The Optus The, part two ... with bonus Dame Slap ...

(Above: don't blame the pond, blame First Dog and his anti-Optus rant, on view in Death to Optus!, way back in 2009).

Now where were we, before being so rudely interrupted?

That's right, practicing our German.

The Optus The.

No, totally incompetent Optus, it doesn't help to be told that all your customers in Newtown, Camperdown, Enmore and Stanmore are suffering too. Shared suffering isn't redemptive, it's just bloody suffering.

The Telstra The.

You useless ning nongs, we've been there and suffered with you too. Get yourself a decent competitive service, and we'll think about jumping.

The Mike Quigley Stephen Conroy NBN The

You pathetic bunch of losers. It certainly doesn't help the pond when deprived of all connectivity and its grasp of virtual reality - the only reality it knows - to be watching a repeat of Air Crash Investigations - what else to do than watch people suffer and die in aircraft porn - to be bombarded with cheerful ads about how anyone can join up to the NBN. In 2050, if we're lucky, you hopeless bunch of incompetents. Roll out? Someone needs to roll over you ...

The Malcolm Turnbull Tony Abbott The.

You dingbats, you vile traducers of truth and technology. Just say it three times so the pond finally can believe you finally get it. Copper is fucked, it is finito, it is finished. And don't tell the pond how grand the cables, the gloriously ancient HFC running past the pond's house promises continued glorious connectivity. It's fucked, it is finito, and so is the Optus infrastructure which requires technicians running around like wombats to sustain. FTTH you cheaters, you abysmal deceivers, you liars, you gormless luddites, not this current muck ...

There that feels better, and no doubt the German readers out there can make the appropriate translations.

In the meantime, what's been happening?

The pond is totally lost. Apparently that prattling Polonius yesterday scribbled Labor so lost that even its confused diehards stagger (forced video at end of link). Well he would gloat and scribble that, but it's yesterday's news, out of date, wrapping fish and chips somewhere, even the footnote where he apologises for one error while overlooking so many others he commits on a weekly basis ...

We need some balance, some sanity, so thank the long absent lord, it's Janet "Dame Slap" Albrechtsen day, and lordy lordy, is she frothing and foaming in Gillard's selfish hold on high office is destroying the Labor brand (behind the paywall so you don't have to pay for ranting):

There is a reason why the word oxymoron fits neatly when the word progressive is applied to members of the Left. Sometimes, more moron than oxy. Take this fantastical conspiracy theory following the bloodless coup-less events in Canberra last Thursday. 
In search of fingerprints on Simon Crean's call for a spill on that fateful day, forget Kevin Rudd's pudgyhands. Instead, the "talon-marks of Australia's dark overlord, Rupert Murdoch, are etched all over this announcement", wrote David Donovan last Thursday. 

Indeed. It is simply outrageous to suggest that the relentless three year campaign by Rupert Murdoch and his minions to spread fear and loathing, and undermine the federal Labor government at every turn - led by those valiant crusaders at the Daily Terror, the HUN and the lizard Oz - have anything to do with the hysteria suffusing the government.

Why comparing Conroy to Stalin is just a pleasant satirical thrust - up there with the pond's Germanic Die Conroy Die -  a jolly jape amongst chums.

"With media reform laws looking likely to have been passed today, it is almost certain he, or his local minions, overnight whispered beguiling words mixed with threats to Crean and others to force a spill today," raged the managing editor of "progressive" online journal Independent Australia. In the end, common sense, not claws, defeated the media laws.

It is of course typical of Dame Slap that she wouldn't actually reference the actual work. In the polite world of social media, links are provided, but not in the world of Murdoch's paranoid castle, because it might take you out of the crib and into the virtual world (the dark forces of Optus permitting).

That way too you miss out on the tweet sent into the digital world by Murdoch featured at Murdoch's marks all over Labor leadership spill:

And look, here you can get even more tweets from that dark fiendish twit - that overlord who seems to have entirely forgotten the hard place David Cameron found himself in because of the truly despicable and outrageous conduct of the News of the World and other Murdoch titles which would have seen any other responsible CEO or Chair sacked and driven from any decent company ... but not where the lust for filthy, irresponsible power is strong, and oh Luke, how the dark side is still strong ...

Now the pond can't go with Independent Australia's more detailed conspiracy theory, but how grand it must feel to know that they've been read and incurred the wrath and the ire of the righteous Dame Slap, herself not above joining with Lord Monckton to decry the United Nations using climate science as a way to bring forth world government.

Oh yes, when it comes to stupid conspiracy theories, she's an ace at the game.

The pond particularly loved this Francis-loving twittering by the overlord, in the grip of the dark side:

But back to Dame Slap, and yes without a hint of irony or the slightest sign of self-awareness or reflexive meta-irony in the conduct of her public discourse (what's that, Simon Crean isn't handing out Arts grants anymore?), she spends the rest of her column doing what Murdochians are expected to do ... assaulting and destroying Gillard and the Labor government.

What's most amusing is the continued elevation of Martin Ferguson:

Martin Ferguson, who resigned on Friday after also signalling the need for a leadership change, falls into the same camp. The Ferguson family -- Martin, his brother and father -- have given 71 years of service to the Labor Party in parliaments, state and federal. 
These two men, Ferguson and Crean, from families who together have represented Labor for 139 years, represent the centrist and sensible Labor brand under Hawke and Keating. That's why Crean and Ferguson could no longer support Gillard.

Now at any other time and place, this sort of nonsense would have been led as prime examples of nepotism and the need in the Labor party for some fresh blood, instead of this never-ending nepotic dominance ... this incestuous control by families within the firm, like dons handing it on in the Mafia.

But in this flip flop Dame Slap view of the world, the enemy of your enemy suddenly becomes your friend and so the childish, arrogant efforts of former chairman Rudd to seek revenge and a new ascendancy become the adult way to behave:

Remember, too, that these two Labor men, both former presidents of the ACTU, threw their lot in with Rudd, a man famously described as having "no Labor values", who is loathed by the union movement. This is how dire things are now in the Labor camp. 
 Ferguson and Crean are standouts because they are among the few adults of the federal parliamentary Labor Party. Yet the adults now sit on the backbench while too many children, some known best for throwing stones at miners, the rich and the media, sit in cabinet.

Yes, because throwing stones at Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer and Chairman Rupert is just so wrong, and so naughty, and Dame Slap runs special severe classes for recalcitrant children who dare to speak up about anything ...

There is of course a peculiar resentment, a fervent hatred and fear of loathing of Gillard that Dame Slap calls her own.

Is it the red hair? Is it the shared Unley heritage? Is it the bogan accent?

Back in July 2010 Albrechtsen mused in Mea culpa time? Not so fast on this very subject:

Start with something so basic it barely gets a mention. That voice. Gillard's accent is curious. Especially if, like her, you grew up in Adelaide, had a working-class background and went to public schools. I'm often asked why I don't sound like Gillard. Easy. No one in Adelaide sounds like Gillard. Certainly no one who went to Unley High School, hardly a school of hard knocks. Could she have manufactured those broad nasal vowels, so different even from her Adelaide-accented sister, to fit her political emergence within Labor's left-wing factions? You feel so cynical even suggesting it.

No you don't feel so cynical, you just feel like Dame Slap, and what a deeply dirty feeling that is ...

Anyhoo, we come to the latest assault, and Dame Slap tackles the subject of toughness, concluding:

All she is left with is tough like "Aussie" Joe Bugner at the back end of his boxing career.

Yes, she'd even do the dirty on poor old Aussie Joe, even though he'd danced with Muhammad Ali (to the delight of certain nuns) ...

Gillard picked some choice words to describe last week. "I was appalled," she said on Monday. We must show self-belief, not self-indulgence, she said. A more accurate word for Gillard is selfish. To be sure, all political leaders are egotistical, over-confident and selfish, and let us admit too we are all selfish, some more, some less. 
But Gillard represents the worst kind of selfishness. Hers is not self-interest combined with vision. 

Absolutely. Her vision simply doesn't allow for a world run by Gina Rinehart, Andrew 'the Bolter' Bolt, the rest of the Murdochians and their dark overlord (turn to the dark side, Luke, turn to the dark), Clive Palmer, incompetent state gauleiters like Campbell Newman, and so on and so forth. They're not selfish people, they just want to rule the world, or perhaps the universe, like Pinky and the brain ...

And here's the most amazing feat of all. Albrechtsen finally comes out and reveals her deep connections to Menzies House and all the other twits who celebrate the fatuous stupidity of Ayn Rand. Yes, she actually does it ...

When Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard pursued their own self-interest to lead the nation it was fuelled by a genuine vision based on a set of convictions they fought for, often in difficult political circumstances.
These leaders followed in the tradition of rational selfishness best described by philosopher Ayn Rand. It's productive, rather than destructive self-interest, that caters to something bigger than a person's ego. 

Ayn Rand!? The very same Ayn Rand who was a welfare queen, who took government assistance while decrying others who did the same?

And now she's a philosopher? As opposed to a self-serving hypocrite? (and she's not much of a philosopher either, special pleading at her wiki aside).

Ah well, in Dame Slap's world, Lord Monckton is a climate scientist, so it must be right.

Naturally Dame Slap concludes with a rant about all that's wrong with the current Labor government - you know, carbon tax, offshore processing, yadda yadda - and without once mentioning their failure to run the NBN through Camperdown while ensuring the pond's extended family in Tamworth are on super fast speeds ...

And to cap it all off, she repeats the Ayn Rand routine:

At present rates, come September 15, the "hard working" Gillard will have plenty of time to read Atlas Shrugged, Rand's most famous treatise about selfishness that is rational and productive rather than Gillard's irrational, destructive variety.

Dame Slap routinely jumps the shark and nukes the fridge but isn't it astonishing to read an actual member of the commentariat in the lizard Oz recommending Ayn Rand, one the most destructive, selfish, irrational, unproductive, and hypocritical writers of the twentieth century ... as sensible reading material ...

Putting her right out and up there with the marathon-distorting times, lying dissembling world of Paul Ryan, who liked Ayn Rand until he discovered she was a political liability and then ditched her.

It brought to mind long-forgotten memories deeply embedded in the pond of young Liberals attending to Ayn Rand. And that verse from the bible:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, I read as a child, heck I even read Ayn Ran: but when I became a woman, when I became a member of the commentariat at the lizard Oz, when I pretended to be an adult with special insights, I put away childish, indulgent things... and mind candy ... and Ayn Rand ...

If only, but that would require a little intelligence and reflexivity, and sadly all Dame Slap has is a rather large cane, which she wields with monotonous predictability, along with occasional forays into Randian stupidity.

It has to be asked. Is she a covert agent for Optus?

(Below: ah, memories, way back in 2009 here. Where are the sweet young things now?)