Miranda Devine, and the bizarre truth about doctors' wives finally revealed ...

If there's one phrase as equally indicative as 'chardonnay sippers' of shoddy, lazy thinking, surely it has to be that mysterious sociological phenomenon known as 'doctors' wives'.

Naturally it's precisely the kind of wording you will find Miranda the Devine deploying, in Abbott's sledging of Rudd cuts through finer points of debate:

... at a different table, grumbling Liberals expressed outrage at his parental leave scheme and declared, ''Tony has peaked''. With such antagonism from the "doctors' wives" set and criticism yesterday from Peter Costello for being fiscally impure (like Howard), it seems Abbott is on track to win over the people he really needs to have on side if he is to do well at the next election - the middle class mortgage belt, aka "working families".

Who are these mysterious "doctors' wives" and why do they associate with the fiscally pure Peter Costello? As opposed to decent caring working families who are sensibly middle class, not that disgusting rabble known as the renting working class (we have some renters in the neighbourhood. Oh dear, you can tell from the gardens ... they never mow their lawns or weed their patches.)

Well it seems that doctors' wives been put on this earth to torment Miranda the Devine with fey dissenting opinions. It seems, as far as I can tell from Costello: the exit of the enigma, that they were the ones that foisted Malcolm Turnbull on the party, which led to the apparent tragedy of the exit of Peter 'the fiscally pure' Costello from the party:

Perhaps the Liberal Party should think twice about choosing leaders from difficult marginal seats such as Wentworth, packed with doctors' wives, greenies and small-l liberals whose cultivation is destined to alienate the party base.

Oh you horrid, wicked, naughty doctors' wives.

But what other distinctive features indicate you might be in the presence of doctors' wives? Well it seems they like the arts, and are always on hand in futile demonstrations, as explained in the Devine's To play king of the middle ground:

Crack journalistic investigative teams would be signing book contracts. Hannie Rayson would whip up another play applauded by chatterers and doctors' wives. The Refugee Action Coalition, Flotillas of Hope, Free the Refugees Campaign, Stop the War Coalition, North Shore Greens, Western Sydney Peace Group and North-West Friends of Refugees would be marching on Kirribilli House.

Oh you horrendous chatterers, how we hate you. Shouldn't you be sticking to macrame?

It seems Miranda's readers are also aware of the dangers, though I'm not quite sure where Turak is:

Miranda is correct. The Liberal base are apposed to this policy. The Nationals base even more so because they know what it would do to rural and regional Australia. If you included the Nationals in the numbers for this policy it would be 50/50 support. The rich Liberals in the cities (the doctors wives in Mosman and Turak) love this policy because they can buy and sell these Carbon Permits like derivatives and think they are saving the planet at the same time.

And yet it seems that their tastes are hard to predict, at least if you're Julie Szego hard at work explaining the charms of Tony Abbott to women voters in It's hard to stay pure with the mad monk:

Well, bollocks. It's time to pour cold water on this Abbott-has-a-woman-problem theory. This can't be done by scrutinising polls or by crystal-ball gazing about whether ''doctors' wives'' would still vote for a party led by the ''mad monk''. Let's admit that this discussion is pure pop-psychology - Venus-and-Mars-style gender stereotyping - let's go for it.

Oh you vexatious, indecipherable, frustrating doctors' wives. But it seems they have amazing powers of persuasion (here):

I chortle while I imagine the North Shore Doctors Wives threatening their husbands with all sorts of dire consequences if Abbot ever becomes PM – chief threat of which may be the withdrawal of the sexual favours Tone seems so afraid of.

Worse than the wife of Bath, these difficult doctors' wives.

And perverse and fickle. When given the opportunity to vote fro Clive Hamilton in Higgins, boy, did they ever let down Guy Rundle:

The argument itself, first: Higgins is the one of the foremost ’social liberal’ (or doctors’ wives) seat in the country. It was one of the few seats which swang towards Labor in 2004 on the strength of Mark Latham hugging Bob Brown (which was of course a disaster everywhere else). Most of its voters are tertiary-educated people who see climate change scepticism as a rural pathology pure and simple. A dapper, eastern suburbs, moderate, candidate arguing that climate change, humanitarian refugee policy and reconciliation are vital issues for liberal-minded people…well, the sky’s the limit. Such a candidate could head towards a 30% primary. (here).

Might that have been payback for Guy using the word "swang"?

Still, good old reliable David Flint understands the dangers they posed to Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull must abandon the doctors's wives, he thundered for Quadrant, under the header, Goodbye doctors' wives. I really have no idea why the doctors' wives filled the good Flint with such disdain, but he was firmly of the view that they must be abandoned as the cheap hussies and minxes they so clearly are:

... unless Mr. Turnbull turns his back on the doctors’ wives of Wentworth, he will remain Mr. Rudd’s principal defence.

Oh you fickle, wretched creatures, you destroyers of planets, you ruiners of souls, you harbingers of doom for politicians, with your siren doctorly wifely songs.

Handily, Andrew Bolt's readers can etch in a little more detail about these singular folk (here):

The “doctors wives” on Chapel St will love their morning “monkey crap coffee” as they listen to Neil Mitchell on their ipods.

Eek, way beyond chardonnay in their perverse tastes.

And then I began to wonder if they really even existed. Take Akker Dakker, and their failure to turn out in numbers for Peter Garrett (here):

The green policies Labor thought would win the hearts of a growing constituency are now hurting, not helping, the electorate. Mr Garrett has been a failure on climate and environmental issues. He was supposed to deliver the so-called doctors’ wives to Labor, but looks as if he is the one in need of a good doctor now.

So called? Oh that hurts. What a cruel thrust. No parry to that remark. Yet Akker Dakker is reported as understanding the phenomenon (here), as he predicts a career of Iraqi-style shoe tossing for them:

What is clear, however, is that to our feral friends the saying "if the shoe fits, wear it" no longer applies.

If this leather launching trend really takes off, future generations of greens, doctors' wives, actors and actresses, and members of the 20-20 retrovision audience will have to remember: If the shoe fits, fling it.

Perhaps the reason no one understands this tribe, or can pin down what these shoeless souls think, is that they're always out when the pollster calls, as cogently explained by Bob Ellis (here):

Then you ring up on Saturday morning, when the Soccer Mums, the Doctors' Wives and the prosperous dads are out shopping or swimming with their kids. And you ring up on Sunday night, when everyone is home, but the ABC watchers are unwilling to take the call.

Thus, like Newspoll, without breaking the law, you can bring the Labor vote down by 3 or 4 percent. Or by not ringing up much on Friday night, and ringing up a lot on Sunday morning, you can put the Labor vote up.

For god's sake, doctors' wives, remember your duty, hang around the phone day and night, waiting for a call from the pollsters! After all, as Akker Dakker explains, it seems you're the only true believers (here):

It comes as no surprise that Labor's true believers - the dilettante North Shore doctors' wives - are loathe to support genuine action - because it focuses attention on the abject failure of the ill-conceived apartheid policies they marched for and in which they placed their deluded, emotive trust.

But please, enough with the dilettante. As well as drinking vile coffee, how about you take up basket weaving, and if not that, surely your husband can spring for a pottery wheel.

I did find one kind soul who was sympathetic (here):

The crowing triumphalism of the New Right extends from Alexander Downer’s revisionist view of ALP history to the scathing dismissal of dissenters as chardonnay socialists, elites, doctors’ wives, and the latte society. Shouldn’t someone be giving an alternative view, even if it is occasionally wrong?

But even he understood that doctors' wives were occasionally wrong, or perhaps even inclined to grievous spiritual error. Look at the company they keep. Soccer moms and the latte sipping society and chardonnay swilling socialists.

Still, I know have an idea of the most useful function doctors' wives serve. Whenever you want to write about politics or social issues in a glib, stereotypical way, call them down for service. Crikey even went so far as to see them as a defining part of Miranda the Devine's world view:

Along with Paul Sheehan and Michael Duffy, she runs the somewhat poorly attended right-wing franchise on the SMH. Like her father Frank, can hold an argument and write well, despite a clear anti-Labor agenda. Baits Balmain basketweavers; damns doctors’ wives in Warringah. (here).

By golly, they get about a lot these doctors' wives. At first I thought they were just in Wentworth and Toorak, but now it turns out that somehow they've managed to elect Tony Abbott as the Federal Member for Warringah.

Damn you, damn you all to hell with your perverse, difficult ways, you doctors' wives.

Oh, sorry, I got quite distracted by this troubling, worrisome issue. The rest of Miranda the Devine's column rushed hot off the presses today for your endless pleasure features the Devine quoting Warren Truss quoting Shakespeare and explaining the many ways she loves Tony Abbott and how soon he will drive the demon Chairman Rudd from our midst. Personally I find one hit wonder Toni Basil's subtle evocation of cheerleading in Mickey more beguiling, but perhaps that's because I could pound out a Devine column in my sleep. I wonder if she's also inclined to somnambulism?

Well since quoting seems all the go, here's William Blake. You might have thought he was evoking the rose when he wrote this, but he knew much better the startling truth:

O doctors' wives, thou art sick!
The Invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of Crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

(Below: further startling proof of the wicked worm-like lifestyle of doctors' wives).

And now a final warning! Repent of your wicked ways, or the office girl will win! And so another desperate despicable doctor's wife will come into the world to confuse everybody about everything. Except we all know that you're to blame for it! Whatever it is or might be in the future, including but not limited to the fate of the Liberal party, its leadership and the number of affairs going on in Wentworth ...


Ah the good old days. Damn you Germaine Greer, damn you to hell. If only you'd become a doctor's wife ...

Barney Zwartz, and a dose of comedy will fix the cosmic joke which ails ya ...

(Warning: do not let your child view the monologue above!)

Sheesh. Sharp evidence from Barney Zwartz that some atheists have no idea about anything, just like drooby Christians.

Talking about the recent atheist convention in Melbourne, Barney gets to brooding about humour in Atheists' ridicule won't win friends and influence people (well his header would say that, wouldn't it, seeing as how Christians are the only true Dale Carnegies in this world):

The humour at the convention was in some ways the most revealing aspect. Some I found very clever; but some it would be charitable to categorise as inept.

American comedian Jamie Kilstein bellowed a monologue at about 600 words a minute, making him hard to hear: just as well, perhaps, as two-thirds of the words began with ‘‘f’’ and ended with ‘‘k’’, and the rest were very specific about gay sexual practices. More than one present confided that it was the low point for them, especially with children there.

Well bugger me dead, you mean there were atheists who dragged their kids along to listen to a fucking stand up comedian, and wondered why there was a fuck here and a shit there? And worst of all, unseemly gay sexual practices?

Now you might not like Kilstein's comedy stylings, but really since the days of Billy Connolly - oh okay Lenny Bruce - you'd have to be remarkably dense to turn up to a stand up comedian's riff and not expect a few salty words. Barney and his co-conspirators, who still manage to be shocked by such words, are showing their age.

What else has he got?

Also unworthy were ABC science presenter Robyn Williams offering “a devastating argument against religion in two words: Senator Fielding”; former Hillsong member Tanya Levin: “I’m finally getting to hang out with the adults”; and Rationalist Society president Ian Robinson, asking whether there were any believers in the audience. “OK, I’ll speak really slowly.” (Wild applause after each.)

Hey, I laughed. Thanks for the jokes Barney.

Here's a Christian joke. You can find more at Christian Jokes. To cut a long shaggy dog story down a little, Satan turns up at a church, and an elderly gentleman, to Satan's consternation, refuses to leave his pew:

"Don't you know who I am?" asks Satan.
"Yep, sure do," the elderly man said.
Satan asked, "Aren't you afraid of me?"
This time the man said, "Nope, sure ain't!"
Satan, a little more perturbed at this, asked, "Why aren't you afraid of me?"
The man calmly replied, "Been married to your sister for 56 years."

Ha, slapped my thigh so hard, I thought I was going to dislocate my hip. Chortle. Bugger me dead, those Christians know how to tell a self-deprecating joke. Bloody women, can't live with 'em and can't live without 'em. No wonder Barney can round out his piece thus:

What was missing was any sign of self-deprecation. Atheism will be a mature movement in Australia when atheists can laugh not just at the religious, but at themselves.

Yep, that's what we call a generalisation. It seems all atheists can't laugh at themselves, despite the cosmic joke the absent god or gods have played upon them, while by contrast it seems that the religious just love the cosmic joke and laugh at themselves all the time. Laugh all the time those Christians, unlike those wretched, high minded, dull, pious, probity-laden, puritanical atheists.

Nothing like a little stereotypical nonsense to keep the wheels turning.

Meanwhile, the next best thing to knocking a sensa huma, which is to keep calling atheism a religion, and atheists religionistas, is the card Barney keeps up his sleeve, and produces at the drop of a hat:

Many there would be horrified at how similar it was to evangelical meetings I have covered, down to the bouffant-haired televangelist prototype in Atheist Alliance International president Stuart Bechman, who was master of ceremonies. Every jibe brought a burst of applause — all that was missing was the “hallelujahs”.

Newsflash Barney. Bechman comes from California, worse still Simi Valley. Out LA way, if you don't have bouffant hair, a nice tan, perfectly capped teeth and a sunny smile, next thing you know you're a bum on the street begging for a dime. It's the California way, and soon enough I'll be in Vegas marvelling at the scenery. Complaining about Bechman doing a Tammy Baker (Tammy Faye Messner to you lot) is about as silly an ad hominem as you can get, as is the desire to turn a congregation of atheists into an ersatz Hillsong. Because over there in the song and dance crowd, you're spending time with children who've yet to put away childish things ...

Oh I'm sorry, there I go again, laughing at the weak minded and speaking slowly.

But it seems Barney is terribly concerned about the atheists, who simply don't have the broadminded tolerance displayed by Christians, from the pope down to the Pellist heretics and the Jensenist nepotics (not that we should, in heretical fashion, be mentioning them in the same breath, since as any Jensenist knows, those papists are heading straight to hellfire and damnation):

In Australia, as a sociologist told me, organised atheism is a nascent movement that has yet to learn to articulate its own viewpoint without misrepresenting others. But it took Christians a long time to learn that, and some still haven’t.

Come on down, Cardinal Pell (here):

"Often God gets caught up in the secular hostility to the Christian defense of human life, especially at the beginning and end, the Christian defense of marriage, family and the linking of sexuality to love and life," Cardinal Pell affirmed.

He added: "Here in these culture wars lies the origin for most of the hatred of God and religion, while the new violence of a minority of Islamist terrorists has given Western secularists new grounds to attack all religions.

"However it is much safer to attack Christians!"

Oh the poor diddums. Islamics getting a free pass while Christians cop the penalty for handling the ball (or, as Jon Stewart might say, the balls).

But at least Pell recognises that atheists and secularists are the enemy and gets on with his tireless work. Barney thinks that atheists need to go soft cock about their business, and please pardon that terrible tribute to masculine, patriarchal thinking, but I can't think of any other way to explain his limp dick advice:

Here’s my advice. If atheists can reduce their contempt for believers and work harder for their positive goal — reducing the footprint of religion in society — they may begin to exert more of the influence they feel they deserve.

Meh. It's already supposed to be a secular state, but the Lord's prayer starts off parliament, god is written into the constitution, and the churches greedily gobble up the funding thrown at them by the state as a substitute for their failing business models.

And we have Chairman Rudd, and as his alternative, Tony Abbott strutting about bashing us like old time Elmer Gantrys like clockwork. For the absent god's sake, even Julia Gillard keeps handing out cash to religious schools, Scientology amongst them, and no one dares say boo to that religious goose, even when Nick Xenuphon invites them (hang on, I think I meant Nick Zenophon).

Which makes it even funnier when Barney offers a way forward:

When it comes to secularism, they have more support than perhaps they realise. Many Christians and agnostics support secularism, as long as it is understood as a voice for all in which none is privileged, rather than the removal of any religious voice from the public arena (which would be undemocratic).

In which none is privileged? Oh great, that means they'll be handing out some prime real estate in the heart of Sydney real soon - perhaps near St. Mary's, though I'd settle a slot somewhere near St James, or perhaps resume some of the handsome space allocated to St Andrew's - so I can stick up an atheist cathedral and bring out handsome teleatheists from California to preach the bouffant gospel to unbelievers.

Yep, for the solemnest, most serious, and it has to be said, utterly humourless treatment of atheism and religion, Barney's your man, and in the process provides richly rewarding reading and ongoing good times.

Go on Barney, keep telling us how to further the atheist secularist agenda, provided it doesn't mock Christians and refuses to dance the militant dance, and how Christians are the persecuted minority in this broad brown land ...

Meanwhile, lordy lordy, up against Barney, I found a little time to enjoy Catherine Deveney, a rare and novel experience as she scribbles Atheism is a broad church:

The ''atheism is a religion'' question is best answered by the Non-Stamp Collector, a YouTube animator who says: "Saying atheism is a religion is like saying not collecting stamps is a hobby, off is a TV channel or bald is a hair colour".

Why are you atheists so angry? If beauty is in the eye of the beholder then anger is in the sphincter of those people whose beliefs are being confronted. No one who agrees with Dawkins has ever called him strident.

The word ''militant'' has become synonymous with atheist. Militant is simply a word used to describe someone showing opposition in a way the people being opposed don't like.

Yes, and atheists tell better jokes, and have a better sense of humour and laugh at the follies of the world knowing that we're a long time dead in the grave, and blowing yourself up to access seventy two virgins is about as fucked in the head as you can get ... and so on and so forth.

And now for some dire atheist humour:

Janet Albrechtsen, Peter Costello, Jonathan Holmes, and keeping a sense of balance while skating on the pond ...

(Above: a reminder from First Dog that March is 'sexualharrassmarch' at your ABC. Click to get a bigger picture. Put on a pair of overalls to get the overall picture. More of the seminal - no I'm not talking about semen - First Dog here).

Heavens to Betsy - as we used to say in the bush long ago, not understanding that the origin of this American phrase is completely unsolvable - the wind has whipped up the waters on the pond today.

There's Peter Costello so severely savaging Tony Abbott's paid maternity leave scheme he sounds like an actual Liberal, and earns himself a splash by Phillip Corey under the header Costello slams Abbott parent tax.

And if reading Corey isn't enough, you get double bunger value because the Herald grandly allows Costello space for his column Leaders jostle in the race to rock bottom.

Costello displays his usual venom - no Abbott and Costello routine here - with words like Sweden, alarm bells, air-raid sirens, Bob Brown and the Greens lauding the scheme, private benefits socialised, and cruellest blow of all, Crocodile Dundee - that's not a maternity leave scheme, this is a maternity leave scheme.

Naturally in the interest of balance, Costello spends half his column treating Chairman Rudd's hospital scheme like a salad maker might shake around a lettuce leaf. But strangely Corey - in raptures with the Costello Crocodile Dundee routine - ignores this in his springboarding off the Costello column to grab his share of the headlines. And when we also read Tom Ormonde scribbling Abbott's parental leave scheme is an unfair stinker, we have to wonder if the Herald is embarking on a crusade, or a campaign.

Where is the balance, we sigh, as Fairfax shows once again it's an outpost of the ABC. Well we would if we were Janet Albrechtsen.

From where we sit, Abbott's scheme is cynical, grasping, opportunist, and way too indulgent, and the most dismaying thing is that clearly somewhere in our mind there must be a Liberal gene - as opposed to a liberal anarcho-syndicalist libertarian gene - that occasionally aligns us with Peter Costello. Oh shoot me now.

But we got to thinking about balance, because naturally as soon as she left the ABC board, we'd been waiting for Janet Albrechtsen to give the organisation a dust up, and she obliges with Strength in diverse views.

Naturally she works herself up into a lather about balance:

... was it balance when an ABC reporter asked Newman on Wednesday whether he was "a climate change denier"?

Or was it a damn sensible question to ask of Newman, who talked and sounded like a gherkin on the subject? And brave enough, because when you read ABC veteran rebuffs Newman on sceptics, you realise that in the ABC the best strategy is always to keep your head down, or the likes of Albrechtsen will lop them off:

Although several ABC journalists have criticised Mr Newman's speech anonymously, only Williams, a 35-year veteran of the ABC's Science Show, would go on the record.

He cited climate change sceptics he had interviewed, including Ian Plimer, Don Aitkin, Nigel Calder and Richard Linson.

Stephen Conroy has generously agreed that Newman can make as much of a goose of himself as he likes (here) - the great big internet filter isn't available just yet - but how shocking that Williams should think of climate deniers as geese of a feather:

"We don't interview people who say HIV doesn't cause AIDS, petrol sniffing is good for kids or smoking doesn't cause cancer, but they're out there," Williams said.

And of course you can read Janet Albrechtsen on climate change anytime you like, thanks to Chairman Rupert, but what's truly remarkable and amazing is the way Media Watch and its host Jonathan Holmes gets up the nose of the likes of Albrechtsen.

Here's my idea of balance - on the one hand, we have three commercial FTA broadcasters who offer little but dross and sport, and we have an SBS that's lost its way, its staff in despair, and we have a digital experiment that saw groups as diverse as Christians and NITV access to the spectrum, an experiment shortly to be terminated by the demonic despotic powers that be, and a community channel that's run on the smell of an oily rag currently lost somewhere in the analogue world, and pay television dedicated to the preposterous notion that you should pay for crap (even though its only temptation, Jon Stewart now slides his slippers under my bed regularly at 7.15 pm on ABC2 - oh Jon, tickle me again), and a newspaper world dominated by Chairman Rupert's seventy per cent stake, and full of commentariat columnists, handsomely paid, of the likes of the Devine, Gerard Henderson and Albrecthsen, not to mention Piers Akerman, Tim Blair, and that dolt Andrew B.

And up against this ocean of suffering, they get agitated about fifteen minutes or so once a week, delivered for the usual socialist working hours of nine months a year?

Spare me days, as we used to say in the bush without quite understanding that it was a plea to the absent god to go on living, and therefore quite meaningless.

Well you can read all of Albrechtsen if you like, thanks to the generous Chairman Rupert, as she gets indignant about Holmes, and blathers on about the ABC charter (in the process conflating gathering and presentation of news with opinion pieces), but when you actually read Holmes' Climate change reporting: balanced or biased?, it turns out to be a more intelligent piece than hers. And when you get to read his Mark their words: the battle begins, he astutely sets the scene for regular bouts of ABC bashing from the commercial sector:

... this much is certain: the current challenge to the ABC's plans to expand its regional websites by companies like Fairfax and APN, which own newspaper chains in regional and rural Australia, is just a preliminary skirmish.

The real battles will be over subscription TV, and subscription news online. The fact that the ABC doesn't take advertising is irrelevant to its commercial rivals in these spaces. It's looking more and more like a billion-dollar gorilla, with its supply of bananas guaranteed, posing an existential threat to the survival of some of this country's most powerful and influential businesses.

Make no mistake, the battle has hardly begun.

Meanwhile, it's good to have a chuckle at the paranoid mindset of the conservative commentariat, and the notion that if you hang around with dogs, you get up with fleas. Here's Albrechtsen:

The truth is that not much is required to make the ABC an even better media organisation, a truly vibrant town square of diverse opinions and perspectives. But you can see how easily group-think settles in. It happens at conservative gatherings, too. No conspiracy is necessary. The simple fact is if you spend too much time listening to views with which you agree, you grow complacent and bored. Even if a young journalist starts out with a refreshingly different perspective, Stockholm syndrome can happen in Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra.

Phew. At last an explanation of why Peter Costello and I agree on Tony Abbott's maternity leave scheme. It's Stockholm syndrome. I've spent so long reading the views of commentariat columnists my mind has been captured, as I grew complacent and bored.

But funnily enough I've never felt captured by Albrechtsen. Perhaps because her group think is just a typical commentariat columnist group think, as here she faithfully echoes Gerard Henderson scribbling only yesterday about the evils of the ABC.

Oh and it wouldn't do if we didn't end with a dire, mysterious imprecation and muttered threat:

The ABC is there to serve the people who fund it. If it chooses to undermine its raison d'etre by ignoring constructive criticism, there will be greater existential threats ahead for Aunty.

Hang on, that sounds like Janet Albrechtsen sounding just like Jonathan Holmes. Existential threats?! The ABC threatening Chairman Rupert who threatens the ABC which threatens the Herald which threatens News Corp which threatens Fairfax which threatens ... Enough already, that's not an existential threat, that's an existential meltdown.

Have they both been reading Jean-Paul Sartre? And which one has Stockholm syndrome?

Just another day ice skating on the pond. Whatever you do, don't lose your balance ...

(Below: a nice Pieter Bruegel showing the pleasure of winter sports. Keep your balance!)

Miranda Devine, Q&A, and no need for an argument about the science when any old argument will do ...

(Above: Miranda Devine on Q&A).

Is it only me that finds shows like the ABC's Q&A entirely unwatchable?

If it isn't full of people saying predictable things in a way that's numbingly predictable, it's full of babble, sound and fury as people attempt to score points - often as a result of point-scoring questions from the real or virtual audience.

Give me the form of Oxford debating any day, though it most likely would lead to dull television. On the other hand, the world could do with a lot more dullness.

But we felt beholden to take a look at the latest exercise (oh we love the royal plural, we do), because it featured Miranda the Devine, and we wanted to see how she'd perform, away from excoriating words, and in a public forum where snarling isn't the best way to settle a point.

Sure enough, the Devine was remarkably sedate. If she repeated her form in her Herald column, the world would be a duller and better place. Sure enough there was some drollery - all the more poignant after Four Corners had just done over Tony Abbott in fine style - but it was quite genteel:

MIRANDA DEVINE: Well, I think Tony Abbott is sort of crossing over. He's showing that conservatives are not people that you can stick in a box and decide that you know exactly what their ideas are on everything.

TONY JONES: What, crossing over to socialism? I mean, crossing over to what?

MIRANDA DEVINE: Crossing over to...

BILL SHORTEN: A parallel universe.

MIRANDA DEVINE: ...to real people, to actually talking to...

PETER DUTTON: Present company excluded, I presume.

CATHERINE DEVENY: We're all human beings. Oh.

Oh indeed. I am not an animal!

But when it came to labelling and defining the Devine, she was quite reticient:

I've never really thought of myself as being particularly dogmatic or slave to any ideology. I prefer to think of myself as pragmatic.

Thank the lord that's cleared up. Next time I read an outburst about this, that and the other, I'll just take it as a fit of pragmatism coming on.

She sounded wounded and hurt by Robyn Williams castigating her kind about climate change:

MIRANDA DEVINE: Or as the ABC science broadcaster Robyn Williams called us, "the sons and daughters of Dr Goebbels". You know, that's a - I'm on a hiding to nothing trying to answer that question.

This was a reference to an item in The Australian, which loves to pick up any affront to denialists (here):

DAYS before ABC chairman Maurice Newman delivered his opening address on "groupthink" at the ABC's leadership conference last week, science broadcaster Robyn Williams let his own views on climate change sceptics be heard. Williams delivered the 2010 Commonwealth Day address at a lunch organised by the Commonwealth Day Council of NSW at NSW Parliament House. He urged people to "debate the widest range of credible views, but recognise the cowboys, the misfits and the sons and daughters of Dr Goebbels for what they are. The Commonwealth is a society of nations. It represents an association of goodwill and co-operation, as well as of diversity and contrast. Let's make the most of it. While we can." One audience member approached Williams later to complain about his reference to sceptics as "sons and daughters of Dr Goebbels".

Williams told Diary yesterday the reference was to Goebbels' infamous "big lie", in which if one says something loud enough and long enough it becomes the truth. He says he wasn't accusing anyone of being a Nazi.

But really to make herself feel better, couldn't the Devine have just accepted a description of herself as being a misfit and a cowgirl?

Never mind. The disgraceful Waleed Aly admitted to not reading many of the Devine's column - offering up the feeble excuse that he's from Melbourne and doesn't get out much and he didn't want to turn it into a Miranda session - and thereby missed the most sterling example of Devine's pragmatism as she went on to talk about climate change...

All I will say is that of course the argument is not that we don't believe in climate change. Nor is it that manmade emissions don't have some impact.

Oh dear that sounds like quite a moderate position. Where's the proud warrior we remember from such Troy McClure movies as Planet doomsayers need a cold shower, and Beware the church of climate alarm?

Back then it required messianic courage to battle the fundamentalist zealotry:

There was much more but essentially Plimer's message is that the idea humans cause climate change has become a fundamentalist religion which is corrupting science. It is embedded with a fear of nature and embraced principally by city people who have lost touch with nature.

He likens the debate to the famous 1990s battle he had in the Federal Court, where he accused an elder of The Hills Bible Church in Baulkham Hills of breaching Australia's Trade Practices Act by claiming to have found scientific evidence of Noah's Ark in Turkey.

Plimer says creationists and climate alarmists are quite similar in that "we're dealing with dogma and people who, when challenged, become quite vicious and irrational".

Is a different song beginning to be sung? These days that haven for denialists, The Australian, has taken to calling for the Cool voice of reason on climate, and praising itself for its promotion of intelligent discussion - no doubt thinking of Janet Albrechtsen's many fine contributions to the debate, and boasting how it has recently published a column by Bjorn Lomborg, who accepts the theory of climate change but argues that cutting carbon would be more costly than living with the problem.

You can read Lomborg's Fixing climate change shouldn't cost the Earth, but just as interesting for Devine spotters is this contribution in Q&A:

The question that where the science has not settled, quite obviously as we've seen even recently, is what quantity of change and whether or not it's worth wrecking our economies to try and stop climate change which may not be possible anyway. So how much are we willing to spend, how much are we willing to wreck our economies?

That's when a cheeky member of the audience prodded the Devine with a stick, and said her columns ignored the evidence, and the Devine took the hook, and began to rant about propaganda from the UN, and the UN being a political body and the IPCC ... and a member of the audience interrupted and Tony Jones called out 'All right, okay', and decided he needed to hog the limelight with his own question, and it got got the Devine going, and she forgot all about her previous idea of being moderate and thoughtful:

TONY JONES: Can I just interrupt? Did it give you pause for thought this morning, when you heard the head of the CSIRO warn of the dangers of climate change and global warming in this country saying that there is proof, in her view, that Australia is warming dangerously?

MIRANDA DEVINE: No, not at all, because what's new with what she's said? You know, it's the same sort of scare campaign, the same attempt to create this feeling that Armageddon is on its way and it's the greatest moral challenge of our time, which clearly it is not.

Yep, the Devine is so much better placed than Dr Megan Clark, when she spoke out of turn in CSIRO chief defends climate science, and then came that moment when I knew there was an exceptionally good reason never to watch Q&A, but only give the transcripts a quick skim:

MIRANDA DEVINE: Well, we're not allowed to talk about this very important thing that's potentially wrecking our economy? We're not allowed to write about it?

TONY JONES: Well, excuse me, with great respect you are talking about it right now.

WALEED ALY: I suspect you talk about it quite a bit. But my point is...

MIRANDA DEVINE: But you're saying it's...

WALEED ALY: But my point is when you get people who are essentially journalists or just opinionated...

MIRANDA DEVINE: So only scientists can talk about it?

WALEED ALY: Okay, yes. I think...

MIRANDA DEVINE: Right.

WALEED ALY: ...if you're making a scientific argument about whether or not climate change is or is not happening, then that is an argument, in my view, best left to scientists. That might be a radical idea to say that scientists should be involved in a scientific...

MIRANDA DEVINE: We're not making a scientific argument.

Oh dear, we're not making a scientific argument. Somehow mystically it needs to be about how the science is used, and whether or not it's being abused, without ever actually worrying about a scientific argument that might establish whether it's happening or not. The format invites panellists to shoot from the mouth, and like any decent cowgirl, the Devine obliged.

Well there's more if you can stand it, here in the transcript, and of course you can also play catch up viewing at the ABC, but of all the ways to generate heat and smoke and deploy mirrors for cunning lighting effects without substance, surely Q&A must rank with the best of them.

I think in the end that tiddlywinks offers more intellectual stimulation, as well as improving dexterity and testing hand-eye co-ordination ...

(Below: the rules of tiddlywinks here, and please get a decent board!)

Melanie Phillips, Richard Dawkins, and a divine squawking about the deluded ...

When you're in search of righteous indignation about militant atheists, where better to look than The Australian.

And sure enough, cue Melanie Phillips getting terribly upset with Richard Dawkins in Dawkins preaches to the deluded against the divine.

Somehow she thinks that Dawkins has defamed our very own Steve Fielding, not to mention the pope, while the lickspittle uncritical Australian media - Chairman Rupert's minions honourably excepted of course - fawned all over him in a way that could only cause stomach upset in sensitive observers:

The bestselling author of The God Delusion was similarly fawned over by the Australian media, which uncritically lapped up everything he said.

This was even after (or perhaps because) he referred to the Pope as a Nazi, which managed to combine defamation of the pontiff with implicit Holocaust denial.

By comparison, Family First senator Steve Fielding may feel he got off lightly when Dawkins described him merely as more stupid than an earthworm.

Of course Phillips gets it entirely arse about, since it's earthworms that Dawkins has defamed. These singularly useful creatures do sterling work all over the globe, preparing the soil, and surely are the finest examples of the cleverness of Charles Darwin's inventions.

I keed, I keed. Darwin didn't invent earthworms, and come to think of it, neither did god.

I could never get enough of earthworms as a child - in the country, they were essential for a good day's fishing - and I could never understand this slanderous reservation of nice creatures like worms and frogs and snails to the males of the species, simply because someone had a trouser snake:

What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails
And puppy-dogs' tails,

That's what little boys are made of.

Even if Dawkins had compared Fielding to a bumble bee, you'd have to think that was a serious defamation. Of the bumble bee. Come to think of it, there aren't many insects who are more useless than Fielding.

But I digress as usual. Phillips is extremely upset, and we must get upset along with her, as she battles the fearsome forces of scientism, which is a mere ideology. Her language is so agitated and disturbed, I fear she might have a heart attack, as she ponders the sight of revivalists from an alternative universe, hardcore unbelievers swallowing blessed wafers from the hand of the high priest of belief in unbelief.

(It's always important, de rigeur almost, to write about atheists using religious terms, just so it can be kept in the proper compound, and true believers can grasp that atheists are just another form of Satanism).

He (Dawkins) became the apostle of scientism, the ideology that says everything in the universe has a materialist explanation and must answer to the rules of empirical scientific evidence; to believe anything else is irrational.

A second's thought tells one this is absurd. Love, law and philosophy are not scientific yet they are not irrational. So it is scientism that seems to be irrational.

Love isn't irrational? A chemical hormonal stew of bizarre thoughts and deeds? And the laws surrounding it, as practised by eminently rational lawyers, also not inclined to the irrational? As for philosophy, quick bring me some Spinoza, I feel faint.

It seems that somehow it got personal with Phillips:

I had first-hand experience of this when, addressing an audience of US atheists, he (Dawkins) accused me of "lying for Jesus" by misquoting him. This came as something of a surprise since I am a Jew.

Thank the lord that despite that nasty experience, Phillips can find the time to celebrate Christianity in her article:

... although terrible things indeed have been done in the name of religion, the fact remains that Christianity and the Hebrew Bible form the foundation stone of Western civilisation and its great cause of human equality and freedom.

Well hooray for Christianity and Judaism, and never mind the reality that much of western civilisation's key elements came from Greek and Roman civilisations that had all kinds of problems for the modern true believer - like homosexuality, licentiousness and a handsome set of gods, with one to hand for any occasion. Take a close look and you'll see that notions of democracy, and human equality and freedom, within the limits of early thinking, as well as Roman law, got taken up and ripped off by Christians when they did a reverse takeover of the empire.

Slavery? Well the bible - in its new and old testaments - contemplates slavery as a viable activity, provided you're nice to your slaves, which is why you could be a slave owner in the nineteenth century United States and contemplate the notion with equanimity.

But Phillips is determined to speak up for the Christians:

Indeed, he (Dawkins) seems almost to believe that, since everyone who believes in God is stupid or evil and Christians are stupid and evil because they believe in God, those who oppose him must be Christian and can be treated with contempt.

Oh surely not just the Christians. Surely Muslims and Jews who believe in God as a solution to the world's problems, and a pie in the sky afterlife, replete with dozens of virgins, especially when it turns into theocratic states of a persecuting, repressive kind, deserve a little intellectual contempt as well. Since after all, we're talking about ideas, not about killing people for the nonsense they believe in.

As for Dawkins's claim that religion is responsible for the ills of the world, this is demonstrably a wild distortion. Some of the worst horrors in human history - the French revolutionary terror, Nazism, communism - have been atheist creeds.

Which is of course an equally and demonstrably wild distortion, and before we get involved in yet another breach of Godwin's Law, why not have a read of the wiki Adolf Hitler's religious views. It isn't quite as simple or as simple-minded as Phillips contends, at least not when it comes to the Nazis and the ongoing business of religion in Germany during the thirties and the war years.

But it does go without saying that humanity has done awful things in the name of religion, and for that matter in the name of Zeus and of Mars, and in the name of simple secular empire-building and getting to be top dog. No better analysis of the urge has been written than in Orwell's simple fable Animal Farm, but then there's evidence that Orwell was that happy contradiction, a pious atheist.

But you see a childish game of 'the secularists killed more than the religionista' or vice versa, doesn't really answer the many questions there are about the absent god (well absent gods, since we still have an abundance of gods, well above quota or need).

Nor does simply citing a bunch of scientists, or philosophers or recanting atheists, actual deliver much in the way of refutation, unless of course you're interested in selecting a first eleven for a game of cricket between god deniers and god botherers.

No there's something about the ferocity of Phillips' denunciation which suggests she gets upset about atheism - I wonder if she regularly has crises about faith - and of course now that the atheists have found voice again - having gone through regular bouts of persecution - it's important that they be labelled with exactly the same sins as the true religions that have gone before:

This is, of course, the characteristic of all totalitarian regimes, including religious inquisitions. Which is why Dawkins can lay claim to being not the most enlightened thinker on the planet, as his acolytes regard him, but instead the Savonarola of scientism and an intolerant closer of minds.

Oh yes, I've noted that Dawkins regularly participates in book burnings, and celebrates the destruction of immoral art, and shows a profound hostility to the Renaissance, and routinely preaches against moral corruption. Just like Savonarola.

Sheesh, and I thought it was Dawkins who was given to hysterical over-statement, as opposed to a fear of rigorous thinking.

Never mind, Phillips' did remind me of the charms of Savonarola, and his famous bonfire of the vanities.

Is it wrong for me to suggest that Phillips' scribbling is a worthy contender for a new bonfire? Oh shush, I know atheists are intolerant closers of minds - unlike the generous openers of minds you find amongst Christians and Muslims and Jews - but who could be bothered howling down or oppressing Phillips?

Except of course that if you say she scribbles nonsense, she might well regard it as vile oppression. Here's hoping the book she's peddling has more substance, but I confess I won't be forking out hard cash for the pleasure of reading it.

Call that oppression if you will, I just call it the advantage of being given a sampler, a taster, by that taster heaven, The Australian, which can always be relied on to march forward with backward thinking ...

Too many adjectives, and too little thought ...

Is it always thus, when the deluded rail about the the divine?

(Below: Savonarola being given a good burning as a send off, a pleasure usually reserved for atheists. Never mind, Dawkins can look forward to a lifetime in hell, or perhaps the grave).

Gerard Henderson, the devious ABC, wretched alarmist scientists, and what the ABC needs is Glenn Beck ...

(Above: more alarmist ranting from scientists. And they're giving it away for free here. Socialists. You can even order up a hard copy. Tree killers!)

Disturbing, shocking news, with confirmation that your Bureau of Meteorology and your CSIRO are part of the international collective dedicated to the dissemination of the global black helicopter conspiracy called by alarmists and hysterics "climate change".

Worse, but naturally, the best way to find out about this international conspiracy is by consulting your ABC.

Yep, there's Weather bureau backs climate change, as Sarah Clark reports the view of the Weather Bureau director's director Greg Ayers that a century's worth of climate records definitively shows that weather patterns are shifting and that the planet has been warming.

"When we look back over the last 50 years or so and look at the succeeding decade as we roll forward, what we see ... is a trend of increasing temperatures from decade to decade," Dr Ayers said.

"We also see shifts in patterns of rainfall with the drying in the east and the south and the west of the continent.

"There is an increase in temperature in the surface oceans around Australia as well that goes hand in hand with the ... surface temperature increases over the continent, and there's also ... a rise in sea level."

The man even has the cheek to suggest that Australians consult the bureau's data for themselves, boasting of 100 climate reference stations, and preening about how they're comparable with anywhere in the world, when any decent conspiracy theorist knows they're riddled with errors.

Worse still, the CSIRO has got into the act, and once again it's your ABC reporting the views of a mendacious set of scientists, as CSIRO chief defends climate science. It's exceptionally disturbing to have the views of scientists reported, when it's a well known fact that able scientists led by Piers Akerman, Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt have established the real science with extensive field observations, and detailed rigorous theories.

Climate change is a fact, says China, and naturally the story is in your ABC, yet another canard in print. What would the Chinese know about climate change? At least up against Rupert's minions.

No wonder ABC chairman Maurice Newman took his ABC to task for shoddy reporting of climate change. If the ABC keeps on reporting the views of scientists and the Chinese, who knows where it might all end. Oh that's right, you can read all about it in your ABC's coverage of Newman, starting with ABC chair criticises climate change coverage.

Now if you go looking for the news of the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO in the Murdoch press, it's a struggle. As it should be. A free press means the freedom to ignore dissenting scientific views after all. Nick Leys in the Herald Sun fronts up with Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO weight into climate change debate to counter sceptics such as Lord Christopher Monckton.

Sure using Monckton's name is a stretch - he left these shores awhile ago - but hey Monckton is a lord and much more full of gravitas and interest than actual dull boffins at the head of dull Australian organisations interested in black helicopters and climate change.

About the only insight you gather from The Australian - a haven for climate change deniers for years - is an editorial celebrating the Cool voice of reason on climate. It sensibly argues for Australia to do nothing, and welcomes informed sensible debate which proves that climate change hasn't amounted to much to date, and that therefore doing nothing before other nations do something is a brave first step .... Let's show the world we care by continuing on as if nothing is happening.

That's why it was so amusing and heartening and cheering to read our very own prattling Polonius asserting in Your ABC's growth strategy: take more of your money, that:

The ABC does not like hearing this. But there is more diversity on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News than can be found on most ABC programs.

Oh he's always good for a laugh is our muse when in Hamlet mode. Now for a truly balanced view what we need is Glenn Beck.

In a speech last year Mark Scott advocated an increased role for the public broadcaster as an agent for the delivery of Australia's ''soft power'' as a form of ''soft diplomacy''. According to Scott, it is the ABC which is capable of putting Australia's ''culture, values and policies on show''. But is it? After almost four years as managing director, Scott has still not found one conservative or right-of-centre personality to present any of the ABC's most influential programs.

Yes, where is Glenn Beck when we need him. Sssh, I think what Gerard's really saying is that the ABC hasn't found him a gig as a conservative or right of centre personality, to present one of the ABC's most influential programs. Say Media Watch.

But when he's not displaying the personality of a pompous prig, doesn't Henderson display the personality of a coconut? And what about Michael Duffy and Paul Comroy-Thomson on Counterpoint? Sssh, they're not personalities, and they appear on Radio National, which has an audience numbered in the hundreds, and anyway they've sold out because they appear on the ABC. It's a point of pride for right wing personalities not to appear on the ABC, which would involve sullying their integrity and show breath-taking hypocrisy for taking cash from put-upon taxpayers.

Especially when yearning for the good old days of Jonathan Shier:

The only program that consciously employs such commentators - ABC1's Insiders - was an initiative during Jonathan Shier's time as managing director.

Well there's more of the prattling Polonius, much more of it. How he was roused to scribble by thoughts of the ABC's annual soiree in Canberra tonight, as they seek to lull and beguile the politicians and demand more cash, led by the considered and reasonable Newman and his refusal to accept the word of scientists when able scholars like Tim Blair and Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt are so much more to the point (not forgetting the Herald's able Miranda the Devine).

Completely unlike the vile, almost unmentionable Jonathan Holmes, who has set himself up as an arbiter of taste on matters media and whose program allows for no on-air debate. Which is strangely like Henderson's very own Media Watch Dog, which curiously allows no online debate at his very own Sydney Institute which prefers certain kinds of debates. Or at least certain outcomes and conclusions. Like how the ABC is stuffed ...

It's all about Holmes handing down his (unappealable) judgments each Monday night. In its two decades, Media Watch has had seven presenters, all of whom have been on the left.

Yep, 15 minutes a week for a socialist slacker season of much less than a year, in squillions of hours of broadcasting over a year on radio and television, and it sends the likes of Henderson into a frenzy. Not once with the valiant Henderson as presenter, or able to bore people silly by having endless arguments about the leftist elements presenting the program or turning it into the dull vicious stew you can find at the Media Watch Dog.

And he's so fey and flippant, that Jonathan Holmes, as he wrapped up the latest Media Watch (here):

Before we go, the punters among you may have laid money that I'd cover the thoughts of ABC Chairman Maurice Newman on the media's balance, or lack of it, on the climate change issue.

If so, you've done your dough. But if you're interested in my thoughts on that difficult topic, I've already expressed them, at some length, in the ABC's analysis and opinion portal, The Drum. (here)

There's a link to the piece, and to the Chairman's speech, on our website.

Leave your comments on that or any other topic there. Until next week, goodnight.

Asking for comments! How dare he!

But back to the prattling:

In an interview with PM, Newman said ''the ABC has probably been more balanced than most of the mainstream media'' in its handling of the climate change debate. Nevertheless, his implied criticism of the ABC was warranted.

The Australian media columnist Errol Simper is a long-time supporter of the public broadcaster. Yet he acknowledged yesterday ''it seemed, particularly in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, that the bulk of ABC television and radio presenters were all in thrall to the weather alarmists''.

And now it seems that they're dangerously in the grip of the weather scientists. Who knows where it might all lead? Thank the lord that there's Rupert's minions out there beavering away.

Thoughtfully, Henderson saves one last deep chuckle, perhaps even a guffaw for the end as he celebrates the balance of Fox. I've added wiki links if you want to learn more about these American personalities:

Such left-of-centre commentators as Alan Colmes, Kirsten Powers, Joe Trippi and Juan Williams are regular Fox commentators. What's more, the Fox program News Watch hears the views of two conservatives and two liberals (in the American sense of the term) each week.

In the land of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly this is a particularly grand and silly joke, as Faux Noise acts as the propaganda machine for Republicans and tea partiers throughout the land. That's why we love Henderson so. The way he oscillates between Hamlet and clownish grave digger in a flash. And then returns to gnaw at that irritating marrowless bone of fifteen minutes of broadcasting:

There is no debate on Media Watch. Newman is correct in drawing the ABC's attention to the need of a spirit of genuine inquiry. This will not occur until the ABC becomes genuinely pluralistic and junks fashionable group-think. Let's drink to that tonight.

Yes, above all, let's not in a spirit of genuine inquiry report on the doings of the weather bureau or the CSIRO. Let's keep on with the Murdoch group think.

Oh dear Australia, can the American dreaming and Fox News and Chairman Rupert's vision - all bow down to Chairman Rupert - be far away?

Meanwhile, Media Watch is doing something right. Each week it irritates the shit out of Henderson is another good week's work ...

(Below: as the ABC resolutely refuses to hire Gerard Henderson, surely the time is right for them to make an offer to bring Glenn Beck to the antipodes. Let's see how Beck and Chairman Rupert and Roger Ailes likes them taxpayers' apples).

Piers Akerman, and a little cherry picking will fix what ails ya ...

Oh the horror, the horror, the shock and the consternation.

It's almost as if Chairman Rudd knew exactly the right buttons to press, and set out to shock, dismay and consternate Akker Dakker.

Yet what's Akker Dakker done to deserve it, as he sits sighing, his keyboard gently weeping?

You see, according to Akker Dakker, the Ruddster has appointed Tim Flannery to a new gig, and it's more than a mortal can bear, as Piers Akerman explains in Flim-flannery to run new bureaucracy:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has named mammal palaeontologist Tim Flannery as the head of the federal government’s new bureaucracy, the Coasts and Climate Change Council.

Professor Flannery, an alarmist author, is best-known for his widely publicised doom-laden predictions about the fate of Australia’s coastal cities.

They've put an hysterical mammal palaeontologist in charge of the beaches! Head for the hills!

Naturally Akker Dakker goes through all of Flannery's broken predictions, and sadly I didn't have time or the inclination to run through them all, but then I came to these couple of succulent references:

Even Flannery conceded in an interview with the ABC’s Lateline last November that the world “hadn’t seen a continuation of that (warming) trend” and “the computer modelling and the real world data disagree”.

Well Akker Dakker is of course an expert in such matters, and well known for his recent exemplary quotation-based work, as outlined by vicious set-up merchants in Fabricated quote used to discredit climate scientist, and his stout-hearted defence of his citation techniques in Malicious bullets fired by the global warmists' guns.

So I scurried off to Lateline and to the transcript of Tim Flannery discusses hacked climate emails, as broadcast on the 23rd November 2009.

Let's compare the quotes:

Akker Dakker: “hadn’t seen a continuation of that (warming) trend”

Lateline: ... In the last few years, were (sic) there hasn't been a continuation of that warming trend, we don't understand all of the factors that create earth's climate, so there are some things we don't understand, that's what the scientists were email about (sic), you know, we don't understand the way the whole system works, and we have to find out.

Well let's not be pedantic. What's a 'hadn't' compared to a 'hasn't' between chums, though perhaps not to Mr. Chips, or the need to insert 'warming' in brackets, when it's already in the snippet, especially given the ABC transcriber's inability to transcribe.

But what a pity Akker Dakker didn't feel the need to continue and explain the quote in context, as Flannery went on to say:

... These people work with models, computer modelling, when the computer modelling and the real world data disagrees you have a problem, that's when science gets engaged. What Kevin Trenberth, one of the most respected climate scientist in the world, is saying is, "We have to get on our horses and find out what we don't know about the system, we have to understand why the cooling is occurring, because the current modelling doesn't reflect it". And that's the way science progresses, we can't pretend to have perfect knowledge, we don't. We have to go forward and formulate policy on the basis of what we know now.

Yep, that's how Akker Dakker arrives at:

“the computer modelling and the real world data disagree”.

It's called cherry picking, and it used to be a much loved technique for film distributors, and still is, though Sony has stopped writing its own reviews for intertubes publications, in order to generate solid, useful adjectives for quoting on posters, or so I'm told.

Instead if a vile reviewer writes "this is the most mind boggling pile of crap", it's perfectly fair to put on your poster, "Mind boggling", raves Dorothy Parker on loon pond. And so forth and so on. It's fun to do - which word would you chose from "most amazing pile of tosh"?

Indeed there are masters of the art everywhere - I'm reminded of this funny anecdote, as outlined here in Cherry-Picking Quotes:

I was reading The Times over the weekend and saw a two-page ad for the Broadway revival of “A Chorus Line,” one of my favorite shows. I was surprised, though, to see this quote from The Times’s own Ben Brantley:

“What occurs shortly after 8 p.m. at the Schoenfeld Theatre feels so fresh that you stop to catch your breath.”

That’s funny, I thought; I distinctly remember Mr. Brantley giving the revival a not-so-hot review.

So I looked it up online. Sure enough, Mr. Brantley’s actual review goes like this:

“What occurs shortly after 8 p.m. at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, where the otherwise pedestrian new revival of ‘A Chorus Line’ opened last night, is a sort of time bending that Einstein would have trouble explaining. Light, music and a mass of bodies in motion combine to allow you to exist both in 1975, when this musical was first staged, and 2006. This is what ‘A Chorus Line’ was when I saw it 31 years ago, and yet it feels so fresh that you stop to catch your breath…

“Watching the show, directed by Bob Avian, is like drinking from a pitcher of draft beer: You never repeat the tang or sting of that first swig.” And the review ends: “In providing us with an archivally and anatomically correct reproduction of a landmark show, its creators neglected to restore its central nervous system and, most important, its throbbing heart.”

So the producers of “A Chorus Line” not only implied that Ben Brantley gave the show a rave, they actually chopped up his opening paragraph to form a whole new sentence that never existed. Aren’t they legally obligated to use an ellipsis (…) to show where they’ve chopped out text?

Ellipsis? Egad sir, that's a little pedantic for Akker Dakker.

Here's what Flannery had to say about warming in the very same interview:

We had a huge cooling event in Sydney between yesterday and today. Time scales are important. If you take too short a time scale you won't get a climate signal, you get a regional weather signal or whatever else. The scales that the climate scientists use to look at the overall trend is century long, and on that trend we are still warming, sure for the last few years we have gone through a slight cooling trend, we saw it in the 1940s the same sort of thing, but that does not negate the overall warming trend.

Say and think what you will about Flannery. I'd just note, perhaps on a paleontological level, that leopards don't change their spots, tigers their stripes, or Akker Dakker his form.

My astonishing, patented, shocking, revelatory, irresistible and stunning explanation? The zombies have taken over Broadway, and there are gremlins in the works at News Corp.

Oh okay, ya got me, that's just so gentlemen readers can get excited about zombies clutching an inert woman in what I'm assured was the most exciting, terrifying and nail biting movie of 1945. And if you believe that, you'll believe Akker Dakker wielding quotation marks ...

Rampant militant atheists, Dawkins on the march, Sheehan in despair, Day in love with the feeding frenzy of sharks, and Burchell to hand for a sorbet

(Above: militant atheists on the march. How dare they call our own Steve Fielding more stupid than an earthworm. Not when you have the Australian cricket team to hand, and the rugby league season well into its first week).

What a perfect storm this Monday brings.

As feared by Barney Zwartz in By their fruit shall ye know them, the militant atheists are on the march, and show all the subtlety of a sledge hammer.

First comes news that Dawkins derides sainthood as Pythonesque, dubbing the creation of saints as pure Monty Puthon, and mocking the work of the Pope Nazi, as if the Church was some kind of medieval monstrosity when it's simply embracing the astute marketing principles of Hollywood. Worse, he's labelled Steve Fielding as more stupid than an earthworm, when in fact the honourable Senator has the brains and functionality of a gadfly. And who knows, they might be as handy as the study of gall wasps turned out to be for Alfred Kinsey.

Even more amazing, sociologists have flocked to marvel and examine the flock of atheists gathered in Melbourne, much as field workers marvel at the pilgrimages of bogong moths, and you can read about it here in Mysterious rituals of the atheists. Proving that you can dress up snide sniping as a frolicsome academic exercise, which nonetheless can carry doom laden messages of warming:

A 2006 study in the US, for example, revealed atheists to be the nation's most distrusted minority - well ahead of, say, Muslims, homosexuals and recent immigrants.

In the process, authors Stephen Bullivant and Lois Lee earn the dubious title of academic squibbers for the year, as they fling around all kinds of hints and innuendos, while cloaking themselves in the garb of academic objectivity:

So, while a couple of thousand assorted unbelievers crowded around South Wharf, basking in the approval of their new-found and like-minded friends, we few sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists will continue our work trying to make sense of it all. And we will not need to turn to the philosophical question of who is right or wrong to do it.

You know, because the last thing science should be is value-laden in its quaint observations of the mysterious ways of the lemmings:

The social sciences can make no comment on the existence or otherwise of God or any other supernatural phenomena. All they can do is demonstrate how humans perceive and relate themselves to such (real, imagined, or socially constructed) phenomena. But that doesn't mean that it isn't eminently interesting or worthwhile.

Which makes the use of value-laden terms as in ...

... book sales alone weren't responsible for the atmosphere of celebration - even, perhaps, self-congratulation.

... a marvel of restrained scientific observation. The authors should self-congratulate themselves for being so smugly objective.

(What's that you say, it's not the same Dr Stephen Bullivant who lingers in the faculty of theology at the University of Oxford, dressed up in the column's credits as a research fellow? Ah well, I guess co-author Lois Lee is keen, and they've done it before in Where do atheists come from?)

Meanwhile, in other news, this kind of sideshow will soon turn out to be completely irrelevant, as we head towards the economic rapture and end times.

This week, Paul Sheehan woke with the fear, a dire case of the Barnabys. We're all going to be rooned, no doubt about it, as the grumpy prophet bestrides the world and warns Batten down the hatches, the waters are still treacherous.

First he saw signs and portents in the local paper - the ominous word 'boom' came up in connection with property. Then more ominous language with talk of 'unstable dynamics'. Then alarums and warnings in the United States, and the debt burden, naturally all the fault of the Obama administration (George who?), and then of course there's the Europeans, and Greece, and Britian and a vulnerable pound, and Italy, and the PIGS disgruntled, and social discord in Greece ...

And don't you go on relying on China. It too will hit a second great wall - water shortages, but sssh, that's nothing to do with climate change - and it will stumble. And why as if to prove his point over in The Australian, Beijing warns of tough times, with Premier Wen Jiabao saying that the world risks sliding back into recession and China will face a difficult year maintaining growth.

Sheehan is so alarmed that he fails to remember it's all the fault of the Rudd government that we escaped the last recession by spending our way out of trouble right up to the last paragraph, and then he gets himself into such a dither when it comes back with a rush, that he goes all royal with his use of "we":

The Rudd government, as it has proved in every area of major policy, overspent. It threw money around with undisciplined panic when faced with the global economic crisis. We said the same thing at the peak of the storm.

Well here at loon pond, we too are concerned and worried, because Sheehan has shifted from raging denunciations and mild apoplexy to a pious, humble suggestion:

In May, when the next federal budget is presented, a debt-reduction and stimulus-reduction program would be the prudent course and help bolster the government's credibility in an election year.

What no great big new tax on business for Tony Abbott's grand maternity leave scheme?

Frankly, we don't think that Sheehan pays sufficient attention to the gravity of the situation, and so we are pleased to announce the suggestion that in Saturday's Herald, as a community service, Fairfax should provide a free cyanide pill of the kind favoured by Goebbels and his family, or failing that a deliciously flavoured Kool Aid, or failing that a free pistol with a loaded magazine and instructions for use.

It seems certain that as the atheists indulge in an orgy of self-congratulation we're all doomed.

Now having put the fear of an absent god into you, for a little light reading, surely you can do no better than Mark Day's valiant defence of media sharkery and shakedowns in Newsworthy or not, sometimes you're hot.

Reviewing the sordid story of the Herald Sun plundering Facebook for photos to illustrate a story about identity theft, Day displays all the sensitivity of a shark confronting a victim. Tough tittie, or in shark speak, tough shit. Facebook is just another resource, to be gouged at will, never mind all that blather by Chairman Rupert about intellectual property rights (yep, go ahead and steal all the photos and stories you like from News Ltd, and use them how you will, because you see it's all up on the intertubes, and as anyone will acknowledge, like Facebook, the intertubes is a public place).

But surely this takes the cake for direct blackmail and moral threat:

But this unpleasantness could have been avoided if McCabe continued on the path she began. She told her story and could have consented to a photograph which was, in my view, a thoroughly legitimate request.

If she had done that, her unasked and unwanted role as a newsmaker would have been over in a day without hostility.

I acknowledge that the media is a hungry beast.

That’s why, when you find yourself in its voracious path, it’s often best to feed it.

Yep, never mind what the victim might think. Just lie down and let the shark have a piece of you. Perhaps a leg or an arm, as a way of saving the rest of your body. Stick your bum in the air and forget the KY jelly.

And never ever tell it just to fuck off. But you know, I'm suddenly warming to the notion that telling Chairman Rupert's minions to fuck off, and then complaining about their behaviour to Media Watch, is a jolly good way forward ...

Now after all that high excitement, atheists, earthworms, the end of the economic world, and the feeding of sharks, you must be in the market for a tasty raspberry sorbet. And who better to provide it than long term favourite David Burchell in The same old waltz of prurience and prudery as he makes a heartfelt Tartuffian-inspired plea for tolerance, in what surely has to be the last last word on the Clarke and Bingle affair.

It seems the modern world is a torture of polarities, and never mind that Burchell himself, with his willingness to frolic in this tired old field, might be one of the unholy regiment of winking know-it-alls and gossip-mongers that he mocks. He has but kind words for these star-crossed lovers in this modern farce ...

But soft, the sun is already up, and the gentle mists sway and dance in the light refracted from the pond, and a new Monday is upon us, as Agamemnon once noted as he led an expedition of Achaean troops to Troy ... sheesh, I've been reading Burchell, and instead of slipping into the world of Moliere, I drifted into Homer.

Whatever, no complaints please. There's the fine sound of squawking as the city comes alive, and a world of entertainment awaits you ... which is just as well, because here at the pond, we know you're all doomed. Enjoy it while you can.

(Below: Moliere, Tartuffe. Note the startling resemblance to Lara Bingle and Michael Clarke. And note one of Chairman Rupert's minions lurking under the table, ready to steal from Facebook and report on the scene).