And now for something completely different, a mixed bag of Friday stereotypes ...

(Above: Martin Rowson, here).

Once again the British parliament provided a fine spectacle on ABC News 24, with the meerkat bobbing of questioners, David Cameron in fine form, and speaker John Bercow showing how it's done with wit and flair.

Sheesh, an entire evening wasted on this new addiction. Must go cold turkey, must go ...

The display was in stark contrast to the routine din and rustic sounds to be heard in the Australian parliament, which oftentime hits the ears like the braying of donkeys, and sees question time banished to the early hours of the morning on TV.

That said, sadly not one MP mentioned the crucial role of Amy Winehouse in the riots, and so not one of them is qualified to write a column for The Australian.

Now all that's left on the matter of the riots is to acknowledge Paul Sheehan's intimate understanding of the riots because he was called a 'foreign cunt' in the streets of London by a white skinny English beggar (Widespread policy failures have bred a feral British underclass).

If this is a qualification, then any Australian woman walking the streets of Sydney, especially late at night or walking past a building site or wanting a quiet drink, will have tremendous insight into the next set of riots at Cronulla, though perhaps only from the limited understanding of a 'domestic cunt' ...

Sheehan, in his usual ineffable way, was rabbiting on about the feral British underclass, so it was strange to read Stereotype of the underclass does not apply in today's Fairfax rag. (warning - forced play video and pop ups).

Ah well, to mangle John Ford, as Sheehan knows when drumming up a frothing, foaming frenzy about socialism and the welfare state, between stereotypes and facts, always print the stereotypes ...

Astonishingly, it was left to David Aaronovitch, escaping The Times' paywall for a brief moment of sunlight down under, to make the obvious point at the start of Violent young men will always be around:

Politically committed people of very different beliefs can take exactly the same events and discover in them a precise vindication of their own original worldview. And so it has been this week.

Yep, another Amy Winehouse denier.

Moving right along, it would be tempting to pause and graze at Kevin Donnelly's ongoing campaign in favour of funding scientological and other religious schools, whether Islamic or the Exclusive Brethren or similar fundamentalist creationist Christian, in The more school options, the better it is for all of us:

Much of the cultural-left’s attack on non-government schools portrays such schools as only serving the top end of town and representative of an inflexible and inequitable class based society.

Well the pond doesn't want to get lumped in with the "cultural-left", whatever that might mean in Donnelly's fevered mind, but I can't see how a school option devoted to creationism, scientology or even to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster will be better for all of us.

Nor how the federal government shovelling money down scientology or Exclusive Brethren schools will improve school students' grasp of reality ...

But then Donnelly always has a wonderful capacity in any discussion of the school funding system to discover a precise vindication of his original world view, as well as the ongoing need to prop up the Catholic school system, never mind any collateral damage to the minds of the young.

Speaking of world views, it was poignant on a Friday to see Ron Boswell assiduously beavering away to confirm a red green watermelon Australian conspiracy involving Julia Gillard, the Socialist Forum of long ago, and current deviant, despicable greenies (The real Julia is true to her socialist forum past).

In a sublime attribution of authorship, Boswell blames Gillard for being on an editorial committee responsible for the publication of The Greening of the Red, a recipe for left-wing totalitarian control ...

Boswell presents the policies proposed by "the author" (author presumably unknown) as exactly the same as Gillard's, and has a fainting fit:

These are the economic prescriptions advocated by Gillard and her socialist chums. They were ridiculous then, as they are ridiculous now.

No doubt it plays well to the chooks in Boswell's back yard, always ready to be fed a rich mix of wheat and corn and never mind the chaff, but it's funny to look at the actual Julia doing the rounds these days, a timid conservative willing to contemplate the Malaysian solution, ready to ignore gay marriage and ready to toe the Tea Party line in relation to a budget surplus, such that even Dennis 'the tie' Shanahan somehow manages to berate her for economic rigidity in Perils for PM in hanging on to surplus.

That's right, 'the tie' is in a rage about rigidity (who knows what he thinks about the rigidity of Angela Shanahan).

It seems it's a scandal that the Labor government has constantly blathered on about a surplus in 2012-13, when what is needed is flexibility:

It is perfectly reasonable, desirable, for a government to be prepared to shift on economic targets as world conditions shift and budgets have to adjust. In another climate such a shift could be achieved reasonably and with limited backlash.

Lordy, lordy, wash out my mouth, or can I call the lad fiscally irresponsible, in a way that's certain to see the Australian economy collapse by 5 pm next Friday.

Why as any reader of Paul Sheehan, follower of housewife Michele Bachmann's domestic budgeting policies, knows, without a balanced budget, we face immediate ruin ...

On the upside, could Dennis Shanahan's suggestion we need to be flexible in the matter of housewife budgeting see him drummed out of the antipodean Tea Party for life? Or is it just another gotcha, and when we see the Labor party fail to deliver said surplus, they can be then be pummelled around the head for following the policies of the ancient student Socialist Forum?

Paging Mr. Boswell, paging Mr. Boswell, there's a spendthrift in the house ...

Meanwhile, if you're looking for a career in Australian politics, quick, look under the bed and burn all the copies of any youthful follies where you might have written about some youthful passion - say about embarking on a career as a Catholic priest - because Ron Boswell is on the prowl and he's coming to get you ...

What's that Mr. Shanahan?

It is perfectly reasonable, desirable, for a person to be prepared to shift on personal views and ideologies and theologies as world conditions shift and views have to adjust to changed reality. In another climate such a shift could be achieved reasonably and with limited backlash.

Not when Ron 'nail the watermelon' Boswell is on the prowl but you have to admire the way he's dredged up an ancient document and turned it into a description of the policies of the current government ...

Meanwhile, one unanswered question. Throughout the debate in the UK parliament last night, Nick Clegg once again cut the most extraordinarily glum, sad-looking, inert, po-faced figure ...

Now it's revealed to the pond that this is his normal posture, such that he's even earned his own tumblr site dedicated to Nick Clegg Looking Sad.

Cheer up Nick, you'll be the leader (or maybe not) of a very minor party come next election ...

And now, since we keep forgetting to draw attention to some actual interesting and/or amusing reading, anyone who's ever suffered through an earnest article by David Brooks will find much to amuse in H. Allen Orr's review of his book The Social Animal, to be found in The New York Review of Books under the header Fooled by Science, and happily outside the paywall.

The pond could cheerfully quote the whole review, which is a smackdown of the most refined kind. Like this footnote:

Some of Brooks's scientific findings are also crushingly banal. On their first date, Rob checks out Julia's curves and Brooks dutifully reports that studies show that men's eyes are drawn to the curve of women's breasts. Anyone who needs science to tell them that men like women's breasts may need to get out more often.

And this blast:

...one sometimes wonders if, in Brooks’s world, contentment is permanently closed to carpenters, musicians, and waitresses. Is the ultimate goal of education specifically and of public policy generally to direct such people into allegedly more meaningful occupations, ones that take place inside office cubicles? It sometimes seems that Brooks’s vision of the good life stretches all the way from Westchester to the Hamptons. In any case, it’s hard to imagine a world more tedious than one wholly populated by Harolds and Ericas. Indeed, Brooks’s characters are so dull that he may have unwittingly written a book that turns readers off to the very American dream he hopes to celebrate.

And so on. The NYRB arrived late by way of post at the pond, but a joy delayed is a joy felt all the more keenly ... and all the more so, if in an earlier life you'd suffered through Brooks' short form version of the book for The New Yorker, Social Animal, where this was the illustration:

Did someone mention crushing banality?

Lordy lordy a feast of British MPs, Paul Sheehan accurately described by a London beggar, and David Brooks smack down time, and the weekend nigh.

Can life get any better than this Mr. Boswell?

And so to Samuel Johnson gazumping David Brooks by a couple of centuries:

Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden exchange meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

Preeesenting Mr. Brendan O'Neill and Mr. Theodore Dalrymple in an Amy Winehouse welfare state battle of the octagon ...

Okay it's shoot out time in the pond.

On the leftish, or in a libertarian, feel free to call it what you like, corner of the octagon, strutting his fists of fury, or perhaps with his trusty six-shooter is Brendan O'Neill, valiantly extolling the virtues of Amy Winehouse in Addicted to the rehab cure-all:

Anger management is a flourishing industry in the Western world, where the aim seems to be to tame people's passions, to rehabilitate them as calm, sedate people who never get "intermittently explosive" about anything. It's a modern, politically correct, less intrusive version of the lobotomy.

In these circumstances, Winehouse's hymn to self-reliance - "Yes I've been black, but then I came back" - is an act of brilliant artistic heresy, a lyrical kick against the pricks who would have us believe none of us can cope without their guiding hand.

Like the brilliant if tragic Winehouse, we should also respond to the know-it-alls who want to remake us in their image with the words: "No, no, no."

Wow. That bit about anger management in the UK is prescient, but enough already, Mr. O'Neill, you've had your turn, now it's the turn of Theodore Dalrymple in British rioters the spawn of a bankrupt ruling elite as he explains how Amy Winehouse and her pop culture led to the current riots:

Perhaps Amy Winehouse was its finest flower and its truest representative in her militant and ideological vulgarity, her stupid taste, her vile personal conduct and preposterous self-pity.

Her sordid life was a long bath in vomitus, literal and metaphorical, for which the exercise of her very minor talent was no excuse or explanation. Yet not a peep of dissent from our intelllectual class was heard after her near canonisation after her death, that class having long had the backbone of a mollusc.

Oh dear, Mr. Dalrymple, the judges have determined that suggesting Mr. O'Neill has the backbone of a mollusc is below the belt.

Non-peeping non-dissenting failed contrarian Mr. O'Neill, do you have any response?

That five-letter word, rehab, is the main motif of our illiberal times. It speaks to the now widespread notion that individuals are fundamentally incapable of taking command of their lives and thus they must occasionally be remade by external experts.

Once, the word rehabilitate was used mainly to describe the attempt to give criminals a moral makeover. These days, all of us are seen as damaged goods in need of rehabilitation, physical, mental or moral, from Those Who Know Better.

Uh huh. Mr. Dalrymple, as one of Those Who Clearly Know Better, do you have a response?

The riots in London and elsewhere in Britain are a backhanded tribute to the long-term intellectual torpor, moral cowardice, incompetence and careerist opportunism of the British political and intellectual class.

They have somehow managed not to notice what has long been apparent to anyone who has taken a short walk with his eyes open down any frequented British street: that a considerable proportion of the country's young population (a proportion that is declining) is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined.

Oh really Mr. Dalrymple, the judges are getting very close to a disqualification.

Calling Mr. O'Neill a moral coward is simply not acceptable.

Is there any way we can get these two fine gentlemen to agree on anything?

What's that you say? We should look more closely at Mr. O'Neill's Less political rebellion, more mollycoddled mob:

The political context is not the cuts or racist policing, it is the welfare state, which has nurtured a generation that has no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.

What do you say, Mr. Dalrymple? Fair point?

British youth leads the Western world in almost all aspects of social pathology, from teenage pregnancy to drug taking, from drunkenness to violent criminality. There is no form of bad behaviour that our version of the welfare state has not sought out and subsidised.

Thank the absent lord, at last we have agreement. Mr. Dalrymple?

Of course, none of this reduces the personal responsibility of the rioters. But the riots are a manifestation of a society in full decomposition, of a people with neither leaders nor followers but composed only of egotists, and followers of Amy Winehouse, including Brendan O'Neill.

Sheesh, this might be hard. No wonder the British are at each others' throats. Mr. O'Neill?

... this street violence was largely ignited by the excesses of the welfare state and intensified by the discombobulation of the police state but not by Amy Winehouse's refusal to go to rehab, no no no. The riots tell a very interesting story about modern Britain.

Enough gentlemen, put away your small disagreement over Amy Winehouse, shake hands, and let's call it a draw. After all, you both agree that it's all the fault of the welfare state and spineless intellectuals and the elites, and we all know that any intellectual writing a column for that elitist rag (AB demographic, please enter via the club door) The Australian is full of spine ...

Hang on, hang on, the judges have decided there has to be a winner, and the prize goes to ...

Mr. Dalrymple, for proposing with equanimity the following sentence:

By the age of 12, an ordinary slum-dweller has learned he has nothing to fear from the law and the only people to fear are those who are stronger or more ruthless than he.

The ordinary slum-dweller!

This is of course in stark contrast to the extraordinary or perhaps the unordinary slum-dweller, a much rarer fish.

The judges have added a special additional gold bar to Mr. Dalrymple's prize for allowing an intense dislike of Amy Winehouse to help explain the riots.

They patiently await Mr. Dalrymple's explanation of how Jimi Hendrix's death (18th September 1970) led to the establishment of the page 3 girl in The Sun (17th November 1970), and how the death of Jim Morrison led to an increase in British troops in Northern Ireland ...

No doubt wicked pop culture causes all sorts of bizarre flow ons, eh Mr. O'Neill, and your fatuous special pleading for Amy Winehouse has caused a breach in the commentariat consensus. Now off to rehab with you, quik stix, yes, yes, yes, and learn to deal with that anger management ...

Meanwhile, the learned judges have determined that inventing this new demographic in the UK puts Mr. Dalrymple right up there with Marie "Let them eat cake" Antoinette, though full credit for that phrase should really go to Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

Enfin je me rappelai le pis-aller d’une grande princesse à qui l’on disait que les paysans n’avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit : Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

Or put it another way:

Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had way too much welfare state, way too many electronic goods, and who responded: "Let them eat popular culture and Amy Winehouse and see how far that gets them in competing with polite well-spoken Polish workers."

So there you go. Please no restlessness as you leave the octagon, faces battered, bruised and bloodied.

Put it another way. If it wasn't such a serious matter, you'd have to laugh rather than cry, but if you want to discover what a full flowering of hostility, contempt, disdain, fear and loathing is like, why you couldn't do much better read Messrs. Dalrymple and O'Neill, with one invoking the name of Lenin and the other the name of Marx!

Just another day frolicking through the opinion pages of The Australian, and never mind the size of the contradictions, feel the mass of the rage ...

Christian Kerr, Xavier Symons, and crumbs from the fifties re-surface in the antipodes ...

You know you're in the company of some amiable trolling when you come across this kind of line:

For two things are sure. The census will show that a clear majority of Australians believe in a god. And religion is a clear force for good in our society.

Not a clear force for good and bad in our society, and let's discuss the percentages, but just a clear force for good.

That's how Christian Kerr pokes the stick in Good God, you atheists are insecure, but you can do it to anyone:

For two things are sure. The census will show that a clear majority of Australians believe in football. And the Collingwood/Manly/Crows/Broncos/who cares about Perth football club is a clear force for good in our society.

Damn you Collingwood and Manly, damn you to hell.

Apparently Kerr had a mid-life conversion after wandering into a church one day at Bondi Junction , and good luck to him.

Truth to tell I have a mental, spiritual or physical conversion of one kind or another any time I visit the appalling junction. And then he goes and spoils it all:

Forget the supernatural aspects of religion if you want to. Human beings have created religion because it meets clear human needs.

Uh huh. So any religion in a storm? Delusion is a human created thing which meets the delusionary needs of humans, so it's all fine.

And that is why despite the shrillness of the proselytising atheists, a clear majority of us will have told the census we believe in God.

And from the header at the start announcing atheists are insecure, by end of tale they've become shrill proselytisers, and should instead embrace their delusionary needs for delusion. By golly I want some of that stuff they're selling at Bondi Junction.

Well Kerr scored a fine flurry of hits, and I guess it's another day of shrill carry ons at The Punch, but the silliness of Kerr is easily matched, and outdone by Xavier Symons' effort in Crummy artist left to pick up the scraps.

Symons, who advises in his profile that he is studying philosophy, with a keen interest in moral philosophy and virtue ethics and natural law, at Sydney University, has apparently just discovered the work of comic book artist Robert Crumb and is shocked to the core:

American cartoonist Robert Crumb has repeatedly depicted scenes of rape, incest, paedophilia and bestiality. Many of his works have racist overtones. We should be discouraging him from publishing, and I was relieved to hear yesterday that he had cancelled his Australian tour.

Robert Crumb is a self confessed “weirdo“, whose work promotes exploitation of women and minors. We should not be celebrating him.

Indeed. Forget the Christmas crackers, and ban him. Dance on his grave if you like.

As Christian Kerr would no doubt confirm:

The bible repeatedly depicts scenes of rape, incest, paedophilia, mass murder, torture, genocide and bestiality. Many of its chapters have racist overtones. We should be discouraging the bible from being published, and I was relieved to hear yesterday that there's a new campaign to remove all Gideon bibles from hotel rooms in Australia.

Christians are generally conceded to be self-confessed weirdos, whose main text promotes the exploitation of women and minors, and allows a role for slavery. We should not be celebrating them, or their fundamentalist calls for men to remain head of the household.

Ah you say, all very fine for a little trolling, but what about the bestiality? Well I know it's a stretch, but there's always Ezekiel 23:2o:

There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. (NIV)

Donkeys' genitals. Why Crumb would make a meal of that.

As for 'weirdo', what a funny and charming term. It took me right back to the nineteen fifties and the world of Maynard G. Krebs in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. And from there it's but a short step to Homer Simpson in Homer the Vigilante:

Herman: See, it's a miniature version of the A-Bomb. The government
built it in the fifties to drop on beatniks.
[Homer imagines a beatnik on the grass with a bongo]
Beatnik: Radiant cool, crazy nightmare
Zen New Jersey nowhere...
[A group of beatniks snap their fingers in time]
[Homer flies overhead in a plane]
Homer: Put this in your pipe and smoke it!
[Presses a button, but the A-Bomb doesn't fall]
Beatnik: How now, brown bureaucrat?
[Homer jumps on the bomb, and it falls with him still on it.
He cheers as though he's riding a bronco]
[It explodes, bringing us back to reality]
Take that, Maynard G. Krebs!
Herman: Hey...see the sign? ["Do not ride the bomb"]
Homer: Sorry.

Yep, Maynard still resonates in the culture, as does Dr. Strangelove, a movie which, besides celebrating armageddon, spends a little time with sociopathic generals anguishing over precious bodily fluids and mad Germans with arm disorders. Sounds like it should be banned or at least discouraged from appearing on dvd down under.

But back to the comedy stylings of Xavier, which reminded me of nothing so much as a conservative undergraduate trying to get some space Tharunka in the sixties, and damned near finding it impossible, what with all the perverted weirdo hippies hanging out with Wendy Bacon.

I find all of this very alarming. I think we need to wake up to the reality of this artist. His work is disturbing, and it flows from a warped mind. Crumb has labelled himself a “weird pervert”. I think this is a pretty good self-analysis. But even more alarming is his shamelessness. As he recounted in another interview, “I do these crazy cartoons…I have no defence. I just have to throw up my hands.”

It’s a good thing that Crumb feels offended by the comments made in the Sunday Telegraph on July 31. Maybe it will help him to be a bit more restrained in his comics. In any event, it’s caused him to cancel his trip to Australia. And this will impede the spread of the Crumb-cult.

Yep, Xavier's right up there, or right out there, with Jesse Phillips scribbling a beat up for the Sunday Terror a couple of weeks ago, and Hetty Johnson:

"These cartoons are not funny or artistic - they are just crude and perverted images emanating from what is clearly a sick mind," she said. "Of all the brilliant artists, cartoonists and writers the Opera House and council could have supported, you have to wonder why they chose Robert Crumb."

Only in Australia, really, and we look forward to Xavier joining with Hetty in fresh calls to ban James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Vladimir Nabokov, who had the sick audacity to write Lolita (don't get us started on Portnoy's Complaint, you filthy adolescent men).

Damned if Nabokov is going to be allowed to visit Australia's shores, or that we should in any way encourage the Nabokov cult. What's that you say? He's dead and he never visited Australia? Well that's a jolly good thing, because the last thing we need in the antipodes is a visit from a sicko, weirdo, perverted zombie ...

As for the Labor party's response to the crisis:

A spokesman for the federal Attorney General's department told The Sunday Telegraph that Crumb's work cannot be shown in Australia unless he submits his illustrations for classification. The spokesman said his work would almost certainly be refused classification.

Yep, there's an intelligent response. We haven't seen it, but we're agin it.

Not that it matters that much, because if you care, you can find Crumb's work on the full to overflowing intertubes, without classification and without respect for intellectual property rights.

What's astonishing is the way that wowsers and prudes keep cropping up in every generation, giving a lie to Christian Kerr's notion that religion is always a force for good.

For a moment there, I almost took Xavier's piece as a subversive bit of yippie trolling, a promotion for Crumb's appearance at the comic con, Graphic 2011 festival, but sadly the wowsers have had their day and the event is cancelled.

The always flighty Crumb has already tucked himself away amongst the perverted French, and these days I only occasionally catch glimpses of the odd panel in that perverted filthy vile rag cherished by sicko New York sophisticates, The New Yorker, and I guess sitting on a plane for hours to cop abuse and controversy that'd take him back to the sixties was a little too déjà vu ...

Naturally Xavier is appalled at the lickspittle Fairfax press, which dared to publish a piece by Charles Purcell celebrating Crumb, in I'm a very eccentric, oddball character.

Dearie me, poor alarmed, disturbed, upset, delicate Xavier, a petulant flower who probably gets an anxiety attack if a dog comes within ten feet of him in the rose garden of life ...

Funnily enough, when I was in Singapore, I went off to an exhibition of works by Salvadore Dali at the bizarre Marina Bay Sands arts science museum. At the time I was full of condescension - it wasn't a very good exhibition, made up of assorted castings scrabbled together, along with some curatorial touches, the odd print and much fuss about melted clocks.

But now it turns out that the soft fascist government of Singapore is more tolerant of, and more liberal about, aesthetic eccentricities than Xavier, Hetty and the Attorney General of Australia.

Ah well, it beats writing about the commentariat for a day, but lordy, how this country was fucked in the fifties, remains fucked today, and presumably will go on being proudly fucked well into the future ...

And by the way, why on earth doesn't the philosophy department at Sydney University insist that all their students take a course in aesthetics? You know, Phil2618 - Aesthetics and Art. Here are the questions, which let me get my 6 credit points easy peasy:

Why is art important to us?

It isn't, not when it's done by sicko weirdo perverts, and it's full of them doing vile things about vile things.

What is an aesthetic response to something?

I don't know. Send all the sicko weirdo perverts to France would be a good start.

What is the relation between art and aesthetics? Is there such a thing as objective interpretation of an artwork?

Yes, there are sicko weirdo perverts out there, and that's an objective fact.

Or is it all a matter of taste? Should we believe in "the death of the author"? What is the relation between art and representation, expression and emotion? We shall discuss these and other questions (e.g. modernity, metaphor) from the perspective of an historical approach to the philosophical study of aesthetics and art.

I don't know, but I do know that sick perverted humanity and its weird warped sexuality is no fit subject for art or artists. Send them all to France.

Golly, who'd have thunk philosophy was so easy.

Please just post the Ph.D in the mail, along with a note that youth is wasted on the young ...

(Below: a couple of rough snaps from the Singapore exhibition, perhaps not classified in Australia, but approved by the Singapore government for public viewing. Amazing.

Be prepared to faint at the quality of the snaps, taken in low light. You might even faint at the artistic abilities, or lack thereof, of Dali. But if you want to faint at the content, please go off and hide behind the skirts of the Attorney General, or hie yourself off to a nunnery. Or perhaps Bondi junction, where you might undergo a spiritual conversion to mammon and the giant mall).

Brendan O'Neill, child beauty pageants, and the London rioting explained ...

(Above: guess which one is Brendan O'Neill. That's right, he's the one on the left playing dress ups).

In recent times, the world down under has been blessed with an abundance of opinions from Brendan O'Neill as he does his tour of the colonies (much to the joy of minions of Murdoch, as they celebrated the tour with Contrarian whose code of freedom rages against Left-Right rigidities).

There he was scribbling furiously about the suffering of Rupert (Right rolls over and lets political correctness censor the world), next thing you know he's on Q&A, and before you can draw breath, he's over at the ABC's The Drum, raging in Well done pageant-haters, without a care in the world about the way his own rough-hewn countenance was put up alongside a young barbie doll.

Apparently pageants for very young girls aren't anything to do with the ambitions and frustrations of stage mothers (oh lordy, the stage mothers I've met in my time), but rather the desire of children to play dress-ups.

In the usual topsy turvey world that O'Neill inhabits - what am I against? what have you got? - it's all in the mind:

Indeed, the great irony of the anti-pageant fury is that it is not the princess-obsessed mums who are sexualising these pink and fluffy girls, but the protesters. Where most normal people who look at a girl in a pink dress and over-the-top make-up simply see a child who likes dressing up, and who will return to her humdrum life once the pageant is over, the pageant-bashers see SEX, a little whore, a walking, talking temptation for the predatory paedophiles who apparently lurk in every street and alleyway in Australia.

Now I could understand this if we were talking about a nude girl, since after all, nudity is natural and harmless. But the whole point of these dress-ups is to turn very young girls into a kind of miniature, idealised view of adult women, using all the tricks and ploys of adult make-up. Lipstick, eye liner, rosy cheeks, blonde curled hair and so on and so forth.

Not that this particularly troubles the pond - after all, we're on Bill Henson's side, even if he's a tad too arty and unbogan for O'Neill - but if you miss this point - the use of an adult sexual veneer on the young, involving all the standard signals which made Lolita such a compelling read, sunglasses and all - you must be pretty thick.

So as far as sex and sexuality is concerned, O'Neill seems as sexually sensitive and aware of sexual signals as a block of red gum.

The whole point of child beauty pageants, like dog and cat shows, and other forms of human eccentricity, including but not limited to dressage contests, is that they are truly weird, and form a rich vein of source material for documentary film-makers tired of cane toads and chickens (but can we ever get enough of Mormons in chains?)

Often, perversity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder - and it takes a pretty perverse mind to behold a six-year-old girl having fun and to think, "She looks like a prostitute. She might get manhandled by evil men."

Yep, Brendan O'Neill has all the sexual acumen of river-hardened red gum.

Now for a final shot across the bows from that hardened gum, good enough for a chopping block:

So, well done pageant-haters - you have successfully turned a small beauty contest in Victoria that would only have been attended by a tiny minority of mums and daughters into a national, furiously-debated symbol of childish sexuality and paedophiliac temptation run riot. Tell me - who are the really messed-up people in this debate?

Would it be wrong to say that Brendan O'Neill is really, truly fucked in the head? Or at least the most mindless, messed-up person in the debate?

Well we wish his children a long and successful career in child beauty pageants.

And here's hoping all the contestants avoid the fate of JonBenét Ramsey.

Perhaps we can look forward to a stream of articles by O'Neill supporting the right of boys and men to dress, think and act like metro-perfumed, heavily made up, bubble headed boobies ...

Funnily enough, O'Neill opened his piece thus:

It is remarkable that in a world walloped by economic recession, when there are wars, uprisings, carbon controversies and assaults on liberty, people can muster up the passion to protest against a beauty pageant.

To which one wag responded:

By a bizarre coincidence, I was just thinking that it's odd that of all the causes you could have championed, you chose beauty pageants for children.

Oh dear, naughty wag. Now you've gone and done it.

That's an open invitation for O'Neill to scribble Less political rebellion, more mollycoddled mob, about the London riots, for The Australian.

In this piece, O'Neill expends much energy and many words bashing away at, inter alia, the welfare state, which has nurtured a generation that has no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.

Yes, if only the young rioters had become involved in child beauty pageants to give them a proper sense of community spirit and social solidarity.

It seems the rioters are "welfare-state mobs", a generation that's been suckled by the state more than any generation before it (and never you mind the actual welfare state of the nineteen fifties in Britain).

It seems the mighty endeavours of Margaret Thatcher to change Britain have been utterly ruined and undone, and welfare statism is rampant, with David Cameron's cuts to the budget just another example of how welfare statism is on the rise.

Well we recently talked about Paul Sheehan and psychological projection, but how's this for a comprehensive state of psychological fear:

The march of the welfare state into every aspect of urban, less well-off people's existences, from their financial wellbeing to their child-rearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain "mentally fit", has undermined individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The antisocial youthful rioters are the end-product of this antisocial system of state intervention.

Uh huh. Talk about giving the rioters an easy out. It was the antisocial system of state intervention wot done it guv'nor. I blames the therapeutic welfarism of the welfare state for me anti-social tendencies...

By golly, there's an urgent need for child beauty pageants in the UK.

The funniest thing? O'Neill pretending that anarchist libertarian rioting and looting has arisen from the welfare state, as opposed to the more natural tendency of anarchist looters to riot and take what they can as a way of showing their individual resourcefulness and capacity for social bonding with other anarchist rioters and looters:

You don't have to be a right-winger with helmet hair and a niggling discomfort with black or chavvy yoof (I am the opposite of that) to recognise that this violence is not political, just criminal.

Uh huh. So what was all that political yabber about?

Surely crime and criminality is the ultimate expression of individual resourcefulness? And if you can get a socially bonded gang together, why you might get to rule Sicily.

After all, Australia was originally built by people who preferred to steal a loaf of bread ...

Now in the normal course, when considering these matters, a responsible commentator, perhaps one on the ground, who has seen what's happened, talked to the people involved, tracked the people who are arrested and charged, their addresses and their motivations, considered the situation from all sides, might contemplate a number of factors, present a number of theories ...

Oh enough with all that childish complexity, and cardigan wearing chatter. For the monomaniacal O'Neill, it's just full bore on one pet theme:

These riots suggest that the welfare state is giving rise to a generation happy to shit on its own doorstep.

Well that takes care of any suggestion that it might have been a fair mix of out of towners happy to shit on other people's doorsteps, and loot what they could find ...

This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one's own community. And as a left-winger I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly adverse affect on working people's lives. Far from being an instance of working-class action, this welfare-state mob has more in common with what Marx described as the lumpenproletariat.

And there you have it, the point where I broke down, despite all the ugliness and pointlessness of the riots and the meaningless destruction, into a helpless, hapless laugh.

O'Neill as a left-winger given to Marxist analysis, and getting agitated about the Welfare State? (We felt the need for boldness).

And it gets richer with a comparison to the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon:

In very different circumstances, we have something similar today where the decadent commentariat's siding with lumpen rioters represents a weird coming together of sections of the bourgeoisie with sections of the underworked and the over-flattered, as the rest of us, "the labouring nation", look on with disdain.

The decadent commentariat? The disdainful Brendan O'Neill part of the "labouring nation"? Oh stop it, stop it, the laughter's killing me ... All those keyboard calluses.

Really, it's a pity George Orwell is no longer with us, even if he left us with Politics and the English Language:

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, decadent commentariat, veritable inferno, mollycoddled welfare state, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Oh okay, George we added in a few words, but if only you were around to throw Brendan O'Neill and his all out assault on the welfare state into the dustbin.

Funnily enough, there were people stupid enough in the comments section to take O'Neill at his own word:

As I live and breathe - a sane left-wing opinion. I didn't think lefties had it in them. I will accept wisdom from anywhere, left or right.

As I live and breathe, there are people stupid enough to accept O'Neill's abuse of the English language and concepts like "left" and "right", and his scourging of the welfare state from an allegedly leftist position ...

About the only leftist position O'Neill adopts is to abuse the cops forced to deal with the situation:

There is one more important part to this rioting story: the reaction of the cops. Their inability to handle the riots effectively reveals the extent to which the British police are adapted to consensual rather than conflictual policing.

Reading that, you might be inclined to forget that this all started with Mark Duggan being killed by a bullet to the chest by police, and then a crowd of protestors facing down some baton-wielding cops (Rioting for 'justice' in London).

I guess that's what we'd all call consensual policing, right up there with the consensual policing copped by Jean Charles de Menezes (Man Shot Dead by British Police Was Innocent Brazilian Citizen).

Back to O'Neill's cop bashing:

It also demonstrates how far they have been paralysed by the politics of victimhood, where virtually every police activity gets followed up by a complaint or a legal case. Their kid-glove approach to the rioters only fuels the riots because, as one observer put it, when the rioters "see that the police cannot control the situation, [that] leads to sort of adrenalin-fuelled euphoria". So this street violence was largely ignited by the excesses of the welfare state and intensified by the discombobulation of the police state. The riots tell a very interesting story about modern Britain.

Actually, if you want an interesting story on the discombobulation of the police in the UK, you might be better off reading Threat of cuts brings added pressure to overstretched police forces. Full credit to the politicians involved.

If you're routinely abused by politicians, pay and perks and numbers slashed, and you routinely cop abuse from all sides, including the likes of 'leftist Marxist' O'Neill, along with all the rioters and dissident looting, pillaging, burning youths on the streets ...

Personally, the last thing the pond would want to be is a London bobby ... too much danger, too little joy, and bugger all in the way of love or pay. Well, who'd be a copper made to stand in the street to deal with violence or assault by motor vehicle in the streets of Brent ... (here).

And then there's the top brass moths singed recently by getting too near the flames of the Murdoch media empire.

As we noted, the love affair between leftist Marxist-quoting O'Neill and arch leftie socialist freedom loving Rupert Murdoch is sickeningly sweet to see - No job is lonelier than defending Rupert Murdoch. Yep, there's nothing like giving Rupert Murdoch's organisation a clean bill of health for corrupting the police force, causing a top down cleansing, and then bashing the cops for their incompetence ...

We remain ever so hopeful that O'Neill will shortly announce that he's leaving the antipodes to show the UK police how to take off the kid gloves. No doubt he'll be on hand in the streets, to handle the riots and rioters, by dealing out shit in fine bovver boy style, and never mind the odd mollycoddled innocent victim who might get blown away.

Or perhaps on his return to London - he is returning, isn't he - the mollycoddling cops might show how they deal with mollycoddled, curdled 'leftie' commentators by taking him out the back next to the dustin bin and giving him a good dust up ...

We can only dream.

There's just one final question. How soon can he fuck off out of here?

And one final note. We certainly wouldn't want to mention unemployment, poverty, recent budget cuts, wealth disparity, the recent royal 'let them eat cake' marriage, or the forthcoming Olympics, as fine an example of panem et circenses as can be found these days ...

But for some strange reason, in his rant about the welfare state, O'Neill didn't blame soccer, and football hooliganism. Nor did he mention the internet or Face Book (perhaps that's reserved for Susan Greenfield).

How strange, since we all know that soccer, and perhaps the new social media, rather than child beauty pageants or the welfare state, are the real reasons for the decline and fall of Britain and Europe ...

There, top that for simple-minded, stupid analysis, Mr. O'Neill ...

Oh wait, you've already done it.

Now let's give a slightly re-worded Gerard Henderson the final word on O'Neill in The Drum:

This was just one of the many improper and unprofessional contributions by British commentators in the Australian domestic debate in recent years. Just imagine what the same journalists would have said if, say, George Bush had written to Kevin Rudd with gratuitous advice on child beauty pageants. (the original Gerard Henderson David Cameron Brit bashing here).

(Below: the beginning of training for the riots).

Janet Albrechtsen, Sir Paul Nurse, and what smokers need is a Frankenstein ...

(Above: a careful uncaricatured response to Sir Paul Nurse).

Watching Sir Paul Nurse's set of personal concerns being unveiled in Science Under Attack last night - it turned up on SBS when the pond was expecting to watch an incisive insight into the sex lives of the Nazi leadership, followed by an expose of J. Edgar Hoover's love of cross-dressing - it was immediately clear that the leadership of a vast international conspiracy had been uncovered.

It starts with the BBC, of course - that almost goes without saying - for providing the insidious platform, and Sir Paul Nurse himself, and the Royal Society for shamelessly exploiting it.

Oh sure, there was much talk of scientists being sceptical and examining the science on its merits and joining in the public debate and being transparent, and how there were kooks and cranks out there, who refused to accept vaccines might be useful, or that HIV caused AIDS, or that smoking and not yellow teeth caused cancer, and how climate science wasn't a vast international conspiracy of scientists.

Once you get this kind of denialism paraded in your face, it all gets too much. Right towards the end there was a sickening, disturbing moment when Sir Paul trots down into the basement of the Royal Society, and begins a shocking cultish worship of dead scientists and their books, including Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

No wonder Cardinal Pell, and Tim Blair and Gerard Henderson and Janet Albrechtsen are so willing to expose the snake oil peddled by these cultists and their ancestor worship ... why it was worse than watching Bear Grylls drink the live pulsating blood of a reindeer, or George Pell feast on the blood and body of Christ.

Along the way, poor old James Delingpole copped a pounding, first by being unable to cope with a simple analogy, and then by revealing himself as a "interpreter of interpretations".

Naturally he responded to the show in fine style with the cartoon above, and with Sir Paul Nurse's big boo boo ...

It seems there were a couple of errors in the program, and worse still, these were acknowledged.

Well it's all ancient history now - the show last aired in the UK back in February - but how pleasing to see Sir Paul's request for civilised debate about scientific matters treated with the complete disdain and contempt it deserves. How pleasing to see the BBC and NASA revealed as stooges for a vast international conspiracy ...

Talk about a mad head ward nurse scissorhand or worse still a Frankenstein freak ...

Okay, that's the ye olde mad tea party out of the way.

Now it's time for ye newe mad tea party, with Janet Albrechtsen and Carbon debate has just begun.

What's most beguiling about Albrechtsen is the way the ground shifts every time there's an attempt to find solid rock.

Over the years, Albrechtsen has routinely suggested that climate science has got it wrong, and trotted around with the likes of Ian Plimer to prove the point. The earth's cooling, the earth's warming, but it's natural etc etc.

Naturally a vast inner city conspiracy is involved:

It is a natural part of our rich human nature to imagine the importance of man and to prefer neat answers. But much of the inner city debate is infused with a disconcerting arrogance that we understand everything, that the science of climate change is settled, that man is to blame and that man can and must fix it, regardless of the cost. (here, to quote myself, original link dead).

This is part of what might be called the varying levels of Bart Simpson denialism.

The climate science isn't settled, and the planet isn't warming, or experiencing change. Or if it is experiencing change, then it isn't the fault of carbon dioxide. Or if it is the fault of carbon dioxide, then it's not the fault of humanity chewing through resources, it's natural (the sun, the volcanoes), and if it is the fault of humanity, then there's nothing we can or should do about it, because that would mean joining in the international conspiracy involving scientists and inner city cardigan wearers.

The circular logic is impenetrable and infallible.

Here's where Albrechtsen has reached this week:

... the 500-strong audience who packed into Tattersalls Club last Wednesday was able to listen to Margaret Thatcher's former energy minister and then chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson explain why a carbon tax will not combat global warming.

Well yes, because global warming isn't happening, or if it is happening etc etc etc ...

After all, how can a carbon tax combat something that isn't happening?

A hearty dose of paranoia and conspiracy theory and repression and persecution should always accompany this kind of discussion:

The government, the Greens, climate change scientists and propagandists may wish it otherwise, but there is plenty left to say about a carbon tax and global warming. Speaking of debates, we had one of those rare events in Sydney last week. Rare because it's hard to recall a similar event where the pros and cons of a carbon tax have been so publicly debated. Far better than the government's 18-page spin document, real information was forthcoming when the Spectator Australia magazine and the Institute of Public Affairs conducted an Oxford-style debate where the motion was "a carbon tax is needed to combat global warming".

Uh huh. So let's get down to it:

We may argue about the degree of global warming and the level of human influence, but one thing is beyond question: it is a global phenomenon.

Say what? We may argue about it? That's it? That's all there is?

But if it is happening - not that we're saying it is - but if it, why surely it's a global phenomenon. Yep, weather and climate are global phenomenons.

Now with that kind of scientific insight, no wonder Albrechtsen is up there in the pantheon with Newton and Einstein.

Moving along, it doesn't take long for the antipodean version of the vast international conspiracy to turn up.

It seems no "taxpayer-funded talking heads" were willing to turn up to be ambushed by the Spectator and the Institute of Public Affairs-arranged talking heads - how strange - and as usual the ABC is front and centre in the conspiracy:

Equally disappointing is the refusal by our taxpayer-funded national broadcaster to interview Lawson, an economist and prominent member of the Thatcher government, on its premier political programs, ABC1's Lateline or 7.30 . While Lawson did speak with ABC Radio National's Fran Kelly and the debate will be broadcast on ABC1 at some point, Aunty's main political forums rebuffed Lawson. What are they afraid of?

The real question might be, what are the viewers/listeners bored by?

Or perhaps we should just quote Gerard Henderson:

This was just one of the many improper and unprofessional interventions by British politicians and diplomats in the Australian domestic debate in recent years. Just imagine what the same journalists would have said if, say, George Bush had written to Rudd with gratuitous advice on climate change policy.

Indeed, Gerard. Just imagine what journalists and you would say reading Janet Albrechtsen demanding that the ABC be turned into a platform for a one time British politician and full time denialist! (Sceptics hall of shame!)

Moving right along, in any other discussion of climate change, being an economist would be a surefire route to hell and damnation.

Here's Albrechtsen in Apocalypse Soon? sneering at the esteemed economist Ross Garnaut and his report:

... will the media provide a pulpit for preaching about Garnaut's report, rather than a platform for debate? Listening to the dogmatic certainty of some climate change zealots, you get the distinct impression that the Garnaut Report will be treated as a climate change Bible.

Note the neat flip. Garnaut is part of the zealotry, involved in a kind of biblical crusade, while all the doubting Thomases do is sit on the sidelines and construct a Gospel of Thomas which isn't allowed into the official text.

So what happens when you refuse to indulge in a theological debate, as one did at the Spectator/IPA follies, haplessly teamed with John Hewson and Mark Latham (well at least he didn't cop Mo and Curly)?

When the climate scientist rose to speak in favour of a carbon tax, McNeill told the audience he would not talk about the science. The audience murmured a quiet "huh?". And herein lies the problem. The climate change scientists prefer not to engage dissenters about the science.

What a spoil sport, refusing to indulge in a glib two minute summary and repeat over and over again by rote that which dissenters don't want to hear, or if they hear, hear only so they can cherry pick away ...

Where did he think he was? In the company of faithful true believers, where trying to have a rational discussion with climate science deniers ... or Janet Albrechtsen ... would be a model of scientific discourse?

Denialists? Moi?

Actually, Lawson is not a denier and the emergence of a carbon tax does not end the debate about the science. Science is an ongoing journey of contestable ideas where even dissenting voices should be openly debated.

Not a denier? Perhaps just Full of hot air ... arguing the case for a carbon tax over climate trading!

Yep, scribbled like a true blue lawyer trained, contestable, dissenting member of The Australian's coterie of commentariat debaters ...

Next week, why scientists should indulge in an ongoing journey of contestable ideas where smoking doesn't cause lung cancer is discussed, and where openly dissenting intelligent designers nee creationists have their eminent scientific ideas openly debated one more time, as if Darwin ever settled the science or ended the debate about the theory of evolution ...

Well you know where this is heading.

Climate science is wrong, there is no warming, and if there is, it isn't caused by carbon dioxide, or if it is, humans aren't responsible for the carbon dioxide, and if they are, there's no point in doing anything about it, we should just learn to live with it and pay the damages bill and just go on doing what we love to do, which is loot and pillage the earth, and the devil take the hind most, and anyway the Chinese are to blame, if not the Indians, and never mind we do it more per capita than anyone else, and who cares if the seas get a little acidic ... (hang on, don't close that gate to the gated community right by the golf course just yet, I'm coming, I'm coming).

Meanwhile, let's pause for the one genuine moment of comedy, as reported by Albrechtsen. Apparently Mark Latham was on the side of the debate that was supposed to be arguing for a carbon tax:

He likened the carbon tax to a government trying to tax cigarettes by giving most of the tax dollars back to smokers, compensating the handful of tobacco companies who were required to pay the tax and not requiring many other tobacco companies to pay anything. How, asked Latham, can the Gillard government claim a conviction about global warming when it has an ersatz policy that does nothing to change human behaviour?

Thank the lord they arranged to get a speaker so strongly in favour of a carbon tax!

And the lesson Albrechtsen draws from this tirade in favour of a carbon tax?

These are questions that the government cannot answer. To do so is to destroy their case for a carbon tax.

Indeed. They might even be questions that Tony Abbott can't answer, because to do so would destroy his case for shovelling money down the throats of the big carbon polluters, in the process forgetting the pitiful "carbon smokers" altogether ...

And if nothing else, smoking makes a nice tidy metaphor for the IPA, still waging a splendid war on behalf of the right of smokers to kill themselves, and via passive smoking, kill others:

Many of us may not agree with the habit of smoking, but there are inherent risks in the majority of us consenting to the fiscal and regulatory exploitation of a minority of smokers.

(Nanny State Thriving On Tax Harvested From Smokers).

Yep, the IPA and Janet Albrechtsen and Mark Latham, fighting for the rights of smokers so they don't lose the right to smoking as a metaphor while exploring the science of climate change ...

Hang on, what's that? Did someone mention science? Phew, thank the lord the pond is a science free zone.

And there's silly old Sir Paul Nurse burbling about yellow teeth and lung cancer.

Sheesh, he might have a Nobel prize in something or other, but talk about a Frankenstein ...

(Below: Frankenstein's monster walks and talks ...

... Oh and an oldie but a goodie, which manages to summarise Janet Albrechtsen's argument that doing nothing is best because there's nothing about which something needs to be done).

Gerard Henderson helps induce a touch of the Jeffrey Bernards ...

(Above: we went looking for a Catch-22 cartoon, but thought this one would do, as it explains so much of Gerard Henderson's anxiety for, and rage about, the future).

In the manner of the immortal Jeffrey Bernard, Ms. Parker is unwell.

Sadly this means that any stray reader will have to deconstruct Gerard Henderson's Now more than ever, tax and red tape are an economic deathtrap more fully by themselves. Beware, death traps, perhaps even bear traps and Bear Grylls, along with the imminent destruction of western civilisation as we know it, are involved.

But we could at least offer a starting point.

By parsing this:

There was considerable media excitement following the leak of a letter written by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, to Gillard supporting the Australian government's carbon tax policy. This was just one of the many improper and unprofessional interventions by British politicians and diplomats in the Australian domestic debate in recent years. Just imagine what the same journalists would have said if, say, George Bush had written to Rudd with gratuitous advice on climate change policy.

You might easily end up with this:

There was considerable media excitement following the leak of a letter written by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, to Gillard supporting the Australian government's carbon tax policy. This was just one of the many improper and unprofessional interventions by British politicians and diplomats in the Australian domestic debate in recent years. Just imagine what Gerard Henderson wouldn't have said if, say, George Bush had written to John Howad inviting him to join in two gratuitous post-colonial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Better still, imagine what Gerard Henderson might have said when George Bush turned up in Sydney to sign The Sydney APEC Leaders' Declaration on Climate Change, Energy Security and Clean Development in 2007. The unnerving cheek of politicians roaming the globe making declarations in other people's backyards.

And if you want to deconstruct Henderson's climate change expert of the week, Professor Murry Salby, you might be better off heading over to Deltoid, and his piece Murry Salby and conservation of mass.

Salby believes the science isn't settled, a line which sent Henderson into a fantasia of rapture.

If there was any visible irony in this follow-up line by Henderson, it was hard to discern:

Labor is being cheered on by members of the industrial relations club, who favour highly regulated labour markets, along with government-funded academics and scientists who comprise the carbon tax club. What these groups have in common is that virtually none of their members has ever had to run a business or pay wages.

Strange, and there we were thinking that Salby might have had some clout because of his research as a government-funded academic at a government-funded university, rather than on the basis of his ability to run a business or pay wages.

But the Henderson line could be a great new way to assess and peer review science.

If a paper is submitted, and a government funded scientist is involved, then he should be drummed out of the club forthwith, without so much as a by your leave.

If they attempt to make it back into the club, they should be forced to admit they haven't run a business or paid wages, and instead have actually focussed on scientific research.

This will allow their research and findings to be dismissed out of hand as the work of insensitive, uncaring hacks. Only people who run a business or pay wages - say employing youths at the minimum wage flipping burgers - live in the real world and have a real insight into science, really. The rest live in fantasy land, and probably belong to clubs in which Groucho Marx has accepted membership ...

The rest of Henderson's piece is an urgent plea for leadership of the country to be handed over forthwith to Tony Abbott before Julia Gillard and the Labor party ruin the country, so he can delay the carbon tax and deregulate the labour market.

Bring back Work Choices, and the sooner the better, we hear you chant, at one and in unison with Gerard Henderson, so that retail workers can stem the tide of internet shopping and return a rosy billion dollar glow to the pallid cheeks of Hardly Normal!

Oh dear, now we realise why we were feeling so Jeffrey Bernard. Reading Gerard Henderson will compound anything, even the minimum wage or government scientists, and turn it into a compounding sense of doom.

Well on that note, and still feeling Bernardish, it's time to leave with a Yossarian rant from Catch-22, which turned up on Andrew Sullivan:

Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain? ... Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! [to warn us of danger] Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't He? ... What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. ...

Amen to that, but could we join in the raillery, by adding to Yossarian's complaint? Phelgm, tooth decay, and the logic on view in Gerard Henderson's columns ...

(Below: and here's a nostalgic snap of, from left to right, Bruce Bernard, Terry Jones and Jeffrey Bernard, c. 1956, taken by John Deakin, and found here).

Paul Sheehan, Barnaby Joyce and the cawing of the crows ...

As expected, the jackals, wolves, vultures and cawing crows are out after their carrion this morning, and leading the pack is Paul Sheehan with US wings clipped by imperial overstretch.

Sheehan leads off with a personal email from a staunch Democrat, a friend who is worried about a budget cut back at work.

Perhaps the friend is in a government job - who knows, she might even have been part of the mad barney over the financing of the F.A.A. (Many Questions About Money Remain After Financing Is Restored for F.A.A.)

If so, it's a complete mystery why Sheehan didn't fire back a quick, Tea Party aligned response.

Along the lines of "what are you doing in a government job? Government is way too big, and completely useless, and must be reduced, if not obliterated at once, and certainly by 5 pm Friday, and I'm sorry if you're collateral damage, but that's the way it's got to be if we want to balance the budget, as demanded by that very attractive and photogenic housewife Michele Bachmann, according to housewife bookkeeping principles, so why not go get a job flipping burgers, or perhaps working the late shift stocking shelves with two dollar goods from China in Target at $8.50 an hour, and so contribute to an improved domestic economy."

Yep, that'll avoid any mention of complicating matters, like increasing revenue, or showing a capacity for compromise, and the hospital pass can be thrown to Obama.

Meanwhile, over at The Australian, Barnaby Joyce is invited to gloat in To those who called me fool, who's laughing now?

As Barners likes to double down when dealing with the matter of US government default, I'll cheerfully call him a fool again, because the current crisis in Washington was entirely induced by Washington lawmakers, and as a lawmaker he's been inclined routinely to play the back end of a donkey.

The role of the other donkeys - the Republican Tea Party mavericks - in the recent sordid affair will of course be down-played. These zealots, fundamentalists and ideologues, and close kissing cousins to the likes of Barners made sure a grander deal was impossible, and who cops the blame in Barner's world? The likes of the intractable Michele Bachmann?

In the political sphere the person who drives via the rear vision mirror, with a wonderful recitation about everywhere you have been and why, but not a clue where you are going, is dangerous. When, with a coterie of bureaucrats, they cannot keep the car on the black stuff but seem to be targeting the trees, you are in for the economic ride of your life.

Yep, never mind the bankers, or the rating agencies that couldn't see 2008 coming at them, or the likes of Michele Bachmann, and the Republican controlled congress, it's the coterie of bureaucrats that's to blame ...

By golly, I'll bet they live in the inner urban suburbs and form part of a cardigan wearing elite, seeing as how politicians are just gosh golly home spun verandah lovers ...

There's a reason that Barners was dropped from the shadow cabinet finance portfolio, as he ran around doing a chicken little routine that was too broad in its comedy stylings even for the master chicken little Tony Abbott (Barnaby Joyce lashes out at colleagues after being dumped from finance), and his latest routine - a mix of chicken little about the imminent collapse of the world economy via Ireland, Iceland, tulips, railroad stocks, Florida real estate, dot.com obligations, and such like - is such a seriously stupid bunch of non-sequiturs, it's hard to know where to start.

Along with the gloating, it makes for another top notch comedy routine, but please someone, anyone, keep his hands off the levers of the economy ...

Truth is, in Barners' world, the road to power always starts with the glass completely empty, and Barners just loves to see an empty glass.

That he can also mix in climate science, and cap his piece with how Australia is too busy trying to cool the planet from a room in Canberra, is a reminder of what an intemperate provocative bumpkin he can be ...

Meanwhile, back with Sheehan fiddling through the entrails, he too manages to drag in as many irrelevancies as possible, including the symbolic impact of an American helicopter being shot down in Afghanistan, with the loss of 31 lives.

It's hard to know what the commentariat make of wars these days.

What with the 24/7 news cycle and the reporting of every casualty, it's difficult to remember that not so long ago - okay, I guess World War II is now long ago - American forces landing at Omaha beach on D-Day endured 5,000 casualties out of 50,000 men, most in the first few hours (and if you want an even more horrendous set of figures, contemplate the cost of the island hopping by United States forces as they made their way to Japan).

So one line might be to suggest that the commentariat harden the fuck up.

These days the commentariat go into hand-wringing mode at the loss of a helicopter, but then only in select circumstances. Was it the same Paul Sheehan who back in 2003 scribbled this denunciation of those who denounced America's imperial ambitions?

The moral virgins in this debate who pronounce themselves "against war", and who rail against American arrogance, need to at least acknowledge the impact that inertia and appeasement have had on the continuing murders and torture in the Abu Ghraib prison, the genocide against the Kurds and the Madans, the invasions of Kuwait and Iran, the missile attacks on Israeli civilians, the use of chemical weapons, the degradation of the environment and the general malevolence of a kleptocracy run by Saddam and his Caligula-like son, Uday, and their vast apparatus of suppression.

Had this regime not been decisively and violently checked by US power 12 years ago, it would now control the vast oil resources of Kuwait as well as its own, would have used this economic power to build an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, would have sought nuclear weapons, and would probably be untouchable. All thanks to prudent, peace-loving people who are against military interventions and American imperialism.

Uh huh. Those were the days, before Abu Grahib became Abu Grahib, so to speak.

But for the sake of the argument and since the pond is in fact of the prudent peace-loving ilk, let's accept that American imperialism is at over-stretch, and America can no longer afford follies like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Who will speak for a rapid draw down?

Perhaps we can look to the anonymous editorialist at The Australian for advice?

Oh dear, the header Coalition must stay the course looks ominous.

As with Ronald Reagan in 1983 after truck bombers killed 241 US marines in Beirut, the pressure will be on Barack Obama to expedite withdrawal from Afghanistan. He and other coalition leaders must continue to resist such pressure, because to submit to it, as General Lord Dannatt, Britain's former chief of general staff, has said, would be to prejudice what chance there is of achieving success in Afghanistan.

Never mind the extraordinarily nebulous definition of what "achieving success in Afghanistan" might mean. And that it still seems to be a crap shoot, so we must speak of "what chance there is ..."

As always, "achieving success" seems to come down to securing the country against the Taliban and al-Qaida, as if securing the country for corrupt government of Hamid Karzai is turning out to be any kind of success at all (see how you go as a woman under Karzai's corrupt regime).

Never mind, I guess that cutting military spending is out - not when bombing to make sure Afghanistan remains in the stone age is high on the anonymous editorialist's list of policy imperatives - just as taxing billionaires must remain off the balance sheet in the United States. It seems imperial ambitions must continue, with the mug punters stocking the shelves at Target the ones to bear the burden and constrain the debt ...

Meanwhile, in the spirit of Barners, Paul Sheehan leaves no stone unturned in his own efforts to be a top notch chicken little, making sure that the "overseas debt bubble" is assigned a proper home - the competence of the Labor government in Canberra.

How handy there's no way to assign the "overseas debt bubble" to the squawking of the commentariat, in which we include that honoured squawker Barnaby Joyce.

Yep, the vultures, the jackals, the wolves and the cawing crows are out in force this morning, with the smell of blood and carrion in the air, and surely they'll achieve control of the saloon once more, if necessary by smashing up the joint like rioters in the streets of Tottenham ...

After all, the best policy we've come across to date, is "If you don't give me the job, I'll wreck the joint."

What's that Barry?

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' "interests," I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can. (Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, 1960)

Yep, you can take your liberty, and while you're at it, you can take your poverty with it too ...

So caw the crows at their tea party ...