A meditation inspired by listening to the Bolter on the car Volksempfänger ...

(Above: and more Rowe here).

While doing a dash of plane spotting and chauffeur duties at Sydney's wonderfully dysfunctional domestic airport last night, the pond had the most excellent chance to listen to the Bolter on tabloid radio rag 2GB.

Now there is an irony there to start with, as might be garnered by reading this semi-literate report in the tabloid Daily Terror:

That was back in December 2014, and yet last night the Bolter ranted in his usual way about the dangerous leftist Fairfaxians - why The Age was even worse than the New York Times - seemingly not caring a whit or a jot how his sturdy work was being used to bolster the Fairfaxian bottom line, feeble and pathetic as it is.

In that report came this killer line:

Former 2GB and 2UE host Jason Morrison said the deal was akin to the Daily Telegraph merging with its archrival the Sydney Morning Herald, or Channel Seven and Nine joining forces.

Strange days indeed in the media world, and how lucky for the Bolter that none of his listeners seem to know or care that he is in reality a closet Fairfaxian ...

But the real fascination was listening to the Bolter as he waxed lyrical and deeply uxorious about Tony Abbott, up there with Peta Credlin on a trip to Paris (and how strange is that).

The Bolter's passion for the lad made the bromancer's efforts at the lizard Oz seem pale and tepid - the Bolter's blind desire was more akin to Cathy's love for Heathcliff, so full of emotional intensity and yearning did he sound.

Callers were quizzed about the response in London to the master's speech, and besides the usual alarums and panics, much attention was paid to how the country had lost its inspirational leader and was now in the leaden times of that useless fop Turnbull, a man without ticker or balls.

Now there's nothing wrong with a manly love of a man for another man, even if it sometimes sounded like the Bolter had an even deeper and undying regard for Abbott than Abbott's no doubt still healthy self-regard ...

But the way it was enunciated - full of paranoia and fear of splitters and deviants who might have wandered from the temple of Abbottian worship - was deeply rewarding, and so the pond immediately had to turn to the reptiles of Oz this morning for their considered opinion on the master's outing.

You see, the Bolter was mightily concerned that there might be heresy in the ranks - why even one of the Murdochians might slip up and mock the master and his London speechifying.

Luckily the reptiles toed the line for the most part, what with 'stop the boats' and 'what we need is a new war' and 'boots on the ground' clear winners, along with a new one - to be a genuine, decent Christian you need to forget Christ's inconvenient, useless teachings.

Old slogans never die, they just go to London:

Indeed, indeed, it reminded the pond of the Bolter's deep abiding love of the frank advice, and a Bolter caller who noted that all the current crop of refugees seemed to have some cash, and therefore must be economic refugees.

The pair of rogues and thieves behind the mike were a little askance - after all, the Nazis had created a genuine bunch of refugees back in the 1930s and not every Jew on the run was stone cold motherless broke - but it didn't stop the general thrust of the argument that Europe now lay in ruins, and it was all the fault of these refugee bludgers, and Europe had had nothing to do with, despite assiduously fucking over the middle east for the past couple of centuries.

Still, the pond was shattered when the reptiles at the Oz broke with the master other matters, and began to sound downright snide and catty:

Without sufficient acumen?

Is that the new way to say as thick as a plank or a piece of four be two?

Why that's shameless, shocking mockery and the pond will report the breach to the Bolter's ideological purity secret police force this very morning ...

Meanwhile, the Bolter is in fine form this morning, continuing with the idea that Europe is in ruins ...

Of course, of course, and at some point if we can only learn to keep out the dangerous Dutch, life in the antipodes will be much enhanced, but the pond wasn't attracted by a standard dose of fear mongering and doom saying, because the Bolter was also banging on about his favourite theme of climate science:

Lately, the Bolter has been exhibiting some alarming signs suggesting an ideological impurity when it comes to climate science.

Now there's general agreement on the five or six stages of denialism.

First is flat denial - there is no climate change, or in a more nuanced way, we can't tell if the climate is changing.

Then there's the second stage, where there might be a teeny weeny bit of climate change, but we can't tell if humans are involved.

The Bolter now seems to have reached the third stage, which is to say there is climate change, and humans might be involved, but it's impossible or too expensive to do anything about it, and besides, it might actually be better for us and for the world:

Of course to characterise either Turnbull or Farquhar as secret or public global warming sceptics is a woeful enlistment of the pair into the Bolter's army of desperates, who will clutch at anything to bolster their denialism.

Farquhar is a scientist, his findings open to assessment and rebuttal, and so far as the pond can tell, he's interested in the science and results, rather than joining cults of the denialist Bolter kind:

“None of the climate models show such a decrease in wind speed. It’s a paradox, which shows we haven’t thought about climate change and its impact enough yet,” says Graham. He thinks it’s possible we could end up with a warmer, wetter world, while still subject to the droughts and floods we have experienced for centuries. 
Graham is also now leading a multi-million dollar project entitled Forests for the Future: making the most of a high CO2 world, financed by the Science and Industry Endowment Fund and partnering ANU, CSIRO and the University of Western Sydney. The project will use Graham’s techniques to help identify trees that will grow faster in response to high CO2 levels. The project will he hopes lead to improved forestry production and a boost to carbon capture through forestry. (more here).

Well there hardly seems much point identifying trees that will grow faster in response to high CO2 levels, if climate change isn't happening and might have some implications for the future, but here's how the desperate Bolter twists that news into a shape that suits his warping and changing denialism:

Yes, we've now reached the stage where there is such a thing as global warming, and it seems that the Bolter has perforce had to reach that stage too.

Oh, and the good news comes with the Bolter's further finding ... if you talk to another scientist, why that endorses other said scientist's views ...

In which case, the pond, by reading the Bolter, has become an hysteric about Europe and Islam and a full blown climate change denialist ...

That said, what a pleasing sign it is that the Bolter should now be so desperate to clutch at assorted straws in the run-up to Paris, getting more contradictory and confused as he begins to acknowledge that climate change might be happening, but is now determined to shape the news in such a way that climate change is going to produce a glowing future full of healthy crops ...

Even worse, some pesky commenters have infested the Bolter's pages with snarky comments:

Nice of Andrew to publish the findings of one scientist (as he is free to do) ... Now is there any danger of Andrew publishing the findings of the hundreds of thousands of other scientists that prove this guy wrong ?? I guess that wouldn't fit in with Andrews pre determined, unqualified, climate change denying view of the world ...

Lily ... We make it simple. The majority of the warmest years in recorded history have been in the last 20 years ... Easy , wasn't it. Your "19 years" waffle is tiresome and has been disproved countless times ...

And this exchange:

Indeed, indeed...

Why you could almost fit some of these exchanges into a flurry of tweets, which reminds the pond of another Bolter obsession.

During last night's radio session - which the pond naturally enjoyed on its car Volksempfänger, though happily not in a Volkswagen - the Bolter and the loon in the chair sharing the mike with him ranted and railed about the twitterati. Oh how they hated the twitterists and their wittering ...

... which is passing rich and strange for a doofus who has made his living and his reputation out of social media, albeit of an ancient blogging kind, trading on the flurry of comments that are much like the ranting feedback that turns up on Bolter talk back radio ...

Naturally the pond was immediately entranced by the latest Twitter tag, featuring as it did the master and his London speech ...

You can find more at #TheToneCommandments, but it reminded the pond why there's still a lot to be said for mockery ... it drives inflexible ratbag monotonal characters like the Bolter into a frenzy of stupefying political correctness and on a quest for rabid ideological purity. It was hard not to flinch when he looked into the future and saw neo-Nazis and the parties of the right on the move and on the march ... as if he himself wasn't of the far right ...

Yet judging by last night's performance, the pond would go so far as to say if another Salem witch trial were to come around, the Bolter would be at the front armed with his righteous pitchfork ...

Never mind, on with the twittering memes ...