Evil Bible to see how Christianity disavowed slavery. As always, Leviticus is a favourite first port of call:

... you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way. (Leviticus 25:44-46)

That really only confirms what everybody knows. Catholics rarely read the bible, preferring their own proximity to god to make fatuous pronouncements about everything from on high.

Oh and in case you were wondering about the New Testament, just remember:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ. (Ephesians 6:5 NLT)

Christians who are slaves should give their masters full respect so that the name of God and his teaching will not be shamed. If your master is a Christian, that is no excuse for being disrespectful. You should work all the harder because you are helping another believer by your efforts. Teach these truths, Timothy, and encourage everyone to obey them. (1 Timothy 6:1-2 NLT)

Yes, you can see how the Australian concept of a fair go had everything to do with the Christian attitude to slavery, and nothing to do with the nationalism, unionism and socialism that became rampant around the land after the great shearers' strike of 1891.

Well there's plenty more lint in the interview, some of it about the dangerous question of modernity, as opposed to traditional slave-owning Christian values, and much of it represents a feeble attempt by Pell to tackle the issue of B. A. Santamaria. In a nutshell, it seems Communism is bad, but then so is Santamarian agrarian anti-free market socialism, except of course when it can be applied to small farms in Australia, at which point agrarian socialism is a jolly good thing.

It must be difficult for a free marketeer like Pell to tip toe around Santamaria and his influence on Tony Abbott:

...I don't look back with nostalgia to either Santamaria or the Movement. I experienced the toxic divisiveness.
Apparently unlike Tony Abbott who, at the January 2007 launch of Santamaria's Selected Letters said, 'I was lucky to know B. A. Santamaria for the last 22 years of his life, to have attended diligently to his writing and speaking.' Santamaria, he says 'left Australian Catholicism more intellectual and less politically tribal', by which he presumably means there are now Catholics in Coalition as well as Labor ranks. (oh yes it's those deviant Jesuits at Eureka Street again, publishing the thoughts of Paul Collins here).

Not to worry. Mr. Abbott just loves the toxic divide.

Meanwhile, on the evidence to hand, Pell is deeply vapid, profoundly conventional, and without an ability to understand much of anything. By golly he must be good at Church politics, it's the only explanation (oh the stories the gay priest in the family tells) ...

As for Nick Cater, how kind of him to cater to Pell's whims by not trawling through the matter of climate change science, which might otherwise have explained how the Greens and some other later day Ba'alists have come to think that Pell is a prime goose ...

All in all, it was just another reminder that every day in The Australian is a lint day. You just have to pay for the lint.

But stay, it seems on Monday, in the spirit of Easter, Pell will tackle that arch-paganist, Ba'alist or perhaps Satanist ... or is he just an angry militant atheist, as opposed to a climate science denialist? ... on Q&A, and it's yours for free thanks to your ABC.

Oh the joys of free lint ...