David Burchell, John Maynard Keynes, pyramids, government expenditure, and sound and fury signifying little

(Above: believing pyramid building to be the way forward for economic recovery, this site is quietly developing plans to sculpt Uluru into the shape of five cascading pyramid shapes. It will require government funding of course, but it will solve indigenous issues in central Australia).

How to write a pretentious newspaper column, as cleverly demonstrated by David Burchell in An economist's laugh, but joke's on us:

1. Start with a fine flurry of purple prose, full of portentous significance:

Today we live, like a colonial outpost in some vast unfamiliar jungle, amid the luxuriant profusion of professional and technical languages, which have spread, like creeping vines, into every crevice of our lives.

2. Having abused the English language with an elaborate excessive almost vinous metaphor, immediately accuse others of doing the same, preferably with a reference to an exotic tribe with a fondness for tearing out still beating hearts:

Prime ministers, premiers and public servants drone on in a mechanical chant that resembles nothing so much as the rites of a long-lost Andean religion. Inasmuch as they wish us to understand what they're saying, it's only by inducting us into the private mysteries of their particular vocation, a territory in which, as they well know, we're on an insecure footing.

3. Recall the old verdant green days of the English vernacular, as spoken by assorted famous writers. Name dropping here is crucial, though whatever you do don't suggest we should return to the days of Chaucer. That would be pushing it:

There are people still living, though, who can recall the day when business people and public officials - even scientists and economists - liked to use some version of that vernacular English which has come down to us from Shakespeare and Donne, Addison and Pope, Thackeray and Dickens, and the rest. After all, the British experienced World War II through the rhetorical updrafts of Churchill's Georgian literary vocabulary, while Americans learned about it through the relaxed Victorian cadences of Franklin Roosevelt. (Even our own Ben Chifley, a more prosaic orator, spent his straitened adolescence immersed in lending-library copies of Plutarch, Gibbon and the Victorians.)

4. Having yearned for the great days of Churchill and relaxed cadences or rhetorical updrafts (perhaps while musing on how Obama is a mere orator, given to fancy speeches but no substance), perhaps it's time to yearn for economic treatises written as great literature, rather than as meaningful economic treatises. Remember, better fine words than actual insight:

Why, in those days even economics tracts could be worth reading, if only for the manner of their writing. A literary critic of today, presented with J.M.Keynes's famous General Theory of 1936, would immediately recognise it, not as a piece of technical writing in the manner of the productivity commission or the reserve bank, but as a literary satire in disguise, after the manner of Voltaire or Swift. Like the best satirists, Keynes could be genuinely outraged in the name of our common humanity, while retaining a robust contempt for most of the actual human specimens who passed his way.

Ah yes, Voltaire and Swift, as fine a pair of minds as you might care to recommend to budding economists.

5. But when someone tries to pass himself off as a wit and a satirist, remember then it's time to excoriate him for his feeble satirical wit. What fun to laugh at Keynes' foolishness, especially as he liked to send up "classical economists" and tell stories about burying money in jars so that people might perform honest labor digging the loot up:

...Keynes the Shakespearian imp suggests that the Treasury might want to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them underground, "and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig them up again". It would be more sensible, no doubt, "to build houses and the like", but hole-digging would be better than the nothing the economists otherwise recommended.

In practice, a good deal of the fiscal stimulus doled out across the Western world over the past 12 months has followed Keynes's light-hearted spirit. Just as for Keynes the pharaohs' pyramids made better public works projects than did railroads, so for us the best form of stimulus is that which gets money into people's pockets the fastest, regardless of its economic or social efficacy.

Under no account should you actually quote Keynes:

Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely pyramid building as well as the search for precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York. Thus we are so sensible, have schooled ourselves to so close a semblance of prudent financiers, taking careful thought before we add to the "financial" burdens of posterity by building them houses to live in, that we have no such easy escape from the sufferings of unemployment. We have to accept them as an inevitable result of applying to the conduct of the State the maxims which are best calculated to "enrich" an individual by enabling him to pile up claims to enjoyment which he does not intend to exercise at any definite time.

Pyramids better than two railways going to the same destination? Well perhaps the meaning is there, along with the celebration of the virtues of having two sets of fibre cables hanging from telephone poles around major cities, or perhaps the pyramids win when we remember what a fine harvester of tourist dollars they've been ever since tourism as an industry was born. Just as war can be a robust activity. But suddenly the satire is clouded, the truth a little harder to see.

No matter. Make light of anything current by thinking of it as pyramid building or digging for bottles:

But then - since electorates are rarely so light-hearted with their money as Keynes was with his - the really important thing is to pretend that these expenditures, devised on the run for the purpose of being spent on the run, should be presented in the loftiest possible terms, as nation-building exercises and education revolutions and the like.

Further, pretty much everybody will be in on the joke, since the most irresponsible and over-geared business person can be bailed out, in the name of public virtue. What could be droller than that?

Well perhaps not so droll as everybody unemployed and out of work and getting droller by the moment as governments stand to one side and do nothing, saying that the irresponsible must be made to go down the gurgler, and take everyone else along with them, as a lesson to us all for allowing the foolish to be foolish (but wait, let's not talk of regulation of the foolish, because that would be oppressive). I guess the lemming theory of economics, that we should all go over the cliff together, shouting at each other that it's all the other's fault, would be a grand literary metaphor. And truly droller than that.

6. Introduce a world weary despairing cynicism as a tonal feature, still replete with laborious breath-taking, nay vertiginous, words:

Like all good jokes, Keynes's satirical sallies on the economics profession were made out of the demands of the moment, in order to justify levels of public expenditure that citizens then found breath-taking and vertiginous, though they may seem like political small beer today. The problem with jokes in this style, though, is that, though hilarious when delivered at speed, they can pall when consumed at leisure.

7. Contemplate doom:

While the federal government is presently enjoying that delicious serendipity which results from doing half-useful things that are also enjoyable to execute, they may find that the Keynesian laugh-line expires sooner than expected. After all, most of the fiscal stimulus has been spent out of money squirreled away over the felicitous years of the past decade. Yet once the money has run out, and the economic world-turned-upside-down has righted itself again, we may have a decade or more of fiscal austerity in which to ponder whether that money spent in bottle-burying haste was indeed spent well.

8. Confirm doom, perhaps by offering up a socialistic vision of community coherence as an alternative, even though some might think co-operative endeavour is little better than organizing society to build pyramids:

Take for instance the acknowledged plight of our school sector, just now the most expensive means of publicly subsidising social inequity known to humankind. Today every school across the nation, rich and poor, functional and dysfunctional alike, has a few freshly mortared brick walls, and a bundle of styrofoam-clad netbooks, with which to console themselves in their isolation. But the pressing need of the school sector, surely, is to harness that enormous public expenditure into some kind of co-operative endeavour, across the borders of the putative sectors, and across the divide that separates the selective student from the comprehensive. Yet, rather than tearing down those Berlin Walls, we're giving them a paint job.

9. Offer up a fading hero, who in his final Wagnerian moments comes to understand that all is bitter in the mouth, an echo of the realization that Keynes had corrupted public economic debate and come to understand his failings, and must shoulder the burden of all that's recently been done in his name, albeit long after his death in 1946:

In his fading years, Keynes increasingly regretted the witticisms of his prime, not least because his satirical spirit had been imitated, ad nauseam, by less gifted wits. In his final published article he acknowledged that classical economics, for all its limits, served a valuable purpose, and that "much modernist stuff, gone wrong and turned sour and silly", had corrupted public economic debate.

10. End with a Shakespearian twist so convoluted and opaque that none will understand and none will disagree, with a double twist pike that both foretells doom and revisits doom:

I doubt he would have recognised 2009 as 1932 revisited. But then, Harlequin wears a dunce's cap, and history plays us all for fools in the end.

And there you have it, the perfect column, which makes no actual reference to the banal, dull, mystifying conceits of current economics, but instead romps through a legion of names, and the literary treasures of John Maynard Keynes, and comes up with a single thought: government expenditure as a rescue package for what currently ails us? I'm agin it.

And remember, plain speaking is the enemy of rotund thinking, just as full-toned sonorous lulling sentences are the way towards a rotund column redolent with yearning for the past and a doom laden fear of the future.

So here's a final thought, no Harlequin, but Macbeth will do just as nicely:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Oh dear.

Colonel Gaddafi, the Swiss and the U.N. goes cuckoo in a week's time

(Above: more Nicholson here, showing an abiding fascination with the Swiss banking system matched only by Australian business folk).

The news that Colonel Gaddafi wants to abolish Switzerland is a heartening development for connoisseurs of fruitloopery.

'Switzerland is a world mafia and not a state,' he said.

'It is formed of an Italian community that should return to Italy, another German community that should return to Germany, and a third French community that should return to France.'

What makes his proposal even richer is that from September 15th, Libya will take over the presidency of the U.N. General Assembly for a year.

There are others who take a jaundiced view of Switzerland, as did Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles in Carol Reed's 1949 film The Third Man, in what's perhaps the most damning and well-known quote about the Swiss and their cheesiness:

Harry Lime: Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Then there's the Reverend Sydney Smith's damning summary:

I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.

Apart from cuckoo clocks and chocolates, Swiss culture doesn't seem to produce much that's distinctive, so it's natural for a superior Scot like Billy Connolly to wonder about a product that' s usually the provenance of poseurs who inhabit urban centres yet pretend they have a vital need for the technology:

I've always wanted to go to Switzerland to see what the army does with those wee red knives.

Well who knows, because removing stones from horses' hooves and corks from wine bottles are becoming lost arts.

There's a bleakness about the place, compounded by the country sitting out World War II and developing a banking system which for generations has been the last refuge of the scoundrel. The Swiss have made a fortune by trading on the corruption of others, while putting a peg over their nose. No wonder Martin Luther saw it as the home of Satan:

In Switzerland, on a high mountain, not far from Lucerne, there is a lake they call Pilate's Pond, which the Devil has fixed upon as one of the chief residences of his evil spirits.

While F. Scott Fitzgerald had an equally bleak vision:

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

Even a late-breaking Larry David got into the act:

Switzerland is a place where they don't like to fight, so they get people to do their fighting for them while they ski and eat chocolate.

While Ernest Hemingway took a dim view:

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

Mark Twain was equally jaundiced:

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

Ernesto Sábato also took a view:

The first time I passed through the country (Switzerland) I had the impression it was swept down with a broom from one end to the other every morning by housewives who dumped all the dirt in Italy.

Of course there's envy, as Jay Leno noted:

Senator John Kerry released his plan today to eliminate the deficit. He said all we have to do is find a really rich country like Switzerland and marry it.

But even the attempts to defend the place founder on a giant rock, or reveal the hidden ugly truth. Cue Samuel Schmid:

There was the joke about Switzerland being an island surrounded by land. This was never true.

What else have the Swiss got? Well there's the right, no the obligation of adult men to carry a rifle, and then never actually get involved in a war, and the device of the referendum, which has sent California broke. While the Swiss and their sordid banks maintain a comfortable richness, broken only by the occasional set piece in a Hollywood blockbuster where a bevy of action stars attempt to rob a Swiss bank.

So it seems by consensus, Colonel Gaddafi's plan will receive universal approval, and it's great he's already filed a motion with the U. N. to get the cuckoo clock cuckooing.

But there's a downside. Sadly it seems it's not just a visionary matter of state on the part of the colonel, there's a slightly vindictive element involved:

Relations between Switzerland and Libya crumbled after Gaddafi's son Hannibal, 33, and his pregnant wife were arrested in Geneva a year ago accused of assaulting a hotel chamber maid.

Now Colonel Gaddafi wants to 'abolish' Switzerland: Dictator files bizarre motion with the U.N. (here's the Daily Mail story).

Even so, Gaddafi, who has ruled Libya as a dictator for the past 40 years, was furious, particularly when he heard an account of what had happened from Aisha, his favourite daughter. According to a witness close to the Gaddafi clan, she told him Hannibal and Aline had been treated "like terrorists" and were held in a prison "worse than Abu Ghraib".

"Honour must be saved," Gaddafi told his daughter.

It is just as well that Libya has renounced its bid to acquire nuclear weapons. "If I had an atomic bomb I would wipe Switzerland off the map," Hannibal is reported to have remarked afterwards. (The Australian, here).

Well the Daily Terror's got into the spirit by mounting a gallery showing how Hollywood stars do Colonel Gaddafi (here).

Jokes aside, in the past year, Libya has cut back oil supplies, and withdrawn more than $8.5 billion from the banks, severed air links, forced several Swiss companies in Libya to close shop, while Gaddafi's refused to meet the new Swiss charge d'affaires in Tripoli, and kept two Swiss businessmen as virtual hostages.

Is this enough punishment for The Sound of Music? Or a sign as peak oil approaches how loons with oil can get away with anything?

Well to be fair, the Swiss didn't have anything to do with mounting that epic celebration of stereotypes, so perhaps Gaddafi has gone too far.

But one thing's certain. The black helicopter brigade are going to be having great fun about the U.N., with Libya holding the reins, and we're only a week away from the circus rolling into town. Hapless Swiss, despairing U.N., cuckoos everywhere rejoicing ...

(Below: the Daily Telegraph treats Gaddafi with the dignity he's earned).

Piers Akerman, the Sunday bash, the tentacles of NSW Labor, Della Bosca and sex in the city

(Above: what does that man and these women know? What can they advise you on? Yep, no need to read on, unless you want to understand sex in the city).

It wouldn't be Sunday for some without Piers Akerman, for others it's always a good Sunday without reading a word of Akker Dakker.

That way they miss out on a monomaniacal relentless rant about the ALP, and an Akker Dakker in strident good form. How's this for an opener for Labor's flawed federal model?

The Rudd Government will have to do more than bar a few dud NSW MPs from entering the federal sphere if it wants to convince voters that NSW Labor’s problems don’t have a bearing on the federal Labor Government.

The federal Labor Government is, if not a clone of the NSW Government, the love-child of the NSW ALP, conceived with the help of the Victorian Left.

Never mind that it's a Queenslander who's actually the PM, and they've been winning the State of Origin with astonishing regularity for years, it's all the fault of NSW power brokers. Which makes me wonder why these powerbrokers - if they've been so successful in winning the federal polls for so many months - have managed so dismally in NSW?

Well Akker Dakker throws around some names - Bob Carr's ex-staffers Bruce Hawker and David Britton, apparently responsible all on their own for the astonishing success of the Morris Iemma and Nathan Rees governments - and now it seems they have swung their weight behind Chairman Rudd, and guided him with an influence little short of Darth Vader helping the emperor.

Well with NSW Labor heavyweight Senator Mark Arbib also thrown into the mix. Governing NSW and Australia is heavy lifting, even for a couple of likely lads.

As for the evidence? Perhaps we should consult the files?

It’s that the Rudd Labor Government, with few exceptions, has lifted the NSW model of government by spin and obfuscation and inflicted it upon the nation.
The past week alone provides enough examples to make a dive into the files unnecessary.

Oh okay, no need to dive into the files, because Akker Dakker has all the talking points in his head, and so he can seamlessly swing into his standard diatribe about the comprehensive failures of Laobr.

There's state housing issue and the huge backflip on the award-modernisation policy and there's the education revolution and there's the wasted stimulus package - lordy even the Greens could do better:

Having wrung $50 million from the federal Government in return for support for its package, the Greens rejoiced in announcing that $40 million would be spent on bike paths, and $1.8 million would be spent to "recruit, train and employ greenhouse auditors’’ and on work experience jobs in the building industry.

Oops, sorry, of course I meant worse, way worse. Out of the $42 billion, they're going to spend $40 million on bike paths, so that loons can cycle around pretending they're getting fit and saving money on petrol, when really they'll only be getting in the road of motorists intent on doing the right thing by petrol companies, middle eastern fundamentalist ratbag suppliers, and the arrival of peak oil.

But won't the bike paths get them out of the way of motorists, you plaintively ask, showing how very little you understand about the stupendous, enormous astonishing wastage happening under Labor. Because at some point these bicyclists will happen upon a main road, and the ensuing catastrophic disaster will be all the fault of the Greens, who happen to be the love child of Senator Arbib and Nathan Rees.

Well truth to tell I'm not sure of the exact parentage, but put it this way, you'd want to be an orphan than have the Greens and Labor as parents. Given the way they can spend 1.8 million on knick knacks and make work jobs.

So what about a rousing finale for the column?

The Rudd Government has even hit a snag with its plan to use every school as an election advertisement, with the Australian Electoral Commission ruling that boastful signs outside schools receiving building funds are in breach of the law and will have to disclaimer stickers attached, be moved or possibly covered up to comply with electoral law.

In each of these examples, spin has dictated the Rudd Government’s policy, not substance.
That spin has kept NSW Labor in office for 14 years, but it is now running down. Australians in other states should look at NSW and ask themselves whether this is the model they think should govern the nation.

Yep, watch the magician, watch the hands. Didn't see it? Happened too quick? Chairman Rudd is Nathan Rees, or vice versa. So how come NSW keeps losing state of origin with monotonous regularity?

Here's my tip. Ask ten people in SA or WA who's the premier ponce in NSW, and I'll bet you get a lot of dud calls. If Akker Dakker thinks smearing Rudd with Rees will work in other states, he's picked the wrong, irrelevant dude. Why not just have a go at Chairman Rudd directly?

Well I guess it's another day, another column, another round of Labor bashing, another dollar in the kitty, but really I felt a little short-changed.

Can I recommend we follow up for dessert with Sorry state of affairs may excuse adultery, Akker Dakker's slightly bizarre take on the John Della Bosca scandal, which is to say a consenting older man having an affair with a consenting younger woman on the assumption of privacy.

Akker Dakker is tormented. He'd really like to nail Della Bosca, but at the same time:

In political terms it is really quite extraordinary that a mere affair has seen an end to a ministerial career in 2009.

Though there has been an upsurge in the number of Australians marrying, taking the numbers to a 20-year high, and though divorce has hit a 17-year low, Australians have generally been prepared to ignore the sexual peccadilloes of their politicians and in some cases - former prime minister Bob Hawke comes to mind - they are even applauded for their sexual conquests.

What follows is some bizarre speculation on the affair, including the notion that the Sex and the City generation subscribe to a more fundamental sense of morality than the entertainment industry believes (so please explain why the show's a runaway hit) or that the woman was so smitten by a politically powerful figure that Henry Kissinger's notion of power being a powerful aphrodisiac must apply (being the Minister of Health in the failing NSW government is a power aphrodisiac? Lordy, what strange times we live in).

And so on, down through narcissism - the pet word for the month - to Della Bosca's motives through to the conclusion that he isn't a rodomontade.

Now don't be alarmed, it's only a cheese eating surrender monkey word for someone given to vain boasting or bluster or bragging speech, but it leads to the best insight of all:

And, while not known to be boastful, if his trysting partner is to be believed he could not help taking her to an office in Parliament House and engaging in the obligatory trophy sex act on the ministerial couch.

Anthropologists would have a field day exploring the origins of this mandatory display of conquest, prowess and power.

Adultery is as old as Moses, indeed, it is startlingly commonplace if one believes the surveys conducted by condom manufacturers.

The deception inherent will always bring a degree of heartbreak to those involved and their families.

Della Bosca has acknowledged and apologised for his “poor decisions” and the embarrassment he has caused the ALP and his family.

He is not the first man to have fallen on his sword.

Oh dear, let's hope that's not the awful pun it seems to be, but after all this, after all the insights from Kissinger through anthropology and Moses to an attempt to dress up the Terror's scandal mongering as in the public interest because Della Bosca missed a plane to Tingha and allegedly helped his girlfriend evade Parliament house security, what's left?

... given the paucity of talent within the NSW Labor Party it is unlikely that he will stay on the backbenches, if he stays in politics after the next election.

That's it? All the talk of Sex and the City and Henry Kissinger and anthropology and Tingha and Moses and trophy sex, and it's all for nothing?

If he hangs around, he'll be baaack ....? And not even a mention of how Della Bosca is responsible for the state and shape of the federal Labor party? Well at least until he got outed.

So it goes, and who will be the boogeyman next week? Which Labor chef intent on ruining the nation with a dastardly mix of union pickles and socialist yak butter will reign supreme? Only Akker Dakker can tell, only Akker Dakker knows ...

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows ... Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh ...!"

"The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay.... The Shadow knows ... heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!"

Gerard Henderson, Andrew Leigh, Joshua Gans, slant in the media and howling at the full moon while wearing steel capped boots

(Above: setting the level and tone for the incisive academic debate to follow).

Could any study of the media convince Gerard Henderson that the ABC isn't a den for craven commie pinko pervert socialists, a dark bat cave full of crazy lefties?

Unlikely. When Professors Andrew Leigh and Joshua Gans recenty published research suggesting Australians journalists tended to be centrist, and that ABC television news had a significant slant towards the coalition during the period 1999-2007, people went on believing what they always believed.

No reason to let a couple of academic wingnuts get in the way of the eternal and correct view of reality.

Professor Gans said that in reaching the results, the researchers had used three methods.

“Our first approach focused on public intellectuals,” said Professor Gans. “Coding up Hansard mentions, we were able to place over 100 public intellectuals on a Labor/Coalition spectrum. Using media mentions of the same individuals, we then tested whether particular media outlets were more likely to quote left-wing and right-wing public intellectuals.

“The second approach analysed journalistic content. We asked five raters to code nearly 300 election stories as pro-Coalition, pro-Labor, or centrist. The third strategy focused on editorial decisions. We had the raters code up newspaper headlines (without seeing the accompanying stories). We also coded up editorial election endorsements,” said Professor Gans. (here).

Clearly they'd got it right in relation to The Age, a notoriously festering cess pit of left wing ideology, so unrelated to reality that it's hard to find a decent loon to write about on a daily basis, but the finding in relation to ABC News was so preposterous, it clearly flung the whole research strategy in to doubt (the full report is available here at the top of page).

What's worse, the findings that most media were largely centrist, that television tended to be the most right-wing medium, and newspapers the most left-wing, were disturbing, but what was truly alarming as that the newspaper rulers (editors and such) were strongly biased, with only 8 of 44 election endorsements over the period 1996-2007 being for Labor.

Well when confronted with these kinds of findings, what to do, how to react? Who better to turn to than Gerard Henderson, whose favorite past time - when not mentioning and burnishing his iconic image of John Howard - is to be a fervent repeater of the news that the ABC is a den of iniquity. Now you might call that a canard but we French lovers known it's a duck. When it quacks like a socialist, walks like a socialist, eats snails like a socialist, it surely is a canard. Vendre un canard à moitié!!!

And how does Henderson respond in his Media Watch Dog, issue no. 26? (here)

Well first he spends a good deal of time reviewing ABC programs for the night of Monday 31st August 2009, thereby showing an unhealthy fixation, almost a compulsion to devour ABC shows which almost matches the bizarre behavior of people anxious to read the work of loons.

So The 7.30 Report is held to produce viewers asleep on their couches, only to awaken to watch Australian Story, which receives this report card:

8 pm. Australian Story takes a full 30 minutes to tell the story of a middle class young man. It’s called “Fly With Me”. He makes paper planes. Wow. It was believed that he had a malignant brain tumour. Sad. He didn’t have cancer and he’s still with us. Hooray. He still makes paper-planes.

At which point you might think 'just switch off the telly' because brain damage, if not brain death, seems the likely outcome - especially if that's the best you can do to send up and traduce a show determinedly aimed, via soft, people-loving human interest stories, at conservative cardigan wearers and librarians.

But no, it's on with Four Corners producing more yawns about an alleged conspiracy in relation to the 7/7 London bombings, involving the recycling of a BBC progam, and a chance to slag off Media Watch because it slagged off the Geelong Advertiser for printing hairsuit instead of hirsute.

Which goes to show that one show's trivial pursuit is certainly the meat and potatoes of the Media Watch Dog scribbler. (But no need to mention the more substantive matters in Media Watch that night because that's just the usual critique of non-stories).

This is followed by a critique of Phillip Adams on Late Night Live, with a long anecdote by Adams reprinted at length, followed by the question does anybody really care? To which the answer is surely no, in which case the full to overflowing intertubes has swollen just tad with more useless trivia thanks to the scribbler's fetishistic recycling of Adams. What is this fixation on men in black, some kind of Tommy Lee Jones or bdsm dungeon thing?

After what's apparently the usual critique of non-stories by the scribbler - Linda Javin's decency in getting whipped when visiting the Hellfire Club in 1993 for Rolling Stone - the scribbler announces a brave decision to award a five paws gong for excellence and a zip paws for trash on the ABC.

Naturally, after handing Emma Alberici a five paws award for a report mentioning the Hitler-Stalin pact (apparently this notorious and well known major historical event is rarely mentioned in the Australian media), a zip paws award is handed out to the ABC Radio news report which called the corruption of the Oil-For-Food program a "Wheat for Weapons" scandal, thereby becoming stooges of Labor spin. Sure that bit of funny business might have helped the tyrant Saddam Hussein, but surely not as much as when we shipped off 107,000 tons of scrap iron to Japan during the period 1939-1941, not to mention plenty of wool and wheat (see here).

Getting a whiff of obsessive compulsive behavior, and way too much attention paid to the ABC?

Well all that is just by way of a hors d'oeuvre for the scribbler's take on the academic study of "media slant", under the extremely objective, non-partisan header The Square-Root of Media Bias, A Full Moon, Some Academics and So On.

Why not start with a cheap shot at the methodology employed by the academics, in the manner of a hairsuit skinhead roaming the streets of Geelong?

Now for a full disclosure. MWD read the Gans/Leigh paper when there was a full moon - or close to a full moon. This may explain MWD’s inability to follow some of the insights of those two insightful academics. Take this insight, at Page 9, for example:

To estimate the political position of each media outlet, we simply estimate a weighted OLS regression, in which the dependent variable P is the share of Coalition mentions by a given public intellectual i in media outlet j in time period t, and the independent variable is a vector of indicator variables for each media outlet:



So that’s pretty clear, then.

[Not really. Are taxpayers paying good money for this sludge or is this all a fake? Ed]

Well that's pretty clever. A joke about the full moon, a joke about an equation, a mention of fake sludge, and it's all done. No need for steel tipped boots, just meeting the academics on their level on a level playing field, and disposing of them with a razor sharp intelligent rebuttal - and did I mention the couple of mentions of how the taxpayers' money was paying for this tripe?

But perhaps you're feeling this is a bit underdone. Well how about this trumping of sordid statistics by valid personal impressions?

In the lead-up to the 2007 election, a majority of journalists - in Canberra and elsewhere - gave the impression that they were opposed to the Howard Government on a range of issues and that, as a result, their coverage was slanted to a leftist or left of centre position. The list includes such subjects as Australia’s’ commitment in Iraq, national security, climate change and the WorkChoices industrial relations changes etc. However, the ANU paper does not even cover these issues. Indeed, at times, the analysis is so vague as to be incomprehensible.

You see "gave the impression" to an individual observer of an objective kind is much more gold standard than the aberrant, incomprehensible mystical full moon gobbledegook of half baked ANU academics intent on statistical observation using mathematical devices so arcane that no man on his fourth beer in a public bar could understand. Which is how their absurd pretense at mathematical precision can be undone by a simple impression - the impression being that it's so vague as to be incomprehensible. To the average duck. And what the average duck doesn't understand surely doesn't matter.

Why bother with an arcane attempt at an overview when you can cherry pick to suit your prejudice? Sure it shows a complete ignorance of statistics and statistical method, but when's that ever prevented a decent impression by an impressionist from being much closer to the truth. Read a novel so you can get closer to the emotional truth. So much better than reading dull history, often written - so I feel - by academic lefties.

So what's the use of taxpayers' money then if it's wasted on aberrant studies when you can always whip up a quick impression?

Throw in a couple more equations to show the transparent absurdity of these absurdist academics - I mean what on earth can you make of muck like this? - and the job is done.

Hah. See. Blithering nonsense. What on earth do they mean? I don't know, so surely it goes without saying, they don't mean anything.

QED. As scientific a demolition job as could be imagined, a hatchet applied to the statistical methodology with unerring precision. So then it's time for a little gay coloring:

Go on. Unfortunately Messers Gans and Leigh did just this. And, unfortunately, The Australian thought that the results of this study - which commenced as an ANU seminar - were worth reporting. This, apparently, is what passes for scholarship in the groves of the ANU.

Yep, it's the standard response nerds get in the school yard when they begin their jibber jabber and end up building something like the intertubes. The scribbler could have just shouted 'bunch of wankers' and performed a wedgie, and he would have elevated the standard of discussion by at least being transparently a basher of academics and intellectuals.

But the funniest thing? While stridently refuting anything that didn't fit with the "impressions" of our scientific observer, it seems the bizarre academics and their perverse study did get it right about The Age.

In any event it was good to see that among the weighted OLS regressions, the variables (dependent and independent alike), the square roots and the not so square roots, The Age - sometimes known as “The Guardian on the Yarra” - held its own as the flyer of the Red Flag. To keep up with “The Guardian on the Yarra” leftist agenda, you merely have to follow the opinion/comment pages each week.

So here's my statistical analysis of that result: The Age: study is correctly proportional to personal impressions, five paws; the ABC: study is inversely incorrect because of square rootage variables, zip paws. And I didn't once crack a root joke. Nota bene.

So then it's off to take a look at The Age, which offers up the opportunity for a few personal impressions of the socialist lefty bias the Melbourne based rag that week, with a piece by Catherine Deveny about religion and God seeming to offer the most offense.

Which perhaps is revelatory, because the response of the scribbler to the statistical methodology deployed in the 'media slant' study is somewhat akin to a creationist confronted by a scientist blathering on in deeply mystical ways about the theory of evolution.

Don't bother me, it's the full moon, and I'm slightly batty, is the only scientific response to scientific gibberish, and the Media Watch Dog plays an adept game. Surely a five paws award, with citation: for maintaining the noble art of Australian anti-intellectualism, balanced by subjective impressions, and aided by a rigorous filter which can spot a leftie hiding under a fig leaf five hundred yard away. Not to mention a refusal by the media to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact at least once a week. Just as no one seems to mention Scrap Iron Bob. Perhaps that's because no one's that intent on reliving ideological wars that are now heading to seventy years old.

If only the scribbler had added a couple of bonus insights: can these academics do the hard yards, and take the ball up the middle, and can they bowl a bouncer, or even light a barbeque in the back yard for the snags and chops? Probably not, and there's your answer. QED.

I suppose you could always read the study yourself, but remember, never let it interfere with your personal prejudices and own solid bias and impressions. That way lies full moon barking mad craziness.

(Below: fearful you've nodded off to sleep, or got distracted, or - gasp - started to watch the leftie ABC or read the red raggers in The Age, how about a few more cartoons. You can catch more Nicholson here, and I know it's a repeat, but eternal vigilance in the matter of the ABC's pinkness is required).

Christopher Pearson, asceticism, hedonism, the Roman church and rites that pass beyond understanding

(Above: Sandro Botticelli's painting based on a story from The Decameron, showing how sooling the hounds on a woman is the surest way to domestic bliss, a theory in relation to women successfully followed by the boys' club Catholic church for a couple of thousand years. You can see the painting in the Prado in Madrid - one of the great collections justifying a trip to Spain - and more on the painting here).

We have a homosexual Catholic priest in the family. He goes about his daily business without fuss (the church these days needs every servant it can get), he has a partner discreetly in the background, and a reasonably comfortable life without any offensive, ostentatious materialism.

I've never asked him about his relationship to the church or his partner or eternal life - where to start - but his relationship with the hierarchy would suggest a 'don't ask, don't tell' strategy is at work. He doesn't work hard at keeping the secret, but he doesn't flaunt it either. And in any case it doesn't take a flock long to work out what's going down.

I remember when a handsome young priest turned up in our local parish and cut a swathe through the female flock, and it only seemed to act as advertising for fresh scalps. Eventually he was moved along, but I'm sure his reputation travelled along with him, and served to pave the way for a lifestyle which really called for the skills of a dinkum Giovanni Boccaccio (and if you haven't read The Decameron, do yourself a favor).

But these kinds of Catholic sagas makes it all the more strange to read Christopher Pearson in The Australian, under the header No regrets about act of faith despite church's woeful state.

For the church is indeed a broad church, which lets in almost anybody (such as the SSPX mob), and which has always seen turf wars between its own brands of liberalism and conservatism. At one time, this conflict was painted across the whole of Europe, these days it's conducted in the cloisters in a much smaller patch of turf.

Usually faith is a matter for private contemplation - a bit like affairs between older men, and younger women, if you're not a politician - but as Pearson celebrates his tenth anniversary entry into the Catholic church, we can see what makes late changers tick - a bit like that famous convert John Henry Newman, who rocked the boat by moving over to the Roman church in his forties.

Newman of course had a friend:

He was a man of marked individuality and Newman paid tribute to him in his Apologia. In The Dream of Gerontius, Edward Elgar's piece based on Newman's poem, the character of the Guardian Angel is considered to be based on St. John...

Newman wrote after the death of Ambrose St John in 1875: "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine."

In accordance with his expressed wishes, Newman was buried in the grave of his lifelong friend, Ambrose St. John. Previously, they had shared a house. The pall over the coffin bore his cardinal's motto Cor ad cor loquitur ("Heart speaks to heart"). Inseparable in death as in life, a joint memorial stone was erected for the two men; the inscription bore words Newman had chosen: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth").

Perhaps our reading for the day should be Matthew 5: 27-28 and wayward men who look at other men:

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a man to lust after him hath committed adultery with him already in his heart.

I keed, I keed. But there is, I think, a certain tendency in the male club that is the Catholic church that reminds me of the conditions in boys only private schools in England, as one friend evoked for me the pleasure of mutual masturbation by the lads after the cry of 'lights out'.

But back to Pearson:

Despite my apprehensions that Catholicism wasn't going to be a bed of roses, it was clear to me that if I wanted to return to the practice of the faith, there was nowhere else to go. I could never have been happy as a gay Christian -- with or without a rainbow sash -- because it always seemed to me a contradiction in terms.

There was no getting around the fact the New Testament said we were all meant to be chaste or monogamously married and I had reluctantly concluded that St Paul was right about homosexual sex.

Well of course he would think that, and St. Paul continues to exercise a baleful influence on conservatives in the church, whereas I tend to favor Plato:

Homosexuality is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love - all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce. (here, where you can also link back to the controversies surrounding John Boswell).

Never mind. Pearson couldn't see much in the alien world of the Eastern Orthodoxy, and reading Newman had persuaded him the Anglican tradition was flawed, especially its tendency to ignore the more inconvenient aspects of patristic theology:

Aside from the fact belief in the resurrection had become optional, Anglicanism was beset by strange, divisive fads.

For example, given that a male priesthood had always been a distinctive element of Judaism, preserved in the new covenant by Christ at the Last Supper, ordaining women was ultra vires. In the face of nearly 2000 years of continuous tradition, nothing 80s feminism had to say on the subject could be in the least persuasive. It was perverse and ahistorical to see the theological question of holy orders through the prism of equal opportunity, as some sort of entitlement.

Not to mention the benefits of keeping control of the boys' club by the boys. And as for prism, how handy that only men have that direct connection to god, and women can only get there by going through the man, not that we're some sort of strange handed down male entitlement theory on how the world should work.

Some of my friends said at the time that I must have crossed the Tiber for the sake of beautiful music and ceremony. But as Gerard Manley Hopkins told his family in reply to similar charges, if it had simply been a matter of aesthetic preferences, the Church of England would always have been far more congenial. Hopkins deplored the kitsch that mostly characterised Catholic devotional life in England then. Heaven only knows what he would have made of the banality of the present-day English liturgy.

So it's not truth is beauty, beauty truth, but all the same banality and kitsch deserves a lashing? Well Hopkins had his own particular issues:

Some contemporary critics believe that Hopkins's suppressed erotic impulses played an important role in the tone, quality and even content of his works. These impulses seem to have taken on a degree of specificity after he met Robert Bridges's distant cousin, friend, and fellow Etonian Digby Mackworth Dolben, "a Christian Uranian". Hopkins's biographer Robert Bernard Martin asserts that Hopkins’s meeting with Dolben – on the occasion of the boy's 17th birthday – at Oxford in February 1865, "was, quite simply, the most momentous emotional event of [his] undergraduate years, probably of his entire life". (here, and if you're unfamiliar with the term Uranian, a link there will take you to a more detailed explanation, but let's just say the notion of gender stretches).

Hopkins was completely taken with Dolben, who was nearly four years his junior, and his private journal for confessions the following year proves how absorbed he was in imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts of him.

Getting the picture here? Newman, Hopkins ...

Never mind, Hopkins is an interesting, if tortured poet, and his work is freely available on the intertubes. Back to Pearson:

What I most wanted was not beauty, crucial though it is, but certainty: immutable doctrine and valid sacraments. As an Anglican, the closest I had come to "the peace which passes all understanding" had been through the sacraments: in the confessional and at the altar rail. By my late 40s it felt like time to come back to them.

Well sadly this is the same motivation for any other conservative religion. In the face of a hostile, uncertain, always and rapidly changing world, with death the only certain outcome, what will certainty? And perhaps pie the sky, an after life in paradise, and as a bonus for members of certain boys' clubs, 72 virgins, eighty thousand servants and a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and ruby (though I start to get worried as to whether the eighty thousand servants have also each scored 72 virgins and eighty thousand servants. The implications of this kind of pyramid scheme are mind boggling),

Never mind. If you don't want the 72 virgins, you can always settle for asceticism:

Making a commitment to regular examination of conscience was unexpectedly therapeutic. It led me to trade in my double bed for something more austere, observe the Lenten fast and try, for the most part, to avoid low bars. I read again the Confessions of my patron saint, Augustine of Hippo, who had famously prayed: "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet", and knew how he felt.

But wait, it seems that asceticism is just one short step away from blatant hedonism:

The welcome I got, especially from people in the Latin mass community, was a warm one. Mostly Irish and working class, its gatherings often involve shucking oysters or shelling prawns, washing them down with Guinness and singing folk noir ballads, as black in their way as Nick Cave's, about convicts, moonshine and infanticide. The same men and a bunch of their home-schooled children thought nothing of driving 100km each way to sing anthems by William Byrd in an Anglican church at my mother's funeral last year.

Well whatever floats your boat, I say, and if Guinness and oysters is austerity, then bring it on in lashings and oodles.

Having come from a cosseted middle-class background and a career in publishing, I had not seen their kind of piety and their respect, bordering on veneration, for the clergy, despite a shared conviction that the church has been going to hell in a handcart since Vatican II. Because the overall standard of preaching in Catholic churches here has been woeful for as long as anyone can remember, the congregation in the churches I frequent tend to tune out during the sermon.

And I guess the way asceticism and hedonism can go cheek by jowl, so too veneration of the clergy can go hand in hand with the notion that the church has been going to hell in a handbasket since Vatican II. Sob. It was the loss of the Latin, you see, never mind that the pious platitudes of the average cleric have rung down through the ages as worthy of inclusion in the great encyclopaedia of dullard talks, while nodding off in church as been standard since the days of Mr. Pooter:

We stayed till four, and the walk home was remarkable only for the fact that several fools giggled at the unpolished state of my boots. Polished them myself when I got home. Went to church in the evening, and could scarcely keep awake. I will not take port on the top of beer again. (The Diary of a Nobody here)

But back to Pearson, in case you're having trouble keeping awake:

There is another strand, Irish in origin and much less appealing, still heavily represented in contemporary Catholicism. I'm talking about the lace curtain brigade. They tend to a continental form of Puritanism called Jansenism, are obsessively concerned with the sins of the flesh and pride themselves on their instinctual anti-intellectuality and indifference to music. Frances O'Brien, in the ABC TV series The Librarians, epitomises the type. Still, say what you will about Jansenists, at least they are in no doubt about the reality of evil. Many Catholic clergy don't seem to take the notion of sin and its consequences seriously any more. I am sick of going to funerals where the deceased are spoken of as though they are already in heaven and have no further need of our intercessions. Typically the celebrant wears white vestments, rather than customary black. The coffin, like a pharaoh's, is littered with grave goods for the journey -- a football scarf, a stubby and reading glasses -- rather than a pall. Make no mistake. Father O'Bubblegum, Auberon Waugh's caricature of trendy clergy of the 80s, is alive and well in the Australian church.

Dearie me, well I'm not certain where that leaves the Pellite heretics, but is there a quest here for persecution and perhaps even a persecution complex?

When I converted, as an adherent of the Latin mass I became a member of a minority, as marginalised and persecuted as the first generation of out-and-proud gays. In fact, it was a lot like reliving the 70s. I also got the distinct impression that a number of acquaintances in the hierarchy had been more cordially disposed towards me in my unregenerate middle age. Perhaps they wondered whether it was really necessary for me to make what pastoral care jargon calls "lifestyle sacrifices". All I can do is quote another of Muggeridge's paradoxes: "One of old age's pleasures is giving things up."

Well I'm glad all this works for Pearson, even if it means that he has to suffer the horror or reliving the seventies (do they have the Bee Gees on heavy rotation as part of the punishment), but somehow it doesn't work for me, nor would it work, I suspect, for the priest who in the family, who has a much more sensible balance between asceticism, hedonism, redemption and the reality of ordinary, human living.

And perversely, I can't give up reading Pearson, though I do wonder how anybody could take his prescriptions and nostrums seriously, at least with regard to the way the world works, or how people should live their lives.

Let's just say I'll stick with the double bed, thank you very much ... and let everyone follow their dream to whatever corner of the pond it might take them, because we all lead strange lives, and that's about the only enduring, wondering, wonderful comfort as we all head towards the inevitable conclusion ...

Paul Kelly, Father Christmas, cracks in the pavement and exhaustion induced by punditry and politicians

(Above: Father Christmas pointing the way ahead towards endless punditry, political weariness and never ending structural reform).

The daily business of life can become wearing, and nothing is more wearing than the business of punditry.

When the headlines are wearing, you have to match the pace. So today Belinda Neal breaks her silence to effectively say nothing in a dignified way (Why Della is a top bloke: Neal breaks her silence) Which surely deserves a dignified silence in response, since politics as soap sage is best left to daytime television.

Elsewhere in the same rag Nathan Rees vows he won't be worn down, boosted by the mortal wound to his rival John Della Bosca (A year on, Rees vows he won't be worn down). So I've vowed I won't be worn down by Nathan Rees, state labor and its endless capacity to induce a sense of crisis by not doing anything useful.

And what's any of this got to do with the good governing of NSW? Nothing much, except to reinforce the view of politics as gladiatorial entertainment, with a brave woman on one stand and Nathan Rees doing a Rusty Crowe on the other.

What we need is a high priest in the corner squawking of doom and gloom, and warning that any good news is just a prelude to bad, nay disastrous news. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it, so cue Paul Kelly in The Australian, under the header Swan, Tanner set rules for the next poll.

Professional, eternal, exhausting anxiety requires long term vulnerabilities and endless reform. Such that you might get reform exhaustion along with pundit exhaustion:

This highlights two truths about the impact of the global financial crisis: that Australia has resisted the downturn more successfully than any other rich nation, but this event has exposed our vulnerabilities and demands a vigorous long-run reform agenda.

Which reminds me of my favorite line in for narrators in uplifting government documentaries. Much has been done, but much remains to be done. To which of course you can add, let's roll up our shirtsleeves (remembering women didn't count) and work together for a brighter future.

Yet it wasn't so long ago that the same pundits were in the business of predicting the GFC would see the end of the world as we know it. Now that we're struggling along, with at least three of the four cylinders firing, what's left except to blather on about the exposed vulnerabilities and the need for a vigorous long-run reform agenda, whatever the hell that might mean. Except it sounds serious, even solemn, like castor oil, maybe not nice tasting but for our health.

Kelly spends his time recounting the different visions of Australia going forward, but his very efforts produce the kind of eye glazing his warnings are supposed to prevent. Because it's all based on the mantra that doom might very well be just around the corner, waiting for us and we don't know or care about it:

Labor's problem is local complacency. The Australian public has not the slightest comprehension about the tribulations affecting the rest of the developed world, which Australia has avoided.

Which of course is an heroic assumption, based on the notion that Australians at large have no interest in or understanding of the rest of the world, or no notion that the United States for example is still struggling and in social and economic turmoil at the moment.

Really it's an assumption designed to reinforce - by way of contrast - how wise and successful our leadership has been in not sharing this kind of simple-minded ignorance:

And Labor strategists fear such complacency will deny them political capital from this economic achievement. Meanwhile Tanner reminded this column: "The government's stimulus strategy is directed at short-term economic activity but also at long-range productivity improvement." This opens the door to another narrative. Because he is responsible for spending restraint and deregulatory reform, Tanner puts his stress on long-run structural changes.

In his speeches and blogs on the crisis Tanner argues that Australia's Father Christmas era of excess cash and big surpluses is finished.

Sob. They're killing Father Christmas. And as we all know there's no Mother Christmas. But we have to go on changing and reforming in an endless cycle of adaptation and adjustment and change and ... help, who can guide us through this relentless never ending trauma of punditry, politics and potential disaster? Can I even take a walk in the street, in the expectation that the tar will hold me up?

His theme: don't get complacent, don't be fooled by Australia's reprieve, beware the cracks beneath the surface.

No Santa Claus, and not even the tar can be trusted. The bloody council. I warned them about the tar they were using.

And stretching endlessly towards the horizon and a setting sun, I can see vulnerabilities of a particularly dangerous and entrenched kind:

For Tanner, the resources boom has concealed Australia's vulnerabilities: "a deteriorating productivity performance, an entrenched, very large current account deficit, a pretty ordinary household savings rate and a very mediocre export performance".

This is a serious list of defects with overtones that have plagued Australia during its economic history.

The question for Australia is whether the legacy of the global crisis will be a delayed shock that exposes such structural flaws.

Deteriorating vulnerabilities, entrenched cracks beneath the surface of the tar, people refusing to put their savings into superannuation to watch it being stripped away, a mediocre export performance as the world loses interest in kangaroo meat, such a serious lift of defects plaguing us that the legacy of shock will surely lead to entrenched structural delays of comprehensive incoherent inertia.

Well we'll ignore all that at our very peril, which might be so perilous that it might well be life threatening unless we propose a central question, which might be called the central cliche, which begs consideration of central issues, which might well be mixed, but perhaps by hand rather than in a mix master:

Tanner argued: "There is a mixture of issues which we ignore at our peril and always our economic policy needs to be informed by the central question: What will we be selling to the rest of the world in 10 or 15 years?"

You mean kangaroo meat isn't going to cut it?

Well like as not I'll be dead in fifteen years, so go talk to the hand. And if we can't dig up coal and iron ore, I suggest a new line of business - exporting politicians and pundits and blather to the world. Sure there'd be fierce competition from the Irish, but their economy is down the tube, and they couldn't handle the heat generated by our finest minds.

But wait, there's even more problems looming up ahead, so that we have to have central themes in answer to the central questions, which require a strengthening in case of a weakness because of the hidden cracks in the tar, which if you step on them will result in a bear springing out and eating you:

Yet, as Rudd and Swan know, the challenge for Australia is to save more, improve productivity and strengthen its export performance. The debate about structural reform cannot be submerged and must became a central theme in Labor's election next year.

Structural reform. Always with the reform, and the strengthening and the saving and the improving and the submerging, or we're all doomed by our exposed vulnerabilities. Fear is the answer, fear is our strength. And if you go down in a submarine, submerge so to speak, beware the machine that goes ping.

So naturally it wouldn't do for Kelly to finish up without consulting the gloomy delphic oracles on the other side, and of course they're laden with warnings and bad news, which might not be bad news provided they get into government instead of the other mob:

At the same time Hockey warns that Labor's fiscal repair job can rely on only three mechanisms: spending cuts, asset sales and higher taxes. Unsurprisingly, he is predicting higher taxes. "We believe that higher taxation is not inevitable," Hockey says. It is, he predicts "the recourse of lazy Labor governments". If Labor hikes selective taxes for health reasons the opposition will relate this back to the imperative of budget repair. The final step in the opposition's argument is that higher productivity is the key to better performance. So it finishes on the same platform as the Rudd government. It would be heartening to think this presages a 2010 campaign about economic reform. This should be the logic flowing from the global crisis, but that would be a heroic assumption.

Well you know - and this is an heroic assumption - it would be heartening to think that the political debate wouldn't be shaped by such a lazy recourse to labored musings on threats, warnings, prophecies and a public which continues to fail its political class by being ignorant and refusing to do the things expected of them, like save like sheep so they can be regularly shorn.

Because if the mantra of higher productivity, for example, is such an important aspect of life, the first thing we should do is abolish the likes of Kelly - perhaps all newspapers - so we can get down to the daily grind without fear mongering or worrying whether the world will continue to be going around in fifteen years.

Because for all its high flown talk of structural reform and vulnerabilities, the real message in Kelly's column is a simple one: you're all doomed if you don't vote for this mob, who know what's going down, as opposed to the other mob, who don't have a clue.

These days anxiety attacks attempted by attendant lords clucking over chicken entrails and warning of doom and gloom in the future wash off the back, and a new rule should be instituted.

If you have no real insights to offer, no genuine sense of where the world is heading, then instead of sending words spinning around lazily in the washing machine hoping they'll end up clean and sparkling, don't bother to write the column.

Because not once does Kelly ever explain the economic reform or the structural vulnerabilities requred outside of the blather of pieties that have been doing the rounds for the last twenty years: save more, improve productivity and strengthen exports.

Well I've decided I'm going to rely on Father Christmas. Yes, there is a Father Christmas, Virginia, I know there is ... and as a back up, you won't ever catch me stepping on a crack in the tar or cement ...

I expect these two structural reforms, designed to guard against long term vulnerabilities, to be implemented immediately. Make it so Spock, and beam me up Scotty.

(Below: after reading Paul Kelly, Father Christmas showing us where we're headed. Dammit, et tu Santa Claus. Time for a war on Christmas).

Steve Fielding, binge drinking, prohibition, possible solutions, and have another one on me

(Above: prohibition. The only way to stop binge drinking and save the Australian film industry?)

Well I can sleep safe and sound tonight. Cue Steve Fielding:

Last week, when I asked the readers of The Punch for a solution, there were some comments which suggested that I wanted to turn Australia into a nanny state.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. And just so we’re crystal clear I don’t want to or ever plan to introduce prohibition.

Yep, how's that for reassuring. He doesn't want to introduce prohibition.

There's a downside. No Al Capone, no Lucky Luciano, no Bugsy Siegel, no Dutch Shultz, no Frank 'the Enforcer' Nitti, and dozens more. Not even a decent St. Valentine's day massacre.

Which in turn means that the Australian feature film industry will go on missing an audience. After all, look how Underbelly turned around Australian produced television drama. With the crime and the sex and the tits and the tits and the tits. Yep, it's on with the earnest introspective dramas about lost souls in this harsh cultural desert.

As for the rest of the column, published in The Punch, under the header No silver bullet in the binge drinking debate?

Fielding seems to spend most of his time explaining how he can't think of anything that might work.

Well he does wring his hands:

...I think state and federal governments need to act in some way to address our binge drinking culture.

I know some readers of The Punch are worried about alcohol restrictions infringing on our free society. To them I say sorry, but something needs to be done. We have laws for a reason, and that reason is to protect ourselves from venturing too far and doing too much harm to society.

Something needs to be done, we need to act in some way! Yes!! But how?

Apparently some readers suggested deregulating alcohol restrictions and lowering the drinking age, as a way of taking the gloss off drinking.

No, says Steve, that's not a good idea. It's a cultural problem, that needs action to produce responsible drinking. And the tax hike on alcopops - which Fielding voted against - doesn't address the cultural problem.

Hmm. Thinking cap on, and thinking hard. What about closing times?

Many other suggestions were left as well, but sadly many will be hard to implement. I read time and time again the call for earlier closing times. This is an idea which I think on the surface has merit, but will be hard to implement given public concerns.

If they don’t like it, then it might not have the desired affect. However, it certainly is an idea both state and federal governments should consider when looking at addressing the alcohol toll.

Hmm, hard to implement, but consider it. Perhaps closing time at 6 pm, so we can return to the good old days of the six o'clock swill, as celebrated in Wake in Fright. By golly, those lads knew how to binge drink, we could see a return to dinkum Aussie manhood.

What about advertising?

I think Imogen had a good point with her approach of making drinking ugly. This is something which has worked well with smoking. The alcohol giants like to make their drinks look sexy and advertise them as such.

Okay, I'll have another sip of the red. Gee, that makes sense, drinking is so ugly, so why do I feel so hysterically fine and up?

However, if there was a campaign which did the opposite it could break the cultural link between Australians and the need to binge drink. But the question which needs to be answered is what sort of campaign would work best? A positive campaign like Slip Slop Slap, or a negative one like that with the road toll. Both I believe are worth exploring further.
The suggestion the responsible service of alcohol laws aren’t enforced is something I’ve heard plenty of times. I have been told by many people that they have never seen anyone turned away from a bar for being too drunk. That’s despite the majority of people in a nightclub being well intoxicated at 3am.

A positive campaign like sip, slurp, slop and slobber? That might work. Or how about waving a pinkie at a drinker? A pinkie drink campaign. If you drink too much your penis will shrink, or your face will wrinkle (a killer for women).

As for responsible service of alcohol, and no one ever having seen it go down, can I just say proudly that I've been in a group turned away by a responsible barmaid, at her personal peril. Well done dearie, and yes it does happen, but maybe not so much in nightclubs, but just how many has Steve Fielding been in to check? Perhaps I go into a higher class of pub, but the pubs I know tend to do the best they can - except for the ones infested by jocks and football players. Ban jocks perhaps? Nope.

So are we being too soft on nightclub and bar owners? Are the State Government’s doing enough to enforce the law? Would the alcohol toll be reduced if the law was enforced? It’s a possibility. The idea of tougher penalties is one that could be look at by both state and federal governments.

Well I guess that's a leap forward. Blame the nightclub and bar owners rather than suggesting the actual drinkers taking responsibility for their actions. And being penalized if they get aggressive and violent rather than pleasantly drunk.

Right. Who else can we blame?

Jack from Perth wrote:
“Its soft sentencing and weak cops that cause violence. In Perth, on Murry Street, a police officer will gladly give you a $150 fine for having an open bottle of wine on the street but once a fight breaks out he is no where to be seen.”

So unfair. Carrying an open bottle of wine around in the street like a harmless drunk and getting done when you're just setting a civilized example.

Right, it's the cops and the judges. Silly bloody cops don't want to be glassed and take a powder, and the judges hit the drinkers with muffins. How craven. All their fault. But it doesn't quite convince Steve:

It’s an interesting point which Jack makes and one which should be looked at. On the surface there could be merit in tougher penalties. But when do restrictions become to much?

Oops, I can feel a few votes slip sliding away.

So where does all this leave us?

Well I would have thought absolutely bloody nowhere, up shit creek without a paddle, or even a flagon of sherry or a cask of red or a six pack of whatever.

One thing sure is clear - there is no silver bullet to solving our culture of binge drinking or alcohol-fuelled street violence. But that doesn’t mean governments should give up because it’s all too hard.

No silver bullet, but don't give up. It might be too hard but we shouldn't think it's too hard just because it's too hard for Steve and the readers of The Punch.

I think one program which could go a long way to helping solve some of the problems on our streets is the ‘Just Think’ program. It’s a program which was started by the Geelong Football Club and the Geelong Advertiser is one I hope to take to the Federal Government to get more funding.

That's what we need - a football led recovery. For Sydney can I suggest a campaign featuring the Eastern Suburbs Roosters, Cronulla Sharks and Manly. Way to go guys, show us how it's done.

It’s designed in a way which doesn’t stop people from drinking, but more getting them to think before they drink and think before they act. It’s a program which gets people talking and thinking about the consequences of binge drinking, not just for them but for the community. It now has the backing of the eight clubs involved in the AFL finals, and I think through them it can send a pretty positive message to our youth.

A positive message! Yes that's what we need. I'll drink to that! Here's to a positive message. Gee that was sweet. Think I'll have another. Thanks Steve, looking good, feeling good, have another old digger old chum, maate, maate ...

And as well as not introducing prohibition, I think we can safely bet nothing will be done about binge drinking in the life of this parliament, at least if Steve Fielding is any guide.

(Below: no, not a bunch of friendly Australians relaxing after a good night out on the turps, but the St Valentine's Day massacre. Perhaps this is the way to sort out binge drinkers?)

Levi Johnston, Sarah Palin, Vanity Fair, interlopers and spoilers and how to charge for slim pickings

(Above: Vanity Fair's teaser trailer available on their site).

Gossip about the famous is a sure fire best seller, and Sarah Palin is a gossip's delight.

But the revelations by Levi Johnston in his new sitcom pitch for "Life with the Palins" raises some interesting questions about how well the media might stick together when one team gets an exclusive and the other teams get snarky.

Vanity Fair is the rag which has delivered the goods, an exclusive piece by Levi Johnston, and in its online version, it's offered up a sneak preview under the header Levi Johnston: "Me and Mrs. Palin".

It also offers a behind-the-scenes video of Mark Seliger's photo shoot with the plucky Alaskan lad, but it seems like this is all just bait on the hook, designed to send people rushing off to buy the October issue, which hits newsstands in New York and LA on September 2 and nationwide on September 8th.

Amongst the tasty tidbits:

Sarah was sad for a while. She walked around the house pouting. I had assumed she was going to go back to her job as governor, but a week or two after she got back she started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make “triple the money.” It was, to her, “not as hard.” She would blatantly say, “I want to just take this money and quit being governor.” She started to say it frequently, but she didn’t know how to do it. When she came home from work, it seemed like she was more and more stressed out.

For this I should buy the magazine? To learn more?

In the meantime, Gail Collins in The New York Times has clearly purchased the magazine, and done a gloss on the article under the header The Revenge of Levi, which opens "For the first time in my life, I feel sympathy for Sarah Palin".

Collins proceeds to dump on Johnston from a great height as she works her way through the domestic politics in the Palin family, as interpreted by Johnston. It sounds like a train wreck waiting for a more full expression of itself on Jerry Springer. Or perhaps an opera featuring Jerry Springer and Levi.

About the only thing that gets Collins excited is Johnston's claim that Palin doesn't know how to shoot a gun, and since that seems to be one of Johnston's few life skills, she gives him credit as a potentially trustworthy source on the matter.

But my interest is in the matter of claim jumping. Here's Vanity Fair making a pitch for subscriber and buyer dollars, and along comes Collins to steal their thunder.

Put her borrowings up alongside the bait offered online by Vanity Fair, and you get a 'no thanks, this is private family stuff', of no interest or relevance to political debates, unless of course you think of politics as an extension of the entertainment game (as the Daily Telegraph did, when they purported public interest in John Della Bosca's love life, when really it was just a chance to dig into the business of an older consenting adult making out with a younger consenting adult in what really is private business).

And next thing you know, The Age has picked up the Collins' piece, and given it a new header, just to show that the subbies are hard at work generating original Australian content. This time it's Boyfriend scorned shoots mouth off but misses the target.

So they too are spoiling the broth for Vanity Fair, with a story filling up their own pages, which is in any case only a click away in the New York Times for someone able to complete free registration and use a mouse.

Now down the track when everyone wants to start charging for content, how is all this filching and cross linking going to be brought under control? And how is the desire to trump a rival's story going to be abandoned, against the instinct of every columnist seeking a quick ramp up on a pre-existing story (as I'm doing right now, by conflating Vanity Fair and The New York Times).

Already most of these publications don't provide links to rival stories - why allow a reader to stray off site when you can keep reader reading your own version of the story, and hopefully then keep them inside your tent. And each want their own exclusives, and hate their rivals getting ahead in the game.

And yes if you want to look further this is not an isolated bit of action in relation to this steory. See Excerpts from Levi Johnston's Vanity Fair Interview, released in Time on September 2, 2009, with an obligatory tip of the hat to VF, or similar short rips such as US News & World Report's piece by Robert Schlesinger The Media Loves Sarah Palin, Thanks to Levi Johnston and Vanity Fair, who does coverage of sundry media takes on the story, and so on down the line, with a google search for "Levi Johnston Vanity Fair" turning up some 713 related news articles at time of writing.

When the story's hot, it spreads across the intertubes like a case of measles. So how to inoculate, how to prevent the spread of the virus, how to keep the exclusive exclusive and charge the punters for the content, and not have spoilers and interlopers turn up to ruin the party?

It'll be interesting to see what answer News Corp comes up with in the next six months, but me, I don't have a clue.

They'll have to do better than Vanity Fair. No sale here, not when I've had the pickings from a dozen other supplier, and they came up slim ...

But just in case you're beguiled, here's what to look for on the newsstands ...