THE OPTUS THE!

For those wishing to learn German:

DIE OPTUS DIE!

If there's a dawn, it hasn't yet dawned on Alexander Downer ...

(Above: if you click to enlarge, maybe you can see Alexander Downer somewhere in this group photo. Perhaps with his head under the blanket, or perhaps off in the distance with his head in the sand?)


For almost completely inexplicable reasons - it was free, it was there, climbing it wasn't like climbing Mount Everest - the pond recently caught up with the re-make of Red Dawn.

It's an appalling, mind-numbing, reprehensible, silly show, too bad even to be really entertaining, but one speech stuck in the noggin:

We're gonna fight. We're gonna keep fighting 'cause it's easier now and we're used to it... When you're fighting in your own back yard... When you're fighting for your family... It all hurts a little less and makes a little more sense... That's our biggest advantage. For them, this is just a place. For us - this is our home.

The "them" is a risible bunch of inept North Koreans (with some Ruskis lurking in the background) who've somehow overrun the United States with conventional weapons, leaving the citizenry to fight back with conventional weapons, while mouthing platitudes about freedom and democracy.

The pond wondered at film's end just how many citizens of the United States came away from viewing of the film making a cognitive leap which would, seen from the other side, apply the same family, homeland rhetoric to Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or any of the other wars the west has recently indulged in  ... as sorry an assortment of imperialistic ventures into "just places" as can be found ...

Let the pond be blunt. There's a similar lack of enlightenment when it comes to that fatuous Adelaide-based stocking-wearing fop Alexander Downer when it comes to recent events and wars:

Yes, everything's for the best in the best of all possible worlds for that fatuous fop as he scribbles Even with hindsight the Iraq war was the best option for all concerned.

Presumably he means that all concerned includes the thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who died as a result of the intervention, and the hundreds still dying as a result of the ineptly planned, badly organised "peace" that was implemented without any understanding or consideration of the situation on the ground ...

In the United States in recent days, journalists have been counting the costs, as usual with a selfish eye on what it cost America and never mind Iraq (An $800 Billion War, since revised upwards to a $4 trillion price tag and counting).

Naturally uppermost in mind is the way that the Bush administration put the cost on the tab, blew the budget, and in the end blew the American economy out of the water, by going to war based on a number of shameless lies.

The Say What? archive is the place to go for some seminal quotes, which illustrate the confused befuddled thinking:

"Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? If you take down the central government of Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq."-- Dick Cheney, on not invading Iraq, April 15, 1994
If I had it to do over again, I'd do it in a minute."-- Dick Cheney, on invading Iraq, March 15, 2013

Well you wouldn't want to be out in the field with Cheney while he's carrying a shotgun, so let's see what Don had to say:

"My interest is to hit Saddam."-- Donald Rumsfeld, at a White House meeting five hours after the 9/11 attacks.
"I didn't advocate invasion. I wasn't asked."-- Donald Rumsfeld, November 20, 2005

And then there's the man who recently has risen to fame as a top notch painter, right up there with the statesmanlike efforts of Winston Churchill ... and Adolf Hitler (take that News Ltd, take that for banning Godwin's Law).

"Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!" – George W. Bush, during a White House videoconference call, April 6, 2004

 "Do you want to know what the foreign policy of Iraq is to the United States? (Gives the finger.) F*** the United States! That's what it is -- and that's why we're going to get him." – George W. Bush, at a Congressional breakfast, September 2002

(Above: oh dear sweet lord, he paints dogs, more here).

You can turn to handwringers now ready to point out the obvious, such as Christian Carl writing The War We Couldn't See:

Americans who did not serve may think that they have some idea of what the war in Iraq was like, but they’re wrong. The culprit here is a culture of well-intentioned self-censorship that refuses to show the real conditions of modern warfare. You can search the seven years of US broadcast news from Iraq almost in vain for images of dead US soldiers, or the grotesque effects of a suicide bombing on buildings or bodies, or the corpses of Iraqi families who had been riddled with bullets by nervous young Americans manning nighttime checkpoints. (The photo of the blood-spattered Iraqi girl taken by the late Chris Hondros is one of the most disturbing exceptions.) For writers the task was somewhat easier: reporters like Peter Maass, Dexter Filkins, and C.J. Chivers were able to confront their readers with gruesome realities. But the problem remains. We can hardly expect Americans to comprehend the grisly reality of wars like the one in Iraq until we’re prepared to show the consequences of the policies we so blithely adopt. The Iraqis themselves, of course, need no counseling on this matter. The war was never invisible to them.

Insights about the war were actively repressed, like the classified footage revealed by Wikileaks, still up on YouTube, and with the payback to Wikileaks the mother of all-out assaults. Collateral murder it was ...

There have been all sorts of apologies in recent times, and reflections on the coverage of the war over the years, some of them collated in The Iraq war in the New Yorker (may require paywall access).

You can read How We Forgot Iraq, or you can read considered reasons for regret in a conservative rag like The Economist in Decade of regret, which notes the unknown consequences of embarking on the unknown with the blunt instrument of war.

You can wander off to read A letter to Paul Wolfowitz (outside the paywall), which proposes that the unthinking should at last try to think.

You can even travel back in time a little and read an epic takedown of Thomas Friedman's confused stupidity, outlined in detail in Thomas Friedman's Confusions, which would be great fun if the subject wasn't such a sombre one:

In April 2003 Friedman said that Arab journalists who talked about the US ‘occupation’ of Iraq were guilty of ‘Saddamism’. In August 2003 Friedman wrote: ‘This is an occupation.’ 
In 2007 he surmised that Iraqis ‘hate each other more than they love their own kids’. In 2009 he hoped that they’d learned from America’s ‘million acts of kindness’ and ‘profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together’. 
 In 2005 Friedman argued: ‘We have to have a proper election in Iraq so we can have a proper civil war there.’ Earlier this year, he wrote: ‘For all of the murderous efforts by al-Qaida to trigger a full-scale civil war in Iraq, it never happened.’ Never mind that in 2006 he said: ‘It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war.’ (hot links in the original story).

There's a very good reason the pond never reads Thomas Friedman, and there you have it in a nutshell.

Reflections, reconsiderations, regrets, or terminal Friedman nonsense.

Of course you could always revert to reading the excuses and the blather of Alexander Downer, a bear of very little brain, and a man of very little conscience, who still finds a way to defend the inexcusable. Try to make sense of this, if you will, in relation to chemical weapons:

Second, there is the issue of chemical and biological weapons. These days it's fashionable to proclaim Hussein didn't have any. 

It's fashionable, you complete and utter goose, because none were actually found, you abysmal dickhead.

Sorry, the pond got a little carried away there with little Alex, and should have just awarded him a dunce cap and sent him to the corner to reflect on logic 101. Do go on, little Alex:

The whole issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction arose not because poor old Saddam was some benign and misunderstood gentleman, but because he did have these weapons and he used them. He used them against the Iranians in the Iran/Iraq war which he started. 
After the Iraq war, the unit charged with the task of finding Hussein's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons - known as the Iraq Survey Group - found none.

Don't you just love the language, so typical of a prat? Though hardly a benign and misunderstood prat ...

But at least now we know why the fashionable proclaim that Saddam had no WMD. It turns out that the Iraq Survey Group, a most fashionable group, found none. How weird, how fashionably wonderful.

The assumption is that the regime had destroyed its stockpiles sometime between 1992 and 2003. That remains an unanswered question. 

Ah the unanswered question. Now there's a good enough reason to go to war, to get an answer to the question.

The UN inspectors were never happy this had happened. Nor were Western and Israeli intelligence agencies. 
But what the Iraq Survey Group did find was that Hussein planned to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction programs once the UN inspection team had been sent packing. Had that happened, the Middle East would have been a much more dangerous place than it already is. 

Yep, so a war is the way to solve any of your current "what if" and "what might have happened if" or "had that happened" questions ... a conundrum based on a speculation.

It turns out that according to little Alex, war in the end was a way to fix an unknown that was unknown, and things are much better in the middle east now that Iran is ascendant and Syria is in turmoil ...

About the only thing you can say in Downer's favour is that he didn't try to peddle the line that Iraq had smuggled its WMD out of the country and into Syria, where they were recently deployed in chemical warfare - a neo con talking point furphy, since the reports indicate that even if true, the 'chemical warfare' involved the sort of chlorine you can buy for use in swimming pools (Syria chemical weapons), while other reports tend to discount the preliminary reports altogether ('Something went down' in Syria, but it was short of chemical weapons).

Which hasn't stopped some desperate people, anxious to maintain the fiction, using the story as possible evidence that Saddam's fabled WMD still exist out there, somewhere, anywhere, despite the fashionable notion that he didn't actually have any ...

Anyhow, by the end of the piece, Downer is sounding like one of those synthetic actors you can find in Red Dawn, mouthing off mindless rhetoric:

That was the thing about the Howard government: we stood for something. And one of the things we stood for was freedom.

What a gormless git. Actually what you stood for, Mr. Downer, was a cheap-skate pose whereby you pretended to be freedom fighters while being careful to stay away from the main game.

While at the same time indulging in abject, supine war-mongering support for the United States...

So riddle this for the pond. If freedom was your main concern, why weren't you there on the frontline, leading the charge to bring down the North Korean regime, which is surely worse than Saddam (mad and bad though he was), and which does genuinely have WMD, and which every so often threatens to use them?

Why not? Well because you're full of hypocritical cant, that's why.

As for freedom, pity the poor Iraqis. That piece in The Economist had a different view to the rosy apple-eyed delusions of freedom fighter Alex Downer:

The resulting rough, majoritarian version of democracy has proved chronically unstable, but has also created opportunities to be exploited. Violent, radically sectarian groups used suicide-bombs and tit-for-tat atrocities to pitch Iraq into full-scale civil war under the hapless noses of America’s troops. Ruthless politicians, most notably Iraq’s now two-term prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, also benefited...
It is a tale worthy of Shakespeare, and its conclusion remains to be written. In Mr Dodge’s assessment, Mr Maliki has made himself indispensable to too many powerful people, and controls enough of the nearly 1m armed men now on the state’s payroll to be unseated any time soon. The future for Iraq itself looks less assured, despite the growing inflow of oil money. 
 Sunni parts of the country are currently in a state of insurrection, and the now prosperous and peaceful, if politically authoritarian, Kurdish north looks closer than ever to seceding. The turmoil in neighbouring Syria, where sectarian tensions starkly mirror those flaring up in Iraq (on an even more destructive scale), is spreading its poison insidiously across the region. In Iraq something may once again have to give.

It's a different story to the glib rhetorical fantastical flights of freedom fighting delivered from the comfort of an Adelaide home.

Does Downer emerge from hiding simply to make Bob Carr sound sensible, coherent and intelligent? Or is it just that he wants to confirm once and for all that old dogs can't learn new tricks, or even new rhetoric?

Well at least it took the pond's mind off generally grumpy Paul Sheehan, who wondrously, strangely and bizarrely decided to channel Mark Latham in PM in snake pit with no antivenom. Sheehan managed the stupendous Herculean feat of copying Latham on the subject of Graham Richardson, while also abusing Latham for abusing Richardson.

No wonder you can sell to this man magic water and special bread for double the average price.

What's even more amazing is that Sheehan abuses ex-pollies as mouths for rent, while being a perfect exemplar of a paid mouth blathering contradictions twice a week.

Is there any upside? Well it seems that the generally grumpy Sheehan has joined the Fairfax fight, and deplored the Murdochians and no longer will it be possible for the Bolter and Miranda the Devine and Tim Bleagh to write admiringly about the way he's the only sensible voice at the place.

Quelle horreur, he takes a swipe at Chris Mitchell ...

One has to question the ethical cynicism of The Australian newspaper, and its long-time editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, in continuing to employ Richardson given that, for 33 years, ever since his appearance before the Wood royal commission in 1980, he has had multiple cameos in stories involving skulduggery. 
The ''Richo'' highlight reel includes appearances in the Offset Alpine scandal, the Rene Rivkin scandal, the cash-for-comment scandal, his own resignation scandal, the Ron Medich scandal and the Eddie Obeid scandal, among others. Now comes his dodgy numbers in the botched power-play in Canberra. 

Of course you might want to question the ethical cynicism (whatever that means) of Fairfax and its many editors for continuing to employ a man who produced the magic water scandal, along with sundry festering outbursts that have done much harm to the community and increased tensions in relation to persecuted minority groups, while embarking on lavish overseas junkets and sauntering off to the finest bakeries for the very finest bread (let the peasants eat cake).

But hey, it's all good, especially when placed up against the rhetoric of freedom fighting Alexander Downer, snug as a bug in a rug in his Adelaide home ...

(Below: lastly a request, involving a cartoon seen online without a source. Seeing as how News Ltd has rendered Godwin's Law meaningless, the pond was struck by this fine blow against News Ltd using the very same tactics. Does anyone know where this cartoonist publishes, online or in hard copy? The pond likes the cut of his/her jib, or his/her thrusting, jutting fine point pen nibs, and would like to see more of his/her work. Click to enlarge).

It's time for a set of Sunday shaggy dog stories with bonus shaggy Sydney Anglicans ...

The pond always likes to start off a meditative Sunday with a good news story.

Now there's a bad news story to start, which is that at ten a.m. on a Sunday on Ten,  the Bolter continues to mount the Bolter report ...

But that's balanced by the good news that today there's no second session of Bolterdom. It seems that the program has bolted from its afternoon slot.

On his return the Bolter picked up 168,00 viewers, and by way of comparison, the Insiders did 166,000 and 71,000, though perhaps more to the point is that the ABC's religious show Compass scored 281,000 and even History Cold Case on SBS managed 207,000.

In that once treasured afternoon slot, which bolstered the numbers and made the Bolter seem vaguely respectable, today there's basketball first up, and then there's an aged documentary The Secret Life of Dugongs.

If they'd called the doc The Secret Sex Life of Dugongs, they might have done a bit better, but apparently no one at Ten thought to change the name of the Bolter's report to The Secret Sex Life of the Bolter. Talk about a ratings winner, and the pond's offering the pitch and the concept free of charge ...

Amazingly you can watch recent Bolter on YouTube, here, which says a lot about Ten's concern for intellectual property breaches when it comes to the Bolter. Isn't calling it intellectual property something of an oxymoron?

The pond suspects that account owner SkepticGronk is actually a pen name for the Bolter, wanting the world to pay attention to his rantings ... maybe self-publishing is the way forward.

The Bolter is now stuck in the early Sunday graveyard shift, where only the fluff-gathering navel gazers reside. The direct competition, for those looking for similar intellectual stimulation, includes Gilligan's Island, a couple of morning shows, sport talk, business chat, and Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Second thoughts, perhaps they should call the show The Bolter: The Brave and the Bold Ranter.

Should the pond take pleasure at another's plight in the television graveyard shift, having once suffered the same experience?

Well the pond is no natural grave dancer - dancing in the dark is more the riff - but a little Baudelaire will fix things:

En tout climat, sous tout soleil, la Mort t'admire 
En tes contorsions, risible Humanité 
Et souvent, comme toi, se parfumant de myrrhe, 
Mêle son ironie à ton insanité!

Or if you will:

In all climes, under every sun, 
Death admires you at your antics, ridiculous Humanity, 
And frequently, like you, scenting herself with myrrh, 
Mingles her irony with your insanity! (the original and several translations here).

Sheesh, bummer dude, that's where thinking about the Bolter on a Sunday will do, so it's time to do a tour of the parishes, and where better to start than the Sydney Anglicans?

But before we do, there has been very little in the way of measured commentary in relation to the recent affairs of the Labor party - the lizard Oz, as always is desert of fear and loathing - but can the pond propose that you meditate this Sunday on James Button's excellent Beyond the king. The younger Button seems to have inherited something of the elder Button, and is a most seemly and wise Button indeed, especially in his cogent understanding of why Chairman Rudd was the solution you have when you don't have a solution. ...

But wait, before we head off to the Sydney Anglicans, can we also brood, or meditate on this?

Mark Latham has been in fine form this week, indeed you can find him in the weekend AFR under the header He's a hater and a wrecker, but I feel sorry for Rudd (outside the paywall at time of writing).

Speaking of good hating, Latham strutted his stuff earlier in the week on radio, and delivered this lovely blast:

"Why don't people listen to Graham Richardson? I'll give you one good reason – he's the man that walked up to Eddie Obeid once and said: 'Here, on this platter for you, I've got a seat in the NSW upper house on behalf of the Labor Party.' 
"How can the man who put Eddie Obeid into the NSW Parliament be wandering around talking about political judgment, calling the Prime Minister an idiot? The biggest idiot in Labor politics today is the man who put Obeid in Parliament: Graham Fredrick Richardson. 
"I've had a gutful of the bloke who was a paid lobbyist for Ron Medich, who got into scandals about Swiss bank accounts. How can you say you're a Labor man when you've set up Swiss bank accounts? Swiss bank accounts worked for Kerry Packer. 
"It's shameful that this man has any reputation, the man who set up the wheeling and dealing, 'whatever it takes' culture in the modern Labor Party. He's the bloke who wrecked the place and he walks around like he's got clean hands like Mother Teresa, knows all the numbers. All he knows how to do is put people like Obeid in Parliament ... and it's a real achievement in public life for Richardson, but 20 years after he made that decision, it is contributing to the destruction of the federal Labor government. He should crawl under the rock from which he came. (a transcript of most of the rant is here, forced video at end of link).

Amen to that brother, and you didn't even mention that he routinely scribbles rubbish for the lizard Oz.

Hold on a tick, before we head off to the Sydney Anglicans, can we also meditate a little about the use of anonymous sources in the mainstream media in the latest bout of blabbermouth wrecking?

For example the pond has heard, from unimpeachable, impeccable sources - including a highly placed apparatchik within the federal Labor party - that immediately the budget is revealed to have a $30 billion deficit, Julia Gillard will stand down, and the job of PM will be given to Bill Shorten.

Hang on, you say, what anonymous source?

What right does the pond have to unleash this ridiculous canard, this unsourced, unamed speculation, this Le Canard enchaîné.

Welcome to the modern world of journalism, where canards are always welcome, speculation is an art form, and stooges and self-serving leakers run rampant.

Indeed now that the pond has let loose the rumour, what's the bet how long it takes before it finds its way into the press?

What's more amazing, people get paid for this sort of drivel, and yet the pond is willing to bet its own self-serving speculation above is just as accurate as the likes of Christopher Pearson proposing Simon Crean as leader of the Labor party.

As well as Latham having a go at leakers, Lenore Taylor makes all the obvious points about this in her last column for Fairfax, Media tread fine line when tribes go to war, before she heads off to The Guardian down under. Roll on The Guardian down under ...

Fairfax and the lizard Oz keep rabbiting on about how threadbare the Labor party front bench looks ... maybe they should take a look at their front bench some time soon.

Now wait, hang on a second, sure, this is getting to be a shaggy dog story, but while we're stuck at Fairfax and the AFR, before we head off to the Sydney Anglicans, can we just contemplate the superb effort by Emma-Kate Symons scribbling The Disney girls gone wild effect, in a bid to sound like a wowser supreme (behind the paywall so you'll never know what the Disney girls gone wild effect means).

It's a terrible column, long on rhetoric, argument and hysteria, completely shorn of data, statistics, proof and actual evidence. It's yet another wowser rant - of the kind you'd usually head off to the Sydney Anglicans to find - and it's all about how Twitter and movie stars and magazines and movies and porn and Harmony Korine have placed women more and more in danger of rape.

You'd expect to find it in a tabloid rather than the AFR, but there you go.

Somehow Symons jumps the shark by dragging in the horrific pack rape of a woman on a bus in India into her column, and somehow relates that matter to the vile, indolent ways of the media in the west.

Does Symons have any idea of just how prurient and repressed Bollywood movies are? Or the rest of Indian media?

Thanks to the Haryana Tribune, the pond can offer you OMG: Most disturbing sex scenes in Bollywood. Prepare to be shocked out of your skin. And if you want an insight into Bollywood's mores, why not read Breaking Bollywood's Rules, or have a crack at A Brief History of Bollywood Sex and Romance.

Now times have changed and standards have relaxed a little from the days when hand-holding or a kiss stood in for a wild-eyed orgasmic fuck in a Bollywood movie, but the prudish rules and the relentless titillation remain much the same in most movies, and if you take a look at mainstream media, you'll find that the country looks and sounds as if it's still caught in a Victorian England time warp (the bureaucracy is too).

A nanosecond thinking about it, and there you go, it completely undercuts the notion of Disney girls gone wild peddled by Symons.

Instead Symons ends up sounding a bit like a Scottish cardinal telling the world all the time how bad homosexuality is while behind the scenes going the grope and maybe going the full hog ...

The pond could spend all day going through the many stupidities in Symons' piece but time is short, and we must, we must head off to the Sydney Anglicans - with whom Symons shares many simplistic notions and positions.

But before we do, could we mention that if Symons wanted a genuine example of truly awesome and sickening sybaritic indulgence, and the ravaging and ravishing of the entire planet, she merely has to look at all the advertisements for the filthy rich lifestyle of the filthy rich that litter the pages of the Australian Financial Review - whether real estate, the current state of Maserati, stories on the art market in Dubai or advertorials promoting a holiday on the Greek islands.

But hang on a second, that barely leaves time to mention Mike Quigley before we head off to the Sydney Anglicans. Why is the man still in charge of the NBN? Why is the government allow him to dangle and run a half-baked inept operation before the incoming Liberal government sack him for incompetence?

Oh shucks, that also barely leaves time for the Australian Financial Review shedding tears over Martin Ferguson as a forward thinking advanced in the brain business sympathetic member of the Labor party.

Why they even wrote an editorial about it in Labor dumps the best of its breed, behind the paywall so only featherheads will lose money or sleep thinking about it.

Martin Ferguson as the best of breed? With the greatest respect, that's the shaggiest part of this shaggy story, since Ferguson is a hack who has long exhibited Stockholm Syndrome, and whom Mark Latham once labelled a climate science denier. (here)

If that dunderhead is best of breed, perhaps it helps explain why they looked to  Conroy and gave him the chance to fuck up the NBN and the media reform package roll-out...

The one thing you can say about the AFR is that they want to charge a lot of moola for journalists who would never make the cut as best of breed ... roll on The Guardian down under.

Oh dear, will we never get to the Sydney Anglicans? Are we there yet?

Well as you know with shaggy dog stories, the punchline is always the weakest, always the most pathetic part of proceedings, and sure enough the Sydney Anglicans play that part to perfection.

Oh okay, the front page has moved on since the pond took the screen cap above - no hot links of course - but surely we can still celebrate the front page that announced Moore students were mounting missions and broadening their horizons by heading out to .... Parramatta ...

What next? Brave missionaries bound out to Dubbo? With the greatest respect, if Parramatta is a way to broaden horizons, how on earth did they get so narrow?

Don't ask, you know the answer ... Sydney Anglicans, living in a weird Speilbergian cocoon.

But wait there's more, because you can also find Phillip Jensen lamenting the modern world and its worship of mammon in Give working families a rest (hold on fast to all that rent-seeking property Sydney Anglicans and make sure you screw your bone-idle tenants into the ground, and if you drop a few squillion on the stock market, hey, life's a gamble and there's nothing really wrong with capitalism or hanging out with brokers and merchant bankers).

Inter alia, Jensen gets on to the matter of women working:

... Mr Tim Toohey the chief economist of Goldman Sachs, lamented the low female participation rate in the workplace – not because of the lack of opportunity for women to fulfil their desire to work but because of the negative effect it has on the GDP of one of the wealthiest nations on earth! Nowhere in the article was there appreciation of work done in the home as an important part of social wellbeing, or a choice that some people may want to make.

Indeed, shame Mr Toohey, shame.

It's well known Anglican women aren't allowed to raise their voices in church, and the last place they're needed is raising their voices at work, when they could be at home doing needful and proper work like knitting and house-making and macrame and soothing hard-working Anglicans mens' brows and doing the washing and the cooking and the ironing, and tending the dog's and cat's shaggy hair and such like very useful things.

It immediately reminded the pond of one of its favourite all time classic Anglican website front pages:

Oh yes, talk about a shaggy dog story ...

Blow that talk of class warfare up your philistine ass ... sorry, arse ...

(Above: bad photo by Dorothy).

The church of popular culture is a broad one. It's big, wide, long, deep, sometimes high, often low.

You can at various times find within it pond favourites like Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Patty Griffin, Regina Spektor. Head down into the basement and you might find Alice Cooper or Norman Bates, so let's not go there.

Head out to the desperately titled Allphones Arena last night and you could yourself, with the pond and a mega, almost sell-out crowd of thousands, in the church of Springsteen.

Whatever you do, don't try to go by rail if you live in the west. The relevant train was running forty minutes late before the pond headed back to the car. Thanks big Bazza, you can't even do a Mussolini and get the trains running on time.

And whatever you do, don't expect anything but anthemic stadium rock, with a nod to Jersey and 125th street and Motown, and with poor acoustics that made the piano sound like someone had deliberately put every key off-key.

Springsteen is a shameless entertainer of the touchy feely kind. He dragged a young boy up on stage to torture, he danced with a woman who required a little hefting to make it to the stage, he danced with a woman who couldn't dance at all, he sculled a beer, he implored the crowd to get off its asses, correction arses, he did a number of walks, and one bit of extended pit surfing.

He also played music, with a generous 16 piece band plus singer ... and it was a generous serve. Tickets were dear, but you got 3 hours and 10 of rock music (some pedants say 3 and 7).

They care about the Boss in Jersey. You can find the set list already posted here in a report at New Jersey.com. The show opened with We Take Care of Our Own and Wrecking Ball, and Springsteen finished it off with Rosalita.

Throughout Springsteen maintained an infectious energy and enthusiasm. Sure he does it professionally but that's what you expect of professionals.

The crowd lapped it up, and why not. What's wrong with a good time?

The pond was surprised by the younger demographic. There were old farts, but there were many who were young. There was also more than a whiff of boganism. After all the stadium is deep in the west of Sydney, and there were plenty of check shirts and right next to the pond sat a Harley-Davidson jacket. Or at least a man on the wrong side of forty wearing one.

It's the turf where Tony Abbott claims he's the new messiah. As if he'll take care of those not his own.

The pond was there partly because of this, scribbled with condescension by George Brandis:

Exciting interest in cultural policy in the Gillard government is a task of almost Sisyphean hopelessness. The Treasurer's idea of high culture is Bruce Springsteen. Among the rest of the hatchet-faced ex-trade union officials and dodgy union lawyers, indifference is as good as it gets. Better that than hostility - for many the default position. Crean is surrounded by colleagues to whom the arts sector has the whiff of dangerous elitism - yet another set of enemies in the class war. (Our Philistine Treasurer and the art of shelving culture, behind the paywall because Brandis still needs to be hidden).

Typical Brandis.

He always sounds like he's just bitten a couple of lemons, or swallowed a tablespoon of alum that's puckered his mouth into a twisted, screwed pillar of hate and bile. Or perhaps he just stuffs his mouth full of prunes, and munches on them slowly.

The thing is, Brandis will never deliver three hours of joy and entertainment to a crowd. Just dull posturing from a dull-minded former lawyer, always ready to toss off insults like "Philistine" along with all the other cantish hate speech.

Now it has to be acknowledged that the Boss treats his hair, but why not, he's an entertainer. He remains incredibly fit for someone born in 1949, and he puts out to a crowd not ashamed to be caught in the church of popular culture.

So fuck you George Brandis, though on second thoughts, maybe a simpering thank you is required.

If enjoying Bruce Springsteen is philistinism, you can take your high culture and your pose of giving a fuck about the western suburbs, a bit like Barry O'Farrell pretending to make the trains of western Sydney run on time, and shove it up your ass. Sorry, arse.

Now get out and dance a little, you tired, out of touch abusive, lemon and alum-laden, prunish old fart. Get out into the west of Sydney and see how it feels. Tell your prattish crew to get rid of their lycra and their middle class obsessions ...

Phew after that, it's almost time for a nap.

The pond felt exhausted just watching Springsteen go about his business, and has barely had time this morning to go looking for nonsense. But of course you can find silliness straight away if you know where to look:

Defecit? Is that some fatal combination of deficit and defecate?

Now the pond is always full of typos - damn you NZ subbies, damn you to hell - but then the pond isn't demanding money with menaces as part of the reading experience.

I'm afraid "defecit" quite put the pond off reading Pearson, who was in any case - having pompously prattled on about the pontiff in recent times - returning to his familiar, threadbare theme, the ALP leadership, and once again strenuously demanding an election now, or at least soon, or pretty please, quite soon. Or perhaps another leadership challenge ...

Well at least he's had to shut up about Simon Crean as the alternative leader (remember back in July 2011, when the pond wrote about Christopher Pearson claiming that Crean was the obvious choice?)

The thing is, week in, week out, the pages of The Australian are full of prognostications and predictions and bleatings, and most of them are talking out of their ass. Sorry, arse.

And yet none of them ever go back and look at their vomit, like any decent dog would do after taking a quick course of cleansing grass.

If you must read Pearson, you can go to ALP leadership defecit remains fatally intact, though you'll have to avoid the paywall of course, because Pearson is locked away so sensible folk can have a day of peace and even bliss.

But a warning - you will be confronted with this:

The attention defecit disorder is still there.

Yes it wasn't just the splash. Inside on the actual story, The Australian's defecit remains fatally intact.

In fact there seemed to be an air of gloom about the rag. Despite their (and Fairfax's) best efforts, the ALP had gone and done the wrong thing.

What was left but to mutter dire imprecations, make thunderous pronouncements, shake collective fists at the impious heavens, stroke beards, and cast once more through the chicken livers and the entrails. Look at this line up (click to enlarge):

And look at this moth-eaten, woe-begotten front page:

The ALP's warned, it's the wrong way, go back?

Is that the best they've got? They've been saying that since the alienated independents - alienated by that lycra-cladded, fitness obsessed professional lout and philistine Tony Abbott - aligned themselves with Labor to form a minority government.

Well if Brandis can fling philistine about, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

That said, if you had to pick a favourite goose for the day, surely it would have to be that pious goose, Dennis "the tie and suit" Shanahan sagely advising that the PM must drop the words that divide, and announcing that the gender and class wars must be set aside if Julia Gillard is to govern in the national interest.

Actually, tie and suit man, saying that a taste for Bruce Springsteen is philistinism is the real gender and class war, and you're speaking, like George Brandis, out of your ass. Sorry, arse.

There's more to life than riding ten thousand dollar bikes or going on half marathons. Try shearing a hundred sheep, then let's talk about the class war.

Despite Shanahan's efforts, there was one that was better, and it deserves all the acclaim it gets:

Now that's intriguing. Finally a mea culpa from the dingbats at The Australian and the Murdochians, who must have the most unreliable and wretched representatives of all?

Nope:

As usual, it's all the Fault of Fairfax, or possibly the ABC, and not a mention of how Nick Leys and his colleagues are once again blowing it out of their sorry asses. Sorry, arses.

You can read it here, if you like, remembering to evade the paywall, but why bother. Unless you require the comfort of predictability on the weekend ...

Oh and there was one other lizard Oz story that caught the eye, and what do you know, it's an exclusive.

It seems the NBN is under dire threat:

What? Suddenly they want the NBN rollout to succeed?

Suddenly the Indonesians pose a crucial, key threat, and might deliver a big setback?

Instead of Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull?

You know, the Tony Abbott who instructed big Mal to destroy the NBN ...

Why the Indonesians are just rank amateurs.

The real experts at setting back the rollout of the NBN are the Murdochians and Tony Abbott.

Enough already. You can read that story here if you care to evade the paywall, but the pond has had enough of these sorry asses, sorry arses, and their attention defecit disorders.

It's time to put on some Springsteen, and get up off the pond's sorry, way after midnight arriving home, sorry Saturday arse ... and dance ...

(Below: bad photo by Dorothy. Excuse? Good cameras were banned).

The pond's in the mood for banning someone, anyone will do ...

(Above: banned covers from Censor nostalgia, found here, because they're more amusing than the Daily Terror and Cassandra Wilkinson)


Thanks to yesterday's proceedings, the pond now has a deeper and richer understanding of the meaning of Harmony Day.

Now on to other business.

The pond has only two very firm rules when it comes to rock ' roll, and here they are:

1. Never ever go to a stadium to endure distorted sound surrounded by a jabbering pack of noisy hyenas;
2. Never ever go to hear an artist enjoyed in youth, and now, voice fading and limbs aging, trotted out for a farewell tour and a last big score.

Now you might wonder why the pond is breaking both, in one go, to wander off to see Bruce "the Boss' Springsteen.

Two words.

George Brandis.

The moment Brandis wrote these dickhead words, the pond knew it was doomed:

Exciting interest in cultural policy in the Gillard government is a task of almost Sisyphean hopelessness. The Treasurer's idea of high culture is Bruce Springsteen. Among the rest of the hatchet-faced ex-trade union officials and dodgy union lawyers, indifference is as good as it gets. Better that than hostility - for many the default position. Crean is surrounded by colleagues to whom the arts sector has the whiff of dangerous elitism - yet another set of enemies in the class war. (Our Philistine Treasurer and the art of shelving culture, behind the paywall because Brandis needs to be hidden).

What a dickhead, a dickhead non pareil, a dickhead of the first water, a pompous pretentious git, and a fool to boot.

The pond just had to show solidarity with the Boss. Oh sure next week it'll be back to the Wittgenstein and the Shostakovich and the New York Review of Books, but right now, the Boss is hurting, he's bleeding, and he needs a little love, not dickhead class warfare hate.

Oh sure getting really cheap good tickets made the gesture a little easier, but it's not the money, it's the dickhead principle of the thing.

So tomorrow morning the pond might be rising a little late, the tinnitus still ringing in the ears. But it's worth it, just to shove it up that hopeless ass George Brandis.

Put it another way, there's more to life than politics, and there's way more than a media obsessed with the Labor party leadership, and the triumphalism of the Greens, the nattering negativity of Tony Abbott, and the shattering of dreams with an emperor who refused to don any clothes at all, or bung on a do ...

Was there any a more tragic header than Rudd support was just 'an illusion'?

The implication? Why reading the Fairfax rags this past week has been reading 'just an illusion' ...

Meanwhile, two actual events took place yesterday - the NBN figures for its rollout were announced yesterday, and they are a disgrace.

And Tony Abbott disgraced himself in relationship to an audience where all he had to do was roll out an apology.

Now it might have seen like a technical breach, but once again it reflects Abbott's boofhead nature, and suspicion of his links to the Catholic church might well have been bubbling beneath the surface. 

You don't have to look far to learn that one of the chief arms of the church has refused to apologise for its role in the cruelty, though St Vincent de Paul assisted in adoptions, a nice wording for an organisation which cruelly defrauded mothers and stole their children ...

Like many others in the country, the pond has had an inexcusably badly treated bastard in its family ranks, but the real bastardry was the treatment of the forced adoption by bastard organisations using a bastard concept of bastardry as an excuse for emotional cruelty of an exceptional kind. That Abbott or his writer didn't get it, and would use words like "relinquishment" is bizarre

But enough of this, let's return to lighthearted themes, there ought to be loons, where are the loons, send in the loons, come on down Cassandra Wilkinson, and scribble for us Left champions freedom for art, not for tabloid (behind the paywall, because some things should be limited, if not banned outright).

Yes, it's time to go round the mulberry bush one more time with the paranoid Murdoch line.

The funny thing is that Wilkinson's piece shows signs of a hasty re-tread:

Although the Gillard government's proposed Public Interest Media Advocate has been shelved for now, the debate about the bill exposed the Left's increasingly uncomfortable relationship with censorship.

Uh huh. Conroy's media bills were shelved, but I've already written the piece, so let's do that opening line, and then let's trawl through history and pretend that it was progressives and the left that were the dynamic behind the battle against censorship in Australia.

It's a most egregious version of the story, and it uses a word the pond loathes, "progressive", as a catch-all, as in:

Progressive Australians and the political Left spent the 20th century arguing to be allowed to read Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Frank Hardy's Power Without Glory, JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, along with works by Norman Lindsay, Gore Vidal and Mickey Spillane.

That entirely misinterprets what happened. Throughout the twentieth century there might have been some on the left who resented political censorship, but a fair number of them were also prudes and quite content with censorship when it came to sexual matters.

It was, for example, the Scullin Labor government that gave Norman Lindsay a hard time, and banned Lindsay's novel "Redheap", along with another 174 "indecent" books out of a total of 294 books that had been banned up to the end of 1931 (see the interesting article by Patricia Holt on Censorship, citizenship and democracy c 1930-1960).

And without wanting to sound too Gerard Henderson about it, it was Arthur Calwell who was the wartime minister for censorship, and it was Calwell who bunged on a do with newspapers:

Calwell brought to this post an ingrained distrust of the press, sharpened by his capacity for splendid invective and his delight in provocation—'stirring the possum' as he put it. He gave his opinion of the Australian press in parliament in November 1941: 'It is owned for the most part by financial crooks and is edited for the most part by mental harlots'. Mounting antagonism between Calwell and the newspaper proprietors came to a climax on 16 April 1944 with the seizure of copies of the Sydney Sunday Telegraph for flouting censorship rules. Next morning the Sydney dailies published a common statement challenging the powers of the censors. Calwell endorsed action by Commonwealth peace officers to confiscate all copies of the offending editions. The High Court of Australia granted an injunction against the suppression. It was at this time that Australian newspaper cartoonists began to caricature Calwell as a cockatoo, seizing on the most obvious aspects of a physiognomy which he himself wryly conceded had 'a kind of rugged grandeur'. (see Graham Freudenberg's witty profile of Calwell for the ADB here).

The point, and it's a banal one, is that wowsers, banners and censors lurk in both parties and have always done so, and the history of censorship is no simple-minded history of nobel progressive Australians and the political Left doing the right thing, and evil conservatives being wrong.

What's more, this kind of narrative leaves out the work of people like liberal-minded Don Chipp chipping away at the censorship structure.

Wilkinson really doesn't have a clue, and here's the way that shows she's clueless, as she yabbers on about Piss Christ, Ken Park, David and Margaret:

Through the years the cultural elite has rallied around hundreds of works, from Salo and Kids to this year's banned favourite, I Want Your Love by Travis Mathews.

Yep, suddenly we've jumped from progressives and leftists to cultural elitists, in the standard Murdoch way, and the inevitable conclusion follows:

It is not wrong or surprising that culturally sophisticated people defended art from the censors. It is only surprising that the same people can't bring themselves to rebuke the proposed censorship of "tabloid media". 

At no time in Wilkinson's piece does she produce evidence that the proposal for a Public Interest Media Advocate was directed at the "tabloid media". At no time does she explain what the proposed censorship would have involved.

The proposed new regulations were exceptionally mild and feeble and ultimately involved a form of self-reulgation. The model  was a very different notion to Conroy's useless notion of a vast internet filter for the intertubes (which Wilkinson proposes was just a website blacklist).

And it's around this point that Wilkinson jumps the shark, nukes the fridge and shows she's imbibed way too much of the News Ltd kool aid:

It is odd, to say the least, that freedom to report the news as we see fit attracts less support from the Left than freedom to blaspheme or freedom to watch pornography. 

Funnily enough, there was absolutely nothing in Conroy's proposal that would have seen the Daily Terror censored or banned for proposing that he was a sociopath up there with Stalin and Chairman Mao.

But to present that sort of monstrous stupidity - it's too dumb to pass as satire, and way too far over the top to defend itself as irony - as reporting the news "as we see fit" is comedy of the first water.

Which brings us full circle:

Given the progressive Left's history of supporting freedom from censorship as a minimum condition of political freedom, it is startling that a Labor government would propose greater restrictions on freedom of speech. That the "progressive" Greens committed to support these measures made the hypocrisy complete. 

Except of course that this is a distorted view of the progressive Left's history, just as you might hunt in vain down the decades of the twentieth century evidence that a progressive Right simply didn't exist.

Censorship in Australia has a complex history, one worth looking at in detail, especially the way that conservative members of the Left co-joined with conservative members of the Right to form a league of wowsers that dominated censorship activities for a century (the censorship of political literature a different activity but also had its share of cross-party banners).

Instead Wilkinson offers up this as a concluding par:

Of all the forms of speech that protect us from tyranny, the freedom to write about society with a critical mind is fundamental. Stead knew this truth in 1935 and it remains as true today - even if The Daily Telegraph thinks so too.

Well may we all conclude that the freedom to write about society with a critical mind is fundamental, which is why it's an even greater tragedy that the incoherent, conflating and confused Wilkinson can't seem to write about the history of censorship - despite the freedom offered to her - with a critical, considered mind.

And if she's going to offer critical minds worth defending, why on earth does she hoist her petard above the Daily Terror, as unlike a critical mind as Genghis Khan.

Happily there are alternatives available online. You can now get a thumbnail chronology of Australian Censorship History here, along with a lot of other information.

An interesting complement is Peter Coleman's - hardly a leftist's - dated Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition, reviewed here, which notes how both sides of the aisle were active in the game, and which was re-released by poor old Duffy & Snellgrove here. There's also an excellent overview of banned books, a bibliography presented by way of introduction at Austlit here.

Sadly if you track back from the titles and the actions, it's not just the likes of Lyons' government Minister for Trade and Customs Thomas White who were in the banning game. Alleged leftists were just as keen, and you will find leftists  right here, right now, willing to cluck and tut about video games and violence and comic books and television.

There is an argument, and the pond buys it, that Australia adopted a system of censorship more stringent than Britain simply to show it was more pure than the motherland. While you're thinking about it, why not have a listen to Prudes, Pervs, and Paper Tigers, downloadable from RN.

What's most irritating in this context is the way the Murdoch press has conflated the latest Conroy episode with an attack on freedom of the press.

There has never been a right in Australia to defame, distort, lie, mislead, misrepresent, or abuse the truth in the media, especially in relation to individuals. The problem has always been what to do when the press or the media more generally gets it wrong, or a Bolter rarely in possession of the facts, or an Alan Jones makes an inflammatory or defamatory remark.

When this happens, the problem has been that defamation law is effectively the province of the rich, and the right to take action against the media has always been the reserve of the rich, such as Gina Rinehart, who can take action against the press and journalists in a cavalier fashion in pursuit of a mere family feud, involving mere money.

Right now the best ACMA can offer is a whipping with a lettuce leaf, and the Press Council is a joke attempting to reform itself so it sounds and seems less pathetic.

To dress all this up as reporting the news as we see fit - which is to say fuck you and fuck the truth and let the courts and the devil take the hindmost - is sophistry of the worst kind.

If Conroy is so bad, why hasn't the media come up with its own decent and effective method of self-regulation, to prevent the onanism we so regularly see in public? (not that there's anything wrong with onanism, the pond has no biblical banning tendencies, but surely the spilling of seeds is best done in private).

Anyway, roll on the Boss, as a way of shoving it up Brandis, and come to think of it, as a way to avoid the desire to ban Cassandra Wilkinson for silliness, and abject ignorance of Australian cultural history, and tabloidism in an alleged broadsheet.

Stop it Ms Wilkinson, or you might well go blind ...

(Below: more banned covers from Censor nostalgia, found here. Oh dear, that looks confronting. Can someone call the Australian Catholic Labor Liberal party for human decency? Can someone organise a joint press conference so Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard can explain why they've banned gay marriage? And the Murdoch press approves?)

If only the Murdoch press could and would exercise their right to silence ... oh wait, when it comes to the rights of ordinary people, they have ...

The wonders of ironical irony.

Thanks to Craig Thomson, the media reforms proposed by Conroy, Gillard et al seem like they might just be about to die a death.

Yes, even paranoid hysterical News Ltd reports Craig Thomson will not back media reforms proposed by Stephen Conroy.

The pond had a wondrous vision of a herd of Murdoch elephants charging for the door.

Led by Kim "the squawker" Williams, there was a lumbering Akker Dakker, a bolting Bolter, a raging Miranda the Devine, an indignant Janet "Dame Slap" Albrechtsen, a covey of Blairite lemmings, and assorted other members of the herd, all were doing an Abbott, or a poodle Pyne.

Never ever ever would they accept a Thomson vote, they were rushing out the door, and once out the door, they kept running and running, until they reached a cliff, and fell over it.

In the very same dream, bolting Abbott and poodle Pyne joined with Thomson to ensure the defeat of the bill. There they were, standing proudly side by side, arm in arm, fingers held aloft in a Churchillian salute to the world ... with the whole tribe of cheering, applauding Murdochian members of the commentariat watching from the public gallery.

Of course it was only a dream, a Dali dream turned surrealist nightmare. It'll never come to a vote on the floor this way.

But still, think of the potential ironical irony.The man the Murdoch press had tortured for a year saved their bacon, and where's the gratitude?

Meanwhile, in another country far away, there's Bazza "let's build Sydney's second airport in Canberra and hook it up with very fast hot air balloons" is still flagging the stripping of the right to silence.

You can read about it in some places, as in NSW to vote on right to silence laws. 

Talk about the convoluted stripping of an ancient right said to go back some four hundred years:

Under the proposed new laws, an unfavourable inference can be drawn if an accused person fails to mention something during official police questioning that they could reasonably be expected to mention, and that they later rely on in their defence. 
NSW Police Minister Mike Gallacher said it was incredible that Labor wouldn't support the government laws and accused the party of giving organised crime a helping hand.

Actually it's incredible that a state government could construct such a bodgie dodgy notion, relying on notions like mentioning something that a person could be reasonably expected to mention.

Now the New South Wales police force has had long had a history of fitting up people. In the old days, a telephone book could do valuable service in an interrogation (not so many marks to the face), and 'verballing' was turned into an art form.

Don't think it's gone away in the age of video recordings. Recently there was a case involving a Ballina man:

The assault charges were heard in the Ballina Magistrates Court in July last year. After seeing the police station CCTV footage of the incident, Magistrate David Heilpern threw out the charge. Magistrate Heilpern was so concerned by the incident—which he said 'debased the administration of justice'—that he referred the matter to the NSW Police Integrity Commission. The police watchdog is investigating both the assault on Barker and the alleged plan to cover it up by laying charges of assault against him. It should be stressed that the PIC is yet to hand down its findings. (Video evidence key to police brutality cases).

Now there is always another side to any story, but the point here surely is that the chance to fit someone up for failing to mention something they should be reasonably expected to mention - when in fact they might just reasonably want to tell the police to fuck off - will surely prove an irresistible temptation down the track.

You know when the police are keen to trash an ancient right that there's the smell of bloodlust in the air, dressed up as a chance to crack down on crime:

...NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione on Wednesday denied the legislation would infringe on a person's basic rights. 
 "This is simply a matter of trying to level the playing field," he told reporters in Sydney. 
 "This is about making sure that people can't concoct an excuse when they get to court on the first occasion and try and catch us out by not having disclosed that previously. 
 "I don't think it trashes civil liberties." 

Of course it trashes a civil liberty and in the worst way imaginable.

Now you don't have to be a Green to share the sentiments of David Shoebridge MLC writing when the proposals were first flagged, here:

The O’Farrell government is removing a four century old right to silence apparently to target hardened criminals but in doing so they are removing this right from everyone in NSW. 
 “This government is trashing a four hundred year old right to silence just to get a headline about fighting gang crime,” Greens NSW MP and Justice spokesperson David Shoebridge said. 
 “The reason the right to silence has stood so long that is because it protects individuals from the heavy handed use of police powers. 
 “Most people’s interactions with police are in highly charged and emotional circumstances. It is at these times that the right to silence is crucial in order to protect people from being entrapped or misunderstood. 
 “You don’t institute fundamental law reform that applies to everyone to deal with only a limited number of hardened criminals. 
 “If organised criminals are getting smarter the solution is smarter policing, not the erosion of a fundamental pillar of the justice system.

Indeed.

Now the NSW bill is hovering in the air, and coming to the vote. Perhaps the Murdoch press is thinking that the legislation will be defeated in the Legislative Council through an unlikely alliance of Greens, Shooters and Fishers party, and the Labor party.

Perhaps that's the reason they're exercising their right to silence.

Naturally the pond went in search of righteous indignation at News Ltd, a fervent crusading campaign denouncing the stripping of ancient rights, and showing Barry O'Farrell as, if not an Adolf Hitler, then at least a despot up there with Mao, or Stalin, or a few others of a North Korean or Iranian kind.

Here's what we found in rags which deal directly with NSW. First up the Daily Terror:

Yep, there's more navel-gazing about the federal media bill, and you get the chance to blog with "Sarrah" about the need for Michelle Obama to HTFU and stop messing around with vegie gardens, but nothing, zip, nil, nada about big bad Bazza and his bill.

Switch over to the lizard Oz, and what do you get?

Yep, nothing, zip, nil, nada.

You can try to find a mention of big Bazza and his fiendish plan to break with an ancient English tradition, and you'll come up with diddly squat on the lengthy front digital page.

It confirms what the pond has always suspected - the current media kerfuffle has nothing to do with principle, and a lot to do with self-serving self-indulgent navel gazing.

The media loves to talk the talk but they run out of puff the minute you ask them to walk the walk.

Speaking of navel gazing, that eminent navel-gazer Brendan O'Neill has contributed yet another piece of fluff he found in his belly button:

Now the pond has no actual need to read O'Neill blather on, though if you want to, you can head off to Politician-led attack on media freedom is a sentence on the public, holding your nose and googling to avoid the paywall, and marvelling that an actual attempt to sentence and fit up the public in NSW is certain to be studiously ignored by the over-ripe camembert posturings of O'Neill.

The pond could write the O'Neill piece in its sleep. How's this for an opener?

Censorious celebrities and liberals who can't spell the word liberty are cock-a-hoop over the muzzling of the press in Britain and Australia.

Oh wait, it seems O'Neill channeled the pond, and has indeed used that very opening.

No, the real purpose in drawing attention to O'Neill is to marvel and to wonder at O'Neill's use of the word "elites" and "elitist" and "elitism" and not just in relation to fonts.

There could be a competition in this.

As well as "elitist" in the splash, O'Neill delivers a spray of "elites" in his closing pars:

Consider those censorious feminists who say The Sun's saucy Page 3 should be banned because it makes men rapacious, or greens who accuse climate change-denying columnists of warping the public's minds: time and again, elite discomfort with press freedom is really elite disdain for the idea that the mob is capable of thinking rationally and seriously. 
 The great British radical Tom Paine recognised this. When, in 1792, he was sentenced to death in absentia for writing The Rights of Man, he described attacks on press freedom as "a sentence on the public instead of the author", since the public is being told "they shall not think, they shall not read". Today, still, restrictions on the press are a sentence on the public, passed by elites who think we morons cannot handle tough or rough or challenging ideas.

Uh huh. Well the morons at News Ltd are doing sweet fuck all about big Bazza's plans, and it seems that only the greenies are taking the threat seriously.

Elitist or what? Up their own fundaments or what?

Well it goes without saying that O'Neill is a completely confused British git, who somehow imagines he's a genuine Marxist, thereby confusing adolescent schoolboy perversity and notions of rebellion with deeper political thinking, but where are the tirades coming from the outraged Murdoch hacks at the plan to abolish the right to silence?

You see that right was established as part of the revolt against the practices of a real Star Chamber, not the hyperventilating indulgent carry-on of Kim Williams about a media Star Chamber.

So where's Miranda the Devine? Up Akker Dakker's fundament, if you read Speaking up for freedom and the usual jibber jabber about Orwellian this and that. And don't ask about Akker Dakker or the Bolter, they're always up their own fundament.

Instead you have to head off to The Conversation back in October last year, with Suri Ratnapala and Our right to silence is too important to lose. The pond likes it so well it, here's a somewhat lengthy quote:

The principle that no person is obliged to incriminate themself is an indispensable element of the panoply of safeguards that secure the citizen’s personal liberty against state oppression. The criminal justice system in common law countries excludes involuntary confessions, bans torture, upholds the presumption of innocence, requires proof of criminal charges beyond reasonable doubt and excludes irrelevant and unreliable evidence. The right to remain silent is part of this system that was established in the seventeenth century revolt against the practices of the Star Chamber and the High Commission. 
It is part of the general common law freedom that no person be compelled on pain of punishment to answer any question asked by another person. 
 This is an aspect of the person’s right to privacy, without which individual liberty is unrealisable. Imagine a life where all your plans, whether personal, emotional or commercial, are available to all on demand. Criminal justice is unattainable without the cooperation of truthful witnesses. However, the common law has historically recognised certain specific immunities. 
 No person is bound to give answers to questions that may incriminate them. A suspect under investigation has no duty to answer questions of any kind. A person under trial for a criminal offence cannot be compelled to give evidence, and no adverse inference can be drawn from silence.

And today comes the news that O'Farrell did a dirty deal with the shooters, and the law has passed.

Yes, you can read about it in the Fairfax press in a nondescript piece tucked down the page under the header MPs backflip on 'right to silence' decision.

How did Law Society of NSW president John Dobson greet the treachery and the betrayal, which no doubt saw the shooters gain the right to some other benefit, having already gained the right to shoot stray passers-by in national parks?

...Law Society of NSW president, John Dobson, said the changes will take the NSW law beyond the UK silence provisions. 
“An adverse inference could be drawn simply as a result of not mentioning a fact at the time of police questioning which is later relied on at trial, " he said. 
“There are many reasons people may exercise the right to silence, including because they are in shock or confused about the allegations, affected by drugs or alcohol, inarticulate or have poor English. “Introducing mandatory defence disclosure in all trial matters would also have significant cost and resource implications for defence and prosecution agencies at a time when resources are already under strain." 

And meanwhile not a Murdoch crusade or crusader in sight or within cooeeeeee.

Instead the Murdoch press exercised its elitist right to silence.

Which is more than the rest of us will be able to do in the future in New South Wales ...

(Below: hey nonny no, on we go, we can at least exercise the right to irony).

Hate is like a loaded gun, and when you read idle chatter about hypocrisy and cant, chances are you're about to get a dose of hypocrisy and cant ...

(Above: substitute The Australian, and you'll see where the pond is heading)

The pond is wildly excited this morning at the news that Richard Torbay has been dumped, and that Barners himself - Barnaby Joyce to the unknowing - might take on Tony Windsor in the mighty capital of the known universe, Tamworth, at the foot of the wild New England ranges.

It seems the far-reaching tentacles of Eddie Obeid might have had something to do with it, but on legal advice, all the pond can do is link to Tony Windsor rival dumped by Nationals.

Oh if only Jimmy Sharman was still alive to showcase the punch-up, instead of making young black fighters punch drunk ...

But duty calls, and today is Janet "Dame Slap" Albrechtsen day, and happily she provides a fine example of psychopathology of a kind all too frequent behind the barricades in Murdoch's paranoid castle, in And if this were Howard's bill? (behind the paywall so you needn't pay for a therapy session after reading it).

Now the pond sometimes keeps the company of shrinks (though they prefer, for some obscure reason to be called psychiatrists), and has learned enough to be dangerous, and the temptation to do a Freudian analysis of Dame Slap is almost overwhelming.

There's such seething bitterness and rage and resentment and paranoia, it's a wonder to behold.

Ostensibly the subject is Conroy and his arrogant media bill, and ordinary people rising in revolt to scribble furious editorials for tabloid papers and the lizard Oz (it's the sort of thing average ordinary people like the pond do in their spare time, rage and rant against the dying of the light, and the right of Murdochians to do and say as they will).

Then there's a sideswipe at Nicola Roxon, who apparently has forsaken maternalism for paternalism, and then a resounding hurrah, huzzah, of the kind the fifth form sounded out when they defeated St Trinians in hockey:

Happily, people are not stupid. The voices of ordinary Australians defeated Roxon. They ought to also defeat Conroy.

Yes it was the voices of ordinary Australian photoshoppers who provided the Daily Terror with those splendid images of Stephen "Uncle Joe" Controy that did the job.

Well done ordinary Australian voices. Thank the absent lord Murdochian hacks only channel your voices, like mediums in search of a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gullible enough to believe such tosh ...

You know whenever a bluestocking given a plum commentariat job, while married to a filthy rich banker, starts talking about the voices of ordinary people, you know you're somewhere up the top of the magic Faraway tree, getting a slapping from Dame Slap ...

It's all predictable enough, and it's followed by a generous dollop of praise for big Mal for standing up to the Stalinists, and an even bigger dollop for George Brandis, and it's at this point that the pond began to think it was time to drag out the couch:

Now compare Labor's former attorney-general with the man who will be attorney-general if the Coalition wins the next election. George Brandis is the antithesis of Roxon. He believes passionately in freedom of expression, recognising that without this freedom other freedoms are nothing more than words in a UN covenant. 
 Last month he called on the Human Rights Commission to create the role of "freedom commissioner" to defend free speech. Eminently sensible, it is also an idea that reflects how far we have moved away from freedom. 

Eminently sensible? A freedom kommissar? A freedom Tsar? And this from a man who can't stand Bruce Springsteen and his poignant cries for freedom?

Surely it's a perfectly preposterous and meaningless idea, yet another example of a politician thinking that a bureaucrat and a department and regulation is the answer to it all.

Oh sorry, who on earth knows where that libertarian rant came from ...

As Brandis told this newspaper, the HRC was established to promote a number of human rights instruments. Yet, while the country has been engaged in a vigorous debate about free speech and freedom of the press, "the Human Rights Commission has done virtually nothing to promote the rights recognised in article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights, that is freedom of speech and expression, while it spends an enormous amount of time advocating other rights, in particular in the anti-discrimination area." 

Uh huh. We're deep into the territory of delusion, with nary a jot or a whit explaining how "the Brandis Initiative" (right up there with the Bourne factotum) will actually insist on freedom.

You haf the right to be free, and we will insist you are free. Like it or not.

Will the commentariat and journalists be stripped of their jobs, and ordinary Australian voices be given control of the media? Will the first twenty pages of the lizard Oz be filled with letters to the editor, instead of the servile voices of lick-spittle Murdochian lackeys?

Never mind, because about now it's time that paranoia took over.

And guess the cause of the paranoia ...

Yep, it's the ABC.

What a surprise, or as we Francophiles say, quelle surprise. Bet that caught you on the hop.

Now the pond is always ready to slag off the ABC - witness its vicious assault on Bush Telegraph, and the supine host's acceptance of the argument that fluoride was a chemical that shouldn't be added to the water ... without once mentioning chlorine ...

But it turns out that's nothing when you come to unhealthy obsessions, and paranoia about same, and Dame Slap is deep in the mire of unhealthy obsessions:

Here's another mind game. Imagine if John Howard, who faced a hostile media for much of his time in office ... 

Oops, stop right there. We just wanted to point out a bald-faced lie. Now do go on:

... had proposed Conroy's regime. The ABC would quickly morph to its bolshie role of campaigner. Questions such as: What? Why? How? would be rightly raised on every ABC platform. There would be taxpayer-funded outrage 24/7 at Aunty. 
Instead, this past week there has been a curious quiescence from Aunty about Conroy's aim to regulate the media. 

Oh yes those bolshie lefties, not once have they pointed out the obvious resemblance of Stephen Conroy to Uncle Joe, thereby abandoning sensible argument, while trying to maintain a semblance that Godwin's Law wasn't shattered by the Murdochian empire.

And then the paranoia comes gushing out, like the fluid from a lanced boil (yes, it's an ugly sight):

Freedom of speech is a fundamental tool of the journalistic trade. Yet, with only a few notable exceptions, a close look at the ABC's output last week revealed Aunty's unhealthy obsession with News Limited (publisher of The Australian) rather than a healthy scepticism about government efforts to oversee the content of newspapers. 

Actually speaking of unhealthy obsessions, Dame Slap doesn't seem to notice that the lizard Oz has an unhealthy obsession with the ABC, routinely reporting on the need to privatise it (well so the IPA believes, and so the Murdochians report - Call to privatise the ABC), barely concealing a deep fear that as The Australian keeps making a loss, and as the papers are cut loose from television and flung into the corporate wilderness to survive on their own, there might be a lot of journos queuing up at the ABC asking for jobs.

But back to that paranoia:

Wherever one turned, from the nightly 7pm bulletin, to 7.30 on ABC1, to ABC journalist Barrie Cassidy on News24 on Thursday huffing and puffing about News Limited to AM and PM on ABC radio, the obsession about News Limited, not media regulation, was on show. 
The week finished with a shameful episode of Insiders with Cassidy and panel members Karen Middleton and Malcolm Farr laughing, giggling and smirking while Piers Akerman pointed to the authoritarian nature of government intervention in the content of newspapers. 

They giggled at Akker Dakker. Oh the shame. Laughter and smirking? Oh the horror.

Of course the real question is why everybody isn't laughing at Akker Dakker all the time, because he's such a one-eyed, hysterical, monomaniacal scribbler, such a foaming frothing ranter inclined to abuse and conspiracy theories, that it's impossible not to laugh. It's like being in the company of a Collingwood supporter (insert Manly if living in NSW) on a 24/7 basis ...

Contrary to the hysteria being whipped up by News Ltd - all too familiar these past few years - the sky isn't falling in, and there's no need to be in a state of paranoid agitation.

Even if Conroy and Gillard manage to get through their watered-down proposals - no guaranteed thing - the current fuss about Stalin and Star Chambers is absurd, and reminiscent of the tone about the carbon tax, in which it was proposed that Whyalla would be wiped from the map and a leg of lamb would cost a hundred smackeroos (oh we luvs ya Barners, we luvs ya mate, what a dinky di mouth you have).

It's no big deal, and it certainly wouldn't stop the crusading excess of Murdochians dropping boiling oil on the punters in the moat down below ...

Now if you've ever been a member of the Catholic church, you'll know that persecution and paranoia is followed by martyrdom, and so it is with Dame Slap:

But let's say thanks anyway to these strangely quiet journalists for providing a clear-cut lesson in cant and hypocrisy. And reminding us that when the going gets tough, the tough get going and our wimpy taxpayer-funded broadcaster cringes at defending freedom. 

Oh for god's sake, the tough get going? Richard the dick Nixon? What next? Jibber jabber about not standing the heat and the need to get out of the kitchen?

Wimps? So we're all better off being boofhead thugs like rugby league players or Murdoch commentators?

Phew, lucky the wimps missed the Murdochian clarion call for freedom.

Freedom for big Rupe and family feuding Gina, and Andrew the Bolter abusing whom he likes at a time of his choosing, and in a manner which inhibits any response ...

But none of this would amount to a hill of beans if we didn't have a swipe at the inner city latte set.

Now steady, deep breath, it's a very long par, getting through it without mud and sweat and tears is like running a marathon, but it's a very important par if you want to get your patient file and analysis right, and capture the tone of bitter resentment and hostility and aggro and biff, a bit like a surly drunk outside the Manly pub at midnight:

Finally, let's express gratitude to the silencing dissent crowd. Remember those passionate authors whose books filled inner-city bookstores declaring that Howard and "an inner circle of ideological warriors" (including me) were silencing dissent? How did we manage this? According to Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison, authors of Silencing Dissent, by "pouring scorn on anyone who dares to articulate views associated with the now unfashionable values of social justice and human rights." The actions of the Howard government "put democracy at risk," they protested. It was nonsense. These academics had grown so accustomed to a one-sided debate they were unable to recognise genuine debate. In any case, where are these defenders of democracy now that a minister of the crown proposes specific legislation aimed at curbing free speech by controlling the content of newspapers? Their silence is another lesson in how human rights -- not to mention democracy -- matter only sometimes, when it is politically convenient to defend them. 

It is of course only an irony that right at the moment the world is celebrating - if that's the right word - the tenth anniversary of the war in Iraq, in which the Howard government played a splendid role as a key player in the coalition of the willing, and never no mind the thousands who lined the streets to protest at going off to war to wreck a country - and wrecked and broken it surely was ...

Up against the hundreds of thousands killed, justified and set in motion by lies and deceit, peddled and supported by the media, Albrechtsen has the cheek to propose that somehow the current little dust-up bears some comparison (and we haven't even got on to the Howard government's locking up of people, or the emulation of that policy by the current government).

Never mind, it's time for a splendid bout of cant to wrap up proceedings:

It's true that on some issues, there is a happy blurring of lines between Left and Right. Members of the former camp have been mugged by the reality that the Right was right on issues such as the regressive nature of welfare to the need for an open economy to education reform. But on the most fundamental of issue of free speech, Conroy, Roxon and their echo chambers within the ABC and academe prove that too many on the Left have not yet recognised that the real title deeds of democracy, best described by Howard, are a robust parliamentary system, an independent judiciary and a free and sceptical press.

Well no, actually. Nobody has persuaded the pond that the recent treatment of single mothers is evidence of the regressive nature of welfare, as opposed to the regressive nature of government.

And as for the tosh about an independent judiciary? What happened to the almost weekly rants by Dame Slap about activist judges? Why the sudden change of tone, from someone who flings around the word "hypocrisy" like confetti and rice at a wedding ...

And as for a free and sceptical press? Is that the same as the wildly hysterical and paranoid Murdoch press, always shaking the finger and pointing the bone at the ABC and anyone who disagrees with the Murdochians (frequently treating them to a one page crusade, with all the sparrows farting in the one general direction, in unison, as if dancing and singing under the guidance of an invisible master sitting just off in the wings).

Every so often, the pond wishes it had the style and impact of a Jon Stewart, and that memorable moment on Crossfire, a show which he helped kill:

I wanted to - I felt that that wasn't fair and I should come here and tell you that I don't - it's not so much that it's bad, as it's hurting America ...
So I wanted to come here today and say ... Here's just what I wanted to tell you guys ...
Stop ...
Stop, stop, stop, stop, hurting America. (full transcript here).

Reading Akker Dakker or the Bolter or Albrechtsen in full fulminating mode has the same impact on the pond.

Stop, stop, stop with the paranoid hysteria.

Stop with the childish obsession with, and abuse of, the ABC.

Stop with the relentless tiresome abuse of people who have a different world view, and theoretically according to your jibber jabber about freedom, are entitled to same.

Stop, stop, stop. You're hurting Australia ...

(Below: yes, hate, read daily in The Australian, is very much like a loaded gun).