Madeleine Bunting, and yet another militant aggressive New Christian ranting and railing at atheists ...

(Above: believers in the United States taking a step back from science, and creationism, and instead offering up myth-making so they can earn praise from Madeleine Bunting ps the kids go for the dinosaurs).

It took The Sydney Morning Herald only a couple of days to dig up Madeleine Bunting's Atheists win a battle but may lose the war from The Guardian, and once disinterred, to offer it a special plot in their very own National Times section.

Perhaps they hoped a change of header from The Guardian's God is attracting more debate than ever would distract readers' attention from the faint hint of rigor mortis, but truth to tell, The Guardian's header is more useful than the SMH's completely useless effort, which takes a piece of militant gibberish from Bunting and turns the debate into a war.

Speaking of war, sometimes distracted subbies should just be taken out the back and shot.

Bunting's effort is otherwise an undistinguished affair, another attempt by the Herald to keep the new crusades and religious wars trotting along as a way of keeping their readers slavering and slobbering with indignation.

Her main flurry of floozies is to talk about New Atheists and New Atheism, which makes as much sense as talking about New Catholicism or New Anglicanism, or New with secret ingredients herbs and spices Chicken.

When underneath the feathers the chooks are still the same, and have been so for a very long time. Well maybe not the Anglicans, since they were a handy way for a king to score a divorce ...

Bunting also exhibits other peculiarities common to the domestic gallus gallus journalist, often known as New Journalists practising New Journalism (never mind that it was 1964 when Tom Wolfe first got his kandy-kolored tangerine-flake story into Esquire).

The usual habit of these barnyard fowls is to cluck around, scratching for a tasty worm or two, berating these suddenly omnipresent New Atheists for a lack of logic, while displaying sundry examples of a sterling lack of logic themselves.

Back to that piece of gibberish about a war going on, and someone winning, as if death is some kind of sweet victory.

After berating Dawkins for his rationalist complacency, invoking philosophers and Jonathan Swift, Bunting lets loose with this:

Perhaps New Atheism's publishing success is a case of winning a battle and losing the war - the main religions are currently experiencing massive expansion across most of the world. One of the biggest drivers of growth is China; by 2050 it could be the biggest Muslim nation, and the biggest Christian one.

Which proves what exactly? That might is right, and that truth can be arrived at by numbers, and that the country once ruled by Mao, in the tradition of the sons of Heaven, those divine rulers, is now heading off to a different kind of schizophrenia where Christians, Muslims and Falun Gong contest for the Chinese soul?

Assuming of course that there is a war, since I really don't give a toss what others believe in, no matter how deluded or crackpot, provided it doesn't get in the way of a civil, decently secular, religion separated from state society.

Then Bunting charges on to all the other third world countries that are leading the way to increased and intensified religiosity, and the future being very religious. Yippee, go Iran, go go, go go Iran. Oh joy of joys, militant Christians v militant Islamics. The new thousand year crusade.

Bunting is terribly worried about how atheists will deal with this rush to religiosity:

To the sceptical Westerner, this is a lonely and unintelligible prospect. So, which of the defences of God on my bookshelf are going to help explain this enduring appeal?

Unintelligible? You mean deluded crackpots drinking the kool aid in Jonestown is unintelligible? Or is it just the mystery of crackpots drinking wafers and wine and thinking they're munching a bit of Christ's flesh, followed by a nice chaser of blood. Cannibalism worthy of a New Guinea tribe anyone?

Never mind, then it's on with the myth-making to explain the enduring appeal:

Start with Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth: ''we are meaning-seeking creatures'' who ''invent stories to place our lives in a larger setting . . . and give us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life has meaning and value''.

Uh huh. Well that explains Hollywood, and no doubt Cecil B. de Mille. But can it explain and forgive Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments?

That helps explain why the bestselling religious book in the US is The Purpose Driven Life. The faithful are not mugging up on critiques of reason for an argument with New Atheism, but turning to religion to offer meaning and purpose.

And who's stopping them? Provided these militant Christians and Islamics forsake their inquisitions (not to mention the bombings), and leave off the persecution of innocent, harmless, amiable atheists. They can have their meaning and purpose, I just need a mechanic who knows how to fix the computer in my car.

Then Bunting delivers up a doozy:

The great mistake the atheists made is to claim that religion started out as a clumsy stab at science - trying to explain how the world worked - and is now clearly redundant. That misses the point entirely: religion is not about explaining how an earthquake or flood happens; rather it offers meanings for such events. When someone is killed in a car accident, Western rationality is good at analysing how the brakes failed and the road curved, but has nothing to say about why, on that particular day, the brakes failed when it was you in the car: the sequence of random events that kill. This search for meaning is part of what drives the religious spirit.

Dear lord, where to start? As if the search for meaning somehow doesn't include the search for an explanation of how earthquakes and floods happen. As if religion isn't a clumsy stab at science, and creationists nee intelligent designers still keep clumsily stabbing away, as some try to explain how god overlooked dinosaurs in the text that explains everything.

Bunting doesn't even have a decent handle on mysticism, which might, in a zen Buddhist way, help her to understand how atheists can indeed have spiritual experiences, and sometimes be moved by inexplicably irrational forces like love (better get than in quick, in case the loved one is reading).

But if you thought that was a doozy, how about this assertion of a set of opinions:

The second mistake made by the atheists is the assumption that faith and belief are mental processes akin to opinion. Armstrong runs through the etymology to uncover original meanings: belief is a commitment not a proposition; faith, as in ''I have faith in you'', is an expression of confidence, not an assertion of the existence of something. Dogma is ''a truth which cannot easily be put into words and which can only be fully understood through long experience'' - rather like the love of a parent for their child growing into adulthood.

Where to start? As if original meanings and original etymologies mean that somehow the original meanings are valid?

Perhaps we can start with a wiki definition of dogma:

Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted or diverged from. The term derives from Greek δόγμα "that which seems to one, opinion or belief" and that from δοκέω (dokeo), "to think, to suppose, to imagine". The plural is either dogmas or dogmata , from Greek δόγματα. (here)

Sob. It's so much easier to make with the Joseph Campbell George Lucas myth-making, but there's nothing in Bunting that leaves me to think that Christianity is superior to Star Wars in its explanation of life, the universe and 42. Come to think of it, is that why I'm ineluctably drawn to Scientology? Because of my experience in a past volcano?

But back to etymology, as if the loss of original meanings (whatever that might mean) somehow explains the way things are now, when in reality all language changes, and goes on changing. Does the great vowel shift explain how we can no longer write poetry like Shakespeare, or more to the point Chaucer?

The loss of the original meanings of all these words show how religious faith in the West came to be interpreted as a matter of the head and the intellect, and was bound up with the authority of an institution that expected submission: God was regarded as something to think about rather than do in large chunks of Western religious practice that, preoccupied with institutional power, ended up in this current cul de sac.

Which is the most peculiar interpretation of clerical history anyone might care to mount, as if the mystical tradition in all religions has been torn up and thrown away by the head and the intellect. So much for those bloody whirling dervishes and their constant whirling, or those chanting monks insisting on their Gregorian chants.

But of course it wouldn't do, having cocked up history, not to cock a snoot at these rampant new atheists:

Armstrong offers an important insight into the sheer aggressive intolerance of New Atheism when she argues that ''the history of religion shows that, once a myth ceases to give people intimations of transcendence, it becomes abhorrent''.

Hang on, just this easter we got another dose of sheer aggressive intolerance from the New Christians about the evils of atheism, and how they were the cause of the Nazis and likely as not the ruination of the world. The only difference is these days when confronted by intolerance and humbuggery from Militant New Christians old atheists can speak their minds, thanks to enlightened secularism.

Folks, do not try to exercise the right to diss Islam in Iran, or think about drinking a beer in Malaysia while denying god. And don't in a cheerful amiable way tell Christians that there won't be pie in the sky by and by, at least not in your home. They might aggressively hurl their cucumber sandwich at you ...

But back to Bunting as on she rambles:

The shift to monotheism provoked huge struggle among the Israelites, for example, and a deep contempt for anything that might be idolatry.

The paradox of New Atheism is that in its bid to make religion unacceptable, it has contributed to making it a subject that is worth talking about again.

Huh? So those bloody new atheists are worth something after all, and it's only the old atheists to whom we need pay no attention? As if atheists are wandering around, trying to convert people to their new religion? But it isn't a bloody religion ... how can you erect a religion around a derelict, absent, wayward, capricious, vicious god?

Never mind, let's get back to the number counting, as that seems to be the only thing to provide comfort, reassurance and confidence in New Christians and New Journalists:

In the US there are now hundreds of think tanks, institutes and courses dedicated to the subject; religion attracts a huge number of posts on opinion websites; literary festivals routinely offer several sessions on religion. Books are churned out. Admittedly, the exchanges can be horribly bad tempered, but God hasn't attracted this intensity of debate for decades.

Yep, seems like everybody's talking about god, and in writing this, I too am talking about god, but hey this is loon pond, where loons talk about all kinds of nonsensical propositions. Who knows, next week we might be spending our time with pagans celebrating a little witchcraft and voodoo.

And speaking of numbers, I see that 900,000 good souls have already ponied up the readies to take a trot through the creation museum in the good old USA. What a think tank that place is.

Why not visit there, and while you're at it, why not get a nice little dinosaur thingamajig as a souvenir of your visit. Just leave your scientific theories at the door, so you can get on with the myth-making:

Gerard Henderson, Barnaby Joyce, a dash of Tony Abbott, and once again Tamworth the centre of the known universe ...

(Above: B. A. Santamaria. Spiritual leader of the Liberal party, Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce. Quick, rush off to Archbishop Pell's funeral oration here, to learn more, or drop in here for a review of his selected letters, as launched by Tony Abbott).

Hooray for Gerard Henderson.

Just when it looked like Barners was going to disappear from public view, or at least settle down to some quiet pillow chewing time, the stolid prattling Polonius manages to trot out a stern defence in stentorian tones in Laugh at your peril: Joyce is not a joke.

In a remarkable bout of revisionism, Henderson devotes an entire column to slaying Barnaby Joyce's flippant enemies, those fearsome dragons of mirth, and celebrating him and the National Party's role on the political stage.

Primly, the pert apologist points out that Joyce was born in Tamworth, brought up in nearby Danglemah, sent to a Jesuit college in Riverview, and studied commerce at the University of New England, before heading off to St George in Queensland.

Now gentle reader it is a remarkable coincidence that I too was born in the centre of the Universe known as Tamworth, and indeed once mingled with the fine lads who went on to make up a remarkable generation of rural scientists and agricultural economists. Talk about beer vomitus from sundry acts of emesis and groping paws. No wonder the University of New England is regularly hailed as an inland Harvard. Apart from the odd dalliance with bankruptcy, they have Judith Wright to point to as an inspiration.

The agitated Henderson gets upset at Andrew Fraser's Barnaby Joyce voices a far Right platform, which linked Barners to Lyndon LaRouche's Citizens Electorial Council, noting that Fraser's evidence for a physical link is that Barners had been placed on the CEC's mailing list.

Never mind any spiritual connection. Andrews actually took some time to talk to a few CEC types:

The party's former candidate in Blair, Dick Thies, a retired builder and farmer from the Darling Downs, spoke to Senator Joyce at a meeting against climate change in Roma in October.

"He's certainly picking up on a lot of our ideas," said Mr Thies. "I found him very receptive."

And this:

"We've also got a lot of supporters in western Queensland and they run into Barnaby all the time -- I'm sure they give him our material and talk to him about it," said Mr Isherwood.

"There's nothing direct with Barnaby, but indirectly, we all run in the same paddock."

That'd be the back paddock, which is unfortunately short of a few sheep at the moment.

And then Henderson is appalled by the comical approach of Guy Rundle saying that Joyce hailed from "deep rural Queensland" when indeed the correct term is the "deep north", in much the same way as those in the United States talk of the "deep south".

Proving that he has a splendid sense of humour, Henderson then goes on to rail at Mungo MacCallum:

... MacCallum asserted that Joyce believes "the world is run by an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers, or possibly Masonic bankers, or possibly Martian bankers". At least Rundle rejected the assertion that Barnaby Joyce is anti-Semitic.

Amazingly Henderson fails to note that Barners, as well as not being anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic, is definitively not anti-Martian.

Then having slayed the so-called, alleged humorists, smirking into their lattes as they sip their chardonnays somewhere near Ultimo, it's on to the positives. Barners lists the St Vincent de Paul Society as a hobby, as any good Catholic should, and Australian Catholics aren't anti-semitic (or even anti-Martian), and if anything, Barners is under the wonderful influence of B. A. Santamaria and the National Civil Council. Oops, think that's a typo, it's the National Civic Council, but we catch Hendo's drift. And what concerned B. A. Santamaria?

In the famous Melbourne University debate about the Spanish Civil War, he declared: "When the bullets of the atheists struck the statue of Christ outside the cathedral in Madrid, for some that was just steel striking brass. But for me, those bullets were piecing the heart of Christ the King."

He could engender a thrill in the heart that was part patriotism, part Christian idealism and part "fighting the good fight".

Oops, sorry, that's not Barners, that's Tony Abbott delivering an address at the launch of Santamaria's letters at the State Library of Victoria on January 30th, 2007, as faithfully reproduced by News Weekly here.

And after the DLP fell on hard times, what then? Tell us Tony:

The last years of Santamaria's life were dominated by two great concerns: the restoration of authority in the Catholic Church and the creation of a political party that people of traditional Australian values could readily vote for other than under threat of fine. In a 1982 letter to Peter Coleman, he complained about the "modernist revolt against the authority of the Church as a whole and the papacy in particular".

In a 1992 letter to Philip Ayres, he said that the roots of a new political party "rest within the Nationals, what are broadly regarded as the social conservatives among the Liberals … and the DLP factor which still exists … within … Labor". I'm not sure, given his constitutional pessimism, that he would have taken the accession of Pope Benedict and the ascendancy of Cardinal Pell here in Australia as vindication, but it is.

It hasn't meant the end of altar girls or the revival of plain-chant in ordinary parish churches (as he wished), but it has meant markedly less equivocation and half-heartedness about Catholic beliefs and their relevance for the wider world.

Altar girls! How preposterous. And the Pellists as vindication!

In the meantime, though, the DLP is alive and well and living inside the Howard Government, and Labor's SDA (Shop Distributive and Allied Employees' Association) caucus has a leader who should at least give them a fair hearing. The times may not have suited his more dire predictions, but they have been kinder to his values.

Oh dear, I got so captivated by Tony and B. A., and Tony's fine solo stand in Q&A last night - did they hear loon ponders rail at the format of six gibbering panelists? - that we're drifted, Rourke's Drift style - from Hendo and Barners.

Joyce is his own man. But he does reflect certain Santamaria positions, much more so than Tony Abbott.

Sheesh. More than Tony?

I was lucky to know B.A. Santamaria for the last 22 years of his life, to have attended diligently to his writing and speaking over that time and to have been the beneficiary of the occasional private lunch and long phone call.

I am honoured to have been asked to help launch these memoirs, as there are many whom he knew better and loved more. Perfectionist that he was, I'm fairly sure that I would have been a disappointment to him. Still, hardly a day passes without recalling his example and its challenge to do more, better.

Guess that makes Barners one of the inner core, perhaps even one of twelve or so key disciples. Now spot the difference between Barners and Tony on policy matters:

Joyce is no fan of free enterprise or globalisation and believes in a degree of protectionism. He is a patriot and has a genuine concern about the communist regime in China. What's more, Joyce has empathy for the down and out, and expresses traditional Catholic views on such issues as abortion.

Yes! Barners is more Catholic than Tony Abbott! Except when it comes to protectionism, when he's an agrarian socialist. Which naturally leads to a concern about communism.

But Hendo, that eternally prattling Polonius, does insist that there is a modest downside to Barners:

He does not appear to be able to say "no" to a media appearance and is yet to constrain his language when a microphone is present. Yet his problem is not language or occasional bad taste but a lack of policy depth and a tendency to exaggerate. And he has been in national politics for only five years.

No, really, his problem isn't language, or a sense of irony, or even what he uses to wipe his bum. That just makes him a real dude, in the manner of a big Lebowski. So attention should be paid, room must be made:

The National Party is never likely to again dominate the Coalition. However, there should be room for Joyce's economic and social philosophy and his message is likely to have some appeal to regional and rural Australia. Hence the Nationals' advertising campaign some six months out from the election.

Meantime, I think Hendo deserves a special prattling award, for failing to note once in his piece that Barners was given the royal order of the sideways shuffle boot by Tony Abbott for too many egregious outbursts, beyond what even Abbott could tolerate, perhaps finally sensing that Barners was a threshing machine constantly in search of wheat, but unable to tell the grain from the chaff (we speak in those kinds of metaphors, we solid citizens of Tamworth).

And don't get me wrong, we love Barners here at the pond. There should always be room at the inn for Barners, and his solid, real, rural folksy presence, hey true blue, so that comedians everywhere can rejoyce and have plenty of material for a slow night at an alt country show in St Kilda. Go you St Kilda cowgirls.

Any goose that keeps on giving golden eggs is revered on the farm.

Why I can't think of a better way to spend a few hours at work than to do a search of Crikey, and spend a few hours reviewing Joyce's golden moments, here.

May he keep on giving, so that Tamworth and UNE will be renowned and revered throughout the known universe, and Gerard Henderson can keep waffling and prattling, and Tamworth can, in due course, become the capital of the grand new state of New England, before eventually becoming the federal capital of this fair land (as Canberra is only full of bureaucrats and politicians and reports only suitable for the dunny or swatting flies or killing redbacks).

Barners, cobber, mate, dinkum didgeridoo, jolly jumbuck, just like the Marrickville mauler, we loves ya. Truly rooly. We owe it all to you ...

(Below: an illustration of a loveable jumbuck being given a dinkum cuddle. Work hard for that patch, Scouters).

Mark Dak, censorship, healthy regulation, net neutrality and paranoia is having all the facts about Chairman Rupert and Stephen Conroy

(Above: shocking. Ban it).

Chairman Rupert cheerleader Mark Day shows he has a lot in common with the current Chinese government in Like it or lump it, net won't be free of regulation.

He provides a sterling example of how the commentariat has jumped from the matter of child porn to the more general tune of a well-regulated internet, along with enthusiastic support for Stephen Conroy's attempts to prove he can out-mandarin the mandarins of China.

"Why is the internet special?" he (Conroy) asked. "It's just a communication and distribution platform. This argument that the internet is some mystical creation that no laws should apply to -- that is a recipe for anarchy and the wild west.

"I believe in a civil society and in a civil society people behave the same way in the physical world as they behave in the virtual world."

Indeed. And if you believe in a censorious society, then in a censorious society, people behave in the virtual world in the same way as they do in the physical world. Ban it! That'll solve everything. Ban it, ban it good, ban it hard!

And in the physical world, the banning brigade are ever active, as wowserdom and Mother Grundies seek the right to interfere with the rights of others.

The latest notion to spring forth, Prohibition style, is that magazines like Playboy and Penthouse should be banned from newsagents, milkbars, convenience stores, supermarkets and petrol stations, in yet another attempt to return the world to the nineteen fifties.

Child experts want ban on soft porn magazines, shrieks the header in the Sydney Morning Herald, handily illustrated by a cover snap from Playboy showing a model clutching a tit.

More than 30 child experts are calling for a ban on the sale of pornographic magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse and other soft porn material from newsagents, milkbars, convenience stores, supermarkets and petrol stations.

The group has asked censorship ministers to review the rules on which the so-called lads' mags such as People, The Picture, Zoo and Ralph are reviewed, saying they are increasingly explicit and contributing to the sexualisation of children.

More than thirty child experts! Case closed. Experts like Noni Hazlehurst, who happens to be an actor with a bee in her bonnet. Tim Costello. Alastair Nicholson. Kids Free 2B Kids. The usual suspects.

Well I can say with some pleasure that I don't read Playboy or the Penthouse for the articles or the pictures. If I want images of pneumatic things, I usually take a look at tyres. On cars or bicycles. Whatever, provided there's a pump handy you can always get them nicely inflated.

As for the likes of People, I have seen it in my rural travels, but I find myself more disturbed by the fetishising of cars you're likely to see in such rags, once again proving my theory that the size of an exhaust pipe is intricately related to the size of a man's penis.

Thankfully the straw poll conducted by the Herald in association with the beat up - spoiler alert - which is as meaningless as the moral panic the fear merchants are constantly trying to whip up - has the anti-banners in a safe majority.

If the banners carried on about militarism and soldiers and support for military action and war mongering in the same way and with equal fervour, we might get a little more peace and quiet on the planet, downtime in which everybody could begin to explore a healthy relationship with their sexuality. I

I've always wondered why fucking someone was so problematic, or the sight of a nude body so disturbing, as opposed to killing people in the name of some glorious ideological notion of truth and justice, and hiding away the photos of what modern weapons can do to flesh and blood.

You have the right to vote in this rigged ballot - here, put your dead hand on the pad so we can fingerprint it and certify you could have voted for a corrupt loon like Hamid Karzai, had you been alive instead of being taken out by friendly fire at a wedding party.

So it's interesting that Day puts himself in the 'won't someone think of the children', 'won't someone save the children' camp.

One of the issues he (Lawrence Strickling) highlighted was the protection of children, which is front and central to Conroy's proposals to filter the Australian internet. As I have mentioned before, I have some sympathies for this proposal because I find it hard to agree that keeping the net free and unfettered in every way, shape or form is more important than seeking to restrict children's access to the worst excesses of rape, incest and bestiality. These nasties are covered in the non-net world by censorship classification laws. If content is judged to be so bad that it is refused any classification, it becomes illegal to sell that content in print, DVD or movie versions.

Conroy asks: "Why should the internet be treated differently?"

Well actually they happen to be illegal on the internet too, and the filter won't stop them from happening, or those interested in accessing them finding what they're after.

But if I happened to be the parent of a child looking at magazines on a magazine rack, and if they happened to be of a mildly salacious kind - and let's face it, civilisation hasn't fallen since Hugh Hefner introduced a new kind of vulgarity to the world - I'd point them in the direction of comics where they could enjoy mindless mayhem or The Simpsons.

And if they happened to be surfing on the intertubes, I'd be wondering why - if I was a parent who cared about such things - I hadn't already implemented a filtering system, without the benefit of Conroy's stupefying, futile and ineffective paternalism.

But as usual, the only time the nanny state conservatives get excited is when the state government threatens to infringe on their right to speed. In cars.

But it gets even more fanciful when Day keeps up his embrace of Lawrence Strickling, and seems to get excited about his call for an internet policy 3.0 (like you know that's so beta plus):

Strickling describes the net as an agglomeration of human actors; a large and growing social organisation with no natural laws to guide it and no self-regulating equilibrium point.

No natural laws to guide it! Mere anarchy and chaos. And here I was thinking that the laws of defamation applied to anything you published on the web, and that some had found this out to their cost. And that other laws did too. Maybe those hapless college and working class pirates who got busted for flogging music around the P2P traps were in some alternative universe.

But the grand vision gets even more visionary:

He (Strickling) says there must be rules because "this cacophony of human actors" demands that there be rules or laws created to protect their interests. Users want to know that online transactions are safe; content owners want copyright protection; large enterprises want protection from hacking -- and these policy tensions need to be addressed.

Ah yes, "policy tensions". Often called the matter of cash in the paw for big corporations so the sheep don't get ideas beyond their station. And what better way to defeat the pirates than to deploy Senator Conroy's great big internet filter.

Strickling says his agency is this year addressing regulatory questions around the issues of privacy, child protection, cyber security, copyright and internet governance. Already the blogging world is fearing the worst: that Strickling's agenda represents the thin edge of the wedge and the real aim is to censor the web.

This is typical of the tendency of many bloggers to see conspiracies everywhere, but the fact that these issues are on the table in the nation that gave us a hands-off approach through the policy of net neutrality, suggests some significant changes may be in store.

Huh? In the usual way of Mark Day, it's the poor old bloggers who cop the blast. Day tends to see bloggers as a vast enemy of unherd-able anarchistic cats, undermining the right of Chairman Rupert to charge and fleece the sheep in the virtual world in the way he's done for years in the real world.

Bloggers, you see, are always paranoid conspiracists, inclined to rant and rail.

Except of course in Day's very own column, there's a mind set on display and more than ample ancillary material designed to get conspiracy theorists anxious about the way old media and big media and Chairman Rupert and conservative politicians of a Catholic kind like Conroy will argue, scheme and plot relentlessly ... to bring the full to overflowing intertubes to heel.

No doubt in the interests of keeping the intertubes safe for Mickey Mouse and the house of mouse, we can expect to see copyright increased to one hundred years for corporations, and a determined effort to regulate piracy into oblivion. Along with unseemly, troublesome, unruly and difficult ideas about life, politics and the universe.

Well good luck with that. It's working a treat in China.

And yet in China, there are millions of spies at work ready to dob in sites containing pornography. And there are plenty willing and able to black ban any errant thinkers about politics and the Communist party and its associated causes.

If that's the new orderly internet 3.0 being dreamed up by the bureaucrats in the ostensibly free world, include me out. It's back to usenet and 4chan, even if I have no interest in them.

Couldn't happen you say? Well how did the house of mouse score its 75 year copyright ruling and safety up for the mouse to 2023, beyond the use of trademarks which guarantees perpetual ownership, provided the character is continued to be exploited commercially? (here)

In short, there's all kinds of things that can be conflated under the name of regulation of the intertubes and keeping the children safe - not limited to, but also including Australian content, and the anti-siphoning laws currently in play in Australia in relation to free to air television - and all kinds of interest groups anxious to get a piece of the action, be it keeping Playboy in a ghetto or preventing teenagers from accessing Penthouse. Or whatever else they find offensive and problematic, and the killjoys are out there in abundance, waiting to censor, ban, black line and otherwise force the world to conform to their own set of prejudices.

And when someone like Day blithely jumps from pornography to net neutrality , and the joys of introducing significant changes to that concept, then it's probably fair to say that paranoid bloggers are simply people who know a little of what's going on. As good old junkie Bill once said, sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.

Never mind, the genie is out of the bottle, and no matter how they try to herd the cats, those few interested in climbing the wall of Conroy's filtered mind will somehow manage.

But ain't it strange that, for all the blather about democracy and freedom, there are many who fear the way people can now speak their minds, and the way adults can read, see, and think what they like ...

"The issue is not whether you are paranoid, the issue is whether you are paranoid enough."

- Max, Strange Days

(Below: something more for the gentleman reader. Kids, talk to your parents about an internet filter for your computer if somehow you're reading this. Remember nudity is evil.

Funnily enough, it was the wowsers who gave Bob Guccione his start, by whacking him with a 110 quid fine in 1965 for using Her Majesty's mail to distribute pornography. The 120,000 copies he had printed sold within the week, helping him built the springboard for the US start up in 1969. Now when the format is old and dying and so last century dead tree, the wowsers are at it again. Nude women? Shocking. Women in the army killing people? Tremendously advanced feminism. Go figure).

Paul Sheehan, and antz everywhere heralding the coming of rain, or perhaps the apocalypse ...

(Above: a CNN poll found that 20% of Americans - nearly 60 million people - believe the Apocalypse will take place in their lifetime. You can hear Nicholas Guyatt interviewed on the BBC here, though you have to get through a lot of BBC nonsense about square sandwiches. Meanwhile, a loon pond poll found that 20% of commentariat columnists - nearly ten people - believe the Apocalypse will take place even sooner if liberal secularist leftist chardonnay sippers are not immediately removed from power).

Catastrophism is one of those basic urges and needs humanity just can't do without, from Noah's ark to 2012.

Fortunately Paul Sheehan is aware of catastrophist thinking, and immune to it, as when he quoted Ian Plimer in his sterling column Beware the climate of conformity, wherein he railed against the orthodoxies of climate change apocalyptic thinkers:

"It is little wonder that catastrophist views of the future of the planet fall on fertile pastures. The history of time shows us that depopulation, social disruption, extinctions, disease and catastrophic droughts take place in cold times … and life blossoms and economies boom in warm times. Planet Earth is dynamic. It always changes and evolves. It is currently in an ice age."

But that was yesterday. Today it's time to look at the ants, and cast the runes and read the I Ching, or perhaps better, Edward O. Wilson's Anthill (excerpt here), and realise the game is up, the goose is cooked, the end is nigh.

Quick, done the sack cloth and ashes, put on the Chicken Little costume, rush out into the fields, shout from the rooftops Watch your step: ants offer a heap of lessons for humanity:

The underlying message in Anthill is humanity has reached a point where it is at war with all other species by consuming so much of the planet's resources. When this happens in nature, there is a crash. There must be a crash.

This Easter, a time of reflection turned into yet another celebration of consumption, Wilson has sent forth tiny messengers with an enormous message.

Sheesh, here I was quietly reflecting while I ate my dark chocolate and hot cross buns, and there's this grumpy old mariner standing outside the wedding warning the guests that the end of the world is nigh.

But last I heard, in Facts conveniently brushed over by the global warming fanatics, is that the pin-up species of global warming, the polar bear, is increasing in number, not decreasing.

Curiously however there's talk that the problematic concept of climate change might actually help the fire ant invasion of the United States (here). As Alfred Hitchcock noted in his epic movie about invasive wildlife, The Ants is coming (okay, it were the birds, but they'se coming as we fight and fuss and feud with nature). You can read about the peril of these imported foreigner ants and the United States response here.

Well I'm sure the ants have much to teach us, but I still hold out most hope for the humble cockroach, amongst the hardiest insects on the planet. One of the best memes to have solidly infested the intertubes is the notion of cockroaches inheriting the earth if we manage to bung on a nuclear war (here, but google the words and you can dine out for a week on cockies surviving the blast).

But back to Sheehan, and the many insights he teases from Wilson's new novel:

Both the novel and the non-fiction are packed with fascinating details which draw obvious parallels between humans and ants. Does this sound familiar: about 10 per cent of the workers in any ant colony earn elite status by initiating more tasks and working harder than other ants, and scribbling for the Sydney Morning Herald apocalyptic warnings and musings, while some are forced into low-status jobs, such as rubbish collecting, and paying for the privilege of reading the Sydney Morning Herald, a cycle from which there is no escape?

Oops, I see that I somehow managed to mangle that quotation.

Never mind, it's important for us all to understand the cosmic karma of ants:

Karma is simply action with intention. Such action plants a seed that in a future time will sprout. For instance, if on the road you tread on an ant without knowing, there is no karmic consequence. But if you saw an ant and deliberately killed it, then there is karmic consequence. (here).

Meanwhile, there's no doubt a sense of armageddon is in the air, and that it might only be stopped, prevented, or thwarted when Tony Abbott comes to power, and his acting lessons lull the electorate and commentariat columnists into a happier frame of mind.

Which is why it's a tragedy that we've lost Barnaby Joyce from his position of finance spokesman, from which perch he could regularly warn us of armageddon - as in Joyce's Armageddon warning:

Tony Abbott's new finance spokesman, Barnaby Joyce, believes the American Government may default on its debt, triggering an ''economic Armageddon'' that will make the recent global financial crisis pale into insignificance.

Now I'm starting to wonder if Joyce, urged on by Sheehan, had an inside running, heading out into the back paddock to contemplate the ants, and come to an understanding - by observing them and their industrious ways - that an economic armageddon is nigh.

For some strange reason, I'm also reminded of Antz (full script here) and Woody Allen's everyant character Z having a chat with crazed General head honcho ant Formica over a tray of hors d'ouevres:

Z: Wow, what a spread -- you know, there's a food shortage in the rest of the colony.

FORMICA: Yes, and do you know why there's a food shortage?

Z: ...Not enough food?

FORMICA: Negatory. Too many ants. And while we soldiers go out there, and fight, and bleed, and die for the colony, the namby-pamby workers live it up back home.

Feeling a little hot, Z wipes his brow.

Z: Well I, I don't think "living it up" is the right term -- how about "working themselves to death"?

FORMICA: I tell you son, sometimes, at night, I see myself in battle, fighting a horrible, faceless enemy, with the future of our whole species at stake. And always, the dream ends with each of us plunging his sword into the other's heart...

Z: (spooked) Oh, hey, that's great, I think I see an old war buddy over there, it's been fun chatting. Good luck with the hallucinations.

Next week: Paul Sheehan and I retreat to a Buddhist colony, to contemplate the ants, and work out, via a mathematical formula, the precise time when the great crash will come ... as a result of the worker ants failing to vote in a party truly dedicated to mining, progress, growth, climate change denialism, and the profit motive.

(Below: the antz chewing over the end of the world).

Angela Shanahan, a lesser Akker Dakker, and how a dose of the pestle and mortar might fix the Catholic church ...

(Above: a 1550 image of a druggist at work in his shop, as a way of illustrating our pestle and mortar homily for Easter Sunday).

After what seems like an eternity away from the splendid musings and insights of our very own Akker Dakker, it was disappointing to discover that he'd been down amongst the rancid turds.

And that this week's Piers Akerman column is just another bout of Chairman Rudd bashing, as he scribbles Rudd ups the ante in self-promotion.

Any half-decently broadminded columnist would have berated both the Rudd and the Howard governments for their tremendous gall in using advertising to sell themselves while purporting to save the electorate. For a start, Rudd isn't upping the ante, he's returning to the Howard status quo.

But not Akker Dakker, who had his eyepatch fashioned a long time ago to prevent any light penetrating his left eye.

It's got so that as soon as I see a government ad urging caution and moderation in all things, I immediately feel the desire to get pissed as a parrot and roam the roads in search of a fender bender. Is this what the commentariat mean when they talk of the burden of the nanny state?

But unusually for Akker Dakker his Easter column was more fibre than juicy fruity bits, and I had a yen - it being Eostre Sunday - for something more like the sultanas you can find in a decent hot cross bun.

Where else to find it than in Angela Shanahan's Sins of the fathers will be purged, as she broods about the current crop of scandals besetting the Roman church and reflects on the former archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland:

Weakland is a disgraced cleric widely known for mishandling sexual-abuse cases during his tenure and who used $US450,000 of archdiocesan funds as hush money to a former homosexual lover blackmailing him.

Weakland had responsibility for the notorious case of priest Lawrence Murphy between 1977 and 1998, when Murphy approached Ratzinger's office, eight months before Murphy's death.

He did nothing about Murphy -- accused of having molested up to 200 deaf boys from the 1950s to the 70s -- until 1996, although the allegations went back to the 70s. Weigel describes the "descent into tabloid sourcing and innuendo" as more offensive because of recent developments that underscore the Pope's determination to root out what he once described as the "filth" in the church.

Now in case you're wondering, it seems that for Shanahan the 'filth' of the church revolves around homosexuality:

This has been particularly necessary in the Irish church, with its quasi-establishment status and puritanical character, which made it difficult to be open about sexual impropriety, particularly of the homosexual variety.

In Ireland -- where a priest in the family was a practical ambition and a glorified ideal -- too many very young boys were herded into junior seminaries where they were never going to mature properly, a recipe for homosexual pedophilia.

Homosexuality was tolerated in some seminaries, particularly in the Anglophone world, but in the present politically correct climate it seems that we are not allowed to mention that problem even though it seems to have been the bulk of the matter.

And there you have it. Homosexuality is a problem, and homosexuality and pedophilia are intricately linked.

Hallelujah. What joy to discover on Easter Sunday that child fiddling by heterosexuals - unless under the deep, malign influence of homosexuals - isn't an issue. And what a relief to realise that homosexuality is closely linked to filth. And that even though she's not allowed to mention it, still Shanahan manages to mention it, and there, it's done and mentioned. And it's the bulk of the matter. Homosexuality, that is. Which is all you can expect of trendies.

In the end, though, the trendies, the modernisers and others who ridicule the church's teachings on sexuality should remember the hierarchy often did what it was advised to do by psychologists and other so-called experts. It got priests counselling and treatment -- but admittedly then stupidly moved them on.

Dearie me, why on earth would these so-called modernisers and trendies and others who ridicule the church's teachings on sexuality be concerned at a little poofter bashing 101, as demonstrated by Shanahan? On a verbal and mental level about a rough equivalent to the thugs lurking outside a public facility on a beat.

What on earth would these so-called experts with their stupid counselling and treatment know about the deeper matters of faith and the creeping ugliness of homosexuality? As opposed to the splendid purity of homosexual haters remaining true to the old testament.

But it's possible to detected a glimmer of discontent in Shanahan's pea-brained defence of the church, which is ready to see itself as suffering anti-semitic persecution while managing to persecute homosexuals as the root cause of it all:

With the reports of the scandal creeping closer to the Pope, perhaps the laity is justified in asking whether the episcopal structure should be renewed to bring the laity and hierarchy closer.

Eek! Closer to George Pell and the pope? Isn't there some other way forward?

Certainly training for the priesthood has changed dramatically since many of these scandals first happened. Candidates are older and aspirants are encouraged to have life experience.

What? Like having a fuck, before being made to give up the idea of fucking? Until a stray parishioner wafts by? Because let's face it, the greatest scandal when I was growing up was not the way the priests did a bit of fiddling behind the altar with the altar boys. That was expected. It was the way they cut a swathe through unhappily married women who turned to them for counselling.

Is that what "life experience" means?

With an influx of married Anglicans, people are talking about the parish clergy being permitted to marry which, although no remedy against pedophilia, brings clergy closer to the people.

WTF? Being permitted to marry and thereby save yourself from burning is no remedy against pedophilia?

Does this mean, and I'm shocked as my head is in turmoil, that some heterosexuals might actually indulge in pedophilia as well? Oh god, please stop the grave from revolving, or even tilting. Please say it ain't so.

But then comes the defiance and the recalcitrance from Shanahan. As the west loses interest in militant Christianity, it seems that it's on the rise in such exciting places as the Philippines:

But amid all the media clamour we should remember the church is part of a very long story without borders. There are more baptisms in The Philippines each year than there are in France, Italy, Spain and Poland combined.

Yeay, go Imelda Marcos. Plenty of shoes, and salvation along with them.

We should be thankful that these scandals are being acknowledged and purged at last. The church has gone through worse, but it needs to heal itself if society is to be healed too.

Luckily, in terms of healing, at an early age I had the chance to read Boccaccio's The Decameron as he ripped through a decadent medieval church and priests with vigorous pestles (available in an old fashioned verbose translation at Project Gutenberg here):

... if now I live in mortar sin, I will ever abide there until it be pestle sin: concern yourself no further on my account. Moreover, let me tell you, that, whereas at Pisa 'twas as if I were your harlot, seeing that the planets in conjunction according to lunar mansion and geometric square intervened between you and me, here with Paganino I deem myself a wife, for he holds me in his arms all night long and hugs and bites me, and how he serves me, God be my witness.

Yep, a little pestle and mortar action will fix what ails you, but does it matter what constitutes a mortar, be it mouth or bum, or whether a couple of mortars work out their own arrangement?

Almost seven hundred years on, and still the Roman church, with its fixation on a chaste clergy doesn't have a clue. And nor does Angela Shanahan. Because here's how she opens her argument:

These priests and the bishops who shielded them should have been better than other people. The argument that these awful crimes against children occur in other walks of life, which they do, is not really getting the point, either. Yes, we live in a milieu of dehumanising sexual licentiousness, which normalises sterile perversions and robs the young of their innocence.

Yep, a world of dehumanising sexual repressiveness, which normalises sterile perverse notions of virginity and chastity and sexual abstinence, and robs the young of their enjoyment of their sexuality.

Oh sorry, got that transcription wrong.

Better strap on the old cilice, lash myself twenty times, and head off to a cave for a year as a hermit (or should I head up the old pole and do a Simon of the desert? And you in the corner, stop sniggering, by old pole, I meant an old wooden pole).

But the fact the cancer is everywhere doesn't excuse the failures of clergy who are supposed to guide us out of this morass. The irony is that many people, particularly campaigners for sexual libertarianism, don't think the clergy should be better than rest of us.

According to the atheistic inhabitants of a looking-glass world, and the pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage and "free condoms for all" campaigners, the church should quit teaching sexual morality based on the natural law.

Que? Morality based on the natural law? And what natural law would that happen to be, as opposed to the arcane constructions of a biblical text overgrown and overlain with centuries of patriarchal repressive thinking? Perhaps we're thinking of Montesquieu's natural law? But didn't he think that polygamy and polyandry might be perfectly natural?

I digress from Shanahan:

These scandals are very difficult for the ordinary Catholic laity to face because they are mixed up with so much anti-Catholic opinion and downright falsehood about the church and the hierarchy that is fostered by its enemies. Therein lies a problem.

So, while ordinary lay Catholics want these scandals uncovered and purged, there is anger at the vulgar, secular, media pot calling the church kettle black.

Ah the vulgar secularist media. And who better to evoke it than a scribbler for Chairman Murdoch? How silly of the vulgar secularist media to think that the black church kettles are being asked to lead inordinately silly and repressed lives as compared to the tea and cucumber sandwich lifestyle of an English vicar. Go Anglicans with your sensible middle of the road moderate pursuit of eternal nonsense ...

Indeed there seems to be a frantic attempt to get as many scalps as possible, the ultimate one, of course, being the Pope's.

Oh no, not the Pope! And with that titillating, optimistic thought, that at last a Pope could be made to fall on his sword (you there, the sniggerer in the second row, by sword, we meant an actual sword made of metal), we must leave Angela Shanahan brooding about the Roman church.

After all, it's time to celebrate the true meaning of Ēostre with an easter egg hunt (dark chocolate of a pure kind only please) and lashings of hot cross buns, so we can crunch our teeth into that tasty white cross.

And now for some strange reason, a few words from Joe Orton. He came to an untidy end, but lordy, did he have some fun along the way. From Oscar Wilde to Joe, a sense of humour is the only way to deal with the Shanahans of the world:

“Every luxury was lavished on you - atheism, breast-feeding, circumcision. I had to make my own way.”

“Reading isn't an occupation we encourage among police officers. We try to keep the paperwork down to a minimum.”

“The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste”

(Below: as usual, women cop both the pestle and the mortar. More on this Mali standing female figure with mortar and pestle here).

Miranda Devine, Christopher Pearson, Machiavelli, and more coins in the Godwin's Law swear jar ...

Oh dear. Miranda the Devine has suddenly gone deeply philosophical and sought to apply the lessons of Machiavelli and The Prince to aspirational Chairman Tony Abbott and actual Chairman Kevin Rudd.

You can read it all here, under the header Abbott by Machiavelli's measure, but if you have only a few spare minutes in your life, why not just read the actual work by Machiavelli, available at Project Gutenberg here, and in various other places on the interubes in rather old fashioned translations. Not only will you get to read a better, more incisive mind, you'll probably do a better job than the Devine applying M's insights - instead of the fey whimsy offered up by the Devine, as she pretends to a kind of balance, but in the usual way manages to sputter like a spent firecracker.

It seems if anything a way to defuse the news that Abbott might have thought about approaching a drama coach for advice on how to be an even better Stanislavskian ham, but the tick and cross approach to Abbott and the Ruddster based on The Prince is such a half-hearted romp that if you came across it in a year 12 essay, you'd think about whether it made the pass grade.

Never mind, we have other Abbott advisors to look at, including the proud editor of his literary works, and so it's off to the valiant, intrepid Christopher Pearson, who when not helping drive SBS into the ground as part of the current board's excellent neutering of the broadcaster, is pleased to scribble for The Australian.

Scandals revive Left fantasy, he broods, as he gets upset at Richard Dawkins for this little outburst:

"Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice -- the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gouging, truth-hating, child-raping institution -- while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, around his ears."

A modest, unremarkable summary of the Roman church to many - especially a church designed to celebrate the creator of the genocidal flood designed to wipe out the bulk of life on earth - but Pearson seems to think it shows malice and lack of proportion.

As if mentioning the crime of rape and the sale of offensive kitsch in the same breath is a rhetorical slip, when it might be argued that the use of offensive trinkets is the first part of the seduction and rape of innocent minds.

Pearson proceeds to take a figure offered up by William Rees-Mogg that the proportion of clergy who have ever had sexual allegations made against them is about one in 200:

From my own reading in recent years, I'd say that sounds about right. It's worth noting that the rate of complaints involving priestly abuse of minors in the post-1960s era pales beside that in developed countries for comparable professions such as teachers, not to mention the public at large.

Who knows what Pearson has been reading in recent years, but it certainly sounds like he hasn't been paying attention to Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi, who in September 2009, said that in the past 50 years between 1.5% and 5% of the Catholic clergy have been involved in sexual abuse cases (here). It goes without saying that even 1.5% isn't quite the same as .5%, and in any case there's considerable evidence that Tomasi was also fudging the figures, with other estimates ranging from 6 to 8%. But Pearson is adept at figure fudging himself:

Not even The New York Times, in an aggressively secularist campaign to destroy the Pope and undermine Catholicism, pretends otherwise.

What drives the editors of a once mighty newspaper to compromise its reputation by carrying shrill attacks with very little corroborative detail is something of a mystery.

A deeper mystery, perhaps comparable to transubstantiation, is the way Pearson seems not to have read Decades of Damage; Trail of Pain in Church Crisis Leads to Nearly Every Diocese , which arrived at a figure of 1.8% of all priests ordained from 1950 to 2001 in the United States, which however you cut it, also isn't in in 200.

Back in 2003 when the article was penned, more than 1,200 priests were facing charges of abuse of more than 4,000 minors in the previous six decades. To quote the NY Times:

The survey also shows how pervasive the abuse has been. Using information from court records, news reports, church documents and interviews, the survey found accusations of abuses in all but 16 of the 177 Latin Rite dioceses in the United States.

Every region was seriously affected, with 206 accused priests in the West, 246 in the South, 335 in the Midwest and 434 in the Northeast. (Some priests were counted more than once if they abused in more than one region.) The crisis reached not only big cities like Boston and Los Angeles but smaller ones like Louisville, Ky., with 27 priests accused, and St. Cloud, Minn., with 9.

Seems the Latin Rite has its downside. Put it another way. If that's a lack of collaborative detail for a shrill attack, all I can say is some chicken, some neck.

But then that's the usual way of dissemblers, apologists and ideologues, which is to attack the messenger, rather than worry about the message:

American-style liberalism has long been contemptuous of what it sees as mere superstition -- in much the same style as the Fairfax press -- but caution about antagonising Catholic readers and alienating their advertising dollars has usually prevailed until now.

Perhaps The New York Times's recent financial woes have left those at the helm feeling they've nothing much left to lose.

Anyone interested in the minutiae of the accusations can find them at the paper's site.

Minutiae? Is that like trinkets of an offensive kitsch kind? Is child abuse minutiae?

Whatever, I guess that Pearson didn't have time to catch up on the latest angle in defense of Rome, which is to compare coverage of the abuse allegations with the "more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism", mounted by no less a personage than the pope's personal preacher (here):

Cantalamessa, in his reflections for the pope on the Catholic church's most solemn day, said he was inspired by a letter from an unidentified Jewish friend who was upset by the "attacks" against Benedict.

Jews "know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms," said Cantalamessa, a Franciscan priest.

Quoting from the letter, Cantalamessa said his Jewish friend was following "with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful of the whole world."

"The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism," he said, quoting from the letter.

Oh dear. Talk about Godwin's Law, Holocaust sub-section. Time for Benedict to dust off the pre-Vatican Council Tridentine Mass which includes a prayer for the conversion of Jews?

But back to Pearson, who after defending Benedict's record for removing filth from the church, cheerfully goes on to conflate pedophilia with homosexuality:

It's instructive to compare that record with the response of Andrew Sullivan, a gay liberal Catholic who wishes the church would hurry up and concede that homosexual acts and same-sex marriages are wholesome and all part of the divine plan.

Like a lot of gay activists, he's incapable of seeing the world through any prism apart from his own experience or imagining that most Catholic clergy are well-adjusted, heterosexual and celibate. Sullivan is also usually one of the first in the American blogoshere to deplore "hate speech" and one of the first to resort to it, especially when describing the church's hierarchy.

Yep, it's instructive to see how homosexuality is dragged into a discussion of the criminal act of pedophilia. Strangely Pearson quotes Sullivan at length, in the hope that somehow this will bring him into disrepute:

"They cover up for one another, they fear that if one of them falls they will all fall; even those who are not totally screwed up about sex are eager to prevent the church's secret from being exposed. But the more they cover up the bigger the calamity when it all emerges.

"And when it's clear that at the centre of this kind of pathological secrecy is the current Pope, then it is clear that the institution is corrupt from the top down.

"These men are too objectively disordered to run a church.

"They bask in self-denial while they wage a culture war against gay men who have actually dealt with their sexuality, who have owned it and celebrated it and even found ways to channel it into their adult relationships and even civil marriages.

"We all know this game is now over. The current Pope is now found directly responsible for two clear incidents of covering up or ignoring child abuse and rape.

"As head of the organisation that took responsibility for investigating these cases for so long, his complicity in this vast and twisted criminal conspiracy is not in dispute. If he were the head of a secular organisation, he would already have resigned and be co-operating with the police."

Why that sounds unnervingly like the persecution of the Jews, doesn't it? Poor Pearson is shocked:

In more settled times, a flight of fancy so virulent and so unmoored to observable reality would probably have disqualified a writer from further participation as a member of the commentariat, at least in a paid capacity.

However the times are anything but settled and Sullivan has a blog, The Daily Dish, with a large and loyal following.

Oh you wretched large and loyal followers of Sullivan, when you could be noble followers of Pearson and Benedict (and you can catch the Daily Dish here).

But wait, it wouldn't be a Pearson column, if after having slagged off liberals, Fairfax, the New York Times and homosexuals that he couldn't find a little room for leftists and Marxists:

Fantasies about the church finally imploding because of its internal contradictions or committing collective suicide have preoccupied the Left since well before the French Revolution.

Marxism has never known quite what to make the world's oldest and most resilient institution.

Just Marxists? Who on earth could know quite what to make of the world's oldest, most resilient, and perhaps most eternally corrupt institution? Why it's more peculiar, in the grand old southern way, than thinking bread can turn into flesh, and wine into blood, and that cannibalism is a fine way to get in tune with god.

But back to Pearson getting upset about the Marxists:

Here, for your Easter edification, is the latest bout of wishful thinking on the subject from Guy Rundle, a gifted comic writer for Max Gillies and Arena magazine pundit.

"The church has already suffered a catastrophic moral collapse and been hollowed out from within, and that is its accommodation with the Holocaust, for political reasons . . . the only moral course of action would have been to risk the physical destruction of the church in Europe by calling on church members to oppose the process. Practically speaking, this would have had a real chance of stopping the process, especially as much of it was happening in Catholic Poland.

"Had the Nazis then turned on the church, as they may well have done, [it would have] been destroyed in Europe, but the process would have destroyed the Holocaust in its tracks.

"The church could have been reconstituted in Latin America and returned to Europe after the war."

Words clearly failed Pearson at this point, not because of Rundle's clear breach of Godwin's Law, but because he was rendered speechless by Rundle's notion that Christ's followers should follow his example, as requested by Christ, and stand up for their beliefs, even if it might mean a fine old crucifixion at the hands of the Nazis.

Steady on old chap, no need for extremism, not when there's some nice young lads waiting to be inducted into the Hitler Youth, and taught the Ayran way (which of course didn't include homosexuality, as noted here, but did include one Joesph Ratzinger).

Contemplating the Roman Church this easter, along with its defenders and apologists doesn't remind me of The Prince so much as Alice in Wonderland.

'I see nobody on the road,' said Alice.

'I only wish I had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!'

Or pedophiles.

Anthony Fisher, the Pellites, Peter Craven, and the real meaning of Easter ...

It being Easter, we thought we'd start with an appropriate religious theme, drawn from the Bald Archy exhibition, which can be seen in the flesh at that den of socialists, the ABC in Ultimo (then to tour), or online at that snickering conclave of chattering chardonnay swillers site here.

Recent intense discussion over the 'real' in politics (Mr Abbott and Mr Joyce by consensus both being 'real') reminded us of our good old hippie days, when real was the highest accolade. 'That's so real man', we'd mumble, or 'you're so real dude', as we toked away, without a clue as to what it might actually mean, since if you think about it, the alternative is unreal, or surreal, or hyperreal, and while Chairman Rudd might be called such things, it's hardly a meaningful term of abuse. And now let's not talk of dumb fuck hippies or use the royal plural again.

As always, it was Barners who put his finger on the precise issue of Abbott as real:

''The thing people like about Tony is [he's] the real deal,'' Joyce said. ''People on the street want reality but they don't want pretend. They will smell it like dog poo on the shoes if they think it's not the real deal.'' (here).

It's time for Barners to scrape the dog shit out of his metaphors if he thinks this is the way to sell a politician thinking about approaching an acting coach. As if any politician isn't first of all a politician, and nothing wrong with that.

Meanwhile, Easter is of course the silly season when righteous, indignant, militant Christians come out of the stable and storm the atheist garrisons.

Thank God we're not all atheists, Archbishop says, and amen to that, as we might also celebrate a header reading Thank God we're not all pedophiles or people married to an absent god or a long ago Christ, with the resulting warped sexuality arising therefrom.

These days of course the Church is under attack from all and sundry as the stench even reaches the Papal Throne, though the splendid material possessions of Rome would surely be enough to make Christ upchuck at what has become of the message he offered up by way of the bible.

And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Am I bitter about the gay priest in the family who has a nice holiday shack, a kindly partner and a pleasant lifestyle? Of course not. He's one of those rare creatures in the church these days, a tolerant liberal who gets by as best he can. And he doesn't have the flagrant treasures of Rome.

Not so liberal is Anthony Fisher, newly installed as Archbishop of Parramatta, the kind of indignant righteous Pellite young blood obviously capable of taking the Church further and deeper into irrelevance, as he does his Don Quixote routine, tilting at atheists and secularists:

''Last century we tried godlessness on a grand scale and the effects were devastating,'' he said.

''Nazism, Stalinism, Pol-Pottery, mass murder and broken relationships: all promoted by state-imposed atheism or culture-insinuated secularism.''

It's very disappointing that he failed to include Chairman Mao - has Mao fallen so far down the list that he can't even make the first eleven of evil secularist atheists, despite doing his best to kill off millions, and even though any liberal secularist household worthy of its name should have a Mao clock tucked away in a corner? (We have four of various vulgar sizes and shapes, but by we I mean my partner and I).

Abusing secularists and atheists by linking them to the worst excesses of power crazed dictators is a most moving and ecumenical way of reaching out to them. Never mind the historical accuracy either, as we constantly remind ourselves that, despite some ambivalence, the Catholic church managed to keep functioning in Nazi German and in fascist Italy during the nineteen thirties and the war years.

Indeed one of those minor epochal moments in history - which isn't celebrated as much as it should be - took place in 1933, when the Holy See and the doddering Paul von Hindenburg, acting for Hitler, signed the Riechskonkordat.

Luckily Hitler also knew the dangers of liberalism:

I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it recognized the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognized. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the Church, and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.

Talk about supping with the devil, as the price for the right of freedom of the Roman Catholic religion, the right to collect church taxes, and so on and so forth saw a deal done with the devil.

If militant atheists were on the march to destroy the world, limp self-seeking self-serving Catholics did their best to help.

But I digress. Cardinal Pell also joined in the caring chorus:

Cardinal Pell also attacked atheism, by giving thanks for church-based community organisations, and noting that ''we find no community services sponsored by the atheists''.

''We thank God for our Christian traditions and the works they inspire,'' he said. ''They have helped make Australia what it is.''

Ah, so it was the Christians who were responsible for the White Australia policy and the Stolen Generation. Thank the lord we've cleared that historical conundrum up.

Surprisingly, in their Easter messages, neither Pell nor Fisher found time to comment on the sex abuse scandals or Benedict's benevolence towards child fiddlers. Instead Pell delivered this kind of oblique defensive guff:

"We often hear about Christian failures to live up to Christian standards - and there have been too many scandals and too many victims,'' Cardinal Pell wrote.

''But the great majority of Christians continue to follow the commandments of love through regular service, tolerance, forgiveness and community building.''

We look forward to the day that militant Christians extend some tolerance to gays and benign average secularist atheists eking out a living as clerks rather than clerics.

Fisher phrased it a little differently:

It was an illusion to think we could live a better life without God, he said, although he acknowledged that the ''violence, abuse and un-lovingness'' of many believers through the ages had driven some people away from the church.

Fancy that.

Meanwhile, if you want even more guff, you can't do any better this Easter Friday than Peter Craven's Has the bell tolled on Easter's meaning?

It seems, thanks be to the lord, that the true meaning of Easter - steaming hot cross buns with lashings of butter, and gorgeous chocolate easter eggs - lives on in our hearts.

But remember that easter eggs started out as a symbol of the rebirth of the earth in celebration of spring, and are therefore deeply pagan, and a lot of them are made of really crappy chocolate - only the sensuously best dark chocolate please. And please also note that while the origin of the hot cross bun is shrouded in mystery, there's a decent chance that these were eaten as early as the Saxons celebrating the goddess Eostre.

So go at it meek and mild secularists and atheists, and enjoy the real meaning of Easter, and if you want a laugh as you scoff down your buns, Craven provides the humour, rambling on about the garden of Eden, wickedness, original sin, and an inclination towards evil - as if an inclination towards dark chocolate was worse than a taste for apples.

When it comes to the great religions, the affinities between Christianity and Judaism and Islam, the twinned spiritualities of Buddhism and Hinduism, there are a lot of people who would like to get beyond their ''unbelief''.

Hmm, remind me to remember the great glory of Islamic fundies blowing up themselves and others in the quest for virgins, or the glories of the Crusades and the Inquisition, since Fisher like, it seems appropriate to pick out the worst of Christianity in much the same way as he picks out the worst dictators (and by the way, never forget the splendid wars of the Papal State, listed here for your Easter delectation).

Barking mad, in a militant Christian way, the lot of them, but splendid fun to accompany the chocolates and the buns.

Go to it, humble atheists and secularists and pagans, and never mind the snake.

Miranda Devine, Lewis Hamilton, speed thrills and end the nanny state now!

(Above: a new role model for Australian drivers, a Shanghai taxi. Is German. Is gut).

How else could you end a piece on the nanny state than this?

Of course, as we get into our cars this Easter we need to take road safety seriously, especially on slippery roads. But driving safely means being competent behind the wheel, and paying attention to the road conditions, not making the speedometer your priority.

Yep, it's that epic nanny, Miranda the Devine, putting on her very best nanny face in Snarl, you're on nanny camera: a cynical lurk to drive us crazy.

In the usual Walt Whitman-esque way of the Devine, happy to embrace contradiction, after doing her bit for nanny-dom, she spends the rest of her column blasting the nanny state and its road safety pieties.

The Devine is most unhappy that Lewis Hamilton was busted for doing a fishtail, a wheelie, call it what you will, on a public road while leaving the grand prix circuit at Albert Park.

To add to the crime of the Victorian authorities, apparently the Roads Minister even called him a dickhead.

The Devine puts on the very best Portia air as she screeches that the quality of mercy should not be strained, and proposes that the dickhead should forthwith be summonsed to appear in a road safety commercial, perhaps to explain how dickheads should not do wheelies or imitate dickheads that do:

So now, instead of a handful of onlookers seeing Hamilton's antics, the whole world knows, vastly increasing the number of copycat admirers, if that's the concern. You may as well arrest the entire cast of Top Gear. No wonder the homegrown driver Mark Webber came to Hamilton's defence this week, blasting Australia as a "nanny state".

Indeed. And let's hope that dickheads doing wheelies are nowhere near cyclists, since you never known when you might get involved in a head-on and wind up with a broken leg. (And for more on Oz's own, Mark Webber, you can wiki him here).

Webber is also consternated that someone should be fined for acting like a goose on the road:

'I think we've got to read an instruction book when we get out of bed - what we can do and what we can't do,'' he said. ''It's certainly changed since I left here. It pisses me off coming back here to be honest. It's a great country but we've got to be responsible for our actions and it's certainly a bloody nanny state when it comes to what we can do.''

Oh it's shocking, and there's no way being responsible for your actions should involve copping a fine for doing things in breach of the law. I mean there's personal responsibility, and then there's onerous, burdensome laws.

Why in the old days, anyone could hop in to a car as pissed as a parrot, ignore the seatbelt, crank up the motor, knock over the odd cyclist or pedestrian, and where was the fucking harm in that?

Sheesh, it's getting so we can't drive on the road in the manner of a Shanghai taxi driver, with one hand on the horn, the other hand on his horn, an abusive word or three, no lanes to follow, and a game of chicken with every other car in the way.

NSW is almost as bad as Victoria. Despite all the promises last year from the Roads Minister, Michael Daly, of a new age of commonsense for drivers, it seems the lunatics are back in control of policy.

Which is way worse than having a lunatic Shanghai taxi driver behind the wheel!

Meanwhile, we can look forward next week to a standard rant by the Devine about how the streets aren't safe in the Arab and Asian districts because of the way the hoons perform wheelies with total disregard for public safety.

But back to Walt Whitman. You see, the Devine is shocked and appalled by the NSW government and its nanny ways, when it fact it should be a wowser nanny instead:

The Premier, Kristina Keneally, doesn't want us to be the wowser state, when it comes to acting on the sensible concerns of a coalition of health and emergency workers about drunken violence outside all-night pubs. But she's quite happy for us to be the nanny state with speed cameras. As one newspaper letter-writer, Joan Moss, of Malabar, wrote: ''Rolling out more speed cameras will only raise revenue from ordinary safe-driving mums and dads travelling a few kilometres over the speed limit … The real culprits - car thieves, drunk drivers, sections of irresponsible testosterone charged youths - most of whom have little or nothing to lose, are let loose with a bit of a reprimand from our legal system to do the same thing again and again."

Yes indeed. What we need is selective nanny state policies, whereby speedsters having a little bit of harmless fun can go about their business peacefully, while the nanny state does its nanny thing about all night pubs, because let's face it, you have to accept responsibility for your actions, but not when indulging in an all night booze up which requires the most powerful and effective expression of nannydom to repress it.

Repeat after me: nanny state is bad, except when nanny state is good.

Not to mention the nannydom required to tell little Kev not to steal cars or drive drunk or worse still become testosterone charged just because they've seen Lewis Hamilton doing wheelies or Jeremy Clarkson acting like a prize git.

We are heading into another double-demerit Easter in which driving 11km/h over the speed limit or not wearing a seatbelt will lose you six points a piece. Do both at once and you've lost your licence.

Yet, despite this punitive regime, and the growing number of speed cameras, the road toll is getting worse, not better, with a 25 per cent increase in fatalities last year.

The response of authorities is to do more of the same that hasn't been working. It's time for new thinking.

Oh indeed. Which is why I'm right behind the campaign to make Sydney's roads like those of Shanghai, and let everyone feel free to drive like a Shanghai taxi driver. It's so invigorating and enlivening, and as your past life flashes before you every moment while you're on the road, you become aware of life, death, immortality, regrets, times of joy, and things you must say to your loved ones before you depart this life.

Replacing flesh-and-blood police in highly visible patrol cars with cameras has been a flop. The more draconian the speed limits, fines, penalties and the more ubiquitous the cameras, the worse the road toll. The 5 per cent of really dangerous drivers speed with impunity, knowing where the cameras are and adjusting their behaviour accordingly.

Oh it's so unfair, so unjust, letting those speedsters get away with it. Where's the nanny state when you need it! Impunity, I tells ya, which is way worse than immunity. As if the roads were there for sharing, and lycra-clad louts like that wretched Tony Abbott had any place on them, at least while being a bicyclist or pedestrian.

As Michael Lane, spokesman for the lobby group the National Motorists Association of Australia, points out, despite the increasingly harsh restrictions on drivers, the road toll has increased, especially in Victoria, the state with the most vigorous camera regime. ''So much for the alleged benefit of speed cameras.''

So much indeed. And just look at the Germans!

In Germany, where autobahns have no speed limits, the road toll has dropped significantly over 20 years.

Yes, and just because autobahns make up just 2% of the road system in Germany, don't you worry about that (but if you want a more interesting insight into the German thinking on autobahns and road fatalities, head off to the wiki here).

On and on the Devine drones, in a way that sounds just like a nanny state bureaucrat. There's the strange notion that speed kills, when we all know that speed is a drug we can't live without:

In NSW, the RTA keeps pushing its mantra of "speed kills", and when the road toll is going the wrong way, it just redoubles its efforts, like any good ideologue incapable of change. Yet the people who are the most dangerous on the roads are good at avoiding speed cameras, or working the system to avoid losing demerit points.

You see! The fiends are cunning, and know how to avoid the nanny state. Resistance is futile, nanny staters, the peasants are revolting and speeding at will with their fox-like clever dickery. Unlike poor old Hamilton, who's such a dumb dick, he did his wheelie in full public view, not even in an industrial estate out in the western suburbs.

In December, the RTA even dropped the speed limit on the Newell Highway from 110km/h in places to 100km/h, prompting the NRMA's regional director, Graham Blight, to claim it was part of a hidden agenda to drop the limit across NSW to 90km/h. Driving so slowly would mean you would spend more time driving to your destination, thus increasing the likelihood of crashes caused by fatigue, not to mention boredom and inattention when you are forced to travel at a speed below comfort level.

Not to mention the boredom and inattention when you force yourself to read through all of the Devine, as the gears grind and clash, and the clutch gets sticky.

Police have been largely cut out of traffic enforcement by technology and have lost any discretion to apply the sort of commonsense which makes our roads safe - the sort of discretion which would have given Lewis Hamilton a slap on the wrist rather than create an international incident.

An international incident! Yes, because a dickhead copped a fine in the long tradition of dickheads copping a fine, but also in the noble tradition of dickhead petrol heads saying 'it wasn't me your honour, and if it was, it was just to test my tyres' and 'in any case, I had to get the pregnant woman to hospital before her baby got delivered in the back of my formula one vehicle and messed up the seats'.

But where are the guardians of the nanny state in all this? The cops, those nannies who insist we always keep our pacifiers firmly in our mouths:

In Queensland, the Police Union has openly scoffed at the latest rollout of speed cameras, saying: ''There has been a big increase in the money collected by speed cameras in recent years, but there has been little discernible positive impact on the road toll. It's time the focus moved more towards increasing traffic enforcement by officers … who are capable of detecting drink-driving, unlicensed or dangerous driving and unroadworthy vehicles.''

Yes! It's time for an elevated kind of nannyism on many difficult and cogent areas, and don't go talking about personal responsibility when it comes to drink-driving, or unlicensed or dangerous driving, like doing wheelies, or deploying unroadworthy vehicles in the manner of a Shanghai taxi driver.

What we need is greater nanny state activism on the part of cops, provided that they leave Lewis Hamilton and Miranda the Devine alone to do wheelies and speed as they like! And run over the odd lyrca-clad cyclist if they irritate the shit out of them!

Amen to that.

Oh it's good to be back in country. And read the Devine. And call on road users to embrace the Shaolin skills of Shanghai taxi drivers. And think of the boost to hair dye as we try to hide our rapidly greying hair ...

Thanks Lewis Hamilton. Dickhead wheelies produce profound metaphysical thinking!

(Below: rush here for your 'end the nanny state now' T-shirt).