Oh no, if this is Monday, the pond is back in la la lotus-eating land ...

(Above: Louis Napoleon, just the man we need in these troubled times?)

So where were we?

Lordy, lordy, when the mouse is away, do the cats come out to play or what.

It seems that while the pond's been away, with nary a thought of Australia fogging its brain, the ACL, aided and abetted by the Jensenists, have been indulging in some fine gay-bashing, with all the subtlety, fear and loathing of a piece of two be four.

And then not to be outdone, the local fundie Islamics felt the need to indulge in a little riotous behaviour, simply because of a YouTube movie which sets a new limbo low for awful production values, let alone script and direction.

Using that child-like logic, every punter trapped in Singapore Airlines with Men in Black 3 as the lead movie in the entertainment unit should have rioted and brought the plane down long before we reached the west coast of Australia.

Tommy Lee Jones did have the sense to turn up for a top and tail cameo, take the money and run, but what to say about a script that shows there's only one way to deal with alien vermin - splatter the matter.

It's the perfect Republican scenario, and no doubt the Mittster is thinking of the insights it offers in relation to border protection even now. Forget all this jibber jabber about law n'order, and justice and jail, just zap the the bugs, and if you've got to travel back in time to save the Alamo, well just do it ...

And then there was the matter of Tony Abbott not just being a handy amateur boxer, but allegedly a tidy two-fisted jabbing wall-puncher.

It had never crossed the pond's mind that Abbott was a rampantly aggressive and assertive politician in possession of a powerful death stare.

No truly, who'd have imagined it, particularly in the fetid atmosphere of University of Sydney politics way back when, as crazed conservative Catholics of the B. A. Santamaria kind waged war against the commie pinko perverts and associated lick-spittle lackeys (the pond thought both sides quite mad, and maintains this attitude to the present day).

What's funny was the response of The Weekend Australian, which the pond had the misfortune to pick up in Singapore Airlines lounge.

Well it was free, even if free doesn't make it a bargain.

Coming off a Jesuitical holiday away from what passes for the media in Australia, it was a reminder of what an extraordinary spectacle the constantly feral tabloid provides on a daily basis.

There was Greg Sheridan rabbiting on endlessly about how it was all the fault of the commie pinko perverts, and nothing to do with the heroic DLP Catholics (except they weren't DLP, they were NCC, and that mysteriously makes a world of difference), and how Tony Abbott was wonderful and might save the world, and even more mysteriously deeper into the rag there was Sheridan also writing about South Pacific. (Rhodes steals the show in Opera Australia's South Pacific - behind the paywall but why should you care?)

It turns out that Sheridan is as silly as a cultural critic as he is as a political writer:

I hope Rhodes doesn't take this the wrong way but I must confess that my musical tastes are a little middlebrow. I have a candy ear. For me, music is 70 per cent melody (the sweeter the better), 20 per cent character and 10 per cent rhythm. So for opera I like Verdi and Puccini, the most delirious enjoyment I have at concerts is provided by Tchaikovsky, and if I see the exquisite Australian Chamber Orchestra, I like the program to be mostly Mozart.

Uh huh. Well there goes the twentieth century. Bugger off Shostakovich, farewell Stravinsky, goodbye Bartok and Leicester square. If only he'd admitted he had a cloth ear because even a nibble of Sheridan on art might turn you off candy for life.

I mean, what sort of self-righteous, sanctimonious goose could write this sort of nonsense as he elevated Jersey Boys over South Pacific:

...as musical theatre it wove an engrossing plot around the career and marital dramas of the group and did enough to advance this modest soap opera drama quite well between the songs. South Pacific was more ambitious in trying to make the music integrally part of the plot, and its plot is more ethically worthy, being a plea against racial prejudice.
But you see I already hate racism, so instructing me on this point, though entirely welcome, does not earn South Pacific any extra points from me purely as entertainment.

What a ponce. Talk about conflating entertainment and instruction, and boasting how he hates racism, while at the same time being the proud author of How I lost faith in multiculturalism a.k.a How the Wogs are Ruining Australia (behind the paywall but why should you care).

Who on earth thinks Sheridan should be allowed out for a night of musical theatre, and then be allowed to scribble about it? Even old musicals should be treated with a little dignity and respect. They are not animals!

Ah well, they allow him to write about politics and international affairs, so you might as well have a trifecta of silliness ...

What was even funnier of course was the way the pack of feral fox-hunters and hounds in The Australian foamed and raged about people daring to dig back in to Tony Abbott's past. The pack were out in force, saturating the rag with rage, and valiantly supporting Julie Bishop as she frothed about character assassination.

This from a rag which was only recently busily digging through whatever excrement it thought it might find in assorted online dunghills so that it could be flung at Julia Gillard.

Naturally there were many worthy defences mounted. It seems that while Tony Abbott might have a problem with women, likely the problem was the women, and not Tony Abbott and his feisty Catholic fundamentalist desire to control their bodies.

And then there was the matter of his alleged homophobia. Not true, said Christopher Pearson, who somehow managed to conflate his personal relationship with Abbott into a complete rehabilitation of Abbott's attitude to gay marriage.

Tony Abbott is not homophobic (inside the paywall but why should you care), he bellowed, on the basis that he was gay and Tony Abbott did right by him, especially at his mother's funeral.

It was a peculiarly indulgent, emotionally wretched, maudlin and sentimental conflation of the personal and the public, slightly nauseating in the read, and then it concluded with the usual mantra from the hive or the herd mind:

Marr is attempting to suggest that people who accept the whole gay policy agenda pretty much at face value are emerging as a silent majority. Either it's a Nixonian strategy or, if he really believes it, he's been living in a gay-friendly enclave and working for The Sydney Morning Herald for far too long.

There's no sign that Pearson has the remotest clue what his sniggering about a "gay-friendly enclave" sounds like, but since he follows it up with a reference to "more experimental menages", we can take it as his usual bout of fear and loathing, of the self and of others, no doubt helped along by Catholic piety offering him pie in the sky in the bye and bye...

Judgmental, pompous, same old same old ...

Meanwhile, there's poor old Barners chipping in with a timely reminder of why Abbott strikes some people as aggressive, not just for the jutting chin and the death stare and the lycra-clad loutishness that sends the likes of Miranda the Devine into a rutting frenzy, but the rampant swagger:

"Some of that's his own fault. I wish he'd stop square-gaiting when he walks."
The opposition leader is well known for his cowboy-style swagger.

Barners, being a Tamworth lad, knows whereof he speaks. Square gaiting is a trotting term, as anyone who once sat and watched the mind-numbing trots at the Tamworth show would know, but naturally it's also been applied to the way some indolent humans move about (as the urban dictionary notes here).

Of course Barners was only saying this to remind us that Mr. Abbott is wonderful, and full of humanity and listens to others, and incapable of getting stuck in the rut of political correctness, but when even your best mates note that you walk and talk with a certain pugnacity, why is there any surprise that Abbott was as pugnacious back then as he is now?

But it did remind the pond of a vision it had at the Royal Palace of Amsterdam in de Dam square.

There was an exhibition on, contemplating the role that Louis Napoleon played in the Dutch state. The various stands were glowing. It turns out that Louis fixed water management, the legal system, the education system, the political system, turned the old town hall into a spiffy palace, improved science and the arts, giving the locals a version of the Prix de Rome, and generally making everything wonderful.

Most particularly he perfected the art of turning up at sundry disasters to inspire the populace, including a gunpowder explosion in Leiden in 1807 and major flooding in 1809 (here at his wiki).

Visions of Tony Abbott turning up at fish markets and shops and dog and cat shows to warn citizens how the sky would fall once the gunpowder carbon tax exploded in their faces immediately leapt to mind.

Sadly the exhibition finished its run a few days ago, but the pond swears blind it was like reading The Australian on a daily basis, devoted as it is to the glories and the wonders and the works of women and gay friendly Tony Abbott.

Room after room devoted to this Renaissance man, explaining how he was the font of the wisdom that would deliver Dutch society into a rational, gay friendly future.

And then the dream shattered like crazed glass. You see, the Dutch at the same time were voting in a new government which will be pro-European, delivering a firm blow against Euro-scepticism, while also making a marked shift away from the extreme right-wing immigrant-baiting parties. No doubt the Bolter is shattered, destroyed ...

Yes it's the European disease. Now who amongst The Australian or the Tony Abbotts of this world would imbibe from that poisonous cup? Where there's talk that climate science might be worth paying attention to, and issues of sustainability deserve some notice?

Ah well, it goes without saying that none of these parochial one day wonders hit the radar in Europe, where the talk was more of the Hillsborough scandal and the vile front page of The Sun, and assorted apologies associated therewith, and the usual Euro brooding and murders in France and bleach in milk in England and so on.

But by a synchronicity, just as the pond was being reminded of the darkest days of Thatcherism, and its links with Murdochism, what should pop up at the end of an episode of Big Bang Theory as the plane dragged a reluctant pond back to the land of sun and silliness, and yes, inevitably tomorrow, it being Tuesday, Gerard "prattling Polonius" Henderson maintaining the rage and defending Tony Abbott in that gay friendly Fairfax enclave as he did last week?

It was this from Chuck Lorre:

Or it might just be the voice of the Jensenists and the Islamic fundies and Greg Sheridan and Christopher Pearson and the whole pack of baying blood hounds that infest The Australian these days ... or a reasonable facsimile.

Oh Australia, you bloody beaut. Can someone pack the pond and ship it back to Europe, at express post speed?

Jogging towards the tower of Babel ...

(Above: Singapore Airlines' Sydney lounge).

So here's the thing.

The pond once knew a jogger who turned into a wannabe runner. Don't ask how or why, it's too sordid.

The level of obsession was fixating, at least if you fancied fixating on smelly runners and sweat-stained clothes that had the aura and stench of camel breath.

Jokes about Jim Fixx having a heart attack at the age of 52 were swept aside like petty-minded nonsense.

It all came back in a wave of amused nausea reading Mark Singer's excellent piece Marathon Man for The New Yorker (outside the paywall at the time of this scribble, and well worth rushing off to read, though really you should subscribe to support decent writing, and vote and make up funny captions for the cartoon caption contest, now they're accepting entries from down under and from Canada - wretched Quebecians excluded).

Singer's piece is about a mysterious dentist from Dillon Montana who set about claiming a series of achievements in marathoning, mainly it seems by skipping the bothersome business of actually doing an entire race.

It's arcane, but it's also true that in running, the rhetoric is the same as golf when it comes to cheating, to lying to yourself (don't ask about the pond and golf, it's too sordid).

The notion is that it's you against the course. Lying to yourself is the ultimate lie. The theory is you could run a marathon by yourself and be perfectly satisfied with the achievement. The truth is what the truth is, and the time you take is the time you take. Contrarywise, if you only managed 30ks, be happy with that, don't embroider, don't twist and turn and chafe at falling short.

You can play a golf course by yourself, and the shots you take are the shots you take. As Singer tells it right at the end:

The marathon, no matter where it takes place, remains, as ever, a solitary pursuit in which every runner ultimately competes against himself or herself. Whatever drove Kip Litton was an entirely different battle with himself, one that quite possibly escaped his understanding. One thing, though, he grasped perfectly. Like the most dazzling of magicians or the most artful of art forgers, by withholding the secret of how the illusion worked he retained a power uniquely his own: the spoils of his humiliation, perhaps, but a knowledge that no one was about to take away.

Which brings us to Paul Ryan, and truthiness, and lying to yourself.

Lying about the time you took to run a marathon is the ultimate lie.

And Ryan lied. He didn't disremember, he didn't forget, he fabricated.

Anyone who knows a runner knows this. They count the time taken, by the kilometre, by the marathon, as a holy grail, a truth telling to themselves and others. Oh dear absent lord, the fetishism, the clock watching, the pulse taking, the obsessiveness, the compulsion, the records and the carry on. With power drinks and camel sweat ...

To misplace an hour is more than a lie, it's a sacrilege. It's a distortion worthy of a surrealist dentist wanting to fake an alternative universe.

A few people have pinged Ryan for this - you can read Sophia McClennen in Truthiness Is Not a Joke: Lying and Living It at the RNC, and locally Guy Rundle has also picked up on the truthiness in 'truthiness' grows like topsy in the Republican camp (behind the Crikey paywall):

... by far the most interesting sideshow was Paul Ryan’s marathon-record. The exoskeletal Ayn Randian discipline-freak is, of course, a marathon runner, and appearing on the right-wing Hugh Hewitt radio show some time back, was asked about his running times. Nowadays, it’s de rigueur for hardcore politician-marathoners, such as Sarah Palin, to do the race in four hours, a substantial achievement by an measure. But Ryan said he had done it in three. Indeed, he told Hewitt, he sometimes got into the two fifties.Which was a bit too impressive — 14 kilometres an hour, which would have put him close to the top 100 in the race in question (in Minnesota, in 1991). In fact he came near 2000th, out of 3200 runners. The idea that he would misremember a placing to put himself out by orders of magnitude is absurd, and serious runners began pointing it out in the media. In response the Ryan camp put out a typically bizarre statement from Ryan:

“The race was more than 20 years ago, but my brother Tobin — who ran Boston last year — reminds me that he is the owner of the fastest marathon in the family and has never himself ran a sub-three. If I were to do any rounding, it would certainly be to four hours, not three.”

Deep in his heart, or perhaps shallow in his lying heart, Ryan is lying to himself, and then lying to others.

He is, in his own way, and by his own mouth, revealed to be something of an Eliot Spitzer, delusional and hypocritical. Call it aggrandising 'snipers in Bosnia' syndrome if you will.

This hasn't got anything to do with political allegiance. It has to do with allegiance to self.

Amazingly there are apologists for the ability to sustain delusions:

Talking about a series of studies of students who embellished their grade point average in a leading American newspaper, a UK psychologist said: “Basically, exaggeration here reflects positive goals for the future, and we have found that those goals tend to be realized.”
In normalspeak, the studies implied that exaggeration might be a symptom of people setting high goals for themselves into the future.(here)

So much for the nuns that berated the pond and promised eternal hell for naughtiness ... and lying. Turns out one person's lie is just another's exaggeration ...

Truthiness lives!

McClennen brooded about this in her piece:

So given the fact that we have learned that the RNC was full of falsehoods, why aren't the liars suffering from backlash? Why aren't their supporters enraged that the candidates they support were incapable of stating their positions and describing their differences with Obama without lying? Has the Republican Party simply given up on truth and embraced truthiness?

According to the Romney campaign's pollster Neil Newhouse it has. After the media questioned the accuracy of speeches at the RNC, he explained that "we're not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."

If you can lie to yourself, you can lie to anyone. You can recall that eagle, that hole in one, that perfect sub-three hour marathon, the fire fight in Vietnam, that rescue of an orphan from a storm, anything you might want to concoct to show you as a hero.

You might even be a dentist setting out to achieve a marathon in each of the states that make up the United States, and never mind if you actually ran the marathons. You did it in your head, and surely that's enough.

In short order, here's the pond's conclusion.

The United States is fucked, and right at the moment, it's staring down the barrel at a man who believes in disappearing gold plates and Christ coming to America before disappearing into heaven, and magic underwear that makes all your troubles disappear ... and a man who lies to himself, and then others, about how fast he ran a marathon.

That's the lie of a hollow man, of a man who wants to be king, but really doesn't have the right stuff. There's no shame in running a four hour marathon, or a five hour one (the pond has never run one, and never will). But there's a shame to fabricating the truth.

In sporting terms, the pond's assured that sort of lying is about as rich as a pedophile priest claiming that the child was seductive ... (well with Paul Ryan being such a devout Catholic it seemed like a Catholic metaphor was required).

Now the pond recalls only yesterday saying it was off on a junket and there'd be no more posts for a while. The pond disapproved of blogs that gloated over people taking junkets and travelling.

Damn straight, but the pond just mis-spoke, disremembered, rounded up or rounded down, or rounded the corner.

Here have a look at this snap of what's on offer at the Singapore Airlines lounge.

Nah nah.

Now having lied to self and you, can I be the vice-president of the United States?

It seems the reward for truthiness is upward mobility and glory, and daily the United States shuffles towards the distortions, lies and venality of a Putin ...

But stay, look at that buffet. Squirrel!

(Below: oh okay, the pond is posting this from Singapore Airlines' Sydney lounge, but couldn't be fagged taking and uploading snaps, so copped a few from here. Is this an exaggeration, a distortion, a blatant form of misdirection, or simply admiration for the cheek and gall of Paul "the Rand man" Ryan? We merely borrow and you decide).

Time for a junket, which is way better than warm milk ...

The pond is off on a junket.

The pond makes no apologies. A junket's a junket, and these days a junket is a rare thing, to be treasured.

Sadly this means saying farewell for a week or more to all the pond's favourite residents, to Mark Latham's meals at the AFR in which he discovers his inner right-wing soul; to Gerard "prattling Polonius" Henderson, routinely taking a fence, and the gate too at insolent leftists, feminists and the ABC; to the punch-drunk hordes at The Punch, too many to mention though surely Sophie Mirabella should be named and shamed every moment she exists and speaks; to Miranda the Devine and her war on bicycles, Satan's preferred form of travel; to Andrew "what Arctic sea ice" Bolt, and his denial of everything while in lap poodle service to the rich; and speaking of prancing poodles, to Christopher "all shaved hair and no meat, you expect me to have an education policy when I just want to say no" Pyne; to Generally grumpy and gloomy Paul Sheehan, on whom the sky falls each Monday without fail so he can gush like a geyser, or perhaps froth and foam like a coffee machine; to old favourites like Piers "Akker Dakker" Akerman, explaining how leftists have ruined everything, even rock 'n roll; to the Angry Submissive Anglicans, so startled and confused to see that the world has moved on from the first century AD; and to the whole loveable gang of rightwing ratbags that infest The Australian like a crusading pack of Joe McCarthy worshippers (Climate change? Isn't that a UN conspiracy?)

So many good times, so much fun, and yet the pond would ship them all down the river in favour of a junket quicker than a spiv would slip you a cut throat razor (so that you too can bring anarchy to the streets).

The pond leaves in good cheer, by fast sedan chair to Sydney's second airport in Canberra, comfortable and relaxed and secure in the knowledge that you can charge $2,000 a developer to access a Minister in New South Wales, and that the state government has this very day announced a brand new transport policy, uncertainly costed, and uncertain in roll out, but Guaranteed To Fix Everything. (Transport plan long on hope, light on detail)

Is it only the hard heads who can remember good old Nathan Rees and his Transport Plan Guaranteed To Fix Everything? (Axed $1.3b south-west rail link revived).

In other words, meet the new government, same as the old government, in much the same way that when you meet the new boss, they might well be the old boss. And we'll all get fooled again.

Now the pond disdains travel blogs, in which people put up gloating posts about their trip.

Rollicking images of life on a beach, or swanning around Amsterdam sipping hot chocolate while trying to work out the deeper mysteries of Andrew Bolt and being Dutch (what did happen to that Arctic sea ice this northern summer?)

Perhaps a trip to the opera while sobbing into a glass of red wine at the sheer tragedy of it all (what did happen to that Arctic sea ice this northern summer?)

Or perhaps yabbering on endlessly about why Singapore Airlines is now better than Qantas (ah that's what happened to it) ...

Enough of that already.

Though this could be a chance to join Jacquie Hayes at the AFR in revelling in what might be called "rich person's porn" or "snob smut". Yes, each week she regales the world with tales of the rich and the well heeled. You can catch her here at Private clubs in a league of their own:

I’d like to know why there isn’t a proper private members’ club in Australia. I’m not talking about those fuddy-duddy single-sex joints that have been in Melbourne and Sydney for a while. I mean truly elegant, rarified and flawlessly civilised places like those I was exposed to during a recent trip to Hong Kong and Europe.
The sole purpose of a private club is to allow the well-heeled to sally forth and partake in some night-time fun and frivolity among a select group of like-minded people. Celebrities and the international jet set are a regular part of the mix, but the environment is designed to cater to the upper classes. On offer is generally a cocktail bar, the option of a lovely meal served by hand picked staff, a dance floor and an unspoken guarantee of complete discretion.

Indeed Jacquie. The pigs must have their private pleasure grounds, and the swine must be kept at bay.

Generally, monthly accounts in clubs remove the need for pesky transactions when there are far more interesting things to do and see. They provide a stage for women to be spectacular, to don their diamonds, for men to power dress to the max.

Yes, and for banality and stereotypes and cliched gormless brain-dead blondes sipping champagne to run amok, as you do each week here.

The clubs are a shrine to sartorial civility, yet also a forum for intimate matters of business. Entry is denied for those who are not members or in the company of one, and wait-lists are long. Annual subscriptions may only be a couple of grand a year, yet the very best of this breed of private club are synonymous with sophistication, exclusivity and unapologetic snobbery.

Thanks Jacquie. Unapologetic is the word. We need to breed more blondes.

In the meantime, gentle pond readers, maintain the rage, or at least a sense of humour ...

... and let the pond's favorite inhabitants continue to produce a deafening crescendo of noise, much sound and fury, achieving diddly squat, while the pond junkets on in blissful silence ...

Getting into a fair old twist about cows, women ruining everything, and favourite bones long buried in the back yard ...

(Above: laugh? Och aye. Does Gerard Henderson do a funny Glaswegian accent? Och aye. Send him this fridge magnet now so he can practise).

Back in the day, the pond used to run a competition counting the number of mentions that Gerard "our very own prattling Polonius" Henderson made mention of Robert Gordon Menzies in a column.

These days it's the ABC conspiracy that catches all the gongs, scoring five direct mentions in It's not destroying the joint, but this double standard is a cow.

The BBC does pretty well too, with four mentions. Alas, their usual partner in crime - their Fairfax co-conspirators - get off scot free, but on the upside that leaves plenty of room for leftists (two nominations) and feminists (two nominations).

The hapless Henderson is this week reduced to brooding about the shocking reaction to Grahame Morris's use of the word "cow" in relation Leigh Sales' interview with Tony Abbott (and what an interview it was, catch up with it here, banishing thoughts of the bumbling Chris Uhlmann from memory forever).

But as a result the pond is reduced to brooding about why Henderson persists in listening to these viper pits.

Speaking of fifty shades of tedious Henderson grey, is it because he's some kind of perverted submissive masochist? Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that.

He seems to spend his entire life listening to people on platforms that will send him into a frenzy, into an outrage. What else can it be than a masochist's pleasure, a submissive's delight?

By tedious prattling column's end, Henderson is forced to conclude:

A sense of perspective might help. In the meantime, Morris should be counselled against using 19th century colloquialisms in these oh-so-sensitive-times. And Sales should desist from getting offended about not very much at all. At least it would free up the BBC for some real news from the antipodes.

Indeed. And as a result it would free up Henderson's columns for some real insights from the antipodes, instead of the standard bear-baiting about matters of trivia of no real import or moment. Or so he says.

We keed, we keed, we know no one reads Henderson for insight, they read him for the comedy, even if it's as predictable as a thin-skinned banana-skin pratfall.

Why, you might ask, doesn't he listen to commercial radio? After all, it seems Henderson doesn't think there's much wrong with Alan Jones, as he downloads on "feminist" Jane Caro downloading on "presenter" Alan Jones for declaring "women are destroying the joint."

You see Jones is just doing what comes naturally. Try this reductio ad absurdum argument on for size:

Shocking, when you think about it. But not if you think for long. For starters, leftists such as Caro are invariably telling us that Jones is a mere shock-jock. Shock-jocks attempt to shock. That's what they do.

A good fit?

Oh a shock jock is what a shock jock do, dooh dah, dooh dah all the day long, and it's shocking when you think about it that shock jocks could shock when shocking's what they do, dooh dah, dooh dah all the living day ...

And there's Alan Jones, sprung, free, liberated, given his 'get out of jail free' card, because he's the scorpion in the frog and the scorpion tale, just doing what is in his nature.

Which is handy because it gives Hendo a chance to be light-hearted and historical (in the same way that lead balloons float wild and free up into the ionosphere), quoting dictionaries of colloquialisms and "Banjo" Patterson. Oh what a wild dinkum colonial lad he is ...

But here's the rub. Sure Alan Jones might be a mere shock-jock, and Morris a magnanimous man who went on ABC Radio 702 (preferred choice for Satanists, feminists and leftists) to deliver a mea culpa for his verbal crime, when he didn't need to, because really what's all the fuss about, and in any case where's the forgiveness? Where's the common humanity? Where's the decency?

Well you can't expect it from women, especially feminists speaking on the BBC:

...from what Caro told the BBC, there will be no forgiveness any time soon - despite the fact that no one suggests Sales even faintly resembles a cow.

So Morris was so inept he called her a cow even in the knowledge that he was hopelessly wrong about Sales, who doesn't even faintly resemble a cow?

Yep, it's a subtle, nuanced defence, worthy of Polonius:

See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportioned thought his act.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

And there's the rub because, you see, Henderson is deep in cup, and bitter and brooding about the double standards and the hypocrisy. Oh the stench, the inhumanity, the foul deeds that cry out to heaven above for vengeance:

It seems the level of measurable insult declines if it is directed at a conservative - male or female - by a continuing leftist.

Yes, continuing leftists!

These are very distinct from discontinuous intermittent or coitus interrupted leftists, and you know the very best defence of Grahame Morris is to compare him to a comedian making a living:

At this year's Mid-Winter Ball at Parliament House, Julian Morrow, one of the ''Chaser boys'' (average age late-30s) referred to mining entrepreneur Gina Rinehart as ''the elephant not in the room''. Laugh? The room, full of journalists, joined in the joke - knowing it was a personal putdown.

There, you see, if one of these - let's pause to purse our lips and sneer "Chaser boys" can do it -where's the harm in Grahame "Chaser boy" Morris joining in? Oh it might be a personal putdown, but it's just Morris being a Chaser man! Laugh? Why that cow joke had the sides splitting ... (we all know she's a cow, and now goddam it, we can't say it).

And so the hounds are loosed, and the game is on, and it's payback time, because you see Grahame Morris being merely indiscreet and Alan Jones being shocking is nothing, nothing I tells ya.

There's a conspiracy of silence, a looking away, a faint-hearted refusal to confront the hideous truth, except for brave, always remembering, always shaming Hendo:

Indeed Morrow's tone is common for the public broadcaster. The likes of Caro said nothing when Bob Ellis, in January 2011, described the NSW Liberal MP Gillian Skinner on ABC's The Drum Online as looking ''like a long-detested nagging land lady with four dead husbands and hairy shoulders''. Moreover, the ABC managing director, Mark Scott, defended the publication of the piece because it was ''particularly robust''. You can say that again.

Don't you just love the lip curl and the sneer embedded in "the likes of Caro".

Yep, it takes the likes of Henderson to tease it out, and demand that everyone maintain his own fixation with Bob Ellis, when an easier solution might simply be to ignore Ellis and hope he retires to his blog.

But Hendo isn't sated, the blood lust of hideous feminist leftist sins must be exposed and aired and chewed over like a dog with a favourite bone dug up from the garden and covered in soil.

Why not head back to 2008 and brood on that chip on the shoulder while chewing the bone?

Earlier, Jonathan Green, the then-editor of The Drum, published Marieke Hardy's description of the Liberal MP Christopher Pyne as a ''douchebag''. It was later spiked. In 2008, The Drum also ran a piece by Ellis referring to Hillary Clinton's ''towering frigidity'' and complaining (without evidence, of course) that she did not engage in a particular sex act. No word was heard from Caro at the time. In recent times, Green was promoted by the ABC and now presents the Radio National Sunday Extra program.

Oh the injustice, oh the humanity. And Grahame Morris so persecuted, when it's clear that two wrongs make a right. And that buffoon Green promoted - oh the criminality - and even worse there's some American academic on Counterpoint yammering on about free speech, and no one proposed Mr. Henderson to run the show, and become the ABC's resident chief conservative. Damn you, Mark Scott, damn you to hell.

And still the list of crimes overwhelms the shocking shock jock - that's what they do - and poor old Gra Gra Morris:

In March, Germaine Greer appeared on Q&A and urged the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to get over her (alleged) ''big arse''. Invited back on the program last week, Greer was at it again. Responding to an approved question, Greer declared Gillard has a ''fat arse'' and advised her to ''wave that arse''. This was also not mentioned by Caro in her whinge on the BBC.

Yes indeed. And please explain, BBC, why Caro didn't mention fundamentalist Islamics, the burqa, sexism of the Catholic church, the outrageous behaviour of Ivan the Terrible, the status of women in the Third Reich, and the role of New Zealanders in always winning rugby tests, turning Australian men into girls! There are simply too many sins of omission, or perhaps emission.

And now, sssh, we must be solemn:

It is true Gillard has been subjected to some sexist comments by the likes of the Liberal senator Bill Heffernan and the former Labor leader Mark Latham. This has been properly criticised.

That's as opposed to the improper criticism of a shock jock merely doing what a shock jock does, or Gra Gra being light-hearted, like a cow flying through the air in Twister.

And now for the final indignity, the lowest of all blows:

But there were few defenders of John Howard during his time as prime minister. In his 2005 book Run, Johnny, Run, author Mungo MacCallum variously called Howard an unflushable turd, a little c---t and a shithouse rat. Right now, MacCallum's latest book is being promoted by the supposedly advertisement-free ABC.

2008? Why not 2005? Why not 2000? Why not 1995? Why not Paul Keating assaulting John Howard?

Yes, Jane Caro, why didn't you too go back to 2005 and flush out Mungo MacCallum? Why didn't you spend your short time on radio addressing the entire history of personal abuse, and the personal role and responsibility of feminists and leftists everywhere for the existence of said abuse?

Shame, Jane Caro, shame. Or wait, perhaps it's all the fault of the intertubes:

...in spite of all the confected outrage, bad language has probably not proliferated. It's just that what was once said in the pub now features increasingly in sections of the mainstream media and overwhelmingly online.

Yes, and in a referential way, the pond is full of remorse for dubbing Henderson a prattling Polonius.

Sure there's a lot of confected outrage out there, and overwhelmingly online, which is where you can find Gerard Henderson abusing the abusers of abusers for not being abusive enough about other abusers and being selective about abusers to abuse, as opposed to Henderson, who freely abuses continuing leftists ... for simply continuing ...

Or some such thing. The real point is seems to be that if Bob Ellis can be a dickhead and a tosser, why so can Grahame Morris, Alan Jones and Gerard Henderson.

While providing way too much information:

When walking my dog Nancy early Sunday evening, I turned on to BBC Radio's World Today Weekend program. Feminist Jane Caro was banging on from Sydney about just how sexist Aussie blokes really are.

He had to listen to that bitch Caro banging on in a bitchy way, while taking his bitch for a walk? On the bloody Beeb, home of bitches?

Oh it's too much to bear, the inhumanity, the cruelty. Oh heartless BBC, what a taxpayer ruin and waste you are, a perfectly good walk with a nice dog shattered ...

And now readers are invited to contemplate the list of fallacies deployed by Henderson in relation to argument at the wiki here.

See how many fallacious arguments were led by Henderson as he dragged in red herrings, ancient history and meaningless comparisons, while attempting to prove there's no harm in calling a woman a cow, because, well, he likes some times to think of them as cows ...

The pond got up to ten, and the good news is that if you do the exercise, it will help prepare you nicely for the HSC.

(Below: speaking of dogs).

Oh lolcat, another day of Paul Sheehan, the Bolter and Tony Abbott, with a sauce provided by Amanda Vanstone ....

tl;dr.

That's all that can be said about Paul "Generally Grumpy" Sheehan's explanation of the dangers of capitalism and share market trading in Computer panic: why you should take stock.

Oh okay, it's a slow Monday, and the pond is just catching up with ancient internet memes, while running shots of nakedly ancient lolcats.

Back to Generally hysterical Sheehan.

Some days Colonel Grumpy (yes he's easily demoted) sounds rabidly socialist, and so it is in today's piece as he rabbits on about the greed of financial advisers, tax lawyers, casino capitalism, volatility, instability, the deep and churning waters, the sinister evolution of markets, electronic eyes, massive transfers of wealth, the siphoning off of wealth, public distrust, and then lordy, he even quotes Jim Cramer as an authority berating the disgrace of the market's attitudes to small traders.

Would that be the same television personality Jim Cramer who made a complete fool of himself back in 2008, leading ABC News, amongst many others, to propose Small investors who follow Ceamer stand to lose big?

Should You Stay Away From Jim Cramer? Only if you don't want to follow that Bear Stearns into a cave ...

Anyhoo, it wouldn't be a Monday without Generally Gloomy Paul "Chicken Little" Sheehan running about predicting that the falling of the sky is imminent, and this today it's the systemic failure and near misses and serious structural failures of the sharemarket.

Yep, there's market dysfunction on a massive scale, the boat people are coming, the seas are rising, and only two options remain: hide under your bed, or hide in the wardrobe, and don't come out for at least a week.

Or go socialist, at least until next week, when Sheehan will explain how Republicanism and Abbottism are the only viable alternative to big regulatory government, and the Labor party ...

Contradictory? Why swallow a gnat when you're adept at swallowing an elephant?

Is this a form of therapy for Sheehan?

After all, while a substantial number of Fairfax employees have in recent days trudged into the office to pick up their redundancy packages, Sheehan goes on warbling and burbling how we'll all be ruined, and all the while being paid to warble like an off-key Indian myna bird ...

It's funny, but can it be funnier than Amanda Vanstone accusing Julia Gillard of a sickening element of grovelling in her speech to the US Congress? (here in Abbott's big problem is not his unpopularity, but his team).

Was it only a few months ago that Tony Abbott made a speech to the Heritage Foundation which included this exceptionally fine grovelling?

These days, America does not need to be told where it is going wrong but where it is going right.
By a large margin, the United States has the best universities, the most creative research, the most sophisticated intellectual property and the most accomplished high-end manufacturing.
America needs to believe in itself the way others still believe in it.
It needs once more to take to heart President Roosevelt’s advice that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
America is exceptional so exceptionalism has its place.
American world leadership might only truly be appreciated were it to disappear.
None of us should want to find out the hard way what a shrunken America might mean.
Australia wills America to succeed because a strong America means a safer world.

Why does Vanstone think she can get away with such a wilfully stupid denunciation of Gillard? Both sides of Australian politics have long sucked up to the US alliance, and it's impossible to sort out and separate one big suck from the next.

How routinely conservatives forget that it was during World War 11 that the Labor party started the trend when, to the consternation of conservatives and Brit lovers and Menzies, Curtin sucked up to MacArthur and Roosevelt (and more on that here).

Anyhoo, Vanstone continues on by explaining how the punters deeply distrust Gillard, but there's no need to worry about Tony Abbott's low approval rating.

Well she would say that, but why is this blather presented as commentary in Fairfax?

Vanstone seems to think that the solution to Abbott's woes is to blame his team:

One problem for Abbott is his team. We see only a few of them. Where are the shadow ministers other than Chris Pyne, Joe Hockey, Malcolm Turnbull and a few others? Are they lazy or incompetent at working with the media? Or is the opposition being managed in such a way that others don't get a chance?

And who would be doing that managing?

Amazingly this blather is at the top of the Fairfax opinion page:

Is this the way it's going to be in the new straitened, reduced circumstances at Fairfax? Aged political hacks trotted out to fill out the gaps in the opinion pages?

Fair enough if it's free, but what happens when the titillating, tantalising Vanstone is planted behind a paywall? They'll be wanting a payment to access unadulterated blather? In your dreams ...

Never mind, perhaps it's time for Ms Vanstone to head back to Italy for a refreshing pasta ...

After proposing that either Tony Abbott is incompetent and doesn't know how to manage his team, or alternatively that Tony Abbott is competent but his team is hopeless, she's done her bit for the Liberal party, and deserves a rest.

Naturally the Bolter is outraged by Fairfax and the way it promoted the Vanstone piece, as you can see in Never mind Gillard. Behold the AbbottAbbottAbbott.

The Bolter is such a dolt when it comes to picking an obvious angle in relation to a piece that is profoundly silly.

Still if you visit the Bolter's pages, you'll have another chance to catch up on his epic conflation of weather and climate and statistics and long term projections, with his short, evocative Skiing on snow they said wouldn't fall.

The pond is slavering for a sequel, perhaps headed Sailing through Arctic seas free of the ice that the Bolter said was as solid as a rock.

Speaking of the Bolter, how will he tackle Colin Rubenstein rabbiting on in the Oz about how We still need race hate laws? (behind the paywall).

The Bolter has been feral in his assault on section 18C, and Tony Abbott has been uxorious in his love of free speech, the freedom wars and the suffering of the Bolter, as you can gather by suffering through the speech he delivered to the tobacco-lovers of the IPA (yes, it was titled Freedom Wars, and remember the freedom to inhale killer smoke is a vital freedom for sponsors of the IPA).

Now Rubenstein, AM, executive director of the Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Council, has dared to join the debate, on completely the wrong side:

Regardless of the Bolt case, it would be an overreaction to remove all protections from racial hate speech acts in Australia's multicultural society.
The fate of this law should not be confused with the separate debate about media regulation. The two issues have little to do with each other, except in the minds of those whose preoccupation is a campaign for absolute "free speech" at all costs.
The Opposition Leader and the legal affairs spokesman have not yet clarified what they see as the best means for protecting the human rights of victims of racial hate speech. Their constructive specific suggestions are keenly awaited.
Our common objectives are, as always, to improve our legal standards so that they will more effectively address the genuine harm caused by public expressions that vilify, incite, intimidate or harass on the basis of racial or ethnic origins.

Outrageous. Shocking.

The pond is looking forward to a post from the Bolter denouncing a Jewish conspiracy to ruin the freedom wars (don't they run the banking system and Hollywood as well?)

Run it past us again Mr. Abbott:

If it’s alright for David Marr, for instance, to upset conservative Christians, in his attempt to have them see the error of their ways, why is it not alright for Andrew Bolt to upset activist Aboriginals to the same end?

Indeed. Of course Bolt wasn't upsetting activist Aboriginals, so much as fair-skinned Aboriginal people identifying as Aboriginal and allegedly making out like bandits, with the Bolter making plenty of amazing factual errors in the process, unlike Marr identifying the way the Sydney Anglicans had pissed $160 million against the wall, but never mind, we catch the drift.

In the world of Abbott facts are of little consequence, whereas the right to sound like a feral yammering jack-hammering shock jock is crucial ...

Well if the Bolter wants to upset activist Jews, would the pond or Tony Abbott stop him? Is it time for the Bolter to make a stand against the Jewish lobby?

The rallying cry attributed to Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it", should have been invoked to defend Bolt, no less than it has been to justify robust speech from different points in the philosophical compass.
The Coalition will repeal section 18C in its current form. Any prohibitions on inciting hatred against or intimidation of particular racial groups should be akin to the ancient common law offences of incitement and causing fear.

Say what? Would that be the ancient law the English got rid of in 2008 because it was a mess? (Incitement).

It's taken awhile for responses to Abbott's speech to drift into the world, and naturally Rubenstein is an interested player for all sorts of reasons:

...the value of 18C's provisions in combatting genuine hate speech has been demonstrated and uncontroversial. In a series of cases, in which the applicant was Jeremy Jones, the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affair Council's director of community and international affairs, who acted for the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, a series of principles were established.

Newspapers were given guidelines on responsibility when publishing material from external sources which were recognised as racist. The internet was found to be covered by Australian law. Holocaust denial was recognised as anti-semitism. Most importantly, victims of harassment had legal recourse.
As a matter of common sense, a judicious review of the racial hatred provisions in the Racial Discrimination Act might be timely. It could yield opportunities to improve on the current law and to examine the relevance of some academic analyses which have critiqued the current provisions for ambiguities and inconsistencies.
But any attack on the basis of such laws is a serious error of political and moral judgment.

A serious error of political and moral judgment?

Now is that Tony Abbott's serious error, or the serious error of Tony Abbott's team?

Did Tony Abbott merely read his speech to the IPA and his team write it? Or did his team stay silent, when they should have been doing the running?

Oh it's all too hard.

Over you to you Ms Vanstone. Is Tony Abbott a dunce, or is his team?

Oh, and please feel free to get the Bolter to explain how Fairfax is responsible for everything wrong in the world ...

(Below: the pond, always maintaining the rage and the meme).

Let's take a turn with Hephzibah, Sydney Anglicans, George Pell and fundies of the good old USA ...

(Above: Mr Pooter and chums catch a wild claret, a little like wild "fast" Sydney Anglicans. You can catch The Diary of a Nobody at Project Gutenberg here).


It's been an epic week for the Sydney Anglicans, with only that preening supercilious wretch Mike Carlton striking a sour note in Ah, men, all's right with the world:

Submission may take many forms, some of them quite simple. Seeking to please her husband, the dutiful wife will find satisfaction in homely tasks: the sparkling clean bathroom, his favourite shirt freshly ironed when he needs it, his golf shoes polished, the delicious evening meal ready on a neatly set table when hubby arrives home weary from daily toil. Why, my own dear wife Priscilla makes a point of abstaining from alcohol so that she may drive home if, by mistake, I have imbibed one cup too many of the claret punch at a parish function! Therein lies the recipe for a happy marriage.

Oh it's so cheap and so unfair, as Carlton makes hay with the church of St. Jensen, Lot's wife turning to salt, and a bunch of Jensens, from Dr. Nesbitt Jesen to Mrs. Hephzibah Jensen.

Carlton shows some fair knowledge in his mockery. Hephzibah turns up in only a couple of places in the bible, as a wife's name (My delight is in her) and in god allocating a name to his chosen people (take it away Rev. Carl Haak here).

Hephzibah is one of those profoundly silly words - like Mr. Pooter or a zillion Dickens character names - guaranteed to please.

Of course none of the fuss of the week penetrated the moat and walls of castle Jensen, also know as the Sydney Anglican web site.

It's September funky town, as the Anglicans get down to the urgent business of raising cash (and never mind that it might be pissed against the wall, or Prayers unanswered as Anglicans brace for more cuts).

Dear sweet absent lord, that's just so funky town. Get down wit it Anglican youffs, join John Travolta under the sparkling glitter ball and the flashy laser lighting.

Oh wait, didn't Mr Travolta go rogue scientologist?

Russell Powell turns the other cheek and puts his best face forward in relation to an ugly week, surely a loss-loss week for a losing church.

He pointedly avoids doing a lengthy diatribe against the Sydney Morning Herald, preferring to celebrate the positives as he scribbles away in Expect the unexpected:

The key thing is not to kick the media but to see the opportunities in this for talking about our faith. Whether the starting point for the discussion is marriage or people's view of Christians or the Judds or the Archbishop or whoever, my prayer is that we will engage people in conversations about Jesus. (That includes letters to the newspapers and talk on talkback)...

... Remember, its not where you start the conversation but where you finish that matters.

But what if you finish with mockery and laughter and more women (and gays it almost goes without saying) marching out the door, either to turn secularist or join a church which has yet to find a foot in the twentieth century (we'll get around to the current century later).

The only other singular achievement this week for the Sydney mob, as Michael Jensen continues to duck and weave and avoid his obligation to deliver unto the world his explanation of the seventh sin of Sydney?

Well surely it must be the hapless Kara Martin's review of Fifty Shades of Grey. The pond has very little time for the appalling writing of EL James, but after reading Kara's review, some sympathy bubbled to the surface. How's this for a synopsis?

Uni student Ana interviews Christian Grey for a student magazine, and he instantly falls for her, seeing her as a possible Submissive for his Dominant sexual practises. He pursues her and woos her with gifts of clothes, a computer and a car. She agrees to a non-disclosure contract, and an agreement to participate in his sexual practises.

That's clunkier than James, and when Kara gets on to the approved Sydney Anglican Christian view of human sexuality, it gets positively silly:

This is making mainstream, sexual practices that are fringe. It is popularising bondage and discipline practises, and legitimising sexual experimentation, without any warning about some of the psychological and physical consequences. The New York Post reported a tenfold increase in rope sales at New York hardware stores, and 30% increase in kinky sex toys.

Is that the slippery rope that the pond's heard so much about? Or merely the kinky slippery slope?

And then there's the usual hairy palms, stop touching yourself there girl or you'll go blind routine:

This book is disturbing and addictive. Porn works on stimulating physical desires in the reader/viewer, but cannot satisfy those desires. The reader falls into a pattern of voyeurism, yearning for the excitement, but left unable to be fulfilled. It results in feelings of guilt and shame. It begins to impact on the way the reader/viewer looks at human beings as objects of desire, things to be used.

But, but, but billy goat butt, women are there to submit and be submissive. The Jensens told the pond so ...

Anyhoo, it would be mean of the pond to do too many spoilers, when the fun is in the full read, as Kara reminded the pond that almost any kink, even EL James, is better kink than Sydney Anglican submissive kink, though if you're looking for a bit of European style, you should really start with Story of O.

But it does lead to the ultimate irony. Even the vanilla Richard Glover makes hay with For a happy marriage, try the submissionary position, along with the mandatory joke:

Sydney's Anglicans have changed the marriage ceremony so the wife agrees to ''submit'' to her husband. People criticise the Sydney Anglicans for being out of touch, so how wonderful to see the success of Fifty Shades of Grey being so rapidly reflected in the service. The only question: will fluffy handcuffs now be a mandatory part of bridalwear?

Et tu Mr Glover, joining in the Fairfax war on the hapless stupefying Sydney Anglicans?

Sadly, putting frivolity and silly marriage vows aside for a moment, the Sydney Anglicans did a grave disservice to the world by providing comedy routines that distracted from attention being paid to Cardinal George Pell.

The Pellists are still embedded in a much more serious set of wars - a nightmare of their own making, seemingly without end - which will see Pell reluctantly, and with pushing, front a Victorian government inquiry into sex abuse (Cardinal George Pell to appear at Victorian sex abuse inquiry - paywall affected).

Back in the day Pell was in the thick of it, as noted in Archbishop George Pell urged to clarify handling of Victorian abuse cases - paywall affected):

Cardinal Pell's connection to the issue is twofold: first as the archbishop of Melbourne who dealt with the church's initial response to the scandal, dubbed the Melbourne Response; and second as a younger priest who worked and lived in the same district as some of the worst offenders.
When former priest Gerard Ridsdale made his first court appearance in 1993, Cardinal Pell stood by his side, although he has steadfastly denied knowledge of his activities. Ridsdale, one of the world's worst pedophiles, has served nearly 20 years in jail.
Cardinal Pell later lamented his decision to support Ridsdale that day.
The Ballarat diocese was so riddled with pedophilia 30 and 40 years ago that attending school and mass became a form of Russian roulette for the largely young male victims.

Meanwhile, Pell came out fighting in his piece last week for the Sunday Terror about the Catholic Church.

In a dissembling way, Pell assured the world that the Catholic church, its leaders and officials, and entities can be sued. He said nothing about the difficulties of mounting cases against unincorporated associations, or working out the appropriate person or entity to sue, pausing only to note that In some well publicised cases lawyers have sued the wrong party. As if the Catholic church should step forward and settle things in an honourable way ... ya ya, got the wrong party ...

Pell also says nothing about the way the church has used its financial resources to hire top quality lawyers to befuddle and deny justice to victims of the institution.

But the real capper is this line:

There has not been a systematic failure by the Church to take action on sex abuse. The procedures were improved in 1996 and again in 2000 and 2009. The Newcastle and Armidale cases now being investigated predate these procedures. While a review of processes and conclusions is available to victims, these are very rarely requested.

That's denialism at its epic worst. The reason that there is now a Victorian inquiry independent of the church is that sufficient evidence has been led to suggest that there was a systematic failure by the Church to take action on sex abuse.

And that's why Pell has ducked and weaved and issued a four thousand word attempt to distance himself from the mess. And he's a dab hand at sharing around the blame:

While Catholic and indeed Christian organizations receive considerable and possibly disproportionate publicity for sexual abuse of minors, it would be a vain hope and badly misleading to conclude that this problem is confined to Christian institutions.

Possibly disproportionate publicity?

The problem isn't confined to Christian institutions?

Uh huh. Another variant on that old proposal sure some of our guys might have done bad things, but have you seen the bad things the other guys have done. So if the other guys do bad things, why are you so hard on, why do you focus on and publicise, the bad things our guys have done?

The answer of course is that churches are given a special position of power, obligation and trust in relation to children. The same applies to schools, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, creches, child care centres, and other places where children are clustered together.

Teachers, priests, child care workers, institutional employees are given a duty of care, and are offered an elevated level of trust. Or else there'd be a shortage of children for choirs and altar work ...

This isn't so hard to understand, unless you happen to be an institution seeking to avoid the implications of breaching that duty of care and breaking that trust.

A breach of that trust should be a major cause for concern, mortification and rectification, instead of the defiant defensiveness shown by the Pellists.

Even now the church must be dragged kicking and shrieking towards doing the right thing, and that is wrong ... and the inquiry in Victoria is but one of a number of inquiries that should have been mounted long ago.

This sickness continues in the church like a festering virus. The latest example comes from the United States and Father Benedict Groeschel, noted here, in which responsibility is lumped on children for being seducers, and in which he offers sympathy for Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky.

Amazingly the National Catholic Register let the remarks run, only to take them down and replace them with an apology here:

Child sexual abuse is never excusable. The editors of the National Catholic Register apologize for publishing without clarification or challenge Father Benedict Groeschel's comments that seem to suggest that the child is somehow responsible for abuse. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our publication of that comment was an editorial mistake, for which we sincerely apologize. Given Father Benedict's stellar history over many years, we released his interview without our usual screening and oversight. We have removed the story. We have sought clarification from Father Benedict.

Ah well, so it goes, it's all too sombre to contemplate the suffering and the damage done, so let's end with a comedy item from Mother Jones, noting 14 Wacky "Facts" Kids Will Learn in Louisiana's Voucher Schools.

Amongst the wacky "facts"? Humans and dinosaurs hung out together, dragons are real, the majority of slave owners were nice guys, the KKK is seriously misunderstood, the Great Depression wasn't too bad, Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson were errant, algebra is too complicated, gay people are down there with child molesters and rapists, and global environmentalists are involved in a global conspiracy. Coming in at number 14?

"But instead of this world unification ushering in an age of prosperity and peace, as most globalists believe it will, it will be a time of unimaginable human suffering as recorded in God's Word. The Anti-christ will tightly regulate who may buy and sell."—Economics: Work and Prosperity in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1999

And you wondered how Arizona could pass a law proposing that pregnancy begins two weeks before conception?

The point in that case is to limit access to abortion - Arizona Abortion Bill: Legislators Pass Three Bills, Including One That Redefines When Life Begins - but does anybody in the GOP begin to wonder if they might be involved in a Grand Old Peevish Perverse Patriarchy of Preposterous Pieties?

And finally, finally, thanks to a thoughtful, attentive correspondent the pond is able to draw attention to Phillip Jensen's latest exercise in devil-fearing, The Power of a Dependent Father.

Jensen starts by brooding about powerful fathers, and then weak and inadequate fathers, before haring off into Exorcist territory and demonising a powerful father:

The devil is a powerful father. Or so he seems to his children. His power lies in his lies; for he is the father of lies (John 8:44). A murderer from the beginning, he uses his deceit to accuse both God and God’s children. He accuses God of not having our interests at heart; of not being righteous and merciful; of not forgiving the sinner of his sin ...

Etc etc, yadda yadda, children of Satan, good old dad Satan, yadda yadda etc etc, with Jensen not pausing to think or contemplate the complexity involved if you remember that Satan was a son of god ...

Damn it, that father sure fucked up his son good and proper (as explained in the Book of Job and the wiki here). Surely it's time to call the long absent god a She so the blame can be properly laid at the feet of the Almighty Mother?

Next week, the Sydney Anglicans explain why children should continue to fear the cookie monster that lurks under their bed at night ...

Shouting at brain-washed feminist chairs with the commentariat at The Australian ...

(Above: special feminist brand).


Sometimes the pond misses the commentariat at The Australian, and on the weekend the sense of loss is at its finest, or perhaps its keenest.

Today for example we have a Shanahan - there's a flock of them, like Jensenists - astutely pinpointing what is wrong with Australia:

Feminist brainwashing saturating the land with myths!

Shanahan's analysis is fine so far as it goes, but the pond found it a tad conservative. When will she reveal that feminist brainwashing is responsible for climate change, the carbon tax, the mockery of Sydney Anglicans, pedophile priests, the war in Afghanistan and the failures of capitalism?

When you get past the excessively verbose header - Women are not fools at the ballot box: they vote for policies, not a leader's personality - thankfully trapped behind the Oz paywall like a herd of lost sheep - it turns out it's just another Shanahan yarn about how unfair the world is to Tony Abbott, and how unfair it is that Julia Gillard is allowed to exist, and how fairly women will vote, for Tony Abbott of course, because a thinking woman will vote for policies and Tony Abbott has the right policies ...

Moving right along, sure in our knowledge that feminist brainwashing has ruined the world, we turned to that old faithful, Christopher Pearson, rummaging through the offal and the kidneys to come up with his umpteenth variation on the future of Australian politics.
Clearly feminist brainwashing is responsible for Pearson's addled thinking.

For years now, Pearson has been running various lines up the flagpole to check who might salute. The Ruddster has been a long running favourite, but any port in a storm - Simon Crean, Wayne Swan, Stephen Smith, Bill Shorten, amongst others, have been given a trot by Pearson's fevered brain.

The latest - Good early election option - is more infantile lap poodle fantasising in service of Pearson's master, Tony Abbott esquire, who no doubt wishes devoutly that Julia Gillard would call an early election, and the sooner the better.

Pearson's piece is trapped behind the paywall - like a wayward sheep lost in the back paddock - and it's just as well, because Pearson leads with Yes Minister as his guide to politics, and leadership challenges, and what this might mean for Gillard as a way of sorting the Ruddster, the sooner the better.

Sadly in a desperate attempt to show he has some connection to reality, Pearson is forced to offer a caveat which makes the entire exercise a supreme example of wankerdom.

Yep, even Pearson concedes that calling an election in response to a Ruddster leadership challenge is not by any measure, her preferred card. But it is the preferred card of Pearson and Abbott surely, and in this crazy mucked up world isn't that enough of an excuse for a column?

By any measure, Pearson is a fool and the pond feels like issuing an alert - at best you'll feel like you've wasted fifteen minutes of your life you'll never retrieve, and at worst you might suffer irretrievable brain damage while reading Pearson.

So hey nonny no, on we go and next up is Greg Sheridan, with his complete incomprehension of anything:

Air in the balloon?

That's right Sheridan is ecstatic about Clint Eastwood, and almost faints with excitement in Magnum force for Mitt Romney, fortunately trapped behind the paywall with the other sheep seeking to make sense of the world.

"Go ahead, make my day."

What a brilliant moment. The most unplugged, out-there, adventurous twist of the hitherto bland Mitt Romney campaign for president was Clint Eastwood and the empty chair act.
The Hollywood legend, beloved of tens of millions of Americans, was the X-factor for the Republicans.

Uh huh. What a brilliant moment? What a brilliantine twit ...

Reading Sheridan you get the impression that one day he was a hundred pound weakling who had sand kicked in his face, and as he retreated, he kept having an epic fantasy of pulling out a .44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world (way back when), whirling on the punk, and asking him whether he felt lucky.

It turns out that once Eastwood speaks, it's holy writ:

If Eastwood regards Vice-President Joe Biden as a laughing stock -- "the brains of the Democrats, you know, kind of a grin with a body behind it" -- then the Vice-President has a problem.

The pond blames feminist brainwashing.

Of course if you read the rest of the world's responses, Clint Eastwood's performance drew mixed reviews, ranging from "eccentric" to "bizarre".

Not only did it cut into coverage of Mitt Romney's speech, going more than twice the scheduled time, even the likes of the Oz's fellow tabloid (in spirit if not in shape), the New York Post asked questions, as you can read in Ann Romney says Clint Eastwood is a 'unique guy':

TAMPA, Fla. — Ann Romney says she appreciates the support Clint Eastwood gave her husband's presidential bid, even if the actor's bizarre monologue at the GOP convention isn't earning rave reviews.
Romney told "CBS This Morning" on Friday that she didn't know what to expect when Eastwood came on stage Thursday night as a warm-up act.
Eastwood's rambling conversation with an empty chair representing an imaginary President Barack Obama drew laughs in the convention hall, but has been widely mocked by critics.
Romney chuckled during awkward pauses both times she was asked about Eastwood.

Yep, in Sheridan's world, bizarre equals brilliant.

You won't find any nuance or balance or insight in Sheridan, which leads the pond to ask if he's the Bill Collins of commentariat scribblers for the Oz. Soft on film stars, and their movies, and in the end a little soft in the head ... oh feminist brain washers, look on your work and apologise to the world.

But wait, there's even more. That stuffed pompous shirt known as Paul Kelly (the editor at large, not the nice singer songwriter) contributes a fine piece of hysteria titled Carbon wars go global, which earns a big splash, happily trapped behind the paywall with the rest of the bewildered sheep:

Will you ever see a header in The Australian, bold and brave, that shrieks CLIMATE CHANGE GOES GLOBAL?

Only in your dreams.

Anyhoo, the befuddled nervous nelly Kelly spends the entire column hand wringing and anguishing about the carbon tax, the bottom line being that this is put us in bed with the perfidious, uncertain Europeans.

What a brave isolationist Kelly makes, and if he can only ensure that Australia has nothing do with climate change and international trade, his policy trifecta will be perfect.

Of course being Kelly he pretends to contemplate all the policy issues with an even-handed balance, which may be summarised faithfully as Tony Abbott is right, and Labor and its climate change edifice and the EU pretty certain to be fucked.

Meanwhile, the pond patiently awaits that big splash in The Australian headed ARCTIC SEA ICE SHRINKAGE HAS GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS.

Even its sister tabloid (in mind if not in body), the Daily Terror, managed a little coverage awhile ago in Arctic sea ice hits record low as melt goes on, which concluded thusly:

The melting of Arctic has helped open up new shipping lanes but is also believed to hold serious consequences for the rest of the planet as the ice serves a vital function in keeping the planet cool.

The pond and google have searched fastidiously to check The Australian's detailed coverage of the issue, and drawn a blank.

Never mind, how does the fastidious futtock Kelly conclude his piece?

Labor's climate change edifice is now tied to the EU.
It is a further elaboration of the market and administrative arrangements that Abbott is determined to tear down. His pledge to repeal every aspect of Labor's structure looms as one of the defining policy and ideological contests of recent decades.

Uh huh. Of course the issue of the effectiveness of the carbon tax, and whether Abbott's set of alternative government/socialist/bureaucratic interventions might be preferable and more effective, could be construed as a response to one of the most important scientific issues of recent decades, or perhaps even recent centuries.

But you won't find much of a word about any of that in The Australian.

The pond blames feminist brain-washing.

What else could be responsible? Certainly not the ability to see everything as an ideological contest ...

(Below: and now for some chair-shouting).

(Or in other words, click to enlarge)