A potpourri of feudal lizards, Sharri Markson, jolly Joe, Kim Williams and a medieval reptile approach to broadband ...

(Above: a bus sign apparently modified in Brisbane and doing the Facebook/Twitter rounds, and that's the last publicity that film will get at the pond. The pond is so over neo realism).

How to begin? How about this?

On Wednesday, as NSW residents took stock of the news of Mike Baird preparing to visit north west NSW farmers caught in the grip of the worst drought since records began  ... (The Land, here)

No, no, that won't do, that makes the pond sound as silly as a climate denialist like Nick Cater scribbling about weather events as a way of justifying a love of coal and the ongoing destruction of the Great Barrier Reef by the Campbell Newman government, and we already know how much on average outburst of climate denialism costs the reptiles at the lizard Oz. Squillions in salaries ...

Speaking of squillions and epic silliness however, the pond by chance came across an offering from Sharri Markson for the reptiles, regarding an attempt to lure gossip monger Joe Aston away from the AFR:

Text messages sighted by Diary show The Australian was only prepared to offer Aston a 25 per cent pay rise, taking his salary to $225,000 cash plus superannuation etc. (here)

They what? How much? Only? Say again? Only ....

Talk about making ridiculous offers for the deck chairs on the Titanic.

But the real joke is that Markson, a writer so stupid she makes doofuses sound like bright sparks, took this as some kind of epic victory for the reptiles:

Aston had made it clear he was more than happy to leave Fairfax. But he wanted $400,000, which was rejected out-of-hand. 
While there were informal text exchanges, no formal offer was ever made to Aston. The discussion stopped with his absurd request for a salary of $400,000.

Stop right there. The absurdity was putting in print that the reptiles had offered Aston a 25% pay rise, and a handsome salary. The rest is mere frippery.

Memo to Markson. When discussing absurdities, please wash underclothes in private and hang them in the bathroom out of sight ...

What else?

Well the pond rarely goes near the Middle East, but this was astonishing, and followed on from some 300 Holocaust survivors placing an advertisement in the New York Times condemning the massacre in Gaza.

The writer had to preface it with a note that it wasn't from The Onion, because it was a record of Facebook responses to the ad translated from the Hebrew:

Meir Dahan: No wonder Hitler murdered 6 million Jews because of people like you you’re not even Jews you’re disgusting people a disgrace to humanity and so are your offspring you are trash. 
Asher Solomon: It’s a shame Hitler didn’t finish the job. 
Katy Morali: Holocaust survivors who think like this are invited to go die in the gas chambers.

And so on, here, with a screen cap of the postings, and yet there might be a few who still wonder why the pond thinks the purpose and meaning of Israel has become grotesque and deformed under Netanyahu's government.

Throw in Wallace Shawn translating an ADL ad justifying Israeli child murder, here, and you can see why the pond steers clear of middle East politics.

No, it's much simpler and much more joyous simply to celebrate the news in The Graudian that Joe Hockey is Australia's least popular recent treasurer, poll suggests ...

What's even crueller for jolly Joe is that Peter Costello came out on top by a goodly margin over Paul Keating, suggesting that the respondents weren't afraid of Liberals generally - they just despised Jolly Joe in particular. Michael Heath at Bloomberg even felt the need to collect a 'greatest gaffes' hit list in Gaffes Worsen Abbott's Woes as $37 Billion in Cuts Stranded.

Can it get any worse? Well yes, it seems Joe's goose is cooked, because the tabloid Terror has taken a turn for the worse, and whipped out the photoshop and turned Jolly Joe into a grinch or a scrooge:

But at least the pond can feel safe that the bottle of red bet on Jolly Joe never making it to PM is looking safer by the day.

Instead he can look forward to scribbling for fast fading newspaper brands, like Peter Costello, perhaps with the byline "known and loved as Australia's worst treasurer".

It's at this point that the tougher luddite reptiles get going, and only the reptiles could have presented big Mal's self-serving "independent" report this way:

Fast browsing? Super-fast net little use to business?

Yep, that's how they filled in the front page, like the useless, backward looking luddites they are:

This in response to a mate's rates report that soft soaps the useless big Mal scheme, which is ineptly and expensively rolling out, at a speed and in a way that makes the original NBN look like a bit of technological wizardry.

Is the pond bitter because it's consigned to Optus? You betcha ...

Is the pond enraged because the reptiles still think broadband is only about fast TV and web browsing?

You cannot begin to understand how pissed ...

But there is an upside, because you see, oh tragic reptiles, it's already fast enough to fuck your tree killing hard copy ancient feudal business plan, and your business strategies and your bottom line, so you can just go take a flying fuck while the pond dances on your still warm grave ... knowing it will get colder as the years pass ...

And it's coincidentally fast enough to help fuck Foxtel, and soon enough Netflix will come to town, and the stalled business model of a pay TV monopoly in this country will see even more cable cutting, and price cutting, and where will your fast TV be then?

While others will begin to explore the educational and health opportunities of broadband, the surface of which has yet been barely scratched in this Murdoch dominated luddite country ...

Oh wait. You just love the NBN because it's all about fast TV, isn't it. Heed the lying, duplicitous, deceitful voice of your doubling down master ...

A nonsense of course. Foxtel was as much behind the digital curve as the tree killers ...

A quarter of a million so the pond could slow browse the thoughts and insights of Joe Aston?

Talk about a fucked business model ...

And you can browse those remarks as fast as the fucked technologies offered by big Mal permit ....

At this point, it would be remiss of the pond not to mention Kim Williams out and about and having fun flogging his book and generating headlines like the one in The Graudian, Rupert Murdoch runs News Corp along 'feudal' lines, Kim William says.

That story opened this way:


News Corp Australia is a company run along feudal lines which is “vaingloriously ignoring the facts” about the digital future of news, says the man who used to run the company, Kim Williams. 
When asked to elaborate on his comments on Rupert Murdoch in his new book, Rules of Engagement, the former CEO Williams told the ABC: “Look, one can only describe the organisational framework and general approach on the part of News as being pretty feudal.” 
“I think it’s a simple descriptive statement of the obvious for anyone who has worked there.”

Well yes, and you only have to look at the ongoing lizard war dance about the NBN to see the rampant feudalism in action ...

But it doesn't matter, because by hook or by crook, and though more slowly than necessary, faster speeds will come, and the feudalists with their addiction to their tree-killing ways will look ever more quaint and antiquated.

In all the recent fuss about the Crikey leaks about the blue book, the thing that most astonished the pond was the way that News Corp was still hanging its hat on print (as noted by Media Watch here).

Now the pond has a coloured view of Kim Williams, but it was possible to summon up some sympathy for a man forced to deal with a flock of luddites:

One commentary piece, by the Australian’s media business media writer Darren Davidson, in particular infuriated Williams with its claim he was “too eager to get ahead of the digital curve” and that was his “fatal mistake”. 
 “Look I stopped reading that piece because I thought it was so ill informed; so clearly indifferent to actually doing a piece of proper journalistic discovery that it didn’t warrant reading,” William said. “Ahead of the digital curve is such a fascinating concept. If ever a set of companies were behind the digital curve, were behind the whole tsunami of change that consumers have wrought upon on the world in response to technology enablement it is print journalism media companies. I mean really? Let’s all grow up; let’s all become serious adults. Please!”

Grow up? Become serious adults?

Sorry Kim, a bunch of kids are in charge of the federal government, doing a dance with Pups, and the adults are nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, Chris Mitchell's crazy gang of kids is still running the lizard Oz, letting the likes of Sharri Markson loose on the world, while the Murdoch tabloids are off in simple-minded photoshop limbo land, which pleases blogs in search of a simple-minded illustration, but does bugger all to elevate the debate for the readership.

Have they not the slightest sense of how they demean themselves as much as their target?

Of course as the Graudian noted, back in the day Williams himself supped of the feudal kool aid and sounded bullish about print still being all the go in 2020.

And the reptiles can be relied upon to brood about Williams' religion and spirit encounters with his mum, as a way of deflecting attention from his digital insights, but  no amount of smokescreen can hide the immense harm that Murdoch and his lackeys have done in supporting Team Luddite Abbott and thereby helping impede Australia being brought up to speed.

Here we were in January 2013:

40!

Which helps explain how iiNet could begin a campaign in June 2014 - with an ethnic tinge - based around the news that Romania and Slovakia have faster internet than Australia:

(here, with links to the spots on YouTube).

Damn you reptiles, damn you to hell, and enjoy your ride on your specially purchased, handsomely salaried Titanic deck chairs.

And now it's about time to wrap up this potpourri, but not before thanking Pope for this insight into the man who helped open the gates of hell.

Better to leave it at a cartoon, for fear of a pond meltdown, and as always more Pope here.