Two cheers for the paracletes, and the return of Dame Slap ...

(Above: after starring in The Enchanted Wood, Dame Slap returned for another outing in The Folk of the Faraway Tree. Accept no imitations, and certainly no substitutes, especially editions which change Dame Slap's name to Dame Snap, and downplay the spanking which all horrid children and Greens richly deserve).

If ever you wanted definitive proof that travel doesn't broaden the mind, look no further than Janet Albrechtsen's Bob, the sun is shining on you.

Yes, hooray, one of the pond's favourite members of the commentariat is back, and a refreshed Dame Slap is in top Faraway Tree form, and it almost goes without saying, is completely and utterly predictable.

Oh yes, it's great, grand news for followers of the chattering urban elite commentariat, even if this first outing is just a standard rant about the ABC and about Bob Brown and the nasty Greens, and how dare anyone say that the ABC has taken a swerve to the right, and it's full of doozies, like this one:

Had Andrew Bolt's new, high-rating Bolt Report launched an aggressive takeover of ABC1's Insiders?

High rating? According to the invaluable Mumbrella, here, Bolt's debut scored 163,000 in its morning slot and 123,000 in its afternoon slot. Well I suppose it's up there with Video Hits, but it takes a truly deluded fellow traveller to call it high rating (and there's even more fun to be had in reading Advertisers in Bolt revolt).

Perhaps we should consider this first return outing a canter, a warm up for more serious outings down the track.

It almost goes without saying that Chris Uhlmann is righteous and probing (as opposed to being a quavering, wavery interviewer of the second water), Bob Brown is devious (as opposed to the Murdoch hacks who are relentless in their unified indignation), and worse, he's also defamatory and totalitarian:

Last week Brown revealed a more totalitarian tack, labelling News Limited as the "hate media" for failing to accept the Greens climate change policy holus-bolus.

Yes, it's totalitarian to say that the minions of Murdoch run a party line, and we really have to score that a splendid breach of Godwin's Law, since everyone knows that totalitarian = Hitler = Nazi = Bob Brown. (Brush up on Godwin's Law here at its wiki).

What a relief to know that calling someone a totalitarian isn't in any way related to hate speech ... Now back to work horrid children and pixies.

Of course all Dame Slap is doing is educating the public, while shedding a tear for the brutal treatment of Pauline Hanson:

Remember Pauline Hanson? She received a mauling at the hands of the media that loathed her. The media does a better job when it sets aside its loathing and loving, as the case may be, and sticks to non-judgmental, hard-hitting questions about issues aimed at eliciting answers to better educate the voting public.

Dame Slap of course always sets aside questions of loathing and loving, especially when it relates to Bob Brown, as she explains how the Greens are ruining the country, and the public are being woken up, made alert, if not hysterically alarmed, by the minions of Murdoch:

They are finally catching up with the real Bob Brown, who has crafted a carefully modulated voice, aiming to ooze sensibility so that his agenda and method escape scrutiny. Any pretence of moral superiority is being rapidly exposed as just that.

Oh yes, with his smarmy clever dick ways and his oozing out of the primordial sludge, out of the paleozoic mud, there's no question that Dame Slap puts loathing aside, and instead, in a non-judgmental way, simply calls out people with a sense of moral superiority, coming as she does from a position of deep moral inferiority. And nothing wrong with that ... because it's climate science at its most expert and detailed and insightful.

And how to top Marion Rae, Brown's sidekick, calling some newspapers great for soaking up cat urine, and thereby failing to make the point that they're actually much better lining cockys' cages to catch all the shit and the litter? (Though perhaps not as good as specially waxed paper liners of the kind advertised here).

Well enough of all this tommy rot and natter and chatter about a more constructive, mature relationship between the Murdoch press and climate change.

... the sun is now shining on Brown. And the King of Canberra Hypocrisy is wilting.

Oh yes, that's how to do a column while setting aside matters of personal loathing, and instead in a non-judmgental way, concentrating on the fine details of climate science, and possible solutions to issues facing the world.

As always, Dame Slap leads the way ... from the rear. And don't you dare trying being nice to her, you horrid Greens with your oozing totalitarian leader.

Spank that naughty child at once.

Well on such a joyous day - schools should be closed to celebrate the return of Dame Slap - the anonymous editorialist is feeling the heat at The Australian. Soon the spotlight will shift away from him or her permanently, given that he or she is merely a third rate scribbler, much like any other anonymous blogger ...

How to stay in the game, how to compete with Dame Slap for the spotlight and a little attention? Well the anon edit tries hard, but ends up being hardly trying in Spare us the lecture again.

Drawing him or herself up to a preening portentous height, the anon edit denounces the current proposal to introduce plain paper packaging, and thereby deny cigarettes their precious branding (won't someone think of the branding, lordy, please, forget the children, someone think of the branding).

The smoking lobby and big tobacco will be mightily pleased, as the anon edit sounds just like a hack seeking a role in the movie Thank you for smoking.

Senator Lothridge: Now as we discussed earlier, these warning labels are not for those who know, but rather for those who don't know. What about the children?
Nick Naylor: Gentleman. It's called education. It doesn't come off the side of a cigarette carton. It comes from our teachers, and more importantly, our parents. It is the job of every parent to warn their children of all the dangers of the world, including cigarettes, so that one day when they get older, they can choose for themselves.

Here's the anon edit singing right from the same song sheet:

Smoking causes heart disease, cancer, emphysema and other illnesses. This is why the proportion of Australians over 14 smoking has almost halved since 1988, and why it is so much lower than in 1945 when 75 per cent of Australian men smoked. But as with other harmful but legal behaviour, responsibility rests with individuals.

Yes, it's completely a matter for personal responsibility, parental responsibility, the responsibility of children and teens to do the right thing.

In much the same way that the sooner we abandon the need to license the driving of motor cars, we can make that too a matter of personal responsibility. And if someone fails to take personal responsibility, and kills someone? Oh what's a crash between chums ...

As for research? Completely irrelevant:

It is beside the point whether market research supports or contradicts the possibility that the world's first plain packaging would cut smoking further.

Let's hear it again from Nick Naylor:

Nick Naylor: Few people on this planet know what it is to be truly despised. Can you blame them? I earn a living fronting an organizing that kills one thousand two hundred human beings a day; twelve hundred people. We're talking two jumbo jet plane loads of men, women, and children. I mean there's Attila, Genghis, and me, Nick Naylor the face of cigarettes, the Colonel Sanders of nicotine. This is where I work, the Academy of Tobacco Studies. It was established by seven gentlemen you may recognize from C-Span. These guys realized quick if they were gonna claim cigarettes were not addictive they better have proof. This is the man they rely on, Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt. They found him in Germany. I won't go into the details. He's been testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for thirty years, and hasn't found any conclusive results. The man's a genius, he could disprove gravity. Then we got our sharks. We draft them out of Ivy League law schools and give them timeshares and sports cars. It's just like a John Grisham novel. Well you know without all the espionage. Most importantly we got spin control. That's where I come in. I get paid to talk. I don't have an MD or law degree. I have a baccalaureate in kicking ass and taking names. You know that guy who can pick up any girl, I'm him on crack.

Well there's none of that ambivalent, confessional guilt on the part of the anon edit doing his Colonel Sanders bit:

In a market economy, the only goods and services that should not be marketed are those that are banned.

So much for all those generic brands all the rage in pharmacies. Not to mention all that generic home brand nonsense.

Which reminds me of one more Nick Naylor exchange, this time with his son about choice, as his son opts for chocolate over vanilla ice cream:

Nick Naylor: Well, I need more than chocolate, and for that matter I need more than vanilla. I believe that we need freedom. And choice when it comes to our ice-cream, and that Joey Naylor, that is the definition of liberty.
Joey Naylor: But that's not what we're talking about
Nick Naylor: Ah! But that's what I'm talking about.
Joey Naylor: ...but you didn't prove that vanilla was the best...
Nick Naylor: I didn't have to. I proved that you're wrong, and if you're wrong I'm right.

Have a cigarette kid. Heck have a whole pack, and remember to admire the branding, which makes you so kool.

So here's the funny thing. The government has already defaced the packets that contain cigarettes with horrendous images, thereby attempting to ruin the branding.

So all the anon edit is doing is joining in a rearguard action to protect the rights of an industry which peddles death, these days most often to working class families. And in the process, the anon edit is zealously guarding their right to kill themselves with an addictive substance ...

The anon edit asserts that anything else is an interference in the liberties of people ... as opposed to the liberty of big tobacco to go on making a killing.

Next week, the libertarian anon edit argues the Ron Paul case for the legalisation of heroin. At least it might keep them in the ring with Janet Albrechtsen.

But a tip, anon edit. Make sure you use the word "totalitarian" at least three times, and preferably discover a connection to Nazi thinking and mind control ...

(Below: oh yes, bring it on, a return to the old days and personal responsibility and Sherlock Holmes before the interfering busy bodies and nanny staters got in the way of a hit, and still for some reason conservatives oppose a decent shooting gallery where people can exercise freedom to do themselves harm. Contradiction? Moi? No, I just read the nattering minions of Murdoch. Go on Akker Dakker you tell 'em in Shooting Gallery Trial an Overdose of failure. Unlike cigarette packaging and branding, which is surely an overdose of success).

Time to bring out the fig leaves again, and if there's no fig leaf available for Peter Costello, at least let's send him abroad ...

(Above: lordy, we feel so bold risking Gail Dines' wrath, though that's as far as it goes, since joining the alleged 557,000 readership for the rag is simply beyond the pale. Get your Cosmopolitan media kit here and see how they shamelessly target the core target of women 18-34).

Beware zealotry and monomania in all its guises, that's the advice I took from a brief and tragic mistake which saw me switch on the ABC too early, looking for Lateline, and then ended up catching some of the ritualised arguing, preening and shouting that marks Q&A, all heat and no light.

It always reminds me of nothing so much as the family at the dinner table, everybody in the trenches with fixed bayonets and positions, and everybody knowing which buttons to push to make sure an Irish barney ensues. A bit like the intertubes really.

So we came to this little exchange:

HOWARD JACOBSON: Any writer who took on Schwarzenegger, the challenge would be to make him sympathetic.

LESLIE CANNOLD: Yes, I would agree with that.

GAIL DINES: Why?

HOWARD JACOBSON: Because he's a - because he's a human being.

LESLIE CANNOLD: Because it's a novel.

HOWARD JACOBSON: He's another person and we shouldn't...

GAIL DINES: He's an adulterer who goes around screwing women. He uses his power. I don't think we should be sympathetic towards him at all.

This exchange helps explain Dines' obsessive monomania, in which pornography is the ruination of everything. It took a patient, bemused Jacobson to push her a little further:

HOWARD JACOBSON: But how on earth do you read literature in that case? Every play of Shakespeare, he's an adulterer. Othello's a wife murderer. What's wonderful about Shakespeare is Shakespeare said here's a man who murders his wife. This is what it's like to be him. Isn't it terrible to be him and you're imagination is expanded. That doesn't mean you forgive him. That doesn't mean you left him off but your imagination is expanded in the acts of understanding what it's like to be somebody else.

GAIL DINES: I'd agree with that. (here, the spelling in the transcript is the property of the ABC).

She'd agree! Having entirely missed the point before.

At that point, to avoid hurling a shoe at the screen, I switched over to another station. It seemed the safer, wiser thing to do ...

But it reminded me of poor old Bob Gould, long a fixture at Gould's Bookstore in King Street Newtown and now dead. He'd been looking fragile these last few years, but in his feistier radical socialist days, when he was running the Third World Bookshop on Goulburn street in the city, he got done over by the cops for stocking Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, posters by Aubrey Beardsley, and pictures of Michelangelo's David, which lacked the Vatican-approved fig leaf. (lordy fig leaves even have their own wiki, here).

Which I suppose is better than the genital mutilation that affected many Roman statues, especially as the Roman ruling elite saw nothing wrong with posing in the nude, and the Christians sought to demonise sex by chopping off their threatening marble thingies (End of cultural chapter as beloved bookseller dies at 74).

The revolution never happened for Gould, but strangely sex and the obsession with it is still hanging around. Will it ever go away? Not if Dines has anything to do with it ...

Gould's bookstore is a lovely mess - always has been, though he'd been taking steps to get things in shape before his fatal fall - and let's hope it stays a mess, an Aladdin's cave of impossible to find delights.

What a pity that there's no chance of a Gould v. Dines match-up, but what the hell, since Dines clearly doesn't have the first clue about literature or art, let's call it a win for Gould in absentia. And someone keep her away from any pictures of Michelangelo's David, for fear her sensibilities are inflamed like a sixties Sydney cop.

Speaking of impossible match-ups, that reminds me of Jack Marx's intriguing insight into Snowtown, the film about the John Bunting murders, under the header From battler to psychotic killer. According to the Dines creed, if Arnie's under the hammer, then this is definitively the sort of film that shouldn't be made, and it's certainly a film I've flinched from seeing.

But Marx's reading is intriguing:

There's a telling moment in the new Justin Kurzel film, Snowtown, when Bunting, addressing his friends around the dinner table, compares his homicidal hatred for pedophiles with the heroism of the Anzacs. The desire to rid the world of evil is what the Anzac spirit was all about, wasn't it? "Where's my medal?" he asks. "Where's my parade?"

Whether Bunting actually said this or not, there can be no doubt that he thought it, nor any doubt that, for many, it's a fair question. Is it really more noble to take a life on direction than to kill at the behest of one's own conscience? If terrorism is, as Arundhati Roy declared it, "only the privatisation of war", might not murder be merely the privatisation of terrorism, the skirmishes of Gallipoli, Bali and Snowtown separated only by degrees of political interference? Was Bunting's army, coerced and corralled into a war that would traumatise them later, any less deserving of our sympathies (let alone our applause) than the veterans of Vietnam?

Marx then manages to tweak this into being a part of the culture and economic wars:

These may seem mischievous questions, but they're pertinent with regard to Snowtown, a horror filed in the Australian psyche as a serial killing when in fact it was a hate crime, an episode of anarchistic butchery driven by a banal malevolence that is enjoying some purchase in the more depressed quarters of this nation and civilised world.

He then jumps the shark and links the whole thing to a kind of capitalist Armageddon, but still it's an engaging set of insights that almost makes me think I should set aside my fear of bodies in barrels. Or maybe wait for the DVD ...

Hang on, here I am quoting a writer for The Australian with some pleasure, a bit like my regular 'guilty pleasure' walks through the insights of Jack the Insider, who, when not celebrating the truth-telling ways of Malcolm Turnbull on Liberal party climate change policy, is berating the theocratic ways of the Dalai Lama.

Well I'll have to stop this before I go blind, or before I start brooding about all the sex talk in Cleo (I Had Sex Every Day For A Month) and Cosmopolitan (How to Master His Member) and Dolly (Is He Your Next BF? Find out on page 94) - that's just a few from the ACP stable - as Dines assures us that women's magazines condition women to enjoy sex, when as everybody knows, women should find sex unendurable and horrid, and it should never last more than five minutes, and thankfully most Australian men oblige ...

Bring back the Victorian era I say ... but wait a second, didn't good old Queen Vic have quite a thing for Bertie until he shuffled off - you don't have nine kids without a little work - and didn't she then find Billy Connolly to her taste?

Must have been the influence of all that Victorian pornography, what with her using all her regal power to screw her manservant. What an unsympathetic character, worse than Emily Bronte salivating over that rough trade Heathcliff, and lordy have all those BBC period dramas got it all wrong.

Hang on, this is supposed to be a site about the commentariat, and so I suppose we must turn to the scandal de jour, in which case Julie Bishop will do just fine. There she was only the other day, scribbling away earnestly Let Peter Costello work his magic at IMF. Oh it was so heartfelt and concerned, as Ms. Bishop explained how the smirk, aka Petey boy, could save the world, or Europe and the euro zone, or at least the Asia Pacific region.

Sadly The Economist, in its list of 14 candidates, completely overlooked the smirk's claims (The IMF's next leader: The betting begins), preferring to list such goers as Agustin Carstens, the governor of the Bank of Mexico (25-1) and Trevor Manuel, former finance minister of South Africa (20-1).

Well blow me down if the smirk doesn't join in today with Why the IMF must look beyond Europe, wherein the smirk gravely explains the huge workload, the need for change, and how he knows the place intimately because he was a part-time governor of the IMF for nearly twelve years.

Now the Asians are restless and the G20 has shown the IMF how to do it, and the IMF needs, sotto voce, to get its act together. By golly, it reads like a job application:

Until you see a managing director chosen outside Europe you will know the IMF still has a long way to go to reflect the world of the 21st century.

Happy days, the smirk goes to run the IMF, and the Fairfax rags no longer have him hanging around like Banquo's ghost writing wretched nostalgic columns about the way things were.

It's a win win for the world, for Europe, for Asia, and for Australia, and for the smirk's sense of self-esteem as he righteously reduces his hotel tariff to well under 2K the night ... and proves to Gail Dines that dullness is its own reward and sex has no place in the world economy.

Make it so, IMF, make it so.

(Below: watch out world and the IMF, the smirk is coming to give you a good tickle, yes he is, oh yes he is).

Gerard Henderson, spiced with a dash of the Pellist heresy and a whiff of traditional dumb broke Labor party voters ...

(Above: Malcolm Turnbull channeling Tony Abbott channeling Malcolm Turnbull).

The story so far.

Last week we were deep in struggle street, with people in the northern and eastern suburbs barely able to scrounge a meal on 150k a year, and forced to make an epic choice between a 60 inch plasma or downscaling to a 55 incher, and there was Gerard Henderson standing by to wipe their tortured, fevered brow and assure them that middle class welfare was a jolly good thing.

This week? Well it seems those deviant well off fools are ruining everything with their support for either (a) Malcolm Turnbull or (b) climate science or (c) even worse, both:

Without question, Turnbull's approach to climate change enjoys considerable support within inner-city electorates, like his own, among well-educated voters in relatively secure financial circumstances. But this stance does not enjoy anything approaching majority support within the Coalition, which is looking to gain votes in the suburbs and regions.

Oh you wretches, you vile vermin. Don't you know how reprehensible it is to be well-educated, and take an informed view of things?

Aren't you shocked by the relatively secure financial circumstances you enjoy because of your snout in the trough middle class welfarism?

Have you no idea that the truth, and therefore policy, and therefore decision making, resides in the suburbs and the regions, where by definition the natives are ill-informed and uneducated - basically just a bunch of sheeple - and the wretches live in totally insecure financial circumstances, suggesting that John Howard's government did nothing for them for an entire decade, since even then in the boom years, the good times, the Valhalla of Australian politics and economic joys, they seemed incapable of securing their financial circumstances ...

Or some such thing, because it's just the usual load of prejudice and bollocks from Gerard Henderson, as he announces this week Prime ministerial baton will never be in Turnbull's reach.

Yep, it's bugger off big Mal, and let the coalition take its climate change policy from the likes of George Pell and Tony Abbott and did we mention Nick Minchin and Eric Abetz and good old Barners?

Speaking of the Pellist heresy, the Jesuits over at Eureka Street recently stirred that climate change pot with Cardinal Pell's climate hot air, in which Tim Stephens attempts to work out why the Cardinal is so obsessed with denialism, and in particular the views of atheist Ian Plimer.

Good luck with that, since strange bedfellows seems to be the order of the day, and Stephens really can't get a handle on what produces Pell's constant interventions in national discussions as one of Australia's best-known climate change contrarians.

But he does foreshadow what should be an epic event down the track:

There are no signs that Pell intends to step back from public discussion on the topic. In October he will deliver the second annual address to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a climate sceptic think-tank in London, established by Lord Nigel Lawson, and which includes Plimer on its Academic Advisory Council. The first Foundation address was delivered by Václav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, who argued that climate change is a ruse to justify a totalitarian ideology.

What makes all this funny is the way denialists talk of dodgy science, and totalitarian ideology, and mass delusion, while Pell's scientific expertise presumable arises from his Licentiate of Sacred Theology from the Urbania University, or his Oxford PhD in church history, or perhaps his Master of Education degree from Monash unversity. (And more on Pell here at his wiki).

Still no doubt you'll be pleased by his democratic support of the ad orientem positioning of the priest during the mass, meaning the priest faces in the direction of the congregation instead of burying his nose in the altar as they used to do in the good old days.

I know, I know, this started off being about Gerard Henderson, and big Mal, but how much can you brood about a one note column?

Enough already big Mal, Gerard Henderson has told you to collect your baton and go, and surely that's enough for you ... off you go and play tiddlywinks with your well-off chums, while Gerard and Tony sort out a climate change policy which won't alienate traditional Labor voters.

Really, there's no point in evoking David Cameron, because we know Cameron is just a hapless puppet when it comes to climate change, a pawn of minority interests:

On Lateline Turnbull effectively supported the climate change approach adopted by David Cameron in Britain and his Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. However, Cameron leads a coalition government because the Conservatives did not win enough seats from Gordon Brown's Labour Party at last year's election. Abbott's political strength is his ability to appeal to traditional Labor voters in the outer suburbs and regional centres.

You see Cameron rides a bicycle, and you'll never see a traditional Labor voter on a bike. Not when they can toot toot like Toad or Tim Blair in a bright shiny red car.

Yes, now we're getting closer to the truth. It seems that traditional Labor voters are in fact (a) hopelessly uneducated and (b) financially woefully insecure, and therefore a mindless ignorant bankrupt rabble, likely to vote for Tony Abbott and help set the coalition's policy on climate science.

Most likely it's the same deviant well-educated and well-off middle class welfarists who are currently inspiring a backbench revolt regarding the coalition's policy in relation to the plain packaging of cigarettes (Abbott faces revolt over tobacco), with threats to cross the floor, whatever the views of ignorant and broke traditional Labor voters yearning to vote for Tony Abbott.

Meanwhile, over at The Australian, the anonymous editorialist has come up with the perfect solution, in Going it alone is pointless.

You see, there's no point in Australia going it alone, and certainly no point in imitating the British, who are also going it alone, except for the Europeans who are also going it alone, nor even plucky New Zealand, who has also gone it alone. But there is a solution, breathtakingly simple in its elegance:

... the hard reality (is) that Australians, who produce 1.47 per cent of global emissions, could abandon the continent and the impact on global emissions, including the future of the Great Barrier Reef, would be negligible.

Abandon the continent!

Yes that would show how serious Australia is in doing its bit for the world. We'd just up anchor and abandon ship, and that'll teach those self-satisfied, smug, financially well off inner suburban types a lesson ...

Yet another moderate contribution from the anon edit by way of genteel language and inspired thinking. We're all gunna be ruined, and even abandoning the ship wouldn't help, and so what's the point, let's just keep littering the nest, even though we at The Australian are all in favour of a market mechanism when not sowing FUD and voting for doing absolutely nothing. As a gesture of solidarity with the world, and as a way of showing Australian leadership, punching above its weight, at its finest ...

Because even if we abandoned the continent, it would have nil effect, since we're just such a small irrelevant carbuncle, a pimple on the gigantic world, or perhaps a modern day Titanic, and Julia Gillard a modern day Captain John Edward Smith, or perhaps a Captain Ahab ...

Not to worry, confronted by the wilderness of the Australian commentariat, we promised to get in the habit of linking to interesting articles, so why not try José Manuel Prieto's devastating piece on Cuba in the New York Review of Books, under the header Havana: The State Retreats.

Gradually over the years the Cuban government has come to admit mistakes (Fidel Castro regrets discrimination against gays in Cuba) and even allowed parades (Cubans march against homophobia in Havana) but still clings to a one party dictatorship and the trappings of the revolution and a hopelessly retro economic system.

If Obama wanted to do something significant for the region, along with proclaiming his Irish-ness (to be sure, to be sure, we're Dorothy O'Parker for the day), he could nudge Cuba and Cubans towards a better system of government and a way out of the economic wilderness ...

(Below: Tony Abbott working hard with some traditional Labor party voters to secure government and impose a totally useless direct action scheme on Australia as a way to shovel billions down the throats of brown coal burners).

In which everyone from Paul Sheehan through Rowan Dean to Roy Williams cops an unseemly amount of distilled pond mud ...

(Above: ever feel like splattering a blonde thinker with grubby atheist mud?)

Having only a few weeks ago advised that the NSW state Liberal government was doomed because it was soft on liberal Liberals and liberal lobbyists, Paul Sheehan waxes lyrical and disappears up an uxorious fundament as he urges an unremitting assault by Barry O'Farrell on fat cat public sector workers, the Industrial Relations Commission, and its "precious" president Roger Boland.

It's all here in Wounded bloat people in a state of indignation, but truth to tell, it will only be of interest to fat cat public servants, devotees of Sheehan's constant bitter revenge motif, worthy of Wagner, and readers who love navel gazing in search of navel lint (which you might know as navel fluff, belly button stuff, and so on, and which amazingly has its own wiki here under the header Navel lint).

We're still waiting a piece from Sheehan noting the departure of lobbyist Michael Photios from the Liberal party's vice-presidency, and - since he apparently loathes factionalism in the Liberal party - deploring the promotion of that hard-right factional enemy of Photios, David Clarke, to parliamentary secretary of justice.

But don't hold your breath, because when there's fat cat public service kicking to be done, who on earth would kick kindly David Clarke as he rakes in another 17k or so to go about his factional and fundamentalist business? (and for a whiff of the paranoia that brings, head off to the inner urban elites in Beware a new police state in NSW).

Anyway, enough of lint fluff, because the pond was inspired by a piece today from Rowan Dean, under the header No smoke and mirrors just plain truth in pitch from Big Tobacco.

Now let's not get things wrong here. Dean is a reformed smoker, and utterly dismissive of pathetic addicts who say it's too hard to give up, and he has absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for the supposed plight of Big Tobacco, as the government rightly seeks ways to dissuade people from engaging in the vile habit.

Sure at one point, he was a tempter, writing cigarette ads, but now he's completely reformed, rolling his eyes heavenward at the advertising campaign against plain packaging (in a doom-laden voice evoking an apocalyptic vision of evil Triads perverting youth with smuggled goods), and he hated David Crow's tortuous and hypocritical and nauseating logic as he explained he feared the plain packaging legislation would lead to more smoking.

Softened up enough yet? Utterly convinced?

By now surely you must have the impression that Dean is spotless, dressed all in white, as if from that pure Blonde land Brewtopia, a place of Utopia far purer than yours, as he fights the evil trucker smokers and their fiendish plans (and if you want more about the Brewtopia campaign, as usual the Inspiration room is all too inspiring).

But you see that's all part of the pitch. Once you've set up the mug punter, you need to pull a switcheroo, a bait and switch, so you can hit them with the real message.

Oh the poor brands, won't someone think of the pitiful innocent brands, and the waste and suffering and the humanity and the loss, oh the tragedy, oh the humanity, the humanity, as Dean confronts the stark evil truth of the government's fiendish scheme, and the industry strikes back with an utterly convincing campaign:

... I couldn't believe my eyes. "What company would stand for this?" asked the headline, above a blank olive green fizzy drink can with the unbranded word ''Cola'' on it. The legislation will "destroy brands that are worth millions if not billions of dollars", the ad informed us. And "no company would stand for having its brands taken away".

Visions of the dull grey green world of old Soviet Russia, the evil empire, floated before my eyes, as the wretched socialists conspired to do evil worthy of Darth Vader:

By all means, make smoking illegal. You'll get no complaints from me. But if the government is not prepared to go down that path, then it has no right to wantonly destroy brands that abide by the law. And the companies and shareholders of those brands have every right to fight for their survival. For once, my sympathy lies entirely with the tobacco companies.

It's amazing how powerful truth in advertising can be.

Yes once again advertising has saved the day, and shown the light, and smote the evil doers. Who needs Spiderman when you've got Advertisingman?

Sure the government has the right to protect children from pornography, violent entertainment, and other dangerous activities - perhaps even smoking - but hands off the precious brands Señor and Señorita politicians, or the magnificent seven advertising companies will destroy you.

For truly whimsical and wonderful comedy stylings, it doesn't get better than this, and I thank the tag for reminding me that Rowan Dean is a regular panellist on that comedy show The Gruen Transfer.

Now he's valiantly fighting for the right of kids to think that they're cool by smoking Kool, or whatever Kool cigarette is currently doing the rounds in its brand new branding ... while shedding a tear for all those precious hours spent conniving in a conspiratorial way to design brands to deceive, such that the fate of Marlboro Man becomes a truly pitiful parable for our times.

Never mind, three of the men who played the Marlboro Man part might have died of lung cancer, but when there's a clear-cut choice between saving someone from acquiring lung cancer and saving the brands the decision for any right-thinking advertising man is clear-cut. Go with the brands ... and to hell with the kids.

Why, once the chortling's done, there's barely eough time to note the splendid piece by Roy Williams in The Punch - sure sign of pure blonde brewtopia - dubbed Atheists shouldn't damn the Bible with faint praise, in which he complains that a love of the bible as literature is, well frankly, at best jejune, and at worst misplaced and insincere, and treating the King James bible as a sort of elite cultural icon (perhaps enjoyed by early morning inner urban latte sippers over a coffee, with chardonnay chaser).

Williams babbles and blathers on in a charming way that suggests he understands little of art or authorship, or complexity of response to a text - it's as if you can only read Hamlet if you swallow Hamlet's philosophical line on everything - and to prove his deep seated philistinism, in the end disavows the King James Version almost entirely and the team who put it together:

Those redoubtable men would surely rejoice, however, that there are billions of Christians in the world today. And they’d not care, I wager, that most Christians no longer use the KJV.

We now have even more accurate translations. None may be as beautiful as the KJV, but they are readily accessible to the modern reader. And that’s the main game.

Yes, forget art, literature, and poetry, dumbing down and conversion is the name of the game. Ready accessibility, and perhaps the bible as a truly accessible online video game is what the world needs. What a splendidly myopic Christian ...

And that barely allows time to mention a most whimsical talk by A. C. Grayling on his own version of the Good Book, which you can still catch on Radio National, here, as the station records the 2011 Sydney Writers' Festival. There's more wit and fun in five minutes of Grayling - and a nice discussion of the King James Version as literature - than can be found in a year of reading The Punch.

And so, since somehow we've been returned to religion, a final word on the rapture.

I was reminded by Rachel Maddow of the best way to confront the end of the world, with her segment on how make a Last Word cocktail suitable for the occasion (video here).

It reminded me of the splendid bit of end of world nonsense conjured up by Stephen Colbert sending up Glenn Beck's hysterical, apocalyptic, gold-selling and end of world 'get your seeds and bunkers now' flogging for his sponsors and survivalist true believers, as week in week out he peddles conspiracy theories and paranoid nonsense (videos here).

Amazingly Beck, after years of selling this kind of delusional rubbish, had the cheek to send up the hapless bunch of most recent millenarian tossers (Glenn Beck makes fun of apocalypse warnings -- because they're not his).

Which in turn reminded me of how much Rupert Murdoch makes out of peddling such Beckian crap, with a a "no care, no responsibility" editorial policy ...

And that in turn reminded me of an excellent piece by Jacob Weisberg, Fantasy Island Are Republicans losing their grip on reality?, wherein he contemplated a number of current Republican absurdities, including "evolution versus creationism", balancing the US Federal budget and conducting government business at a feasible level without raising taxes, climate change, birtherism, and so on, constituting a kind of impossible mental White Queen Shangri-La stream of ratbag claptrap, driven by a fundamentalist fringe to which moderates must cede ground:

The GOP rank and file is in desperate need of a cold shower, a slap in the face, a wake-up call. But instead of telling the base to get a grip on reality, the party's leaders are chasing after the delusional mob. To get to the front of the line in 2012, Republican candidates must pretend to believe a lot of nonsense than isn't so. Or do they actually believe it?

Who knows, but there a lot of people happy to cultivate the delusions and use them to turn the sheep their way. Just like Family Radio ...

The way that Republicans are searching around frantically for somebody, anybody, other than Sarah Palin to head up the team in 2012 - she can see Alaska from her window - suggests the hole they've dug for themselves.

Which in turn reminded me of the one sensible response to all this, following on from Maddow, and that's the stand that the impossibly suave and elegant George Sanders took in Cecil B. DeMille's 1949 sword and sandal pic Samson and Delilah.

When that triple decked smoked ham roll known as Victor Mature at last succeeds in toppling the pagan temple, aided and abetted by Hedy Lamarr, George as the Saran of Gaza, simply lifts his glass and toasts Delilah, before disappearing beneath the masonry.

Would that we could all confront the end with such elegant style.

Sadly of course the real George killed himself with nembutal at the age of 65, leaving behind a note:

Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

Sad really, but after reading all this blather on a Monday, I'm beginning to understand where he's coming from.

Waiter, bring me that Maddow cocktail. Between supposedly reformed smokers, Christians renouncing the King James version because it's inaccessible and too poetic, Sarah Palin, Victor Mature and George Sanders, I vote for a suave response to the divine comedy ...

(Below: and here's how George drank his cocktail, and if you're too miserly to spring for a dvd, and need some retro kitsch, the whole show is currently up on YouTube, starting here. Intellectual property rights? Talk to the hand).

Of Tim Blair, Kevin Donnelly, motor cars, the bible and all the usual stuff from half-baked commentariat scribblers who think they're today's Ciceros

(Above: dubbed by Tim Blair The single greatest item in the history of clothing, here. What a sick, tortured, perverted mind he has, and don't worry, he's so sick, tortured and perverted, he'd take those adjectives as compliments, the twisted fucker. Remember, he only does it to tease, and to dog whistle, and lordy does he have plenty of dumb hounds to whistle to).

Speaking of urban myths, a few days ago, the Sydney Morning Herald's Column 8 ran this little bit of Nostradamus-like commentary, attributing it to Cicero writing in 55BC:

The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.

Cicero as a wise old ancient Tea Partier? The Romans ahead of their times, and the font of Judeo-Christian civilisation, and never mind the pagan gods?

Too cute? Too pat? Of course it is, and if you google the phrase, you'll discover it's either (a) part of a much reduced actual quotation (b) sourced from a historical novel featuring Cicero or (c) nothing to do with Cicero at all.

The Herald palmed responsibility for the gobbet off on its contributing reader - without explaining why it didn't thank him for sending in an emyth - and relax, I didn't pay for this misinformation, I picked the rag up for free while on the way to Mahler's Ninth (and a fine Ninth it was too, thanks Maestro and the SSO).

But it's a reminder that while reading papers these days, and the commentariat, distortions, misinformation, and downright deceptions are all grist to the mill, and that opinion pieces are merely opinion, an untimely mix of hot air, blather, and bullshit. The Ciceros of our times.

Like this little effort from Tim Blair in David E. Davis:

I’d developed an appreciation for Davis’s work beyond any connection to O’Rourke. He was an automotive advocate, who saw in cars the meaning of a free people. (here)

It's part of a heartfelt obituary for Davis, involving P. J. O'Rourke and Davis rolling an MG and scraping his face, some kind of unique automotive achievement and party anecdote, but let's flip that a little:

I’d developed an appreciation for Blanchett’s work beyond any connection to Utpon. She was a theatre advocate, who saw in the stage the meaning of a free people.

Yes, it's complete Cicero wankerdom, and you can imagine if your average hippy led with that kind of rhetorical claptrap, the kind of serve they'd get from a Blair or a Bolt for being wankers.

Blair is a mystical worshipper at the shrine of the motor car, and as deluded as the followers of Harold Camping. Is it possible, in a Freudian way, that his relentless, monotonous, completely unscientific opposition to climate science is due to the threat it poses to the oil industry, and thereby to the eight cylinder automobile, now with extra baboon grunt?

Is that why the industry dragged Allan Moffat out of the boondocks to sell the supercharged Boss 335 GT in a brand spanking new campaign, which I momentarily spotted in a momentary visit to free to air television (Allan Moffat turns up the volume on the supercharged Boss 335 GT in new campaign).

Yep, the boofheads are still out there, even if they now have to drag out a superannuated touring car driver to deliver the pitch.

It helps explain how Joe Hockey could think that this metaphor would work for his chosen demographic:

"We've said that we will deliver a national broadband policy," he said.
"Today the Government is rolling out a Bentley to every Australian. We believe that we can as a nation only afford a Commodore at the moment.
"But from our perspective, it does a very similar job." (here).

Hey Joe, haven't you heard? The idea's to get a huge level of performance in a family sized Australian sedan, so you can obliterate the local opposition and make life tough for Euro hot rods at twice the price, and all for a humble $75k. Remember, being a modded Ford makes all the difference ...

Still the question remains Joe, regarding your class-based metaphor. Instead of talking Bentley, are we just talking a crappy Commodore that will expire in a couple of years, as wireless disappears up its over-crowded fundament, or are we talking a decent supercharger with serious low down grunt? Or is your current broadband policy just half-baked and half-arsed?

Speaking of jolly Joe, what fun to learn today that there are tensions between him and Tony Abbott, as reported in You left me swinging: Joe to Tony. Sadly it's only about family trusts, and Warren Truss and the Nationals and agrarian socialists looking at ways of avoiding paying taxes, so the question remains when the Liberal moderates will realise that they need to cobble together better alternative policies in relation to broadband and climate change, if they're to appeal to swinging motors like me. (Sorry ... voters).

Or end up sounding like Tim Blair on valium, or a car with the grunt of a three cylinder Suzuki.

Hurry Joe, big Mal is on the prowl with a loose mouth, and the precious is rightly yours ...

Sorry about all those car metaphors, but it makes a change from talking about end of world religious loons.

Speaking of religious loons, it's got so that it's impossible to go anywhere near the ABC - it's your ABC, not mine - such is the toxic degradation of the brand currently in progress.

The current affairs slot at 7.30 pm is much diminished, a fatally flawed re-badging with inept interviewers at the helm, the likes of Q&A merely serves for rabble rousing, but nowhere is the rabble more roused than online at The Drum, which manages to make The Punch look like a seemly bunch of intellectuals just escaped from a bout of coffee drinking in the inner west.

Evidence? Look no further than Kevin Donnelly's curious rant, All cultures and religions are not created equal. It's a few days old now, which is a tad troubling because it reads like a bunch of fish heads left over from the culture wars, and instead of being turned into an elegant soup, it now stinks to high heaven.

Of course in the online world it delivers what matters, which is over four hundred hits and counting.

That it also delivers bile, prejudice and little sense doesn't count at all.

Donnelly's thesis is the usual nonsense about Christians being good and Islamics being bad, because after all Islam is prone to violence, and so we must be very careful about allowing any study of Islam in schools:

Ignored is what some see as the inherently violent nature of the Koran, where devout Muslims are called on to carry out Jihad and to convert non-believers, and the destructive nature of what is termed dhimmis – where non-believers are forced to accept punitive taxation laws.

You have to wonder where gherkins like Donnelly were, blathering about the inherently violent nature of the Koran, when two world wars broke out last century.

The first world war was a tribute to the inherently violent nature of European countries, long dubbed Christian, and long inclined to imperial and colonial adventures. Germany, home of the Protestant reformation, might cop the blame, but all of them were in on it, in an arms race and a 'paint the world map your favourite colour' routine that suggests the inherently violent nature of Christian countries.

Ditto the second world war, where Germany cops the blame, but let's not let off the hook that inherently violent papist country Italy, or any of the other inherently Christian countries that joined in, and gleefully participated in the extermination of Jews. Okay, the blame game can be shared around with communists and Stalinists and such like, and the Japanese, inclined to a peculiar mix of ancestor worship, Buddhism and Shintoism, but where pray tell, are the inherently violent Koranists in all this? (The best you can say about the Asian sub-continent's contribution to the second world war was that it was half-hearted and mixed up with anti-colonial endeavours ...)

And where were the Islamics during the series of Crusades during the medieval ages which saw the Europeans bung on a series of dos because fighting the Islamics was the done thing? Fighting back, but long gone the plans to shift from Spain and take over the rest of Europe (I was recently re-reading Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades and it's still a mighty fine read for the lay reader. If you want to get a whiff of Runicman's style, there's a neat excerpt here describing the 1212 The Children's Crusades).

Of course the easy way to have a go at Donnelly would be to recite all the various acts detailed in the bible, performed by god against humanity, with god's full approval, ranging from a holocaust to sundry wars and whimsical forms of persecution (watch out for the shellfish folks). Not to mention the deeds done in god's name by acolytes of god, performed against various tribes, peoples, nations, women and homosexuals.

But we haven't got all year, let alone all day, so let's just take that as read.

It would in fact do the world of good for students to be given a course in comparative religions, and thereby study the various absurdities as well as the various noble arguments of the major religions, and so notice the eerie similarities of the pitch to the mug punters.

After all, stripped of his metaphysical and mystical elements, Christ isn't a bad subject for an ethics 101 course, as suggested by Thomas Jefferson when he stripped out all the miracles in his version of the bible, and turned it into The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

With a bit of luck, by the end of such a course, a student might come to the closer in Donnelly's piece and realise what a ratbag he is, as he blathers on about Christians, Muslims, quotes George Pell approvingly, and berates the notion of multicultural teaching explained in a booklet Learning From One Another: Brining Muslim Perspectives into Australian Schools:

The statement in the book that, “Students will come to appreciate that there are many valid worldviews and perspectives” ignores the reality that some worldviews are preferable to others and some religious and cultural practices are un-Australian.

Un-Australian?

The most odious and un-Australian concept in the dictionary, and so we dub Kevin Donnelly completely and utterly un-Australian for his use of the word "un-Australian" as a way of explaining how others are more "un-Australian" than he is ...

Why he even manages to make Tim Blair and motor cars sound respectably Australian ...

As for the pond, if belief in Donnelly and the Pellist heresy and the follies of Christianity is what makes you Australian, we are of course proudly Un-Australian ...

(Below: Leunig on the anthem, click to enlarge, and a little memory of the joys of being an Australian in a beach riot).

Rapture day, and what better way to rapture your way to hell than by reading The Australian ...

(Above: a flyer kindly forwarded to the pond in the interest of saving civilisation).

The hour is getting close, but it's still Friday in America at time of writing, so you still have a few precious, fragile moments to rush off to Snopes to read about the Rapture of the Dolls, the tragic story of a woman killed and thirteen injured in a twenty car pile up because the woman was convinced that the rapture was happening when she saw twelve people floating into the air. Turns out that what she saw were helium-filled blow-up sex dolls ...

Of course this will be old news to you if you're a fan of Six Feet Under, which opened an episode with a dramatisation of this urban myth, a myth provoked by the fun pen of Elroy Willis. We like the notion so well we couldn't resist the flyer above, though as usual we have to forgive the spelling error. Surely graphic designers should be the first consigned to hell.

Meanwhile, a reader drew our attention to a splendid piece by Phillip Jensen, dubbed The Brothel and the Academic, wherein the nepotic Jensenite broods mightily about sinful brothels in Sydney, and the sinfulness of Stephen Hawking for daring to suggest that religion is designed for people afraid of the dark. The punchline? (Sorry, spoiler alert, but let's cut to the chase):

In the brothel we see sin. In “heaven is a fairytale” we hear the voice of Satan.

Yep, Hawking is channeling Satan, the father of lies, the user of the serpent to deceive, the plunger of the whole of humanity into God's condemnation, and perhaps, who knows, might even be Satan, using a funny Dalek voice and a wheelchair to hide his Satanic guile.

Look out, there's a sex doll rapturing its way to heaven.

Well the good Jensen sets a righteous tone of blathering nonsense, and so readies us for a trip to the opinion pages of The Australian, where predictable posturing is always the go.

There's Christopher Pearson explaining sagely how Time is running out for Gillard as PM, leading off with a plug for Andrew Bolt's new show, which sadly we've failed to see. Come to think of it, we're probably going to be sad for all eternity for failing to see it ...

Pearson's piece is utterly predictable - Gillard is facing gloom and doom in much the same way as the world is facing the rapture, and so Gillard must go, and former chairman Rudd must either make waves or resign his seat, and Greg Combet must be installed forthwith. Look out, there's a helium-filled sex doll wending its way to heaven ...

Tnen there's Dennis "the amazingly hued tie" Shanahan explaining how Gillard's long game is a big gamble. Naturally Tony Abbott is doing a wonderful job spreading FUD:

Abbott has no intention of easing his anti-tax campaign because he believes continuing price rises will be blamed on the carbon tax regardless of their origin.

We know electricity, gas, and petrol prices are going to continue to rise with or without a carbon tax and so Gillard has to deal with political reality while demonstrating Abbott's scare campaign hasn't lived up to his claims.

Never mind the truth, just roll out the scare campaign. Now there's a statesman ready to lead the country in a statesmanlike way. Look out it's a helium-filled sex doll on its way to heaven ...

And the weekend wouldn't be complete without reading Barnaby Joyce explaining how there's No place for sharia law here.

Yes it's good old Barners kicking the Islamic can, in a way only Barners could manage (he comes from up Tamworth way you know, watch the natives writhe in hellish fire and brimstone when you remind them):

Our grandads did not fight for some religious, unelected body to impose themselves on my freedom, stone adulterers or create a stratified society.

I know this is a Judeo-Christian society and I respect that when I go to Saudi Arabia it is not.

Yes, it's a Judeo-Christian society, so Barners thinks, but strangely, he seems to be wanting to keep a separation of mosque and state in the lucky country. Does that include churches as well, or do they get a free pass for telling their own brand of fairy tale?

How about kicking chaplains out of state schools, Barners, and re-thinking the policy on funding private schools dedicated to the propagation of their various forms of religious loonacy?

We look forward to to your many vigilant votes ensuring the separation of Judeo-Christian churches and dinkum secularist state.

Watch out, it's a helium-filled sex doll flying overhead ...

Barners seems to have his settings a little muddled:

Under sharia law, gay marriage would be another excuse for a good public stoning. How many Islamic countries are introducing a carbon tax?

Strange, did they introduce gay marriage laws in Australia while I was away? Or did the usual ritual public stonings of the concept continue?

And is Barners somehow suggesting that Tony Abbott's daily stoning of a carbon tax puts him in the company of many Islamic countries?

What a wondrous, dextrous thinker. And he knows about history too:

You get the feeling that in pre-Reformation Germany, the Greens would have been silent on Martin Luther's 95 theses, preferring instead to rail against the injustice of the trees that were chopped down to create the door of the Wittenberg church.

Actually I get the feeling that Barners has jumped the shark and nuked the fridge with his laboured comedy stylings about tree huggers. You get the feeling Barners is strangely silent on why he hasn't vigorously campaigned for gay marriage and a carbon tax, to differentiate himself from those Islamic fiends.

And so we come to the big Barners' wrap up:

I hope Australia's attention is clearly focused in dealing with this issue. If it isn't, then in a couple of years it will be prescribed that I cannot say I dissent.

Oh bugger me dead, or at least to an erotic state of ecstasy, now he's doing a Martin Niemöller routine, and worst of all, in some kind of double negative way.

Try it this way Barners. I can say I dissented, but was silenced, because they took away the trade unionists and gays, and saved the National party for last, because let's face it, we agree on so many things, like gay marriage, and climate change, carbon taxes and the value of oil and coal.

More to the point, try this: I can say I rabbited on like a goose, a gherkin, and a first water futtock. (oh I know a futtock is actually a curved timber that forms a rib in the frame of a ship, but I do so love it as a portmanteau, combining fuckwit and buttock, and a whiff of camel's arse).

Now we're ready for the big build:

That is the end game for the civilisation that gave us Mozart, penicillin, equality of men and women, the man on the moon, Shakespeare, habeas corpus, Hemingway, splitting the atom, James Joyce, electricity, man-made flight, locomotion, Jimi Hendrix - actually let's include the stockmarket, the mechanical wheat harvester and iPads.

Yes, and it also gave us Phillip Jensen, the Pellist heretics, helium-filled sex dolls, two world wars in which millions upon millions were killed, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, the cold war, more hot wars than you can name, the inequality of men and women, and worst of all, the Dandy Warhols, currently touring the unlucky country ... (and did Barners mean Ernest or Mariel, the thinking bushie's piece of lesbian crumpet in Personal Best?)

Not to worry Barners, well said, but your bizarre point being? No place for bumbling idiots here, unlike in all 'dem Islamic countries? But, but, but, we elect our bumbling idiots to parliament, preferably the Senate, so we can enjoy their rambling idiocies and insights in that paper of record The Oz ...

Oh yes, it's a bumper crop of nonsense in the weekend Australian, so naturally we revert to the anonymous editorialist - worse than your average anon blogger - as he defiantly explains how wicked the Greens are, and how proudly independent The Australian is, holding everyone, except Tony Abbott and his truly inept climate change policies, to account ...

It's all there in Why the Greens are seeing red (yes, the anon edit loves a childish play on words, much like Barners loves tree hugger jokes), as the anon edit denies that The Australian is some kind of activist rag, and instead aims to hold authority to account and reflect the breadth of national views ... including Lord Monckton (and including but not limited to, such fellow travelling denialists and widely acclaimed scientists as Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair, and Miranda the Devine).

The poor sweet long suffering, proudly defiant anon edit's feelings are just so hurt.

Oh you wicked Greens, how dare you, when all we need to know is that Barners loves Jimi Hendrix, and suddenly my feelings about Jimi take a dive. Next thing you know Barners will reveal 'the Boss', for all his Democrat ways, is the finest example extant of National party and Judeo-Christian values ...

Never mind, it's fun to see Bob Brown fuck with the hive minds of the Murdoch hacks, as he explains why he has no intention of retiring, because he sees Rupert Murdoch as a role model for active eighty year olds (The Brown approach), and dishes it out to the evil empire, as reported in loving detail in News' revenge: editorial pages rain down on Brown's crusade. All because Brown had the temerity to strike back, and point out that the emperor regularly parades in shimmering denialist clothes.

The richest line in the whole thing?

Chris Mitchell, the man responsible for spreading more bad science, FUD, and fear mongering about climate change, more than any other editor in Australia, saying that he's washed out his mouth with soap, and The Australian has long supported a market-based mechanism for dealing with climate change.

What climate change, you goose? A consistent reading of The Australian's opinion pages over the past couple of years has firmly established in my mind that (a) like unicorns, climate change is a myth and (b) if urban myths like unicorns and helium-filled sex dolls and climate change are real, why we just have to learn to live with them, and certainly not spend a cent on them (well no more than fifty bucks for your sex doll, and the helium you can pick up at your local balloon party store, and dammit that's way cheaper than a carbon tax, which will increase the price of mashed potatoes, amongst many other things).

Confronted with all these Satanic issues, the Oz responds to Brown by running Barners on the joys of western civilisation.

It could be worse I suppose, it could have been Sarah Palin.

Watch out, there's a helium-filled sex balloon floating just above your head ...

(Below: Stephen Hawking in The Simpsons. Hang on a second, The Simpsons is funded by Fox, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and here he is allowing Hawking to speak directly to The Simpsons' vast audience of children, which can only mean that Murdoch is Satan, or at least Satan's accomplice, and so The Australian is Satan's mouthpiece. Well you might think that if you were Phillip Jensen, and truth to tell, it's as coherent as any editorial piece by the anon edit in that wicked, devilish, Barners, Pearson, Shanahan worshipping rag).

In which sundry matters of high state, religion, and Tony Abbott's banana-eating ways are considered ...

(Above: a photo to get things started on a Friday. What a great source of potassium, phosphorus, other minerals and vitamins, here. As for the rest of you, take care what you're holding and chewing when someone takes a snap of you).

The ability to call black white, and vice versa, and disseminate nonsense in the cause of supposed insight, is an important part of life in the Catholic church.

How else to explain spending a couple of million bucks to produce a report based on church supplied evidence, which pins the blame for the church's sexual woes on the liberated sixties. Sheesh, the sixties is a decade which just keeps on giving, and not just for ancients like Tim Blair and P. J. O'Rourke. (US Catholic Church study blames 1960s permissiveness for rise in sexual abuse).

Can we all use this as an excuse now? I couldn't help meself guv'nor, it was the sixties wot made me dunnit.

If it wasn't so risible, it would be pathetic. Shepherds guiding their flocks towards paradise, and a little weed and Haight Ashbury brings them undone, and they start putting flowers in their hair and feeling up children?

Meanwhile, the black/white syndrome is also handy in politics, what with Tony Abbott pretending that everything is hunky dory when it comes to him, climate change policy, and Malcolm Turnbull. And if you believe that, have I got a nice Statue of Liberty for sale just to you for a knockdown price, after I picked it up in a fire sale in New York quite recently ...

"I thought that he gave a very strong performance under a bit of goading and provocation," the Opposition Leader said. "Malcolm and I talk regularly about these subjects and he fully supports the Coalition's policy."

Give that man a wad of butter. Damn it, I'll bet a hundred bucks it won't melt in his Catholic mouth. Maybe it was the sixties what made Malcolm dunnit.

As for the baying hounds, those minions of Murdoch ever ready to stand by and plug leaks in the dike, the natural lead for the day was Malcolm Turnbull will never lead again: Liberal MPs. Oh yes, everything's hunky dory. Just feel the hate, hate, hate ...

Truth in politics? Is that like suds that clean extra white, in a Catholic way?

Meanwhile, it is the pond's grave duty to report that the mining industry is about to collapse, what with the most unseemly increase in royalties - oh heck let's just call it a tax - levied by the Western Australian Liberal government.

Liberal parties around the country are reeling with dismay and shock, and already conservative commentariat pundits around the country are lashing WA treasurer Christian Porter for turning into Wayne Swan. The industry will be ruined, creeping communism is at work - did we mention that Chifley wanted to nationalise the banks - and right at this moment we understand Gina Reinhardt is organising a street rally that will be lead by Andrew Bolt, to be broadcast on the Ten network.

Two billion buckeroos, not loose change even between chums, and what are the buggers going to do with it?

Non-profit groups have hailed a $600 million injection for the sector in the West Australian budget as overdue recognition of the cost of delivering welfare services to the most vulnerable. ($600m win for private welfare in WA budget)

Damn me, the lick spittle socialists have infiltrated the WA government and taken it over. Hang on, wait a second, time to read the fine print:

Mr Porter said the decision was part of a move away from the public sector, and the increased funding was a recognition the private sector could deliver these services better than "employees of a large bureaucracy will likely ever do".

Phew, sounds like a boondoggle for Christian charities, and their associated quangos and mangos. Yes, it's not really socialism, it's just the government redistributing wealth by way of taxation ...

Naturally the anon editorialist at the languid, lizard Australian is suddenly all in favour of the transformative power of increasing taxation on the mining industry, because you see it's being done by a Liberal government and they have a narrative. (WA budget with a narrative).

I used to think words like sycophantic, lick spittle, and hypocrite were a tad offensive in the public discourse, but hey anon edit, if they fit like a pair of pyjamas, why not slip into them and wear them with style?

And naturally the anon edit is out for blood when it comes to big Mal. Sure only the other day the rag was opining how big Mal was right about the opposition's climate change policy, and Abbott the odd man out, which naturally means that Abbott must get about the business of dealing with Turnbull's "contemptuous disloyalty". (Dealing with the weakest links).

You see big Mal is also failing to explain in a sufficiently satisfactory way how the NBN will destroy Rupert Murdoch's business model ...

Speaking of that business model, when you turn to the opinion pages of the lizard Oz, what do you get? Well there's Christopher Hitchens rabbiting on about Bill Clinton and his wayward cock in his usual way, and the unfortunate Paul Wolfowitz, with the recent fuss about Strauss-Khan as the excuse, under the header Who's naive when it comes to sex, lies and power? The publication date is listed as 12:00 AM May 20, 2011.

Oh dear, the rag's been scooped again, as the Hitchens' piece was published in Slate at 11:37AM ET, on Wednesday May 18th, available free, and if connected to the NBN, fast, under the more seemly and engaging header Beaucoup B.S. The DSK case and the silly stereotypes about American and European morals.

B.S.? Merde.

No wonder the regional outposts of the Murdoch empire fear and loath the NBN. They're still hoping no one has noticed that the content they recycle is available a mere click away, free, and delivered in a timely manner, and often from sources uncontaminated by their ideological zealotry. And at Slate you also get Doonesbury, free, currently doing an end of the world schtick, so that even if the Trump gag was trumped by recent events, it still reads funny (click to enlarge, more Doonesbury here).

Speaking of the end of the world, it was inevitable that the pond would stray into the rankest parts of the Murdoch empire at some point, as for some obscure reason pundits still keep on punching away at The Punch, and thereby stumble across the end of the world reflections of one Tory Shepherd in ICB: Put on clean undies, the end of the world is nigh.

The hapless Tory, confronted by the loonish ways of Family Radio and Harold Camping, and the end of the world, now scheduled for tomorrow, comes to these unnerving conclusions:

... Camping is embracing and celebrating the idea that in just a couple of days, 98 per cent of the population is going to burn for eternal damnation.

Yes, perhaps he's read the bible, and taken it literally, often the case when it comes to people who suggest that the bible is literally true and infallible, especially when it comes to the business of being eternally dead and writhing in hellfire, or being eternally alive and living in paradise. It's the same routine as with Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, with two per cent scoring the pressies and the coins and the Santa choccies that bring on the tooth fairy, and the rest sent to bed without supper.

Poor hapless Tory doesn't quite get this, and seeks to redeem the Xians:

So it’s either bullshit that Camping’s a Christian in the eyes of the rest of the Christian community, or it’s bullshit that Christians are good.

I’m pretty sure it’s the former. Camping’s an aberration who should be roundly condemned – specifically by those who are meant to be saved.

Oh for the dear absent lord's sake Tory read the bible, you utter goose. Specifically the Book of Revelation, and if you find it all too confusing, why not just read the wiki about the Book of Revelation, here.

Hellfire, locusts, lava, earthquakes, seals, horsemen, destruction and ruin, waste and chaos, despair and the end of the world, quite possibly starring Tom Hanks, and so on and so forth.

By definition anyone who takes all the fine print in the bible literally is as mad as a march hare, and the only sensible Christians are the ones who totally ignore the implications of the Christian fairy story.

There's not much point in being saved if everyone gets saved. Some need to be sent to bed without their supper, or pressies, or coins or choccies, especially the ones who indulged themselves in the permissive sixties and ruined the Catholic church.

And if you can swallow that, like a gnat or the eye of a needle, you deserve an eternity in hellfire.

Well it's the end of the week, and just to prove that the pond isn't always bashing religion, and since the whole world is celebrating the anniversary of Buddha's enlightenment - even that covert mystic and metaphysical muddler and talker over guests and explainer of how just how important and wonderful he is, Philip Adams - got on the case with 2600th anniversary of Buddha's enlightenment - here's a koan to get you through the weekend and be ready to deal with the squawking of the loons bright and early on Monday:

101. Buddha's Zen

Buddha said: "I consider the positions of kings and rulers as that of dust motes. I observe treasures of gold and gems as so many bricks and pebbles. I look upon the finest silken robes as tattered rags. I see myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds of fruit, and the greatest lake in India as a drop of oil on my foot. I perceive the teachings of the world to be the illusion of magicians. I discern the highest conception of emancipation as a golden brocade in a dream, and view the holy path of the illuminated ones as flowers appearing in one's eyes. I see meditation as a pillar of a mountain, Nirvana as a nightmare of daytime. I look upon the judgment of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs as but traces left by the four seasons." (here for the previous 100 koans)

If nothing else it will help you deal with the Murdoch press, the relentless negativity of Tony "Dr No" Abbott, and give you the strength to read Paul Sheehan's regular Monday outing.

Consider their scribbles as dust motes, their finest observations as so many bricks and pebbles, their finest budgie smugglers and lycra clad bicycle splendour as tattered rags, and their view of the world the illusion of magicians. And when it comes to the science of global warming and its treatment by the Murdoch press, could anyone put it better than Buddha?

The serpentine dance of a wretched dragon, their beliefs but traces left in the acidified oceans ...

(Below: and now for a little more Doonesbury, since there's nothing like Christians believing in the bible as a source of some light-hearted humour. Click on to enlarge).