Living in the new age of entitlement ...

(Above: and more Moir here)

So the age of entitlement is over ...

Except perhaps for Alan Joyce.  Drive a business into the ground and you're sure to be rewarded.

And except for farmers, god bless their agrarian socialist socks. Praise the long absent lord and Her fickle way with climate science, Barners has delivered. Is there a climate scientist in the house, thanks to a pond correspondent?

And except for Fiona Nash, and never you mind Fiona Nash has been poor, the PM must be worried.

And except for Cadbury chocolate eaters, no matter that it seems to be a murky kind of compound chocolate, as you can read in Abbott and axed man at Cadbury photo op, with contradictions in the story all the go.

And except in due course, it still seems, for well off women, who will be rewarded for adding to the stock of top notch private school good Christian soldiers.

And except it seems for the militarists anxious to make use of said Xian soldiers. Yes, the pond reeled at this EXCLUSIVE from Greg "bromance for the ages" Sheridan:

Oh sure, the pond can understand the impeccable logic.

It's only right and proper, having alienated and offended the Indonesians, we should get ready to bung on a do. If you're going to be a half baked colonial militaristic peacock strutting the Pacific, best do it in warlike militarist style. None of this concealed carry down under. You give 'em free lifeboats and still they whinge and moan ...

Speaking of entitlement, the pond was almost moved to tears by Media Watch's adjustment of its claims over the losses currently being endured by the reptiles at the lizard Oz (here at The Graudian).

It turns out that the reptiles might be on course to lose $15m. this year, and might have lost $30m. in 2012-13. How dare the cardigan wearers get the size of the loss so wrong, when Christ Mitchell runs about every day boasting about every penny down the gurgler.

But then the rag has long been rumoured to be a loss maker. Which is why it's as prime an example of corporate welfarism as you could find, sustained only because Chairman Rupert wants an ideological weapon, a handy tool populated by useful fools.

Yep, all those members of the commentariat scribbling about the free market, and creative destruction, and Adam Smith and Ayn Rand, are living off welfare, and immune to the conventional forces of capitalism, which would have seen their business model - offend a substantial part of the potential readership up hill and down dale - go out of business years ago.

As for Chairman Rupert's indulgence?

Why should he care? He's now nearing the end of his tether - if all this talk of god is a guide - and he can keep on following Citizen Kane, nee Hearst, for as long as he likes:

THATCHER: I happened to see your consolidated statement yesterday, Rupert. Could I not suggest to you that it is unwise for you to continue this philanthropic enterprise - (sneeringly) this wretched reptile feast you call The Australian - that is costing you fifteen million dollars a year? 
THE CHAIRMAN: You're right. We did lose thirty million dollars last year.  And maybe fifteen million dollars this year.
Thatcher thinks maybe the point has registered. 
THE CHAIRMAN: We expect to lost fifteen million next year, too. You know, Mr. Thatcher - (starts tapping quietly) at the rate of fifteen million a year - we'll have to close this place in sixty six point 66 repeating years, assuming I've got a lazy billion to spare.

Or some such thing. Apologies to Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz (and the rest of the screenplay here).

Meanwhile, the subsidised welfarists at the Daily Terror, the least trusted newspaper in Australia, go about the business of reycling the Bolter, in lieu of a business plan.

Here, if you haven't got a baseball bat or a hammer handy, hit yourself with these for your daily dose of ignorance, bile and rage:

Yep, it's yet another outing in relation to Manus Island which studiously wants to avoid discussing what actually happened on Manus Island. For that you might have to read a story like Asylum seeker Reza Barati died from 'multiple head injuries', PNG police say.

And then there's this the very same day, because Xmas comes every day with the Bolter:

Actually, explaining why the Bolter is still the guru of the denialists is the hard one.

Actually, it's not so hard.

When speaking on One Plus One, the Bolter explained that in his youth he was an alienated introverted outsider, rootless and restless, and that he was stubborn, intractable, unpleasant and pig headed, or as the Dutch would say, eigen wijze. (eigenwijs if you will and you prefer to be cocky, like a screeching cockatoo).

Eigen wijze!

Of course the idea is to disarm people from calling the Bolter pig headed because that's what he calls himself.

Inter alia, the Bolter announced proudly "I'm not a scientist", which of course means he's eminently suited to make grandiose statements about science and scientists.

He also confesses to being didactic, a preacher and a wagger of the finger. Which surely are all the basic skills you need to become a top notch climate scientist. The very same ones that Cardinal Pell seems to possess in abundance.

Perhaps the most revealing moment came when the Bolter talked of loyalty. It wasn't loyalty to ideas, or loyalty to a notion of truth, no matter how subjective that might be. It was loyalty to his readers, which is to say the cultists who routinely drink the Bolter kool aid.

Bizarrely the Bolter used his quest for a Dutch identity to explain how you can in fact chose your "racial identity", without for a moment considering how that might play for someone who doesn't look like like an angry one-time Dutch identifying white male.

But do go on, black people, the Bolter says its terribly easy to chose your white Dutch identity ...

Enough of the cheap paperback Freudian analysis - you could spend a lifetime analysing the seething mass of neuroses that make up the Bolter's psyche and he loves the exhibitionism in a painfully narcissist way.

Instead, this week there's been a more interesting ongoing rumbling about fundamentalism and the havoc it wreaks:

Oops, so sorry. The pond has been off at the Bolter's comments Twitter feed here, soaking up the crazy.

It's part of the more general craziness which, in lieu of not  having a Republican party and a bunch of Tea Partiers (the crazy there is very strong in Arizona at the moment), must be supplied by the Murdochians and the Bolter.

It's well known that the Bolter provides a forum for denialists, creationists, and anti-science luddites. And well, it has to be said, assorted crazies and weirdos. Here we go, more climate science:

Which is a good enough cue for the subject of dinosaurs, which have turned up again, though strangely never mentioned in the bible, not even their bones:

Once, I had no issue with it. My son was receiving Special Religious Instruction at school, just as I had in the '70s. I believed it was innocuous enough - he would be learning about such things as being a good friend, being a good person and colouring in pictures of Jesus. No big deal. And it was only half an hour a week. 
One day, at our usual conversation at the dinner table, my son exclaimed, ''Mrs Smith* said that there was no such thing as dinosaurs!'' What? He went on to say that when he said that there must have been because there are dinosaur fossils all over the world, she responded, ''God put them there''. My son was confused. He had read countless books that told him dinosaurs roamed the earth millions of years ago, long before humans. While I did feel a little touch of pride that he had questioned her claim, her response was unpalatable and unacceptable to me. (here)

There you go, twenty first science teaching for the new millennium at work in Australian schools.

The Bolter loves to present himself as a sceptic, and a doubter and a questioner and as an archetypal scientific type, but in the end, it's conservatives like him, and the whole Murdochian tribe working in support of John Howard and Tony Abbott, who have helped cultivate and maintain the teaching of Christian fundamentalism and creationism in schools.

You won't see the Bolter getting agitated about this sort of thing - must stay loyal to the readers and not offend the demographic - but poor old Marion Maddox has been banging on about this sort of thought crime for a long time - her last outing came with Teaching children that dinosaurs didn't exist: how public schools fail their brief.

Conducting surveys and interviews in 23 public schools in NSW and Queensland between 2009 and 2012, education researcher Cathy Byrne found that SRI volunteers “preferred significantly more conservative approaches” to their subject than parents, principals or professional teachers. 
For example, asked whether they thought the Bible should be taught “as fact” and therefore “accepted without too much questioning”, parents and education professionals favoured questioning, whereas SRI volunteers tended toward “biblical inerrancy,” the view that the entire text of the Bible is free from error of any kind. In almost a quarter of the schools, Byrne found teaching to the effect that students or their families or friends would “burn in hell” if they did not believe the volunteer’s version.

Burn in hell?

Oh let's keep the age of entitlement rocking along for a little longer ...

But wait, you say, this is surely pond lite.

I still haven't had enough surreal existential absurdity for the day.

Well you can always trot off to read the late, profoundly unlamented Kristina Keneally saying farewell to the late, profoundly unlamented Cardinal George Pell in George Pell The view from the pew ...

Talk about Pepé Le Pew not being able to smell ...

(Below: and more Cathy Wilcox here)