Once more off to the clique of paranoid hysterics ...

(Above: more Tandberg here)


What a great relief to learn that Australia has got the best government that money can buy.

And there's not much chance of there being any buyers' remorse, at least if you're part of the 1%, and not an educationist interested in the Gonski solution, a worker in manufacturing, anyone with a sense of entitlement, which is to say the dirt poor struggling on welfare street, or a user of the ABC, or climate scientists, or small businesses relying on tourism on the reef, when pandering to giant multinationals is all the go, or ....

... yadda, yadda, by now anyone can complete the list in their sleep ... (Roslyn Packer tops list with massive gift to Liberal Party)

Oh yes, the fuckers - Blair defence - are determined to fuck over anyone without the cash to donate to the party, and that's as it should be.

Meanwhile, the ABC has finally decided to crank into gear, and so the pond had the particular pleasure of not watching Q and A yet again, especially as it featured Nick Cater.

What routinely astonishes the pond is the way the neocon commentariat turn up at ABC fests such as Q and A, while in their other lives denouncing everything about the ABC, including the programs they turn up on.

If the ABC offends these ponces so much, why do they grace ABC shows with their presence?

I mean, if we may bend Godwin's Law a fraction, if you don't like the socialists, why turn up and serve as a performer for the Stalinist or Trotskyite clique?

Surely you'd be better off doing manly exercise in a Murdoch Youth Camp, explaining the world to the Jungvolk? Teaching them how to deploy a Jugend-Fahrtenmesser on passing hipsters?

Now you might think that the pond is attempting to be comical, but as noted in the return of Media Watch, this is the sort of language you can cop in an editorial by The Australian.

Is it temperate? you ask. Is it measured?

No, it's hysterical and it's full of paranoid fear and loathing, and funnily, it reveals what it purports to denounce, which is the evil influence of the full to overflowing intertubes:

Who is taking responsibility for stories? That the answer is so obviously "no one" may give comfort to the ABC's collectivist, inner-city clique of broadcasters, bloggers, latter-day Trotskyites and inked hipsters, but it should chill the blood of taxpayers and a broad audience seeking reliable, factual and comprehensive news and current affairs. (National broadcaster has lot the plot and prestige)

The funny thing is that the reptile who delivered up this kind of rabid abuse - while also wilfully ignoring the true nature of ABC demographics - is purportedly mourning the losing of the plot and prestige at the national broadcaster.

But what does that sort of frothing and foaming say about the losing of the plot and prestige at the allegedly national broadsheet?

This was, after all, an anonymous editorial allegedly authorised at the highest level of the rag, and yet it's pitiful, childish name calling of the most adolescent, pimply, strangled voice kind (did the writer serve burgers in the school holidays while building up a huge pile of resentment at the cool kids?)

You might expect this sort of idle abuse from one of the commentariat - it's how such parasites make a living - but as an official form of editorial abuse?

Surely the routine defamation of the ABC's audience is not the way to win anyone over to paying money for this sort of hysterical abuse, courtesy the Murdochians. If that's their business model, the fuckers - Blair defence - are truly fucked.

Not that there's anything wrong with being part of a collectivist inner-city clique, though you might be worried if you find yourself part of that inner city clique, the hive mind, that lives and breathes in Holt street in Sydney and surely will one day be rewarded with an episode in a revived X Files.

It's just that talking about the ABC's audience in terms of chardonnay sippers, latter-day Trotskyites and inked hipsters is so infantile and mind-boggling, and so outside the actual demographic, it surely helps explain why the reptiles at the lizard Oz are having deep troubles with their own demographic and audience reach.

Speaking of which, we should honour the hagiographers diligently at work doing the heavy lifting today:

Uh huh.

Well you've been warned, and the pond simply doesn't know how many times it must remind readers to take medication before straying into the blinding light of the masterful hagiographer - take two deep sips of How I Learnt To Love Tony Abbott A bromance for the ages and a swig of single malt before plunging in, and if you suffer spasms and twitches, why you've hit your head on the tiles again, and you should never ever dive into the shallow end of the pool ...

And wouldn't you guess it? Not satisfied with turning up on Q and A, the preening, strutting peacock, who mistakes feathers and finery for actual signs of intelligent life,  has come up with this one:

The funniest thing about this? Well Cater resorts to the very kinds of scientists that The Australian routinely abuses for the data he deploys in Reef battle a Trojan seahorse in the war on coal  (behind the paywall to keep your brain Caterist free)

And what does he say about these scientists?

In the past 40 years countless billions of dollars have been directed into environmental science. Our knowledge of the impact of human activity on the environment and the mitigation techniques that can be employed has improved vastly.

Uh huh. That would be the environmental scientists, who accept the current parameters of climate science, and for it, are regularly traduced by the Murdoch press.

Ssssh! How many times have we begged readers not to mention climate change. You know it sends the Bolter into a frenzy:

But do go on:

In the end, this is not an argument about sand or coral. It is a campaign about coal, with Abbot Point caught in a proxy war between mainstream Australia and the eco-fundamentalists who see the extraction of fossil fuels as akin to murder. 
Their rhetoric may be aimed at the Coalition government, but the previous federal Labor government was no less committed to the development of the Galilee Basin and other untapped reserves in Queensland. 
To hear the counter argument made, one has to venture beyond the platforms of the major parties to the Greens or the websites run by the ABC. In a passionate opinion piece published recently, the ABC's online environment editor, Sara Phillips, argues that the downstream effects of the coal passing through Abbot Point should have been included in the environmental impact study. 
"Sure the port is only the transit lounge for coal destined for faraway power stations, but it is a key link in the chain," she writes. "The intertwining of the operations of this enlarged port and climate change are impossible to ignore. 
"Coral bleaching may seem unrelated to the departure of a shipload of coal heading to China, but the connection is undeniable." 
Sentiments such as these cannot be appeased. It makes little difference if the dredged sand is dumped in a marine park, as landfill or on the Environment Minister's house. 
The aim is not to stop the Abbot Point expansion; it is to shut the whole damn thing down. 

Indeed. But then the Caterist desire to rape and pillage the earth also can't be appeased.

Let's revert to those scientists, announcing their key findings here:

The study clearly shows that three factors are overwhelmingly responsible for this loss of coral cover. Intense tropical cyclones have caused massive damage, primarily to reefs in the central and southern parts of the Reef, while population explosions of the coral-consuming Crown-of-thorns starfish have affected coral populations along the length of the Reef. Two severe coral bleaching events have also had major detrimental impacts in northern and central parts of the GBR. 
"Our data show that the reefs can regain their coral cover after such disturbances, but recovery takes 10-20 years. At present, the intervals between the disturbances are generally too short for full recovery and that's causing the long-term losses," says Dr Hugh Sweatman, one of the study's authors. 
"We can't stop the storms, and ocean warming (the primary cause of coral bleaching) is one of the critical impacts of the global climate change," says AIMS CEO, John Gunn. "However, we can act to reduce the impact of crown of thorns," he says. "The study shows that in the absence of crown of thorns, coral cover would increase at 0.89% per year, so even with losses due to cyclones and bleaching there should be slow recovery.

Oh dear, how reprehensible. They dared to mention climate science. Why you might, reading between the lines, begin to wonder why there have been all these intense tropical cyclones causing such massive damage ...

But the poor buggers know that there's no point in brooding about climate science or doing anything about it. They'd be howled down by the noisy Murdochians who can beat a gaggle of noisy mynah birds any day of the week.

So it's off to do battle with the crown of thorns and hope no one notices the cyclones or the bleaching or the role that coal plays in same ...

Gosh darn it, we've mentioned climate science again ... and pesky scientists, who would be abused any other day of the week by the Caterists as being deluded.

And if you want some alternative reading on the reef, removed from the rampant Ayn Rand ideologies prowling the corridors of The Australian, why not head off to The Conversation, here, using its handy tag, you hipster scum.

Meanwhile, there's plenty of other comedy afoot, with poodle Pyne managing to alienate state education ministers - why even the Nine Network paid attention in NSW not after 'wholesale' school autonomy.

Yes, even the state Liberals think the poodle Pyne is barking mad.

It's a measure of the poodle's delusion that autonomy would somehow fix everything in the education system. This is a bit like the deluded notion that capitalism doesn't encourage greed, and instead is played out on a level playing field with ethical players willing to play by jolly hockey stick rules.

It will in time turn into a pink batt scandal, as some schools fall victim to con artists and the corrupt, wanting to make out like bandits, and able to do so because of a lack of oversight.

Can't happen? Tell that to the Malek Fahd Islamic school:

Australia's biggest Islamic school has been ordered to pay back $9 million in public funds to the NSW government after it found millions in taxpayers' money had been diverted to the country's peak Muslim body. 
 Malek Fahd, which has more than 2000 students at its Greenacre campus in Sydney's southwest, receives almost 75 per cent of its funds from state and commonwealth governments. (Malek Fahd Islamic school to repay $9m in public funds, behind the paywall)

There are already plenty of other scandals arising from schools gaily exercising their sense of autonomy, and we can look forward to plenty more, thanks to the delusional mind of the poodle Pyne, who probably won't stop until the whole country is returned to home schooling.

Finally, the pond is terrible with email and rarely strays to the box and never responds, but recently noticed a plaintive email correspondent who advised that, in fifty years in the newspaper game, he had never heard of sub-editors referred to as 'subbies', and that 'subs' would do.

Now this is all very well and good, and no doubt true, but the pond uses the term with particular relish because:

(a) subbies is slang for sub-contractors, and sad to say, these days subbies are often sub-contractors and sometimes based in New Zealand; and
(b) subbies is also slang in the SM world for submissives, and truth to tell, can you imagine a more submissive bunch than the current crop of journalists, tamed by the lash and the cane?

So a vision of lashed NZ subbies saying 'suxty sux' it is ...

The pond also offers the Humpty Dumpty defence:

Humpty Dumpty took the book, and looked at it carefully. 'That seems to be done right—' he began. 'You're holding it upside down!' Alice interrupted. 
'To be sure I was!' Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for him. 'I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that SEEMS to be done right—though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now—and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents—' 
'Certainly,' said Alice. 
'And only ONE for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!' 
'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said. 
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"' 
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected. 
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.' 
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.' 
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master—that's all.' 
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!' 'Would you tell me, please,' said Alice 'what that means?' 
'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. 
'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.' 'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone. 
'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.' 
'Oh!' said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark. 
'Ah, you should see 'em come round me of a Saturday night,' Humpty Dumpty went on, wagging his head gravely from side to side: 'for to get their wages, you know.' (Alice didn't venture to ask what he paid them with; and so you see I can't tell YOU.) (the rest here, and surely it's better reading than a Murdoch rag, and no paywall to google around either)

The pond pays handsomely to conflate subbies with New Zealanders and submissives, not that there's anything wrong with any of that, and while it's only threepence down and a penny a week damned if we won't screw the word every which way, in the best Caterist and Murdochian style ... and if you don't like it, you Trotskyite hipster scum, stand out of the light.

Why we're just waiting our turn to go on to Q and A, and do a preening, poncing impression of a Caterist in front of the bright glamorous ABC lights, before we retire to scribble about the hipsters who watched us reveal our hypocritical pretensions and delusions ...

What does it say about Australia that Nick Cater came to the colonies and suddenly transformed himself into a commentator? Too much, way too much Ms Roslyn Packer ...

(Below: thank the long absent lord, he's back, evoking school autonomy at its finest. Can a poodle also be a pinocchio? Sure can. More David Pope here).