Where to start? Where to start?

(Above: fools or frauds? Or a bit of both?)


Where to start? Where to start?

Well it seems like the reptiles at the lizard Oz have done a makeover while the pond's been junketing, the sneaky furtive mice sensing the cat's away (can a skulking reptile also be a furtive mouse? Why do you ask such a silly question?)

It seems that the rag has decided the gold bar fickle finger of fate - aka demanding money with menaces and false pretences as to the truth - should be a little more discreet.

But the raging barrage of red-coloured EXCLUSIVES still pepper the front digital page, no doubt before disappearing up some nearby fundament.

Oh and there was a burst of unseemly fury about PANPA daring to approve of The Age above the lizard Oz, when really any assault on the awards should have begun with the disgraceful decision to allow a rabid ideological feral rag to call itself the newspaper of the year ... last year ...

What can be said about Nick Leys' piece PANPA award sparks outrage and accusations of bias from rival editors that hasn't already been said?

Suck it up, cry baby lizards and spoilsports, bleating and sulking like sore losers at an Academy shindig.

Even better was the news that only an accounting trick had kept the rag and its colleagues from being part of a massive blow-out, as the full-year's financial results for News Corp sidled into the arena like a warthog (News Corp's hall of mirrors can't hide newspaper woes, may be paywall affected).

Suck it up lizards, it's sure to get worse, as astonished readers of Nick Leys' petulant princess piece of sullen perverse bellyaching decide to can such a narcissist rag ...

It turns out that nothing has actually changed, at least if Media Watch is anything to go by.

Last night's piece, A real scoop or just hot air?, watched with bleary-eyed incredulity through jetlag, was a lovely smack down, and by the end of it, the pond was left wondering how Graham Lloyd - allegedly the lizard Oz's environment editor - sleeps at night with himself.

What does he think when he looks at himself in the mirror in the morning? Does he see a dunce, or a fellow traveller seeking out anything eggbeater to hand to serve his master's voice? There can't be too many other options ...

And this was rapidly followed by news that the Daily Terror was in the middle of one of its feral campaigns, as detailed in Bike Bashing at the Daily Telegraph.

Having just been in two cities - Amsterdam and Paris - where bike riding is both pleasurable and practical, you have to wonder why the Daily Terror wants to turn Sydney into the nightmare on the roads that torture Los Angeles. What's in it for them?

Even more peculiar, don't they realise that Dear Leader loves to cycle, and is, without a shadow of a doubt, a lycra-clad lout?

There can be only one diagnosis, and the pond offers it for free - the Terror is in the grip of a deep and deadly schizophrenia.

What else? Well there was some good news - yes only Andrew Bolt can do it for the pond - with the news the ratings for The Bolt Report have slipped under the 100k mark, with 96,000 and 94,000 for its September 23rd outings. (here)

It seems that the Bolter was shifted to the 11.30 am slot, but still had less appeal than Video Hits running highlights of the disco era (ah, for an opera buff to be done over by Xanadu, what joy, what joy).

Or as Glenn Dyer put it here, may be paywall affected:

The partisanship of Bolt and people like Piers Akerman who was on Insiders yesterday morning aren’t liked by viewers who have moved on from the election campaign and the Rudd-Gillard years. Bolt and Akerman and their fellow travelers are fighting yesterday’s battles, like the two old codgers on The Muppet Show.

Akker Dakker and the Bolter as muppets?

Oh so unkind, kind sir, so unkind ... but you do make a fair point, because now that Dear Leader Abbott is installed, all that's left for the Bolter is the simpering, fawning air of a lickspittle doe-eyed deer ...

What's he do do? Criticise Dear Leader for being a soft leftie?

Even better - yes it's hard to imagine but the image of a bloated Akker Dakker making a fool of himself yet again is even better than the petulant reptiles at the Oz or the fawn-like Bolter - is the way that the ABC has been compelled to distance itself from its guest commentator.

You can, thanks to the wonders of the slow-intertubes - make it slower, big Mal, make it even slower, use copper, Queen Victoria would approve -  catch up with the circus here, though any stray and wiser reader might have just been content with the ABC having to acknowledge the folly of showcasing tired ideological hacks and fetid Murdoch warriors:

Misinformed? That's a quaint word for a rabid zealot ...

Now if the pond were to say it was pleased to return from bicycling in Amsterdam and doing a tour of the galleries of Paris, it would be a bald-and-bare-faced lie, up there with the Murdochians and their Janus-like approach to the truth, but it has to be acknowledged there are some compensations at returning to see such pleasant scenes ...

As for the rest, everything as it was. Peter "send in the hounds" Reith continues his permanent residency at the ABC, perhaps thereby showing how privatising the place and making it a division of the IPA might well be an excellent policy initiative in the next year or so.

It takes an enormous gall to title a piece The return of stable government without the surprises, but then this is a man who thinks sending in the hounds is a way to produce industrial harmony.

Naturally stable government includes furtive secrecy on the matter of boats - conceal news of their arrival and hey presto they don't arrive. Do they really think if they turn back a boat, and it sinks and people drown that  no one will ever know?

But it turns out this also includes a novel approach to science.

Abolish any news of climate change, and hey presto it's not happening (and by the way have you finally come to understand that copper is all the working class dregs need for their connectivity?)

And as usual, there's prattling Polonius, still rolling out his tedious and banal insights, and calling into question with every word the singular and peculiar slogan of the Fairfaxians to be always proud of their independence ... a quaint way of putting their ongoing publicity for and promotion of the Sydney Institute and its guru ...

Happily the pond skipped Blame game should start with party names because the pond lost a good bottle of red wine betting that prattling Polonius wouldn't be frothing and foaming about Clive Palmer and the AEC and the Liberal Democrats, but instead would be shocked and outraged at David Marr's takedown of the Pellists (you can sample it at The Monthly here). Maybe next week, or maybe Pellism is a losing cause ...

More to the point, as a way of confirming that it's business at usual at Fairfax, it seems that their expert troller at large, Paul Sheehan, has been trolling away in fine style.

How can you tell he's a troll? Well he boasts of the hits arising from his trolling in Fakes, trolls and counterfeit politics:

Last Monday's column, ''Welcome to the Abbottoir'', about the fundamentalist subculture of Abbott-hating, generated more than 300,000 visitors on the Fairfax websites and more than 1000 comments, 300 of them deemed unpublishable. As I say, trolls don't do irony. 

Yep, Paul Sheehan doesn't do irony, though you'd think that his love of magic water might have led to a little self-awareness.

What's even more interesting, apart from the peacock-strutting and the boasting about the way his shit-stirring stirs up shit and resentment, is the way that Sheehan sees himself and Fairfax at war with the full to overflowing intertubes:

These were real numbers, generated by a real company, with people operating in the sunlight, in contrast to the counterfeit politics and counterfeit morality that inhabits great swathes of the internet.

This from a flim flam magic water man.

The irony is too delicious.

But it reminded the pond that the war just isn't with the reptiles at the lizard Oz, it includes the Fairfaxians, who routinely value shit-stirring trolling over substance.

How so? Well the flim flam magic water man had the cheek to scribble this:

In modern politics, fakery and insult are thus growing enormously via social media. For me, the biggest issue in our society is the environment and I believe we have underestimated the damage done to the soil and water during the past 200 years as Europeans tried to turn a highly complex ecosystem into a new Europe. But, instead of a genuine, grassroots, pragmatic, environment-centric environmental party, we have the Greens.

This from a man who wrote in praise of "Lord" Monckton, and took all Monckton and Bob Carter's and the other denialists' talking points seriously, while at the same time pretending an interest in the environment.

Yep, Paul Sheehan doesn't do irony.

But it should be noted that the Europe Sheehan routinely berates is changing rapidly, with wind farms in abundance, high speed rail long a banal reality, and electric fuelling stations all over the place in Paris - Libre comme l'air runs the slogan, which is more than can be said for Fairfax wanting people to pay for Sheehan's trolling.

More like merde agitation à un prix.

Never mind, as the pond was strolling through the Louvre with an independent air - as one does - an image caught the eye.

It seemed to be the perfect visual metaphor for the new Australia - xenophobic, isolated, parochial, and with remarkably little interest in the ways of the world, preferring a hunkered down fear and loathing approach to real engagement - and a perfect evocation of the way the new policies of Dear Leader would be applied:

Ouch.

Silly pond.

Of course the painting means something else entirely different and in any case it features two women, when it's well known you need only one woman in cabinet to do a hearty nipple pinch ...

Still while away, the pond did come up with a solution to certain fiscal woes.

Sale and leaseback.

Take all the works in the Louvre, and other European museums (what a fine looter Napoleon was), and don't forget ones held by the Papacy or the expert museum looters of Britain and the United States, and value them at a fair market price, and send the money off to Greece and Italy and Iran and such like places, and suddenly these poor countries would be rolling in cash. The Etruscans and the Carthaginians would also be in great shape.

So the Louvre could keep itself in the tourism game - with maybe a five per cent royalty for the leaseback - and all would be well.

Perhaps we start by helping the Egyptians. Who will start the bidding on the Seated Scribe?