Pondering the wisdom of Murdochian crowds, or perhaps just another case of anally obsessed fluff gathering ...

It almost goes without saying that it's a comedy beyond caricature...

The number of times the Caterists in particular and the Murdochians in general work "elites" into a header or into a story ...

Has anybody done a body count? The pond's betting there'd be no need to produce an exaggerated number of kills of the kind done for General Westmoreland in the Vietnam war ...

There's actually no need to read - or more to the point spend precious minutes of life evading the paywall - to get to the Caterist effort, Elites wilfully blind to decency.

Elites, schmulites ...

It's more of the same, which is bashing the Human Rights Commission, and public servants bunging on a cocktail do in a harbour side setting, and Gillian Trigg talking of a shabby village hall in Koo Wee Rupp.

Now of course this is shocking discrimination, and the pond is suitably appalled at the high handed manner of outrageous legal academics - the pond never makes jokes about Woy Woy, the one time home of Spike Milligan's mum, or Taperoo - what a funny name - or just about any town in Queensland likely to be full of cane toads ...

No, it was this Caterist outburst about the citizens of Koo Wee Rupp that caught the eye:

The town’s 3080 residents do not have a law degree between them. Three quarters of them did not complete Year 12. 
 It is a town where people come home from work with dirt under their fingernails, a town of motor mechanics, carpenters, plumbers, cleaners, concreters, packers, truck drivers and earth movers. It is a place where the commissioner and commentator classes rarely venture. The Census data tells the story. Number of journalists: Nil. Media professionals: Nil. Number of university lecturers: zero.

Say what? Journalists? Media professionals?

Eek, these rogues and rapscallions are dangerous elitists, by definition wilfully blind to decency ...

You'd think Cater had enough intelligence to limit his abuse to lawyers and such like, but the man's got so little dirt under his fingernails and so little grey matter that he had to indulge in a perverse display of Onanism in public, berating Koo Wee Rupp for not harbouring a single elitist journalist ...

Does it matter? Not really, except that down the track in the piece, Cater goes on to celebrate the wonderful tolerance of the world of whitebread Australians, while deploring nasty types like Waleed Aly and Tim Soutphommasane getting a little anxious about the dark edge to the fluffy white clouds floating happily in the Caterist sky ...

It turns out that Australia is a veritable prejudice-free paradise, oh bliss oh poop,

Race commissioner Tim Soutphommasane frets about a “darker, even violent, side of our humanity” that might surface if parliament tinkers with the act. 
Yet there is nothing, apart from prejudice, to back this slur on the character of his fellow Australians.

Nothing, nothing at all? Not even the Cronulla riots, Alan Jones, the Bolter, the Murdochians, the slurs on Aboriginal people, outbursts on buses, and so on and so forth?

No, no, no.

But what about the gulags, devised to stop all those filthy brown queue jumpers jumping the queue? What about locking them up and flinging away the key and bashing one of them to death?

Isn't there at least a little fear at work? A sort of reflex Pauline Hansonism?

Or was Hansonism just a passing dream, washed away by a good television dance show? Seems so:

Time after time, Australians have confounded their sophisticated critics with their ­capacity to embrace plurality. 
In so far as attitudes to immigration reflect broader sentiments on race, Australians are remarkably broad-minded, according to the latest findings from the rolling Australian Election Study released in February. 
Fewer than one in six Australians think immigration is bad for the economy and 75 per cent say it opens the country to other ideas and cultures. 
In 1996, more than six out of 10 Australians wanted immigration quotas to be cut. In 2013 a clear majority — 59 per cent — believed immigration levels were about right or should be increased. There are signs that attitudes are softening even towards asylum-seekers. At the 2001 election 63 per cent wanted to turn back the boats. Last year 49 per cent advocated the turn-back. 
There is no evidence to suggest anything has changed since Gough Whitlam declared Australians “an exceptionally generous and understanding people” in a speech proclaiming Australia’s first human rights legislation.
“When we look at the history of our immigration program and compare our record with that of any other multiracial society, it is remarkable how smooth and harmonious this great experiment has been,” he said. “We can fairly claim that Australian people are among the most tolerant and decent in the world.”

No evidence to suggest anything has changed since Gough Whitlam?

Not a shred or a skerrick or a scrap?

We're an exceptionally generous and understanding people, all kindness and loving and giving, to the point of a kind of goo-gooing sentimentality that's nauseous, rather like over-dosing on fairy floss or toffee apples?

Well here's a go then. The pond looks forward to the Caterist campaign to shut down the gulags immediately and forthwith, and for any within them to be held within Australia while their claims are processed ...

You know, seeing how tolerant we are, and seeing how it's only a minority in favour of turn back and seeing how we think immigration levels might even be increased a little. How hard would it be to put an end to the local version of Guantanamo Bay.

Uh huh. Thought not. Eek, the noble whitebread Judaeo-Christian culture handed down from the mighty Vikings, or some such thing, is under attack.

So much mealy mouthed tosh. But then that's what you get when you listen to the blather of dangerous, offensive elites who don't have the slightest shred of decency, or the barest grasp of reality ...

Speaking of which, the pond was pleased to see the Bolter fire a warning shot across all those jumped up primitive scientists this morning.

No doubt in due course the Bolter will single-handedly produce an epic bout of research which will prove all the scientists wrong - but for the moment he was content with mocking a headline, which as a bonus mocked the ABC:

Quite right, you could do a search of the lizard Oz's front digital page for the word "climate" and come up with a zero. As it should be. All this alarmist nonsense. It was zero for the Terror too. Whales yes, climate no.

And the HUN came up with this one from Terry McCrann:

Yes it's a scientific poll on attitudes to science.

McCrann is so enormously silly and such a long term drinker of the kool aid, the pond rarely bothers with him, but the pond is now looking forward to his treatise on the wisdom of (Yankee) crowds, which sees angels favoured over the theory of evolution. (Yep, a Pew poll in 2007 found that 68% of Americans believed angels and demons were active in the world, 20% said they had an encounter with an angel or a devil, while in Pew's latest report on human evolution, only 60% thought humans had evolved over time).

Of all the humbuggery the world is capable of, blather about scientific polls and the wisdom of the crowds shows the infinite capacity of journalists to be asinine ...

And that's it for News Corp on a major report on climate science.

Hang on,  booga booga? Did the Bolter mention booga booga?

Yes it's a variant on that old favourite, ooga booga.

Now you might, if you come from Tamworth, think a booger has something to do with snot, but note the spelling.

Ooga booga and booga booga are something else again, but the pond must leave you to discover the words as used on The Simpsons and as defined in the Urban Dictionary - really there are some things the pond can't link to.

But the boogie woogie mumbo jumbo of the satirical Bolter reminded the pond of a court case which revolved around the word/s:

You can find the original story at The Age, here, where inter alia, you can also read this:

At the appeal hearing in the Federal Magistrates Court, the woman argued, among other things, that the word, while not appearing in any dictionary, was in fact "an insulting onomatopoeia … denoting some form of derisory or insulting comment". 
Opposing counsel argued that the word was not onomatopoeiac or racist and noted that it had been adopted as a brand name by a clothing company. 
 But Magistrate Grant Riethmuller rejected this argument, suggesting clothing names were "not altogether helpful given other recent names such as FCUK and CNUT appear in the marketplace". 
He then embarked on a thorough treatise on the word's usage. It included a lengthy quote from James Cook's 1777 work A Voyage Towards the South Pole Around the World, in which a young man named Wha-a-gou had no knowledge of goats, dogs or cats, "calling them all hogs (booga or boogas)". He also quoted a US film critic's review of Peter Jackson's King Kong remake that said: "Jackson's cavalcade of oogabooga savages makes Memoirs of a Geisha seem like a monument to ethnic sensitivity." 
He referred to reports of a successful racism suit in the US where an employee complained of enduring taunts of "oogabooga" from a fellow worker. In finding that a case of bias had been established, Mr Riethmuller remarked: "The issues are potentially those of life and death for the applicant."

Indeed, indeed.

Now if the pond happened to be a Freudian, it would suspect a deep seated childhood fright had something to do with the Bolter's psychological problems and his fear of the ooga booga booga boogas. It might have come from anything ... from too much reading of The Phantom comics to being frightened by a golliwog ...

Lordy, lordy, what do you know. A piece by Shane Kneipp from 1989, part of a Phantom series, titled Ooga Booga:

What else?

Well last night's Media Watch was a doozy. Poor old Genevieve Jacobs, so far out of her depth it was like she was in Das Boat and the rivets had begun to pop - just watch the film dearie, watch the film or forget it and line up to be Pilgered with grace - haven't you ever heard of Pilgering? - while the Phil Jacobs affair was just bizarre and makes the pond wonder what life must be like deep in the Murdochian bunkers.

It reminded the pond that News Corp hacks are obsessed with Paul Barry and Media Watch, or more to the point they're obsessed with the notion that Paul Barry is obsessed with them.

To movie buffs, this is commonly known as Glenn Close syndrome, though more lax players of the game will allow Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.

The drums have been throbbing and pulsing in the jungle of late, with poor old Sharri Markson given the kool aid spear carrier duties in Paul Barry slammed by editors for obsession with News Corp (behind the paywall, but you could write the copy in your paranoid sleep).

Poor thing, the story even carried this little note:

An earlier version of this article was published in error due to production issues. This is the correct version.

Oh dear, the poor sweet possums. They couldn't even get their paranoia into proper shape ...

Then it was Terry McCrann's obsessive turn to obsessively note Paul Barry's obsession, as you can read in Media Watch hobbled by host's Murdoch obsession, behind the paywall, but you could write the paranoid copy in your paranoid sleep.

Ah McCrann, McCrann, you've done it again, just like McCain ...

In other news, the Murdochians boast of their huge circulation and massive readership, making the company the dominant player in print journalism in the land. The pond simply can't understand why a program titled Media Watch would pay the slightest attention to the lizards going about the diligent business of knob polishing and hagiography ...

But it can be done, and here's how it's done, and lordy, long absent lordy, does McCrann produce a cracker:

To not point out that the worst thing the News of the World was purported to have done it had not in fact done betrayed his obsession and anti-Murdoch animus. 
Indeed Barry made this explicit when asked by O’Loghlin if he’d got sick of the Murdochs after spending two years immersed in them. 
He replied he was certainly not “sick of them”. He found them endlessly fascinating and it had been worth spending 18 months, two years, of his life on them. 
Crucially, he explained that he had started out “positive” on them, but the more it went on, the “less I found his (Murdoch’s) behaviour defensible and I moved away from my great admiration”. Coming from the often understated Barry, that was tantamount to saying he now despised him.

Never mind the absolute torture of that first sentence. What a grinding of gears!

What about McCrann cannily putting words in Barry's mouth, such that moving from great admiration is tantamount to saying Barry despised the Murdochs, or for all the pond knows, felt disgust, fear, loathing, nausea, and retching bile, culminating with a fit of the vomits if anyone said the name Murdoch within his earshot ...

Sadly, as usual, the reptiles reveal more about their own obsessions and psychological traumas and scars than they do about Barry.

It's impossible to despise them, in their captive Stockholm Syndrome state. Pity them? Yes, of course, it must be hell working for the man ...

Myriam Robin made the obvious point in Crikey, 'Obsession' cuts both ways in The Australian's war on Media Watch. (behind the paywall)

Apart from noting Sharri Markson's obsessive compulsive behaviour, Robin pointed out that the lizards became so obsessed with Barry that they stalked him and shot him paparazzi style:

Lordy, the reptiles have their very own Princess Dianna.

And a Twitter war raged here.

Once again the pond feels like it's stepped into bizarro land.

Quick, it's time for a cleansing Pope, and never mind that the reptiles are actively helping Sir Knight fuck the world, and remember more cleansing Popes here:

Sadly the reptiles have provided an answer to Pope. Why use that climate wisdom as toilet paper, so you can save the Murdoch rags from the fate, and instead use them to ponder the wisdom of journalists pondering the wisdom of the crowd. Let's see, how did that work out during the French revolution ...