Peter van Onselen, and what if the world were free of News Corp tomorrow?

(Above: more Tom Tomorrow here).

Every so often on Fox News a visionary comes along, a da Vinci of politics:

Hannity: I've actually had an idea -- no one listens to little ol' Sean Hannity. But I'm like -- I think the Iraqis, with all their oil resources, need to pay us back for their liberation. Every single solitary penny. Because we really need --

Johnson: I really thought that from the beginning. I thought that that was kind of, part of the equation.

Hannity: It should have been part of the deal.

Johnson: Should have been part of the deal.

Hannity: I think it should be now. I think they owe us a lot for that. (here).

Which got me to thinking that if Chairman Rupert paid me to read News Corp publications and watch News Corp shows - it really should be part of the deal - I could perhaps come at the idea of paying for content. I pay, and then after a period of remorse for inflicting fools, delusionistas and a massive bombing campaign based on a false premise on me, News Corp refunds the cost, with interest. (1% above prime thank you).

Otherwise News Corp content needs to go on being provided for free.

It's the only way I can rationalise my ongoing dalliance with the charms of the commentating commentariat.

I reckon I spent at least ten minutes reading Peter van Onselen's What if Costello were leader of the Liberal Party?

Which is ten minutes I could have spent reading my own exciting What if Adolf Hitler had taken Stalingrad and Moscow, got hold of Russia's oil resources, and kept Europe by signing a peace treaty with the United States?

Which is really no match for my exemplary What if Shakespeare was Queen Elizabeth the first, and Francis Bacon was a transsexual?

Have we, this close to an election campaign, been reduced to this kind of nonsense already?

On and on van Onselen rambles in a heightened state of oneiric deliriousness at the prospect of Peter Costello still inhabiting a parallel universe in which he stays on as Liberal leader and smotes Kevin Rudd's prime ministership.

Not once pausing to think that if Costello had become leader at the right time, Kevin Rudd might never have become prime minister.

What if Peter Costello had become PM and invaded Western Australia? Or Tasmania?

Like Gareth Evans thinking he was Biggles with a spy plane? (Memories).

Not once pausing to wonder that if you go back into the past, then step on an ant, thereby killing off an entire species of ants, what's the chance you'll return to a present in which ants rule the world?

Or some such, since this kind of Terminator nonsense is really only interesting when watching Arnie play a terminator.

What's even worse is that van Onselen doesn't even pay homage to the sources of his idea. He's content to label it a parallel universe:

The concept of the parallel universe derives from the notion in physics of the metaverse, a hypothetical group of universes that together encapsulate all that exists in space and time. While H. G. Wells popularised the idea of parallel universes in his book The Time Machine, written in 1895, it was Edwin Abbott who first floated the idea of different dimensions about a decade earlier.

But actually the concept of alternate or alternative history has many more diverse sources, as well as many modern practitioners, who do it in more exciting and interesting ways than managed by van Onselen.

And then there's counterfactual history, which has also been dubbed virtual history, which involves "what if" questions of the kind mounted by van Onselen.

Then there's the debate over the differences between alternate history, and counterfactual history, as explained by the wiki:

Counterfactual history is neither historical revisionism nor alternate history.

In general, the main distinguishing feature of counterfactual history is that it is interested precisely in the incident or event that is being negated by the counterfactual, and is seeking to evaluate its relative historical importance by means of the counterfactual. Thus, the counterfactual historian attempts to provide reasoned arguments for each change, and the changes are usually outlined only in broad terms, since the results of the counterfactual are not the point of the exercise but merely the byproduct.

An alternate history writer, on the other hand, is interested precisely in the hypothetical scenarios that flow from the negated incident or event. A fiction writer is thus free to invent very specific events and characters in the imagined history.

Sad to say, as a writer of fictions, van Onselen can't even pass the Nabokov Ada or Philip Roth Plot Against America test.

What's even more bizarre is that it turns out in the end that the entire point of van Onselen's piece is that Malcolm Turnbull is something of a clone of Peter Costello.

You know, like all those terrible clone movies, like The 6th Day, which inevitably features Arnie yet again, or George wanting us all to watch as he sends in the clowns in the clone wars, or the clones in Moon slowly and painfully working out that they're clones when they could have just berated the film-makers for using miniature models rather than CGIs.

But I digress, because van Onselen's plea for Abbott to bring back Turnbull right now is as half baked as the rest of his piece:

Given that Turnbull is electorally appealing to small-l liberals and has economic credibility, Abbott should bring him into the tent to help, lest Turnbull starts doing the proverbial from outside it. That is, unless Abbott simply doesn't trust Turnbull to work and play well with others.

Abbott doesn't trust Turnbull? After stabbing him in the back by one skimpy vote?

That's when I began to wonder what if van Onselen had never written his piece, and therefore I'd never been able to read it? Would the world be a safer place, or would the Martians have attacked immediately, with burning cows running down the street outside my house?

Fortunately Sturgeon's Law, sometimes known as Sturgeon's Revelation, came to mind a nanosecond before I went clinically insane:

1. "Nothing is always absolutely so".

2. "Ninety percent of everything is crud." (The last word is frequently misquoted as "crap".) (here).

Together Hannity and van Onselen confirm once again that Sturgeon's Law still applies, and despite an impression of anarchy and chaos and decay, the universe remains an ordered, law obeying time space cosmos. And that one of the rarer corollaries of Parkinson's Law still applies to anything published by News Corp:

Reading expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

An infinity of long suffering 'what ifs'.

Ah yes, loon pond, home of 'what if' science, and idle speculation by hacks beavering away to make Chairman Rupert richer by the day ...

Piers Akerman, fake plates, suffering miners, the perfidious Swiss, Colonel Gadhafi, and sandgropers rallying to the Eureka flag ...

I woke up today, and then was shattered, with the news to hand suggesting that the world had tilted on its axis.

The very idea that MasterChef would allow the presentation of camera friendly plates, as if the show was on television, is the kind of stomach churning revelation that threatens the shatter forever the surface of glib fake sordid reality.

This is the kind of scoop that keeps the Murdoch press at the heart of breaking news. When they do a splash, hey it's a big splash. With video! Is there no end to the deep content now available online?

Naturally Akker Dakker aka Piers Akerman aka our very own Billy Bunter, fat owl of the remove, can also spot a fake from a great distance and then in an interminable discourse, denounce the fake.

He's at it again in Rudd raiding our super to pay bills and as usual it's another splenetic liverish dose of two legged Rudd baaad, wonderful top notch four legged WA miners gooood.

But I am grateful to Akker Dakker for this special historical insight:

The Eureka flag, which elements of the Left (and extreme Right) have co-opted over the years, actually flew over the miners’ camp at Ballarat in 1854, not the government barracks. It was raised in protest at petty government fees, not in support of the colonial bureaucracy.

Actually the miners also wanted the right to vote for men (no blacks or women), and the abolition of property qualifications for members of parliament, and payment of members of parliament, and voting by secret ballot, and short term parliaments, and equal electoral districts, as well as the abolition of diggers' and storekeepers' licences, reform in administration of the gold fields, and revisions of laws relating to Crown land and its purchase. (here).

While Akker Dakker might just think of it as a self-interested tea party, the actual diggers had other ideas. But then accuracy has never been of undue concern to Akker Dakker, not when it might take up valuable space best devoted to rhetorical abuse.

Even then, I'm not quite sure what the Eureka reference means. Is Akker Dakker suggesting that the hard pressed corporate giant miners of WA must now rally to the Eureka flag and stage a revolution against petty government fees and taxes?

No, no, he's suggesting the ballot box, rather than bullets, but it seems he's a great believer in regional paranoia:

Western Australians have a deep suspicion of Canberra: indeed, of all that comes from what they call the Eastern States.

What? Including Akker Dakker and his inane rhetoric? Oh say it ain't so, Western Australians, say you love Akker Dakker, and have no deep suspicion of him. He stands tall under the coolibah tree, a Eureka flag in one hand, and a Swan Lager - when it's not an Emu bitter - in the other.

Rally against the apparatchiks and the attack dogs. Time to buy that giant chainsaw and sever the the state along the dotted line, so that it might drift free and float towards Africa?

Sadly, Akker Dakker is just a tin plated colonial, an antipodean clown who can't cut the mustard up against a decent international loon. Thanks the vigilant lads at Crikey, I was directed to Der Spiegel's interview with Mammar Gadhafi, which amazingly enough is headed Spiegel Interview with Libyan Leader Moammar Gadhafi.

Gadhafi's war with Switzerland remains an enduring repository of comedy gold, way more than the devious ways of MasterChef or Akker Dakker railing against Chairman Rudd. It seems the Swiss are the Mafia, and there are dangers in hold a Swiss bank account:

Money is laundered on a grand scale in Switzerland. Anyone who robs a bank later invests the money in Switzerland. Anyone who evades taxes goes to Switzerland. Anyone who wants to deposit money in secret accounts goes to Switzerland. And a large number of owners of such secret accounts have died under mysterious circumstances.

Golly, remind me to steer clear of Swiss chocolate and watches. Who knows, they might contain a dab of curare. But it gets worse, as Libyans and others with secret Swiss bank accounts drop like flies:

Spiegel: ... you are seriously maintaining that Switzerland as a state ordered the killing of these people?

Gadhafi: The investigations will show this. And this brings me back once again to the phenomenon of assisted suicide. A large number of people have been deliberately eliminated under this pretext. Switzerland maintains that these individuals expressed the desire to take their lives. But in reality it was done to get at their money. More than 7,000 people have died like this. I am thus calling for Switzerland to be dissolved as a state. The French part should go to France, the Italian part to Italy and the German part to Germany. Even Ayman al-Zawahiri …

Spiegel: … Osama bin Laden's deputy …

Gadhafi: … took al-Qaida's money to Switzerland, where it is still located. Switzerland finances terrorism.

Golly, you'd better scrub the place off as a location for assisted suicides too. Did Orson Welles get it wrong in The Third Man or what?

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Peace. The cuckoo clock? Think gangsters and terrorists and a Swiss mafia.

Der Spiegel outrageously suggests that Gadhafi's views have been formed, or distorted, by the way his son was arrested by Geneva police in July 2008 for allegedly beating up two people in his employ, but Gadhafi correctly explains that the Swiss police acted like gangsters performing an act of terrorism on a totally innocent lad.

And Silvio Berlusconi must be pleased that Gadhafi considers him his closest friend in Europe.

There's plenty more to entertain in the interview, but I think Gadhafi has hit on an important point. Gangsters and terrorists use Swiss bank accounts, and so do Western Australian magnates. Remember poor old Alan Bond?

Fourteen years ago, Alan Bond was brain damaged and a broken man. The poor guy could barely remember his name, let alone whether he had $50 million in bank accounts in Switzerland.

I remember him sitting in the Federal Court in Sydney, staring into space for minutes on end, then turning to his interrogator to claim he had forgotten the question. And now he's on his way to another billion dollars.

During the week, Bond made the 2008 BRW Rich List with a fortune of $265 million, putting him in 157th place. (Alan Bond: from jailed fraudster to millionaire).

Bondie recovered his fortune by getting involved in a diamond mine in Africa and an oil well in Madagascar.

But now the deviant Chairman Rudd is ruining the game for honest squillionaires, and if you look carefully in the reporting, you will see Suisse names popping up here and there:

Credit Suisse analysts said that the proposals could force the country's two largest miners, BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP) and Rio Tinto PLC (RTP), back to the negotiating table on their proposed A$116 billion joint venture to combine their iron ore assets in Western Australia's Pilbara region.

"We are still committed to the joint venture. We are assessing the impact but it is a bit early to say," a BHP spokeswoman said adding there is "still a great deal that is unclear" about the detail of the tax changes....

... Mick Davis, Chief Executive of Anglo-Swiss mining giant Xstrata, said that under the plan, Australia would have the highest taxes on the minerals sector anywhere in the world.

"(It) will result in significant and disproportionate additional taxation on the industry and could well curb the large scale, long-term investments required to develop Australia's natural resources for the benefit of all Australians," Xstrata said in a statement. (both here at Nasdaq)

Ruined, just as Akker Dakker and the Eureka diggers foretold and forewarned. And somehow, the Swiss seem to be involved in the affair. Should the fourth Bourne movie get a new plot and a new title? The Coolibah Suisse Concession?

Never mind, inspired by Akker Dakker and Colonel Gadhafi, here at the pond we can now see a clear solution for beleaguered Western Australian miners, paranoids in possession of all the facts, who understand you can only trust an eastern stater as far as you can throw them. And while these eastern staters are mental midgets, they're quite hefty, living as they do off the fat of the Western Australian land. Meaning you can't throw them very far at all ...

So sandgropers*, it's time to take out a Swiss bank account, and drift off to Africa. If it was good enough for Bondie, then surely it's good enough for all of you ...

Teach those eastern staters a lesson. And remember, Akker Dakker is an eastern stater ...

*Sandgroper
noun:- a resident of Western Australia, after a sand-burrowing desert insect

(Below: a mole cricket aka sandgroper aka desert miner).

Christopher Pearson, Club Sensible, a changing climate, and the Latin mass is 42 ...

(Above: this is an example of misdirection. There is no 42 in this piece, and no understanding of life, the universe and everything, or Douglas Adams. You can find that a kind of DA blawg nonsense here).

This week Club Sensible seems to have been forgotten by Christopher Pearson, and it's time for a standard piece of baby seal clubbing, or if you will, since the idea of Kevin Rudd as a baby seal is trifle bizarre and offensive, it's out with the pins and stick them in the Chairman Rudd voodoo doll.

Survival comes first these days is the header, and Pearson is rampant with glee, because he has the answer, and it's 42, or so Douglas Adams and that Aussie electoral guru Graham Richardson say, and so the days of Chairman Rudd are numbered.

But if you'll forgive my newly learned American, there's something worrisome, something momentarily strange and tortured about Pearson's logic when it comes to climate change. Could it be this?

Here's Pearson rabbiting on at length back in November of last year in Malcolm's sensible solution is WWJD ... what would John do?, in which he berates Malcolm Turnbull for having kittens over a double dissolution and the possibility of losing seats:

It's a judgment call that tells us a lot about his relative inexperience as a politician. The 20 extra seats loss scenario was plausible six months ago, but the politics have changed. Not many of his senior colleagues now believe that Kevin Rudd is keen to call an early election. Public sentiment on the dangers of global warming has shifted in the past two years.

As Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott have argued, a negative campaign modelled along similar lines to Paul Keating's opposition to the GST would avert an electoral catastrophe and might even win the next election.

Might even win the next election ...

Sic transit gloria to all that, as Pearson berates Cheryl Saunders and Gerard Henderson for daring to suggest that Labor technically might not have been able to use the ETS legislation as a double dissolution trigger:

As Saunders conceded, the deadlocked provisions are clearly robust enough to overcome any problem with minor Senate amendments mischievously calculated to pre-empt their use by a determined government. The other halfway respectable argument is for Labor to claim it may have lost the election. Of course, now we'll never know, though all the polling suggests that a campaign focused on the ETS would have resulted in a comfortable Labor victory, given the solid but now dwindling majority who say they support action on climate change.

A campaign focused on the ETS would deliver a comfortable Labor victory ...

Yep, in the world of speculation it's terribly easy to shift from a possible win to the Liberals to a comfortable Labor victory. Or as we say here on the pond, 42.

I always found jousting with Jesuits produced the same kind of angel dancing on the head of a pin routine when it came to firming up the exact location of the absent god ...

What makes it richly amusing of course, is that Pearson is firmly in the 'climate change is crap' camp, and so it takes a very convoluted kind of logic to relish the irritation of the 'true believers' for Chairman Rudd having abandoned them and climate change action.

But really how is it possible for Pearson to sit straight in front of his keyboard and not chortle into his chardonnay as he typed the following?

Even conceding the element of risk in any national poll, the question must surely be: if not now, when?

The unceremonious dumping of its commitment to the ETS was unspinnable, except by blaming a recalcitrant Senate, and it was plain to almost everyone that the government had the means, at a time of its own choosing, to reconstitute the chamber so that it could have passed its legislation at a joint sitting. The upshot is that the electorate now knows that Kevin Rudd's main concern is not a policy agenda but clinging to power. Survival matters more to him than principle.

You see, the government had the option to call a double dissolution - at which a tremendous negative campaign by the likes of Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott spouting off Barnaby Joyce's great big new tax mantra like cockatoos driven mad by the climate changed mid-day sun - which would have given the negatavistas a good chance of winning, or so we were told, and now instead the cynical government has cynically decided to cling to power.

As if politicians were above cynicism. As if Abbott has no cynical desire for power ...

No truly, he doesn't ...

Abbott has consistently put Turnbull's interests and the party's ahead of his own. Had Turnbull heeded Abbott's advice more often and taken a more conciliatory approach, the Liberal Party would not have become as rancorously divided as it is.

Club sensible reverts to proper form, as club cheerleader.

Which is how Christopher Pearson comes to be terribly distressed and concerned at the terrible distress and concern shown by climate change true believers, confronted by the fickle and perfidious Chairman Rudd and his henchperson Penny Wong:

Last week marked another turning point in the political cycle. ABC1's Tony Jones, presenter of the panel show Q&A, was repeatedly dismissive with Penny Wong, the Climate Change Minister, accusing her of evasiveness in answering questions. Jones is a passionate believer in anthropogenic global warming and - while he was incensed at the Rudd government's policy backdown on the emissions trading scheme - nothing about his previously deferential treatment of Wong had prepared us for last Monday's performance. It was noteworthy because Wong was more animated than I can recall her being on camera, but to no avail.

Q&A is (rather clunkily) interactive and, while Wong was equivocating, a tweet flashed up demanding that someone ask her why, if Labor still believed in climate change, they didn't take the country to a double-dissolution election on the issue. It was the question of the week, of course.

Well actually, and it almost goes without saying, of course, the question of the week is how the coalition can currently think its stance on climate change is a vote winner. And how rabbiting on about double dissolutions means anything to the average punter, who doesn't give a toss for Canberra's machinations, as opposed to actually doing something ...

Malcolm Turnbull thought human influenced climate change real, and got shafted for his stance. Tony Abbott is an unbeliever, as are his acolytes and supporters. He put up a fake, insincere token policy which had all the credibility of a snow flake attempting to carve a path through hell. Where will the votes of the true believers go? Or the middle ground, a tad worried about the way the world and the weather is behaving? To Tony Abbott?

If Turnbull were still around, the Liberals might have a credible alternative, someone who thinks the environment is worth action by government ...

Oh wait, he is hanging around, and he's still banging on about climate change. The difference is, where Pearson has been a denier, Turnbull can at least say he has had some consistency:

Mr Turnbull says his decision to stay in politics will not cause a rift between him and Tony Abbott over climate change policy.

Mr Turnbull says while he supports an emissions trading scheme (ETS), he also supports Tony Abbott as leader.

"People know what I stand for. But the party has a policy... for climate change. The Labor Party has nothing," he said.

"We are only months away from a federal election and we have a federal government that has no policy on what its leader describes as the greatest moral challenge of our times."

But Treasurer Wayne Swan says Mr Turnbull's backflip will not please Mr Abbott.

"I reckon that Tony Abbott wouldn't be popping any champagne corks tonight," he said. (here).

I doubt that Club Sensible will have anything to say about that, and might prefer to stay indoors with a post-prandial port and a game of billiards.

Meanwhile, Club Sensible spends the last few pars fighting a valiant battle in the name of all the miners carving up Australia and shipping it off in job lots to Asia.

But I'm wondering just how long this bleating and squawking and threats to move off shore to Canada or perhaps Antarctica will last, up against the treasure chest of purchasing power the tax offers, and which can be used as an election campaign bribe.

That's the true cynicism of Labor, that's the WWJD, what would John do, solution that they've hit on. Pick on the big guys and use the windfall to bribe the electorate. And can the electorate be bribed, while Tony Abbott bleats about the fate of the big miners and this big new tax, and the craven Anna Bligh joins in the anvil chorus?

Well we know what John did, and a fine career he carved out of bribing the middle class, and small business, and punters in marginal seats.

Club Sensible might wring its hands about predictable and reputable jurisdictions suffering as the poor miners are taxed, and can only make off like bandits with a few squillion, but it suddenly makes an alternate scenario a possibility.

Chairman Rudd squeaks get back in, and gets taken out by Julia Gillard, and Tony Abbott, a beaten leader, gets sent to the back bench for recreation leave and rehabilitation ... leaving someone else to pick up the shattered Liberals. And who might that be?

Well, it's as credible as Pearson's cheerleading speculations, dressed up as insights, and like him, I can change my opinion next week to suit any new situation that comes along.

But here's the real problem with Club Sensible taking on the job of Club Cheerleader and trying to write seriously about politics as if astutely observing the flow and flux of the game, and even quoting Paul Kelly as a way of confirming that the tedium quotient is now elevated to a high level of refinement.

Yep, it's tedious. A respectable Christopher Pearson, respected political commentator du jour? It's worse than tedious. It's a waste of eccentricity.

We were so upset we immediately had to go in search of decent, vintage Pearson, not some quaffing tawny port, but a decent rich plum blackberry cigar flavoured vintage Hardy's port from the nineteen fifties.

How about Christopher Pearson: Spring of the Latin Rite vintage 2006?

There that should keep everyone happy for a little while wandering down the greatest hits and memories.

The way forward is the Latin mass, no doubt about it, and let's not have any nitpicking about whether we mean Latin:

Latin, until recently a universal language, was prized as such, the sign of a universal church. It wasn't a serious barrier to popular understanding because parallel texts were, and still are, freely available. Had Vatican II simply authorised the Bible readings in the language of the people and left the fixed unvarying parts of the mass in their familiar, ancient forms, as was originally intended, a great deal of anguish and bitterness could so easily have been avoided.

You see! Latin, until recently a universal language, much more loved than Esperanto ... that's what we hunger for here on the pond, a love of Latin. There's more, much more, as Latin back in 2006 was set to sweep through the church and change everything for the better:

Along with the return of an ancient ritual language, the restoration of church music is likely to remind even casual visitors of the sense of the supernatural and the presence of the sacred in ways our grandparents took pretty much for granted but that are often almost unimaginable to modern sensibilities. This is going to have an almost immediate influence on the "high church" liturgical practice of some of the Lutherans, Anglicans and even Uniting churches.

There will be a lot more jobs for organists, cantors and church musicians generally. It's also on the cards that it will make choral singing, especially for schoolchildren and undergraduates, as popular a pastime as it was in the early '60s.

In one stroke, Latin solves unemployment for musicians. How did the economy survive the great recession without it?

I did dig up one response which I'm afraid was a tad killjoy as it was full, not only of evocative memories, but sensible opinions - Latin killed the Romans and now it's killing me.

The mass was in Latin until I was about twenty. All my childhood in country NSW the mass was said in a mumble we could not hear or understand. We knelt and quietly read our St Joseph’s missals, and the old ladies said the rosary. We had jokes about the Latin, ‘Me a cowboy, me a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy, ‘and ‘Will you play dominos with me? Yes I will play dominos with you’, for instance. There were many priests who said mass badly. Almost none of them, even those who said mass well, spoke or read Latin and few of them pronounced it well, even church Latin. There were notable exceptions of course. I did not experience the Latin mass done consistently well until I entered a monastery where we had good musicians and singers and priests who could say mass well all the time. Even there we had the occasional priest who was scrupulous and could not get through the words of consecration. One came to consecrating the wine, went ‘Hanc, hanc, hanc, hanc’ and could go no further.

To read people like Christopher Pearson you would think we all heard Palestrina, Haydn, Mozart, Monteverdi and the like Sunday after Sunday when in fact we heard wheezy melodeon or harmonium style organs played slowly and badly and the music that was played was no better than now.

Ah memories, and a fun read.

Now is clearly the time for a letter writing campaign to The Australian, demanding that Club Sensible be immediately abandoned, and in its place Club Eccentric be immediately reinstated, on pain of sacking.

The pond has few enough loons who have earned the right to be cherished, and membership of Club Cheerleader is a ground for being exiled, like Cicero, to a faraway place, and since Thessalonica is a little far to travel, it could well mean Wollongong ...

Never mind climate change, not when Latin might yet change the world ...

(Below: and now a cartoon for big miners worried about revolutionary radicals speaking up for the poor and chastising the rich).

Miranda Devine, Catherine Deveney, and the future of newspapers made safe by her boning ...

(Above: wanting to display your manliness? What better way than a boning stein from Zazzle?)

I was trying to maintain a dignified silence about the urgent need for the boning of Sydney Morning Herald, and therefore The Age columnist Miranda the Devine, but the Devine kept dragging me in to the discussion. Here's how she did it in A crudity that was just too much:

I was trying to maintain a dignified silence about the boning of the Age columnist Catherine Deveny, but the twitterati kept dragging me in.

"Sack Miranda Devine", came the cry.

"If The Age has fired awesome Catherine Deveny, then surely for balance the SMH should fire awful Miranda Devine."

It was hard to fathom what link I had with Deveny's self-immolation on Twitter on Logies night.

Hmm, what link could there be between the boning of Deveny, and the potential boning of the Devine?

Boning? What a curious, offensive, vulgar word, almost as bad in its deployment, surely, as the suggestion that Bindi might, nay should, get laid down the track.

I rushed off to the Urban Dictionary to confirm my suspicions, and here are just a few of the unsavoury implications of the word:

Laying your man pipe in a girl's nether regions until neither party can handle it any longer.

Engaging in sexual intercourse
having vaginal sex
to have sexual intercourse, to fuck.
sexual intercourse until your penis reaches her bone

And so on and so forth. The silly American-centric dictionary hasn't caught up with the Australian deployment of the word, but if anything that's worse, since it's a vulgarism designed to mean fuck over, fuck someone hard in an employment sense by giving them the fucking sack, and otherwise shafting them good. Shoving it up them, giving them the shove, rutting in their penury and poverty. Not to put too fine a point on it, The Age fucking over Deveny.

And so on and so forth, in the best management style evoked by the likes of Kerry Packer and the axe Al Dunlap, where if you weren't boning them in style you were giving them a haircut with a chainsaw.

Ah the good old days of Al, whose name had become a Wall Street verb, and who in turn - as happened to the inventor of the guillotine - was given a boning by Sunbeam back in 1998 (Chainsaw Al Dunlap Gets The Chop).

But I digress. Could the use of the word by the Devine indicate a fatal innocence, rather like the Tea Partiers who quickly had to let go of the tea bag as a symbol when they rushed off to the Urban Dictionary to discover with shock and horror that tea bagging meant the putting of testicles in someone else's mouth? (here)

Or is it an attempt to match Deveny at her game, to show that the Devine is ballsy too, and game, and up for a verbal boning anytime you bring on a joust? Or is the Devine a thrillseeker, teetering on the edge of a cliff, shouting to the editor 'bone me if you dare'? Or perhaps just a masculinist, ready to assert anywhere anytime that boning is a legitimate activity?

Whatever, for we will never know. It turns out that the Devine thinks of Deveny this way:

I am a Sydney journalist. She is a Melbourne stand-up comic. Her persona is heroically retro-left wing with a particularly savage atheist streak. She does car crash comment, saying the most outlandish things, often with sexual overtones and foul language, just for dramatic effect.

Okay, at last I get it. Boning has no sexual overtones, and perhaps is just fowl language, said for dramatic effect.

Still I could barely resist the temptation to do a little subbing of the piece. Instead of this:

It was the short-term British former Age editor-in-chief Andrew Jaspan who made the mistake of plucking her out of obscurity as a freelance contributor to the TV pages in 2007 and placing her on the opinion page. The imprimatur of the Age opinion page gave her fringe lunacy reach and sting and gravitas, and made her tweets about Bindi Irwin international news.

How about this?

It was the soon to flee to New York to ruin the New York Post Daily Terror Col Allan who made the mistake of plucking her out of obscurity as a police reporter and assistant editor way back when in the nineties and placing her on the opinion page. Then she shifted to The Sydney Morning Herald and the imprimatur of that opinion page gave her fringe lunacy reach and sting and gravitas, and made her tweets about the boning of Catherine Deveny international news.

I keed, I keed, because you see the boning of Deveny is the way that newspapers will be made safe for family reading, and ensure that their futures are enshrined in the heart of readers:

Jaspan's successor and the editors of this newspaper know that safeguarding journalistic standards is more important now than ever as other sources of news encroach on their territory. For this newspaper the reward last year was steady circulation and healthy profits, despite an economic downturn.

Yep, safeguarding journalistic standards is the way forward. You know, like Chairman Rupert is guarding journalistic standards in the Daily Terror and the Herald Sun, and the New York Post, and especially in that haven for fair and balanced reporting Fox News. As for good old England, why it's full of splendid rags showing relentless objectivity.

You see, it's all good, and all up, and never mind that this very week the Washington Post has put up Newsweek for sale, and perhaps might even accept a suitcase of decent second hand clothes as a fair price. Provided the clothes have been washed and ironed.

Sheesh have I got it all wrong. Instead it's all good, and a new golden age is imminent:

Far from newspapers being on death row, the good ones are thriving, and have created online businesses that may one day provide the sorts of fat profits that used to flow in the golden days of print. Experiments have begun with pay walls, as well as newspaper applications on new reader-friendly devices such as the iPad.

Yep, very shortly you will have the astonishing pleasure of paying for the opinions of Miranda the Devine, and taking them anywhere in your new reader-friendly device, the iPad.

The fact Rupert Murdoch paid $US5 billion for the publisher of The Wall Street Journal shows the world's most successful media mogul has faith in the staying power of newspapers. He boasts of 64,000 active users for the WSJ iPad application, after just a month. The WSJ on iPad, by the way, like USA Today, looks just like a newspaper page.

Oh yes indeed, it looks verily like a newspaper page, in much the same way as Avatar on its 9.56 x 7.47 inch screen looks just like a movie up on an 80 foot wide x 35 foot high theatre screen in 3D.

Apart from the way the iPad fails to rustle when you tilt it, and refuses to show an entire page, and doesn't leave black ink all over your fingers but instead shows smudgy fingerprints and the faintest hint of dandruff or dust (carry a cloth at all time), and fails dismally in the most important job of any newspaper, which is to decently wrap fish and chips, and stand guard in the outdoor dunny ready for any emergency.

But ain't it grand that the Devine doesn't think Chairman Rupert paid too much for the WSJ, as argued by those wretched liberals in the New York Times in Murdoch's Soft Spot for Print Slows News Corp. And now, to try to keep his investment buoyant, Chairman Rupert has embarked on a campaign to take out the New York Times, by producing a local New York edition of the WSJ, which led to this response by Times executives:

So as our welcome gift to New York, we pass on a few helpful hints to our Journal colleagues: the Dodgers now play in Los Angeles, Soho is the acronym for South of Houston, Fashion Week has moved to Lincoln Center, Idlewild is now JFK and Cats is no longer playing on Broadway.

If you happen to know anyone who works for the Journal’s new section and he or she wants any additional information about the greater New York region, tell them to check out NYTimes.com’s always very helpful archive. (here)

Still as the sharks circle, and the industry cannibalises itself, and Chairman Rupert looks for road kill as he tries to turn New York - New York New York!! - in to a two paper town - his two papers - it's still all good for the Devine:

Newspapers are still more popular as a news source than the internet, though TV is No. 1.

Que? Poor hapless Devine. She certainly isn't a news source, as all you have to do is google the full to overflowing intertubes, and you can find a dozen surveys that say the precise opposite. Here's just one: Online 'more popular than newspapers' in US:

Online news has become more popular than reading newspapers in the US, according to a survey.

It is the third most popular form of news, behind local and national TV stations, the Pew Research Center said.

"News awareness is becoming an anytime, anywhere, any device activity for those who want to stay informed," it said.. .

...The survey showed that news aggregators such as Google News and AOL were most commonly used, along with the websites of CNN and the BBC

Doesn't the Devine understand the concept of news grazing and the dastardly role news aggregators play in ruining the newspaper game, to the chagrin of Chairman Rupert? Does she understand the contradiction in celebrating the arrival of the iPad, which is the sure sign of the end of the physical newspaper, and the arrival of the four "anys" into our lives - any content on any device any time any where?

Some will be able to monetise their content in this new world, and good luck with that, and some will give it away for free, sustained either by advertising or by public subsidy, and hence the attacks by Chairman Rupert and his clique gang of lick spittle followers on the ABC and the BBC.

But back to the forever optimistic Devine, spouting statistics like a tea kettle:

And the competition online has just made more people read more news. According to British surveys by McKinsey Media and Entertainment News, cited in the magazine Change Agent magazine last month, news consumption grew 20 per cent in the past three years - from 60 to 72 minutes between 2006 and 2009, with the greatest gains for people under 35.

And 10 per cent more of those savvy young people cited interest in newspapers than they did in 2006.

The young taking an interest in newspapers? Well I guess they take an interest in vinyl, and fifties fashions, the more foolish ones at least. If you haven't lived it, it seems to exercise a strange ghoulish charm, even a compelling fascination. Yes, I'm talking about you Faster Pussycat.

Never mind, back to the Devine and the clutching at the straws, when it's the straw that breaks the camel's back.

The whole spiel, the seizing on the Deveny matter for a little local colour and timeliness and faux relevance, and then the lurching off to apply said relevance to the current plight of newspapers, reminded me of how endearing the Devine's confused, chaotic, prejudiced, incoherent, illogical and irrational opinions are:

In a chaotic world of aggregators, of Google and Twitter and specialist web feeds, a newspaper is a "credible one-stop shop" of local news where all the hard choices have been made for the reader. Which is why not trashing the brand is more important than ever. Sorry, Catherine.

Uh huh. You want me to pay for the pleasure of reading the Devine and this kind of guff? Let's phrase that another way:

In the abundant fertile world of the Internet and of aggregators, of Google and Twitter and specialist web feeds, where good content of all kinds is easily indexed and easy to find, a newspaper is but one stop on the Internet superhighway, now littered with many interesting and credible sources, especially for local news, not to mention crannies and nooks with tasty content, and where there's no need to be spoon fed or to hunt out pre-digested pap where all the hard choices have been made for the reader. And the last thing that is needed is just another ill informed opinion, since the world is full of ill-informed opinions. We do it daily on the pond. Which is why not trashing the brand by publishing incoherent columnists is more important than ever. Sorry, Miranda.

Never has anyone in their own lunchtime argued so forcibly, so cogently, so incoherently, for their own boning. But steady on, if they bone Miranda, or put her behind a paywall, what will loon pond do? How will we cope?

Never mind, there are plenty of loons in the world, and we're all as mad as hell, and now we're all online ...

As Sideshow Bob once said in his wise Germanic way about newspapers - or was it Bart Simpson - The newspapers The.

Or as the Nazis once said, Die Wehrmacht, Die.

And now a thought from the young:

Miranda Devine, Bill Henson, and a reliable enemy of nuanced thought ...

(Above: an exquisitely moody landscape, done way back in 2005 when Bill Henson collaborated with Richard Tognetti on Luminous, and clearly had lost his mojo, until he got his mojo back in 2008, and then lost his mojo again in 2010. Loon pond is currently organising a search party for Bill Henson's mojo. You can read about Luminous here and here).

Was it so long ago that Miranda the Dvine was in a frenzy about Bill Henson and his photographs of nude girls?

Here she is fuming and frothing in Moral backlash over sexing up of our children, and by golly she knew who was responsible for it all:

The effort over many decades by various groups - artists, perverts, academics, libertarians, the media and advertising industries, respectable corporations and the porn industry - to smash taboos of previous generations and define down community standards, has successfully eroded the special protection once afforded childhood.

Um, yeah, like the special protection Lewis Carroll and his camera afforded it. Or the toffs paying for the under age prostitutes in Victorian England. Or the man boy relationships of Sparta.

Never mind, don't you just love that subtle juxtaposition? Artists and academics, with perverts right there in the middle. Roll it around on your tongue. Doesn't it sound just fine. Artists, perverts, academics.

Oh excuse me, must go and get out the pitchforks and perhaps an adze or two, and certainly some hot tar and loads of feathers. Goddam correct order, and correct weight: artists, perverts and academics.

But it wasn't just artists and perverts who understood that simple nudity was shocking, shameful, guilt-laden, Catholic church riddled pornography of the vilest kind, and that head to toe dress must be worn when venturing out in to public (hang on, don't we want to ban the burqa? Oh never mind).

No, no, no, it was everywhere, all around us:

It is now impossible to shield children from a culture dripping with sexual imagery, in which Saturday morning cartoons are interspersed with soft-porn music videos, pole-dancing kits with sexy garters are marketed to little girls and huge billboards for "Longer Lasting Sex" dot the landscape.

Sheesh, someone in the SMH must have a full time job wiping the spittle from the Devine's lips so that she can fulminate a little more. The inspiration for the Devine's rant about the imminent end of western civilisation as we know it was of course the invitation to Bill Henson's exhibition of photographs in 2008, and it prompted one wag at the time to scribble these immortal words, here:

There has never been a accusation of abuse by Henson’s models or the parents of these models. In fact several former models, now adults, have spoken out this week in Henson’s defense. The photographs are not intended to titillate. This is a simple witchhunt stirred in part by Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine, that reliable enemy of nuanced thought.

Sob. In that one short phrase - roll it around on the tongue, relish it, spit it out into the chill autumn air - that reliable enemy of nuanced thought - the thousands of words scribbled at the pond have been reduced to one succulent expression. It almost strips away the purpose, the meaning of loon pond.

What else is there to say, but ... Miranda Devine, that reliable enemy of nuanced thought.

Except of course that the reliable enemy keeps on rolling along, and today has blessed us with a report fresh from the front line of salacious trivia, under the header He ignited controversy - now he's ditching it.

It seems Bill Henson with his latest, carefully guarded and discreet exhibition, the photos already checked and certified by the censor, has disappointed our bubble headed booby:

The first sign that Bill Henson may have lost his mojo came at the front door of the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington last night.

Lost his mojo? What exactly does that mean? Why it means that Henson has serenely done his thing, to the great disappointment of the slobbering, salacious media, forming their usual rucks and intrusive scrums as they race to feed off whatever cheap sordid titillation they can find, like the grub street hacks they often want to be:

Burly bodyguards turned away photographers who had arrived to record the controversial photographic artist's first exhibition since police closed down his 2008 show over nude photos of a pubescent girl, which even the Prime Minister declared were ''revolting''. [A Fairfax photographer managed to take several photos before being asked to stop.]

Revolting? Funny, these days the commentariat are busy assuring us that Chairman Rudd is revolting. Or at least that we should be revolting.

Ah but that fuss was two long years ago, and thanks to the Devine and others, it seems that Henson has now reformed, become a better person:

But mobile phone cameras abounded inside the gallery where 31 of Henson's untitled, exquisitely moody 127x180cm photographs adorned the walls, priced at $30,000 each.

You see. Exquisitely moody, even if untitled. Suddenly he's an artist again.

But wait, couldn't he think up a title or three? Some artist ...

The artist himself said he just wanted the opening to be about the art not the controversy. Although, he noted, ''controversy is interesting'', before he was silenced by his hovering public relations agent Sue Cato, who declared he would not be speaking to the media.

''I've told so many nice people they can't interview Bill, so I can't let you,'' she said, rather undiplomatically.

Undiplomatic? Who, moi ponders the Devine? Moi, who lathered up a storm about the overwhelming evidence of psychological damage wrought on a generation of children, particularly little girls, of premature sexualisation? What the heck? Doesn't this Henson chappie and Cato public relations person realise that as a bubble headed booby moi can't hold a consistent attitude over two years, let alone two weeks?

Because you see Henson is at it again:

The biggest sellers of the night were the nudes, Henson's signature images - young and nubile, a girl of about 15 or 16, though no one is saying, since the 13-year-old of 2008 caused such consternation.

Shocking. Stand by for a slobber of indignation.

Oh wait, hang on, it's not actually shocking this time:

This time, however, no pubescent nipples were visible - just the soft curves of a ''susceptible shoulder'' as Henson's friend Edmund Capon put it.

A susceptible shoulder on a fifteen year old? WTF? Susceptible to what? A nibble, like a tender young ice cream? Is this more of the psychological damage so rampant two years ago, the work of perverts with a very postmodern agenda and old fashioned feminist views?

Steady, steady, get around behind Bluey, no need to panic the sheep. What's left in the mouth is a deep disappointment that Henson has lost his mojo and failed to delivery on controversy. Here's how the Devine ends her piece:

But the landscapes and architectural images outnumbered the nudes, which the art collector and North Sydney councillor Jilly Gibson found ''puzzling''.

Ah dear deep and insightful art collector Jilly Gibson. Puzzled by this puzzling turn of events. An artist who might be interested in landscape and architecture as well as nudes. Shocking, deeply disturbing, even problematic as she ponders the ponderous.

Surely our Jilly can detect an alarming change. The artist has been brought to heel, turned domestic, a dingo now sitting before the blazing fire in the lounge like a lap dog:

Despite Henson and Cato saying that the artist had been unfazed by the 2008 furore, Gibson could detect a change.

''It's very different from the last show,'' she said.

''They were almost all nudes last time … he should have stuck to his guns and gone against the critics.''

You mean, gone against the Devine?

Never mind, I too was always disappointed when Picasso failed to relentlessly paint nudes, and sometimes even went so far as to waste his time painting a work like Guernica.

Well somehow Jilly's disappointment transmitted itself to Miranda, and now we know that Bill has lost his mojo, and we don't know where it is. Mojo-less and perhaps also eyeless in Gaza.

And worst of all, no nudes to slobber over and whitter about, and tweet over, even if not using twitter. Well at least not decent mojo-laden nudes.

Roaming around Wiki, I recently came across this:

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by abnormalities in the perception or expression of reality. It most commonly manifests as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking with significant social or occupational dysfunction. (here)

Not that we're suggesting anything here, least of all the latter part of the definition might apply to anyone we've just been scribbling about.

No, we're just happy to pay tribute to another writer:

Miranda Devine, that reliable enemy of nuanced thought.

More on Bill Henson, and a few photos, here. The thought and photo police have kept Henson's visual presence down at his home gallery here, though you can find examples of his work from his various exhibitions, even if all that's on view involves a "susceptible shoulder".

I still can't work out what the shoulder might be susceptible to. White ant, mould, humidity, a honey and soy sauce? Or brainless gits who can't even get the irony being ladled all over them?

(Below: untitled).

Tim Blair, Jonathan Holmes, Media Watch and puking over wayward possums ...

(Above: all the cats that are fit to print. A screen cap of the Daily Terror at its finest).

This little gem of wit and irony recently popped out of the Tim Blair archive, wherein it lurked in Blair's Daily Terror blog under the header He Has His Reasons:

Whenever people complain about Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes being smug, condescending, or arrogant, I always tell them: “Well, maybe you would be smug, too, if you’d won a Victoria Cross and the Tour de France in the same year. And maybe you would be a little condescending if you’d devised an inexpensive water purification method with life-saving applications throughout the Third World and also a failsafe courtroom gambit to defeat all speeding charges. And maybe you would be arrogant as well if you’d knocked out Evander Holyfield in a street fight and secured a world-first interview with the Hidden Imam.”

Mind you, I’m not aware that Holmes has actually done any of these things, but he must have come terribly close. Otherwise he’s just some English bloke hosting a dull 15-minute TV show, in which case acting so very superior just makes no sense at all.

Translation for the unsophisticated: ya boo, ya suck eggs, ya pommie bastard. Which inspired a similar level of wit and irony at the pond:

Whenever people complain about Murdoch Daily Terror blogger Tim Blair being smug, condescending, or arrogant, I always tell them: “Well, maybe you would be smug, too, if you’d won a Victoria Cross and the Indy 500 in the same year. And maybe you would be a little condescending if you’d devised an inexpensive water purification method with life-saving applications throughout the Third World and also a failsafe courtroom gambit to defeat all speeding charges, not to mention providing unimpeachable scientific evidence that global warming was a myth. And maybe you would be arrogant as well if you’d knocked out Evander Holyfield in a street fight and secured a world-first interview with the Hidden Imam instead of simply whining about Islamics on a daily basis and doing snippets of trivia to feed your trolls.”

Mind you, I’m not aware that Blair has actually done any of these things, but he must have come terribly close. Otherwise he’s just some dinkum dodo bloke hosting a dull ratbag blog targeted at riff raff and ne'er do wells with suspect literacy levels, in which case acting so very superior just makes no sense at all.

Translation for the unsophisticated: ya boo, ya suck eggs, ya Murdoch blogging hack.

Dearie me, it's always good to start off the day with an elevated, sophisticated level of discussion and debate and meaningful argument, as always inspired by the commentariat, and a sure sign that civilisation is relentlessly advancing.

Still I'm assured by those who know that tonight is Friday night football night, and that the new rule is the same as the old rule: always play the man, and bugger the ball.

Meanwhile, you're just three sleeps away from the next Media Watch program, which you can also see online here, which is so dull it always seems to infuriate Murdoch media hacks, and brings out the hoppy toads and spiteful snakes like a refreshing rain storm. What fun.

Martin King: Would you eat possum pie, Wendy?

Caller Wendy: Well I'd try it and see what it's like if we have to but I mean what else can you do when there's an awful lot of road kill out here. Mainly the males at the moment, because when there's changeover from, it buggers up their body-clock, you know, these daylight savings back to Eastern Standard Time...

— Melbourne Talk Radio (MTR), Drive with Martin King, 27th April, 2010

But at least the possum pie will give her the strength to fix the fading in the curtains caused by daylight saving.

Now all she needs to do is read Tim Blair for his latest insights into the world of science ...

By the way, when in New Zealand, you might like to try Pete's possum pies and pate.

They have a thing about possums in New Zealand, a bit like Blair's thing about Holmes. Pete also does a mean possum pie, and I'm told here that the Puke pub serves possum. We will resist the obvious ... after all, this is loon pond, not Tim Blair.

Miranda Devine, bolshie teachers, power crazed bureaucrats and a kernel panic attack ...

Here's a relatively simple question:

If Dorothy leaves Sydney to read Miranda the Devine at 7.30 am, and arrives home, having driven like a bat out of hell, by 12.30 pm, and the amount of information absorbed relative to the amount of disinformation, disingenuous distortion, and outright humbuggery, can be expressed as an average, please tell me if Dorothy spent two hours reading Miranda the Devine at an average speed of 60 kilometres an hour, while her partner drove the rest of the way averaging 90 kilometres an hour, what is the speed at which the brain dissolves: (a) 67 km/h; (b) 75 km/h (c) 78 km/h; (d) 84 km/h; (e) none of the above, the brain dissolved instantly once it was decided it should spend some time in the mugwump swamp mush of Miranda the Devine thinking.

Got it wrong? What this town needs is a monorail - oh wait, we've got one already - and what you need is more time in a NSW public school.

The Devine is of course off on a union bashing exercise and celebrating the national NAPLAN tests as a way of subverting their fiendish cabalish ways, what with the bully boy tactics and the yadda yadda this and the yadda yadda that. You can find it here under the gentle header Bureaucrats catch the bully bug from anti-test teachers, a pious plea for reasoned, balanced debate and discussion, and an example of courteous behaviour worthy of an Oxford debate.

Yep, let's not mince words, sabotage and saboteurs are at work in a brand new educatioal environment, and Bob Carr is a hero for defending the curriculum from the worst educational fads.

Bob Carr? You there Smithers, stop chortling and get back on your chair.

We can learn from some of the surprise successes, such as Macquarie Fields High School in the oft-maligned south-west suburb, which ranked in the top 100 schools in the country in numeracy.

Hang on a nervous tic, as Herbert Lom said to the Pink Panther.

At this point, perhaps it's time to revert to some of the Devine's readers comments, to see what this really means:

Macquarie Fields High School is a semi-selective High School so its results naturally are more positive than fully comprehensive schools in impoverished areas. Your misinterpretation of this school's result, is exactly the reason why teachers don't want this data published ...

Macquarie Fields High School's ranking in the top 100 was not a "surprise success". It is a half selective, half community school, which means 50% of the enrolment intake is made up of selective students ...

Macquarie Fields is an excellent high school, but it is a semi-selective school, which allows it to attract many bright students who would otherwise attend neighbouring schools.
Details such as this are just too difficult for the simplistic reporting of people like Miranda Devine. This is exactly the kind of unfair comparisons that are causing the dispute over the use of NAPLAN tests.

Talk about a selective selection of selective responses to a selective point!

There were other marking downs of the Devine's talking points:

Miranda loses marks for the English section of her test when she writes "...students who sat the first test in 2008..." People sit FOR tests, they don't SIT them. How annolying can you be to an old teacher!!

Oops, pity about that stray l. Let he whose without typos cast the first ston.

And way too cruel David Morrison. If we applied literacy standards to journalists, we'd have nothing to read. Worse still, this vexatious pedant then has the cheek to go on to defend the teachers' union as not being particularly militant or left wing, and basing its current position on good educational principles.

No wonder then for the rest of the column, the Devine shifts tack, and embarks on a campaign of support for a site that provides NAPLAN tests for paying customers. Oh hang on, she's still banging on about Macquarie Fields, and what it all means for power crazed militant ideologues:

The only logical explanation for this madness is the unions are frightened of information. They don't want Macquarie Fields to be hailed a success or become a model for other schools in impoverished areas. They want to hide failures and condemn another generation of young Australians to illiteracy.

Logic and the Devine? That's the only time you'll see those words linked in a coherent sentence. Hang on, if it's a coherent sentence, where's the verb? And how about an adjective? Logic and the delinquent Devine?

It turns out that the NAPLAN tests which seemed to have the enthusiastic support of the Devine are in fact deeply flawed, or so the Devine asserts:

An IT expert married to a schoolteacher, Johnson, 43, came up with the idea for the website after his eldest son sat the first NAPLAN tests in 2008 and he saw the flaws. ''It was all paper-based, expensive and controlled by big bureaucracy.''

Hmm, could the teachers have a point? Is NAPLAN fatally flawed?

Warning inconsistent logic problem, kernel panic attack, motherboard under stress, hit restart button, plunge into the nether world of the terminal, throw machine out with garbage.

No, no, you silly goose, it's all very easily resolved. The whole education system needs to be turned into a private playground for benefit of Catholics and Anglicans (and to hell with those silly ethics classes).

BTW, how has the sorry saga of the IT revolution ended?

As Johnson says: ''If our site disappears, someone somewhere will build another site to replace it.'' But he is running out of money and is now thinking of giving up and taking an IT job overseas. He has shown how private enterprise can solve problems more efficiently than bureaucracies. But his travails show how innovation is crushed when those bureaucracies run out of control.

You see, it wasn't the viciously ideological teachers after all, but the power-crazed out of control Bambi-crushing bureaucrats, some still in power from the time Bob Carr sat on his bum for a decade.

Well, that's it. Out with the bureaucrats, out with the teachers, and in with the private sector. In no time at all, we can manage to have as dumbed down and useless an education sector as is on offer to the wretched poor in the United States.

Still it confirmed that once again the Devine managed to publish the controversy without shedding much useful light on the actual issues to hand, a remarkable skill, even if as a result I remain in educational oblivion, while fully informed about her own whacky views. And thanking the absent lord I'm not a teacher having to deal with all this nonsense and a classroom full of fractious unruly children, inspired to revolt by reading the Devine.

But I do so love the idea that if you sit for a school test and do well, you're on the way to a tremendously successful qualification, certified on ways to best deal with the world. I've always though multiple answer tests are tremendous, and as useful as sending a rat through a maze to score a tasty treat.

It must be a constant regret for all the dropkicks and ne'er do wells who dropped out of school and went on to make billions that they failed to see the tremendous benefit in being able to calculate an average travel time which fails to produce an understanding of the average logic on display in a Miranda the Devine column ...

Now when teachers can sort out that kind of opaque muddied thinking, the easy generalisations, the political attitudinising, the sloppy misuse and abuse of facts, and the willingness to resort to simple minded calumnies and stereotypes (bolshie teachers, power mad bureaucrats), we might truly be in the middle of an educational revolution ...

(Below: and now its time for you to sit the highly esteemed First Dog test. No excuses. Click on for a larger image, and forward all answers to Miranda the Devine. More of the invaluable First Dog here).

Greg Sheridan, a horde of Murdoch media pundits, and a call for dexterous flexibility ...

(Above: here at the pond, we like to see things double).

Okay, I have to admit it.

I've been playing with an iPad, and like all toys, it exercises a peculiar fascination, like an iPhone or iPod on steroids.

Load it up with an avi (which you have to convert to an iTunes friendly standard) or use an app like Handbrake to convert a Video_TS file (drm free natch) to a file transfer friendly format, and bob's your uncle.

Suddenly you have your own portable private screen, better for inflight entertainment than any current airline offering, and unnervingly sharp. I swear that the avi of an old movie from 1973 that I dug up was transformed the moment it hit the iPad, and it wasn't just due to the groovy small screen presentation. It was actually a better defined image, as if there was a mini upscaler at work. Better than the image to be had on a very sharp 23" screen hooked up to my box, and still managing to be better than the very sharp screen on my Mac portable.

What next? Well 3D obviously, as connectivity via 3G and then soon enough through 4G/LTE is already coming.

Doubt me on the 3D? Why not trot off to Apple Foresees 3D Glasses That Use Your iPhone for your futurist hit, and take it in, along with a hit of the breakfast bran needed to calm the nerves at the thought of incessant gadget change. Always with the changes Mr. Jobs and the leeching of the early adopters.

Now if you're in the entertainment industry, you might be wondering what all this means. And I think it's safe to say that the iPad will do for movies what the iPod did for mp3s and drm and free music on the internet.

You see, provided that you convert your file to an iTunes friendly format, the platform is agnostic about where it came from. You might, for example, have ripped a copy of Avatar - purchased for your own private use, natch, just as your ripper is only for private domestic fair use purposes - and then downloaded it to your iPad so you could inhabit the alien blue world wherever you roam. Or you might simply have taken a short cut and downloaded one of the many rips roaming the full to overflowing intertubes. Meh, we're agnostic at the pond.

End result? Piratez have their perfect tool, piratez rulez. The industry better hope that iSpecs work because that's the only logical step to upgrade in a way that sidesteps the pirates, at least for a little while ... until the piratez work out the game on that one.

But why this side step down the futurist technology path when the pond is dedicated to loons?

Well it was because I clicked on The Australian this morning and I was awestruck by the fair and balanced coverage on view in the opinion pages.

First up there was Greg Sheridan endorsing Kevin Rudd's sit on his bum do nothing about climate change policies, under the craven header, No need to lead from the front on ETS action, and as if startled by the horses, or having been caught out praising complete inertia as a strategy, Sheridan then rounds out his piece by finding mystical comfort in Abbott's obfuscation over immigration:

Abbott's speech dwelled too much on opinion polls - one reason it was under-reported - and gave the impression the Coalition would be happier with 29 million rather than 36 million Australians, but did so with such dexterous flexibility that an Abbott government could pursue growth, surely a bedrock value of the Liberal Party, as energetically as the Howard government did.

Dexterous flexibility! Has there ever been a more felicitous phrase for talking out your arse? Why you might counter with "economical with the truth", but I think I have a new phrase, right up with "that's a very courageous decision Minister".

Not only can you talk gobbledegook, but Sheridan will become part of a conga line of journalists endorsing you for being the very model of a model politician. You fools that think politicians should say what they mean and mean what they say simply don't have a clue. Think dexterous flexibility, and nothing is but what is not ...

Next on the list was Henry Ergas, doing what has become a standard bleat about the mining tax, as we all suddenly forget small business and Howard's battlers and the middle class, to don sackcloth and ashes for the long suffering mining industry, who at this minute are preparing to pack their bags for Canada.

This tax won't win any respect, Henry opines, clearly of the view that once you've got into bed with the mining industry, you should marry them by morning, or you'll lose all respect. Henry evokes Aretha Franklin to explain why the rich should go on getting rich, because otherwise we all face a brown out, or deja vu all over again. Better to be in California or Nevada perhaps where nobody gets taxed at a government sustaining level, and everything is falling apart.

But hey ho, nonny no, on we go, and next up is Tony Makin explaining how Rudd hits flat note with unfinished symphony. He explains how we're all better off living abroad, like the million Australians in the dinkum diaspora, and how nearly all taxes confer a net loss of economic welfare. Yep, it's better to live in California or Nevada perhaps, where the punters have stopped politicians devising new forms of taxation, and everything is falling apart.

Makin's immediately followed by Justine Ferrari, who explains how Post-crisis, PM should have lifted sights, which is to say that the BER scheme failed to deliver value for money, and it's all Chairman Rudd's fault, or perhaps a teensy bit Gillard's too.

By now I was beginning to reel in a drunken way, but taking a deep breath I plunged into Dennis Shanahan's Julia's Teflon wearing a bit thin, wherein he does another beat up on the BER, and does his best to bring out the worst in the recent audit report.

I could barely summon up the strength to reach Samantha Maiden's report from the despatch box, on how Gillard has in fact managed to avoid the heat coming from the BER and somehow, whatever Shanahan alleges, by a Lourdes miracle perhaps, the header magically becomes Deputy sidesteps heat from kitchen. Yep, it was the kitchen cabinet that done it, that and a lack of cabinet scrutiny, and Gillard rolling the critics like a carrot-topped steamroller.

I began - dimly - to understand that Australia was in utter ruin, the kitchen cabinet a disaster, Teflon flaking off like a space shuttle losing tiles, Aretha Franklin brooding about a loss of respect, and the only way forward a hearty dose of dexterous flexibility.

By the time I got to Barry Cohen's Let's not beat about the bush, there's room aplenty, I began to get metal fatigue - or is that mental? Bazza wants a big Australia, and he wants new Australians to go bush. It seems Bazza lives in Bungedore, and he comes out with this beauty:

"Ah," I hear you say, "but that's all very well for you, you live outside Canberra." That's true but similar lifestyles are available close to Sydney, Wollongong, Newcastle, Gosford, Armidale, Tamworth, Wagga and numerous towns in the other states.

Tamworth? Armidale? Wash out your mouth Bazza, it's full of summer flies and the twang of country music.

At this point I began to convulse and get the shakes. Whenever anyone transports me more than five kilometres from the centre of Sydney - unless it's to Paris, Rome or New York - I begin to get the shakes.

Relax, I muttered, it's just another day with Murdoch media, and what joy there will be, in a post-Avatar world, when the fiscal news about News Ltd suddenly turns sour. How long can this Murdoch ponzi scheme go on, propped up as it is by Fox News and blue indigenous environmentally aware mystical spiritual pagan creatures, while the rest of the empire bleeds red ink?

Which reminds me, I must get back to my iPad and have a little more of a play with Avatar.

(Below: pick Chairman Rupert. You want a clue? He's the one on the right, except he's not the one on the right).