Another mash-up ranging from Gina Rinehart's suffering through Chris Berg doing Kafka to Bob Ellis doing Shakespeare to Peter Costello doing his smirk

(Above: the struggle to rise up against class warfare continues by the day, the hour and the minute, as you can read in Rinehart world's richest woman: BRW - warning forced video attached).

A moment's silence please, if you don't mind, while the pond contemplates the hideous, outrageous, successful class warfare campaign conducted against job creator Gina Rinehart, now reduced to a humble 52 mil. a day in earnings power.

Ms. Rinehart struggles on, doing her best, creating jobs left, right and centre (along with mall poetry) and somehow manages to survive on the mere pittance of the 52 mil. siphoned off to her personal treasure chest.

Thank the absent lord the good folk at The Australian help maintain the rage against this wicked class warfare, and if you're a subscriber to the rag, why in turn you're doing your little bit to keep Ms Rinehart just above the poverty line, that plimsoll line of suffering confronting the entire mining industry in Australia.

Amazingly however on the day when it's most relevant The Australian's front digital page doesn't mention class warfare in a single header!

Maintain the rage mymidon Murdochians, Ms. Rinehart is suffering mightily, and feeble protectors like Andrew 'the Bolter' Bolt can only do so much to help ...

Oh and if you subscribe, not only do you defeat class warfare and all the evil it represents, but you get a bonus Dennis "the tie" Shanahan rant:

Yes for your comfort and safety, The Australian employs a righteous rhetorical blowhard always ready to partake in Murdochian obfuscation and delusional denial, keenly aware of the failings of politicians without ever once seemingly aware that his purported objectivity might be just another dose of ... class warfare.

Moving right along, the pond pauses only to note how the OECD has noted how the federal government is presiding over one of the worst economies in the world - oh sure the economy might be slated to experience the fastest economic growth in the OECD in the next year, with relatively low unemployment, but think how much better the winning margin could be, how much further Australia could be ahead at number one! What losers we are, how we need The Australian to berate us daily ...

Why every citizen could be Gina Rinehart, and without benefit of lotto!

And now, since the pond usually spends its time mocking, berating and abusing Chris Berg, it seems only fair to acknowledge that if you're a consistent libertarian, sometimes you will turn up with a piece like Locking people away forever because ASIO reckons:

It's a scandal that administrative decisions which result in indefinite detention are made outside judicial scrutiny.

What do you know? Here's a Bergian piece with which the pond is at one, but then between choosing the Bergian view and the Kafka-esque nightmare invented by the federal government which makes Joseph K.'s fate almost benign, perhaps it's an easy choice:

You're under arrest all right, but not the way a thief would be. If you're arrested like a thief, that's bad, but this arrest .... It seems like something scholarly, I'm sorry if that sounds stupid, but it seems like something scholarly that I don't understand, but that I don't need to understand either.

Or as Berg puts it:

The Department of Immigration only refers asylum seekers to ASIO for security checks after it's been determined they qualify for refugee status. It's one of the last steps. By the time ASIO looks at them, the Australian Government already believes they have a well-founded fear of being persecuted.

So when a refugee receives an adverse security assessment, they're thrown into administrative limbo. They are unable to return home (too dangerous for them) and they are unable to enter Australia (too dangerous for us). The result is indefinite detention. It's a classically bureaucratic non-solution. Just lock them up forever and hope the problem goes away.

Yep, that's a scholarly state of arrest.

But if the pond thinks about it too much, there's agitation and outrage bubbling to the surface.

What can we do for entertainment that doesn't involve self-harm?

Thank the long absent lord for Bob Ellis.

Come on down Bob and explain The curious hodgepodge that is Shakespeare.

Now if you actually bother to read the piece, you won't find any solid arguments. Just a mish-mash of notions, but isn't that always the Ellis way? It turns out that the curious hodgepodge that is Bob Ellis is a fan of the theory that Oxford was Shakespeare, proving you can sell a conspiracy theory to any passing literary mug.

According to Ellis, Nothing after Othello actually works, which is a tremendous relief to the pond, confirming that King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Winter's Tale and The Tempest are a waste of time. Students, when pressed by your teacher, remind them of the self-regarding Ellis's insight.

Self-regarding? Well you see in his tour through the world of Shakespeare, Ellis can draw on his own rich experiences to provide conclusive insights:

For now as then, authorship is a fluid concept. I wrote episodes of Number 96 that Don Cash and Bill Harmon in some way 'owned'. My wife Anne Brooksbank wrote episodes of A Country Practice that Jim Davern still makes big money from. Woody Allen and Mel Brooks wrote sketches that Sid Caesar miraculously 'owned' and made famous,' Big Julie, I told him, don't go, already'; and so on.

And if that's not conclusive evidence that Oxford was Shakespeare, then really what planet do you live on?

The similarities between Ellis at work on Number 96, and the procedures of Australian television in the nineteen seventies in relation to authorship, and Oxford scribbling away to make Shakespeare internationally famous are painfully clear ...

You can gather the depth of Ellis's insight by this closing summary:

It is worth looking up Tom North's Plutarch's account (note how the apostrophes accumulate) of the last days of Julius Caesar, and comparing them with Act 2 and Act 3 of 'Shakespeare's' most enduring and accessible work. It was successful, I submit, m'lud, because it was reportage of actual events more than a work of the imagination. It had no more 'author' than Oliver Stone's JFK.
And a great deal of 'Shakespeare's' work was like that.

Uh huh. Plutarch was born in 46ACE, and his life of Caesar was perhaps written around 75 ACE. Caesar was assassinated 44BCE.

Now there's reportage of actual events at work, in much the same way that the pond routinely conducts reportage of actual events in the Boer war. Ah let me tell you again about the times we spent roaming the plains in search of ministers of religion with 'Breaker' Morant ... why it feels like it was only yesterday.

Yep, somehow it's news that Shakespeare sensibly ripped off a good source. It's a pity the same couldn't be said for Ellis, who somehow imagined that his life was a good source. And so the world came to ignore The Nostradamus Kid.

But a great deal of Ellis's work is like that - factoid gibberish and self-regarding fantasy, and if want entertainment of a bloated kind, you can rarely do better.

Of course if you wanted actual insight, there are dozens of places you can find on the full to over-flowing intertubes, including The Shakespeare authorship page, which is dedicated to the absurd proposition that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, and which has a handy set of links to so many loons - not just Ellis - lurking under the sun.

Strangely however, the page utterly fails to take into account the significance of Number 96 in the Shakespearian oeuvre.

Never mind, speaking of self-regard, finally just a note on that self-serving, spineless smirk sometimes known as Peter Costello, who it will be recalled successfully sued Ellis, perhaps his one noble deed.

Amazingly Costello still has the front and the brass to appear in print, proving Michael Kroger no longer knows how to kick heads so they stay kicked.

In his outing in Difficult to cast house of sin in a good light, Costello just a righteous job of sneering and pontificating and judging the current parliament as full of sleaze, and then presents this little doozy:

When allegations of travel rorts rebounded on to Labor's senator Nick Sherry he engaged in an act of serious self-harm. Thankfully nothing as serious as that has happened during this furore.

Could we just offer a little re-write on that?

When allegations of travel rorts rebounded on to Labor's senator Nick Sherry and I made a couple of really cheap jokes - oh possum she says, and oh possum, you're home - he engaged in an act of serious self-harm. Thankfully nothing as serious as that has happened during this furore because thankfully I'm no longer in parliament, which means all you get is sleaze, when in my time at the helm, I offered sleaze ... with bonus smirks.

Oh possum, if only you could remember why everybody was glad to see the back of you, and how risibly your efforts at journalism are regarded.

If only you could take off your sunglasses, and open your hubristic, self-regarding eyes ...

(Below: The Costello smirk through the ages, as here he's juxtaposed with his great-great-grandfather Patrick Costello).