The pond goes Kendrick Lamar ...

(Above: Andrew Dyson and more Dyson here)

As Kendrick Lamar might say in one of his lyrics - or his audience chant back at him as a kind of chorus - fuck that.

Anything you like or don't really, fuck that.

Like the way the ABC burst into a moaning and keening about Phillip Morris giving up manufacturing killer sticks in Australia. Oh sure there were job losses but now at least the workers can do something useful with their lives, instead of making goods designed to kill fellow Australians and international buyers.

Yet what did we hear?

ELEANOR HALL: And Peter, there's also news this morning that the cigarette company Philip Morris is pulling out of Australia. What reasons are they giving? 
PETER RYAN: Yes, it's been a big morning of bad news. Phillip Morris says it will be closing its Moorabbin factory in Melbourne's south-east by the end of the year, and it's planning to cease all manufacturing operations of cigarettes and shift all production to South Korea (here).

A big morning of bad news?

Fuck that.

If that's bad news, let the bad news keep coming.

Like Clive Palmer being noted as a megalomaniac election buying big spender who can't keep his dinosaurs clean of pigeon shit these days ... and not so long ago an innocent billionaire victim of a wicked (albeit hopelessly implemented) mining tax and a shining light in the Queensland LNP.

Fuck that.

Or Tim Wilson saying that black people are advantaged because they can use "nigga" amongst themselves (Wilson couldn't bring himself to say the actual word), whereas white people wouldn't dare use it.

Fuck that.

Knights and dames? FT.

Lindsay Maxsted, chairman of Westpac, dropping a $100m grant into an education foundation, along with this sort of pious mealy mouthed blather?

Australia is one of the great nations of the 21st century. To stay that way we need great people — people of ambition, ability and drive. The kind of men and women who dream, think and live beyond the bounds of what is thought to be possible — and who, when confronted with a challenge, see a perfect wave inste­ad of a perfect storm.

As if nobody had noticed that the vulture bank had made a record $7.1 billion profit in 2013 and so the  grant could be considered a rounding exercise. FT.

Or Moses Obeid announcing that he'd told a little white lie in the Australian Water Holdings matter, along with adopting Bill Clinton's line by saying "we did not have investor relations in that company". FT. (Moses Obeid's Bill Clinton response comes undone)

As NSW Liberals, you know it's serious when even grumpy Paul "Magic Water" Sheehan bursts into print to denounce the state party for being corrupted by lobbying and lobbyists. FT. (Arthur Sinodinos no longer the Liberal saint).

What's the world coming to when the pond can't rant at the Magic Water man on a Thursday? FT.

And what about the usually wretched Elizabeth Farrelly, who instead of rambling on about architecture and Sydney street design, gets agitated about Cardinal Pell wanting to insure priests against being sued for child sexual abuse?

That's the pond's turf. FT.

Oh sure she's right:

Let's be clear. Child abuse is no accident. It's not just something that will, now and then, happen. If you're an even half-decent person, much less a spiritual leader, you needn't insure against kiddie fiddling. You just need to abstain. 
Or is abstinence something the church no longer expects of itself? 
What part of all this does the cardinal, and the church that has just kicked him upstairs, not understand? (Cleaning up the post-George Pell parish in Sydney)

But it's just not fair. FT.

What's left? Does the pond have to head off to the Daily Terror for its daily dose of loonacy? FT.

Oh sure, it's there in abundance, the last stand of the wildly rabid, a top and tail offering in the digital whirlpool of death:

But what if the pond isn't in the mood for a zillionth bashing of journalists, the IPCC, climate scientists and the ABC?

What if the best that can be mustered is a shrug of the shoulders and a wry "Fuck that"?

The Bolter is as lazy as ever, condescending, smirking, gloating, and so on and so forth on the matter of climate change, just his usual sort of trolling, but the pond happened to be out and about and listening to Bush Telegraph yesterday, and it was genuinely interesting and informative to listen to farmers dealing with actual issues on the ground (and thanks to the wonders of Malcolm Turnbull's copper wire and sealing wax NBN, you can hear that story online here).

You see, the Bolter assumes everything is fine in the world of agriculture and productivity is on the march, so it was quaint to actually hear from real people on the ground talking about their actual experiences (and you know they were genuine, because one farmer noted the difficulty of getting a crowd of cockies to agree on what time of day it is, let alone climate change).

Of course the more the Bolter insists that climate science is a religion, the more obvious it becomes that he too is a true believer, except he likes to cast himself in the role of the clear-thinking, cynical Lucifer.

Type-casting.

Of course it's likely that the Bolter has a go at the doomsayers and the journalists and is silent on the actual science, because he's still waiting for others to pick apart the science in the report.

As for the ABC bashing, it really shows the Bolter in bizarre form. He takes a single episode of Q and A, the one last Monday night, as firm evidence of the ABC's bias: Has the Left's authoritarianism, vulgarity and hatred of the West ever been so open?

Hapless Mona Eltahawy lands in Bolter hot water for daring to deface a subway poster that equated Muslims with "savages - naturally you can read a more balanced view of the incident elsewhere by heading off to Activist Mona Eltahawy released after arrest in New York subway protest.

What's always remarkable when reading the Bolter is just how intolerant he is.

He's "get off my lawn" cranked up to eleven, or maybe even 42 ... and there's no sign he'll ever do a Clint Eastwood and soften a little by the end of the movie ...

Does the Bolter show the slightest interest, empathy or concern for the issues that drive Eltahawy (which you can find in an interview with her here).

The long absent lord knows, Egypt has its problems at the moment. They have the sort of hanging judge that would make hanging judges of the old wild west like Judge Isaac Parker and Phantly Roy Bean Jr. admit they entirely lacked ambition ...

No. All he's got is a simple-minded response. You know. FT.

Using QandA as a symbol of the entire ABC is a bit, you know:

Apologies to Jerry Lewis for the casual defamation of the dead. FT.

Now the pond rarely watches QandA. It's designed to generate heat and not much light, it's designed as a kind of trolling, and it's a very different beast to the way the rest of the ABC comports itself. Even shows like The Insiders or The Drum don't so nakedly assemble panels designed to send off sparks.

It's a measure of the Bolter that he should fixate on it as a symbol of the ABC. It would be just as silly to fixate on The Bolt Report as symbolising all that's wrong with the Ten network.

Oh okay, the pond does that, but only in jest. The Ten network is comprehensively fucked, and the Bolter is just one of the symptoms, even if he's a notable sign that the network doesn't have an understanding of its demographic or its intended audience.

How long ago were they making out like bandits with a young demographic? And now they wear as a badge of honour an angry man ranting at his aging, very small audience on a Sunday? FT. You'd be better off spending time with Elmer Gantry ...

The pond has never watched an episode of the Bolter in full for the same reason as QandA is better avoided - it's designed to troll and to inflame, and not to inform or enlighten, seeing as how it's conducted by a rabid ideologue of the fanatical kind ...

FT.

Here's an example of the sort of elision that irritates the heck out of the pond, as performed by the artful Bolter. So according to the Bolter Lucy Siegle says:

Said Siegle: “If you take a contrarian, shock jock point of view, you’re going to get a lot of attention and a lot of money. I don’t think we should change laws to protect their freedom of speech.” 

So the Bolter says:

But if shock jocks should be banned, what of Eltahawy, who four times dropped the F word?

But that's the entire fucking point.

You see, according to the very words deployed by the Bolter, Siegle didn't say shock jocks should be banned. She said that the laws allegedly keeping them in check should stay, though there's not much sign the laws have taken the wind out of the likes of Alan Jones' sails.

The bit about banning them is the Bolter leaping to that conclusion. He's the one making that point, not Siegle.

And then a free speech advocate goes all limp wristed and jelly fished and coy and can't even get beyond primly noting that Siegle says the "F word" - four times! - making him sound ever so much like a nanny in Victorian England. Or a John Wayne hero in a 1950s movie who doesn't cuss while there be ladies in the room.

"Ma'am", tilting the black Stetson ...

Fuck that.

At the end of it all, with the Bolter conflating guests on a panel show, with the ABC and with Mark Scott making a comment on balance, and a single program with the ABC's 24/7 output across many radio stations and television networks, the Bolter grandly concludes:

Scott may say the ABC isn’t as biased as I think, but after QandA I ask: is it as balanced as Scott believes?

One thing's certain. The Bolter is both unbalanced and routinely inclined to be unhinged ... how it must stick in the craw that The Insiders is thrashing his show, showing that the great unwashed public out there has more of a taste for the ABC than for the Bolter, or the Ten network. Time for another bout of Barrie Cassidy bashing.

And yes the pond didn't link to the Bolter's rants ... Point people in his direction? FT.

Meanwhile, both David Rowe and David Pope today focus on the wayward billionaire.

Pope verges on heresy. If the PUP monster is a kind of bloated Friar Tuck of the regressive kind, why that implies that Tony Abbott must be Robin Hood, or even Errol Flynn playing RH. With the greatest respect, Mr. Pope, FT, unless you mean to imply that Robin Hood really only stole from the rich to give to the rich.

Now Tony Abbott could play that role - and more Pope here:

You see Mr Pope, there is pleasure to be found in Clive Palmer's weirdness, though it's profoundly, immensely perverse, as David Rowe explains, with the beached bleached whale turning up yet again to haunt the dreams of the ones that once pandered to him (and more Rowe here - see the earlier panel to cop the flouncing whale):