In the grip of fear about various national emergencies ...

At first the pond couldn't believe the brazen cheekiness when told about it, but yep, there is was on the PUP's splendid site, and never mind the errant question mark in the top left hand corner that suggested the coding monkeys (oh we luvs ya coders, we really do) had gone home early.

It turns out, if you click on the above to enlarge, that Clive is the latest in a line of bold visionary leaders of his historic party, which inter alia include Bob 'Ming the Merciless' Menzies, Billy 'the little digger' Hughes, and Honest Joe Lyons.

The pond still couldn't believe the chutzpah, and checked out a little further, and at the bottom of the history page, came across this:

Now never mind that the PUP isn't the UAP, because Clive couldn't get his act together...

If ever you wanted a first class example of why the National Trust in NSW are braying geese, there it is, with Clive able to call himself a renowned Australian National Living Treasure, and in his own lunchtime, too ... and who on earth allowed the rhetorical flourish of the Professor and the three-barrelled name ...

Is Clive one of those dangerous radical elites Nick Cater warns us about all the time? An actual, gasp, professor? This could be the start of a national emergency ...

Oh it made the pond's day, because on a more serious note, the pond was shocked to discover the nation is in the grip of an actual real national emergency. Or so Tony Abbott told us ...

Here the pond was thinking that we were in the grip of some sad examples of human tragedy, but a national emergency ...?

Do we have other examples of national emergencies so we can understand the term?

Well yes, Syria seems a good example, in the grip of a brutal bloody civil war which has gone on for years, with thousands dead, and some 1.8 million, at last estimate, refugees leaving their homeland.

What's more, between 600,000 and 1.2 million have ended up inside Lebanon's borders, and yet the Lebanese have kept their border open, and continue to allow refugees to enter the country, thereby creating real stress and a national emergency for Lebanon.

You could say that Egypt has been through a national emergency or two in recent years, and so has Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, and Pakistan is also rarely short of a national crisis.

But Australia?

Does the ugly sight of grubby politicians using vile hysterical rhetoric for political gain constitute a national emergency?

Does the routine, pathetic superficial treatment of issues by the Australian media - which has always preferred ambulance chasing and now boat chasing - to substantive insights constitute a national emergency?

No, not even that. Not even the notion that brave plucky Australia will overturn the Refugee Convention and to hell with the people of Syria.

To lighten the mood a little, the pond proposes it might be a national emergency if Indonesia invaded Australia and it would certainly be a national folly if Australia attempted to invade Indonesia.

Maybe it would be a kind of mouse that roared national emergency if Tasmania joined forces with New Zealand to seize Melbourne, but  hey, in the end it's Melbourne. It might be okay if we draw a line at Euroa a bit like the Brisbane line (now those were the days of a real national emergency).

Back to the solemn side .... why do we all have to suffer this kind of exaggerated hysteria in the national debate?

It's a terrible thing that people die at sea, but self-satisifed lucky country Australians wouldn't have the first clue about a genuine national emergency, and no amount of frothing and foaming and pumping up the volume by Tony Abbott -  or the Ruddster attempting to match him - will turn a bicycle tube into a tyre suitable for a monster truck ...

Funnily enough, not one of the papers headed their tree killer editions with Abbott's words - though you'd think if we were in the grip of a national emergency rather than the grip of football and cricket, it would be top of the page.

Only the reptiles at the lizard Oz contrived an angle on the national emergency:

Other parochial rags focussed on the football, and Daily Terror managed to combine the football with a new angle. Fresh from their Stalinist satire, the thugby league boofheads have gone Hollywood:

Presumably no one saw the movie and came to understand that Ralph is a most sympathetic wrecker.

Daily Teror: What's your name?

Wreck-It Kevin: Kevin, Wreck-It Kevin.

Daily Terror: Why is your smile so freakishly weird?

Wreck-It Kevin: I don't know. Why are you so freakishly annoying? (more quotes here)

All the pond asks is that Hollywood agents interested in the property queue politely ...

But there was another upside. With the Terror's wreck-it paywall in action, it's been a very long time since the pond visited Miranda the Devine, and what a relief to discover that the Devine is in the grip of a national emergency, as she explains in Why virtual parenting raises virtual children.

Now readers with their memories intact - not always easy when you read the Devine - will recall that back in the day she was madly infatuated with the mad Susan Greenfield and her plasticity of the brain routine and her chatter about the evils of Twitter, and social media and computers and screens and so on and so forth ...

But at some point the Devine finally twigged that maybe Greenfield was off the planet, but that doesn't stop her gnashing her teeth and wringing her hands and furrowing her brow:

Reasons parents gave for neglecting family time included that "the children are watching TV" or "the children are playing computer games". 
Who is the parent here? It is a woeful tale with worrying implications for the future. 
A generation of children who are virtually bringing up themselves, with the help of whatever is beaming at them through their screens.

Ah yes, it's the screens, it's the screens, it's a national disaster and a national emergency:

...psychologists are warning we're raising a generation of "Tamagotchi Kids" - children brought up by computers and TVs and smart phones. 

With parents on their laptops while watching TV in one room and the children engrossed in their own digital entertainments in another, it can be easy to spend an entire evening communing less with your offspring than you did with the guy you bought your coffee from on the way to work.

Reminded of anything? Well those who grew up in the glory years of television will recall that it was the ruination of the young. And those who sat around listening to the radio - with silence an essential requirement - no doubt can remember how not a word passed between the family, not even when the obliging apron-clad martyred mother brought a cup of Bonox or hot chocolate or bedtime Milo into the lounge room.

And if you have vampiric tendencies, you might have been around enough centuries to remember the outcry at the way the printing press was going to ruin everything, with people burying their heads in their books, and not saying a word to anybody, locked away in a fantasy world, engrossed in frivolous entertainment like poems and novels.

Here's where Devine gives the game away:

You might be in the same house with your children but you are not doing your job as a parent. You're not imprinting your values, imparting their worth, setting boundaries and teaching them how to be a good person.

Imprint your values? That's the mission of a parent. To indoctrinate? Set boundaries? Teach them to be good?

The pond felt an immediate desire to smash up the joint, but the Devine was too quick, back to the wringing of the hands, and for that you can't have a smart phone in your hands (no, a stupid phone isn't any better):

Born roughly since the mid-1990s, Gen Z is born virtually with a smart phone in their hands. They are the first post-technological revolution generation and their default reality is radically different from anything before. 

But this teacher sees the dark side of her charges' facility with digital technology. So immersed are they in their screens that she fears they are losing the ability to read facial expressions, a prerequisite for empathy. 

Now the elderly might recall how flappers and the bobby soxers and the  baby boomers and Gen X and Gen Y and all the other pseudo-marketing gibberish were each the worst generation of their times, but what is the Devine really on about?

Well she's on about fear and the dark side and the lack of empathy and ruination:

Carr-Gregg predicts a "decline in civic connectedness and ... social capital" as a consequence. 

Yes, at a time in NSW where the ambulance chasers are brooding about children being murdered by derelict parents, the Devine is brooding about civic connectedness.

At the end of it all, the best the Devine can muster is that people should spend more time with their children, though even on an anecdotal level, she manages a level of comedy the pond finds wonderful:

A full-time mother of nine children I know always makes a point of having a cup of tea alone after her husband has gone to bed so that any child who wants a private chat knows where to find her.

What? The exhausted hubbie trots off to bed at 8 because the children want a chat, and as any strict parent knows, the chat has to end by 9 because that's lights out (and please make sure there is no artificial light pulsating beneath the sheets, providing the evidence the ruffians have smuggled an actual soul- and brain- and plasticity-destroying screen to bed). 

Remember, imprint your values. Remind the children they are worthless digital failures. Set boundaries, and make sure they're doomed, doomed, unless they learn to fear and loathe, like the Devine ...

The conclusion? Well one way or another it seems that politicians and the commentariat are determined to have this first world country in the grip of a crisis, a national emergency, though a lot of it seems to revolve around what can only be called first world problems ...

The common currency? Fear, fear of the unknown, fear of the future, fear of them, fear of the other, fear of the foreign, fear of each other, fear of parents, fear of children, fear of the screens, fear of the smart phones, fear of the digital.  

Heck, what have you got, because we's got the fear ... Doesn't in the end matter much what it is, provided you just fear ... 

Oh and take out a digital sub to read my column about fear, and buy their book about fear, and make sure to rush off to a friendly psychologist, who will charge  exceptionally modest rates to discuss and if possible heighten your fear ...

The pond wishes they'd stop it ... for fear, you know, that they might all go blind ...

(Below: and there are a zillion more, just google)

(Above: yes, the joke's already been done).


Whenever you let members of the commentariat have their head, they're inclined to run with metaphors, analogies, whatever's to hand - a bit of metaphorical 4 be 2 is also useful - and by golly Janet "Dame Slap" Albrechtsen's effort in the opening two pars of Sex discrimination where there is none (behind the lizard Oz paywall) is a doozy of the first water:

Angry Birds are wingless birds, the stars of the video game sensation where a player uses a slingshot to fling the birds at pigs on a playing field. For those of a certain age, it's apparently fun and addictive. In the same way, if you are a few decades older, there is another version of Angry Birds apparently just as fun and addictive for some. 
Also wingless, these birds are women who fling around emotionally charged arguments about misogyny, sexism and discrimination with scant regard for facts. The latest polls reveal women are returning to Labor under Kevin Rudd. While this puts a large dent in the argument that sexism brought down Julia Gillard, don't expect Angry Birds to acknowledge the truth. When rage underpins your ideology, it's hard to let go of that part of your identity. After all, being a Rational Bird doesn't sound much fun.

Say what?

What on earth did Angry Birds to to end up as the opener for what is clearly going to be an epic rant of fear and loathing about wingless birds, namely certain kinds of women?

Wouldn't it have been easier for Dame Slap simply to rant about headless chooks, namely women?

Never mind, the pond bit - the pond is a hopeless sucker for a rant - and sure enough there was Anne Summers being called the nation's Angriest Bird, outrageous when you think about it because surely Dame Slap must be a contender.

Will Dame Slap ever tire of berating feminism, feminists, academics, discrimination divas, and of course Julia Gillard? Will she ever tire of such bizarre notions that to be a feminist you have to be a collectivist?

The outdated mindset that defines women - their successes and their failures - in collective terms says that if women succeed, it's because they are better than men; if they fail, it's because men are misogynists. This obsession with the collective over the individual has always been feminism's failure. Instead of promoting liberty, it interferes with it, consigning women to collective duties and outcomes.

Of course not, not when you can deploy straw dogs and straw women.

Will Dame Slap ever write a piece that's indignant about the way Tony Abbott and his fellow-travelling senior politicians stood shamelessly under signs saying 'Ditch the witch' and 'Bob Brown's bitch', a lot more practical illustration of bile and prejudice in action than her blather about collectives? Certainly not! How could you work an Angry Birds routine into that yarn?

But it got the pond off to a good start to the day, with a feeling that all is right and predictable in what can sometimes be an uncertain world, what with Dame Slap thinking that abusing other women as Angry Birds was a first class example of being a calm Rational Bird.

As opposed to a shit-stirring abusive metaphor-addicted bird, and as a result, the pond feels much happier continuing to call her after the stern schoolmistress at the top of the magic faraway tree .... oh she might think she's a terribly modern video game player, but Enid Blyton had her pegged many years ago ...

Meanwhile, the lizard Oz once again shows its usual cheek, by seeking to charge for the thoughts of war criminal Tony Blair - but why click on We can't let Egypt collapse (behind the lizard oz paywall) when you can simply revert to the story as it was published in The Observer on the 7th July!, under the header, Democracy doesn't on its own mean effective government.

The Observer! Why that's almost as bad, as horrendous and horrid as taking copy from filthy vile angry bird leftists at The Guardian (settle, that's a joke).

Naturally in its original setting Blair's piece brought the punters out in entertaining droves, especially as Blair's only reference to Iraq was oblique, proposing that failing to settle Syria would further destabilise Iraq, as if the war criminal hadn't done a splendid job of destabilisation in consort with the United States (and please, no mention of Saudi Arabia and the way it continues to assist fundamentalism around the world).

What's remarkable these days is the way Blair simply has to step into a spotlight, any kind of spotlight - and he's oh so tragically desperate to stay in a spotlight, any spotlight - and he'll attract feral wild abuse in a way that would make a light bulb regret it lacked the same power with moths (oh that Dame Slap trick is catching I tells ya).

Perhaps Blair will be more at home with the lizard Oz readership even if his thoughts are already a little stale and smelly.

Meanwhile, the reptiles at the lizard Oz are in a great state of agitation. Dour ponderous Paul Kelly, surely the dullest scribbler doing the rounds, is tortured by the notion that the Ruddster is a politician, and even worse, at this point, with an election just around the corner, he's not actually governing, he's campaigning (yes that's what the header says, Rudd is campaigning, not governing, behind the paywall so you don't have to suffer).

What's interesting - okay it's preposterous to say anything Kelly scribbles is interesting - is the way that the tone of the coverage has changed, with Kelly even canvassing what might happen should Abbott lose the unloseable  election (unlosable if you will):

Labor's ultimate fantasy is that if Abbott loses the election then he will be discredited, the Coalition will publicly recant, ask for forgiveness, declare that Rudd was always right about emissions trading and promptly assist Rudd to terminate early the Gillard fixed price policy. That is a fantasy. 
Any lurch in that direction by the Coalition would shatter its electoral base and re-create the events of late 2009 with a large number of Coalition senators ready to cross the floor in open revolt rather than back a Labor government emissions trading bill. 

Actually the real fantasy is that Abbott would be around to influence the coalition or what it might do, as opposed to disappearing out the door in Hewson style (would he ever be able to construct a career as a go to commentator for the ABC? Oh the horror).

And if Malcolm Turnbull got the nod, who knows what might happen (and just why did big Mal duck away from a public gathering last night for an urgent meeting of his faction, even if they don't have factions in the Liberal party? Could the faceless men be up to something?)

And as for what might happen if jolly Joe Hockey took the helm ...

The point of course is that until the election and the actual result, all bets are off, and all Kelly is doing is indulging in a little Abbott-influenced rhetoric

There is no prospect of a post-election Coalition volte face, just as there is no prospect of a defeated Labor party suddenly deciding post-election that it will buckle before Abbott, ditch its carbon pricing faith and vote with Abbott to repeal the Gillard model. What is the political reality? The answer is that all roads lead back to Gillard's laws. They were an immense achievement based upon a complex compromise and will be very hard to unscramble. 
The further reality is that only Abbott will have the potential to change these laws because, as PM, he may have the chance to construct a Senate majority on this issue from independents and crossbenchers effective from July 2014. Maybe.

You see? Everything is ruined and we face a Gillard world for ever, and it will be terribly hard to unscramble them, unless Abbott makes it back in and somehow wangles a majority in the Senate ...

It's desperate stuff, because Dame Slap's Angry Birds make it seem very likely that if he wins in the lower house, Abbott will no longer be able to construct a Senate majority.

But why has Kelly indulged in this sort of idle speculation?

Well you see it's part of a phenomenon which the pond thinks of as the conversion of the reptiles of the lizard Oz into a kind of Faux Noise, where opinion masquerades as reporting, and opinion reinforces the opinions which are passed off as a form of reporting.

You see, here's the top of the digital page this hour (click to enlarge to read the hive mind at work collectively on the carbon tax in a way that makes a feminist collective look like a group of raging anarchist libertarians):

And here's the tree killer front page:

Because you see, the reptiles at the lizard Oz aren't reporting, they're campaigning, and they sense that one area of major weakness for Tony "invisible substance" Abbott is his position on climate science, and mechanisms for tackling issues arising from same.

But they got themselves into this mess by routinely offering up climate denialism and scepticism, and now by acknowledging that they think they and Abbott still need the great big carbon tax as a political club.

But now the real problem they face is that Tony Abbott himself is deeply unpopular, and he has to come up with something to respond to the Ruddster, and never mind all the legislative hurdles the Ruddster might face down the track, because these are exactly the same hurdles Abbott will  himself face, and quite soon there will be only one hurdler standing ...

It's desperate stuff - no, not the politics, that's just politicians being politicians, but rather the sight of a once proud rag turned into a propaganda arm for regressive responses to an issue the rag's senior staff believe is crap ... just like Abbott ...

And sad as well, though perhaps not as sad as the possibility that Abbott might get to implement his socialist big government solutions in response to his problems with an invisible substance ...

But what fun to see an invisible substance bite so hard on the bum of the reptiles at the lizard Oz and on Tony Abbott as well ...

(Below: as usual you're better off with a Pope cartoon for political analysis than any blather by Paul Kelly, more Pope here, which for the moment will take you to a jolly one about the Ruddster).

Yes, yes, for all the recent pond ructions with Crikey, the pond hasn't given up on First Dog either. More First Dog here, and still the only reason to subscribe.

Speaking of invisible substances and the gas emanating from Tony Abbott ...

Sometimes the pond just gets overwhelmed with all the noise, the hubbub, the brass bands of loons on the march.

Item 1: why does Tony Abbott keep on referring to carbon dioxide as an "invisible substance"?

Can someone please hand the honourable leader of the opposition a large chunk of dry ice, and ask him to recite over and over, a substance (let us accept the generalist definition a particular kind of matter with uniform properties) can in fact be a gas, a solid, or a liquid, and in some forms might be visible to the human eye, and yes, I promise if elected to office in a position of power and trust, to re-do my high school science ...

No the pond will not be responsible for any damage to Abbott's hands while he's in learning mode and the dry ice is held in his paws.

The larger point isn't a matter of pedantry. It shows the sort of science, and the sort of fringe characters Abbot hangs around with behind closed doors, picking up a little bit of denialist rhetoric here and there, but without the wherewithal to separate the scientific and rhetorical wheat from the chaff.

Not many bother to chivvy Abbott this sort of language - it's at one with his joke about Malcolm Turnbull inventing the intertubes, copper is good, and carbon dioxide being a colourless, odourless gas. And we haven't got on to noting that in fact "invisible substances" can have value and can have a market.

Ben Cubby has a go at it today,  trying to explain that while sounding dumb, it's actually Abbott playing dumb so he can pander to the basest lowest common denominator:

Best of all, "invisible substance" plugs into a medieval mistrust of scientists and their incomprehensible powers. The sentence links these modern-day alchemists together with the shadowy financiers who would run the so-called markets, trading invisibility while we pay for it. 
Or something. It suggests that Abbott is prepared to wear some public ridicule in exchange for speaking directly to that part of his supporter base that is unmoved by scientific evidence about global warming. Never mind that the Coalition is proposing to spend about $10 billion of the public's money fighting an "invisible substance". (A So-Called Market in Invisible Stuff: Tony Abbott's Carbon Talk, it'll cost you a Fairfax hit with a forced vieo)

Actually the pond does mind.

By lowering the debate in this way, Abbott reduces it to primary school level, and yet he's never pinged by the conservative media for doing it. But perhaps the worm is finally turning, as reported in Abbott hit by backlash (it'll cost you a Fairfax hit and a forced video).

Item 2: speaking of climate science, or in the case of Abbott, no science at all, why is Chris Uhlmann allowed to conduct interviews about climate science on the ABC, when demonstrably he doesn't have a clue about either the science or the opposition's plans to fight an "invisible substance" with a heap of public money.

Oh he tried hard enough, but he didn't even get to mention Abbott's phoney talk of invisible substances in his interview with Greg Hunt last night, which you can still catch here under the bizarrely favourable header Shadow Minister describes once-in-a-generation climate change policy.

Oh there was a flurry of "with the greatest respects" to evoke the notion that the pair were locked in a fierce debate, but Uhlmann was a roll-over puppy, as Hunt steamrollered his way through the interview virtually unchallenged. This sort of nonsense went through to the keeper:

CHRIS UHLMANN: Well with respect, Greg Hunt, your system isn't a market-based system, it's a government-based system. 
GREG HUNT: Well with great respect, you're wrong. And the reason why is this: that what we have is a reverse auction. We will purchase the lowest-cost emissions reduction. What the Government has is a tax ...

And so on and so forth, and never mind that the plan is for government to pick winners, and the talk of a reverse auction so much hokum, and by the end, all Uhlmann could do was keep on harping on about potential costs of the scheme by 2020, and never mind the current costs and utility of the proposal, or the usefulness of the 15,000 strong green army roaming around the country doing 'make-work' jobs worthy of street-sweeping employment schemes in Tokyo.

With the greatest respect, it reinforces the notion that opposition speakers will only appear on the ABC's 7.30 if they can be interviewed by a patsy, a soft touch, an under-briefed performer, a stolid on his feet punching bag, a rope-a-dope, a kind of Jess Willard, which is to say the tragic and inept and ponderous Chris Uhlmann (yes the pond's father was a boxing enthusiast, want to make something of it?)

Put it this way, if your life depended on swiftness of response, you wouldn't want Twinkle toes Uhlmann in your corner.

Item 3: while on the subject of 7.30 and the pathetic Uhlmann, another segment, presented by him and reported by Greg Hoy, managed to look at taxpayer-funded forest schemes, and made great play with talk of federal governments, but only once - once in the entire story - mentioned that it was the Howard government that set the rorts going, while proposing that the Labor government kept them running. You could find out more about Timbercorp simply by reverting to its short wiki here, and the collapse of the Great Southern Group at its wiki here. A report with a little bit more bite would have looked at how the Howard government set these MIS schemes in motion, but alas, 7.30, is routinely a slice of mild cheese scared to go hard on the politics, and instead content to blather on about the federal government, as if all governments were equal in this disaster, which involved much contrivance and much deregulation by the Howard government. There, the pond has said it again, and will say it again, the bloody Howard government  ...

That's it for the 7.30 show for the pond, and thank the long absent lord, it's also the end of Brendan O'Neill hosting Counterpoint for RN.

Item 4: the pond went out of its way to actually listen to O'Neill this week on his first run yesterday, and it was great stuff, and never mind that O'Neill didn't even know how to say Melbourne (after all, Melburnians don't know how to say Newcastle, in the northern style).

There was a rant involving Leveson which - let's keep it in-house and in the club - featured Mick Hume
of Spiked, promoting a book, (how did you guess this just happened to be the very same Spiked where O'Neill lurks, cross-promotion moi?), followed by a classic O'Neill rant about The pathologisation of dissent which sounded to the pond quite pathological, paranoid and irrational, and soon enough involved carrying on about gay marriage and homophobia and climate change, as if back in O'Neill's days of freedom, gays had never been given a backhand by shrinks or talk of invisible substances usually involved chatter about the Holy Ghost.

And as for the third item, Should hate speech be allowed?, it seemed to the pond that O'Neill was actually all in favour of hate speech of all kind ... perhaps understandable given his absolute visceral hatred and contempt for intellectual elites, including the ones who are allowed to get their hands on an ABC radio show and chatter on endlessly ...

Sadly that's it, and presumably O'Neill will go back to guesting as rocket scientist Amanda Vanstone returns to talk about her experiences, her feelings and her insights in the benign, preferably silent company of a companionable guest, but still the pond wonders if exporting the show to England was a good idea.

Was O'Neill the only conservative available in Australia, sorry, the world, to conduct the show? Was there no other? None at all? Nadir, zip, zero conservatives up to the task, with a local inflection and interested in local issues, one that might have done a job on our own press inquiry, rather than Leveson? Or go on a paranoid rant about how the intellectual elites were out to get them rather than leaving the job to O'Neill?

Apparently not. It seems we don't have a decent paranoid conservative with microphone technique available anywhere in the land for the ABC ...

Item 5: in lieu of actually watching the Bolter's TV show - there are some things that are above and beyond the call of any duty - the pond is pleased to report these figures for last Sunday:

Insiders: 204,000 / 98,000 / 32,000
The Bolt Report: 168,000 / 94,000

Yes it's astonishing that there are 168,000 with nothing better to do on a Sunday morning (you'd think they could find ways of filling in a half hour in bed) but at least the contagion is contained and Insiders continues to cream the Bolter (not that the pond can bear to watch Insiders either).

As for the Bolter himself, the pond is indebted to John Quiggin for resurrecting a piece written by the Bolter aboout the Iraq war back on 9th June 2003, which you can read in Bolt, ten years on.

In it, the Bolter proves to be utterly wrong, in relation to statistics and predictions, and it makes for remarkably woeful reading, and is an exemplary example of why demagogue writers are in fact dangerous. (And you might just follow your reading of the Bolter with Lincoln Archer's July 8th 2013 piece at the ABC, Iraq violence: why the death toll is rising which notes that sectarian violence is back to levels not seen since 2006/07).

Has the Bolter any shame, any regret for his ancient false scribbles, his fellow travelling with the war monger pack?

Of course not. He's as close to the scorpion in that frog and scorpion tale as any you can find in the Murdoch press ... I rant without due regard to truth or facts or insight not blinded by ideology because it's in my nature ...

Item 6: which brings us at last to Gerard Henderson scribbling today, but oh the poor dear, because he's scribbling this the very day after Dr No sounded like Captain "invisible substance" Stupid:

Ah well, they say timing is everything on the stage, and poor old Hendo, our very own prattling Polonius, struck out in a big way.

It's desperate stuff, but if you've got a few Fairfax hits left, lying around like loose change, or Xmas play money, you might care to spend them on Dr No? Why Abbott is Captain Positive, but only if you want to read the most tragic form of pure worshipful hagiography.

Clearly the heat and the Ruddster in the kitchen has flushed out Hendo, and he feels Tony needs a leg-up, and so he panders in a most supportive way, which makes the piece largely predictable and no doubt for many completely unreadable, and towards the end of this piece, he comes up with this:

On indigenous policy Abbott would be more properly labelled as ''Captain Positive''. Indeed it is in this area that the Prime Minister is negative, identifying a problem which does not exist. It was much the same in November 2009 when Rudd falsely claimed that Malcolm Turnbull was a climate change sceptic who was close to Lord Monckton. This was not the case as was evident within weeks when Turnbull lost the Liberal Party leadership to Abbott over his support for Rudd's carbon pollution reduction scheme. 
Right now there are all too many journalists prepared to run Labor's line that Abbott is exclusively negative. The truth is that sometimes even political celebrities throw the switch to negativity.

No doubt Hendo thought that he was applying a king hit to the Ruddster for denigrating big Mal, but sadly this is "invisible substance" day, and all it does is remind us that it was Tony "climate science is crap" Abbott who got close to Lord Monckton, as recorded in 'Mad Monk' meets Monckton (oh be fair, that'd be irresistible to a subbie).

Ah yes, in those days Abbott wasn't an intellectual snob, and he was ready to sit down with anyone and have a chat about invisible substances.

It wasn't just Abbott of course. There were a lot in the commentariat - the Bolter, Janet Albrechtsen, Miranda the Devine and so on - who did the dance with Monckton until he went off into la la land with Pastor Danny ...

Abbott cannily avoided a photo op with Monckton, but so long as he keeps talking about invisible substances, he's channeling Monckton, and by golly does that give Hendo a tough job pushing the dry ice up the hill ...

(Below: one question that never got asked)

(Below: count the degrees of separation and see if you can still get to Kevin Bacon)

From journalists doing it for free to fracking for fun ...

You can imagine the pond's shock, horror and dismay.

Here we were hoarding our Fairfax hits like gold, like a survivalist wanting to store up the gold for when the paper currencies collapse. Oh, the 30 hits were engraved on the forehead like an ancient sign of the coming of age ...

And then it turned out that the Fairfax paywall is a paper tiger, a dodge, a ruse, a bluff, and the full-to-overflowing intertubes is littered with simple ways to avoid it, with an intertubes cynic opening the pond's eyes wide.

Perhaps it's because the pond has never had any need of safe browsing or incognito mode to visit porn sites ... and even more amazing, we didn't even need to use the in-house VPN, as a second's googling will tell you ...

Never mind, the pond still treasures the joke of treasuring the Fairfax hits of gold, and so it's decided to spend lavishly this morning, spend up big on generally grumpy Paul Sheehan, furiously scribbling Confronting the monster within.

What to do about DOCS, Sheehan asks, and what to do about child abuse, and what to do to help ruptured, broken families and the fallout, and how to cure society's ills?

Well of course Sheehan would be hoisting himself on his own petard if he were to dare to suggest an increase in government expenditure, or a review of the current government's current policies, and anyway, he has a much better idea:

Who, then, would keep an eye on children after they had been assessed as being at risk? Volunteers. The underemployment rate in Australia is about 18 per cent (including the official unemployment rate). Thousands of people are qualified to apply commonsense to problems, at little or no cost to the state budget.

That's right, get people to sort it out for free, because you know, it's cheap, it's really cheap, and all those dole bludgers have got nothing better to do, and it won't cost the state diddly-squat.

Oh the man's a visionary, and by golly, has he got his eye on the gold as well.

Towards the end Sheehan manages to confuse and conflate these issues with others, as he contemplates volunteerism at work in Victims and Witnesses of Crime Support:

Every time Thornton has sought to expand VWCCS into new courts she has encountered bureaucratic blockages. Apparently, these ''amateurs'' (almost all university-educated professionals) need to be carefully managed. There are ''liability'' issues. There are ''qualification'' issues. There are ''compliance'' issues. There are ''OHandS'' issues. In short, if you suggested a fundamental re-organisation of the way society responds to any problem, such as the child abuse epidemic, you will encounter a wall of passive-aggressive territoriality and legalism. 

But are they merely passive-aggressive territorial legalistic issues?

Any fool - apart from Sheehan - knows that if a volunteer turned up in a house and was threatened or assaulted - some people tend to get emotional - of course there are are liability and compliance issues. Just as there are if you hop on a bus to get to a place of work, or drive a car, or trip on a step and break a leg, and so on and on and on ...

In short, if you suggest a fundamental re-organisation of the way society responds to any problem, you need to have some clues, and not simply employ abusive aggressive language.

And don't you just love the way Sheehan moves from an unemployment rate of 18% - all that talent lying idle - to the notion of amateurs as almost all university-educated professionals. What a relief to know that the real unemployment rate is made up of top-notch university-educated professionals just itching to do a day's honest volunteering (sssh, don't ask Sheehan, he's got columns to write)

Sheehan is a first class example of a man sitting on his bum in his ivory tower - a place he usually reserves for isolated academics - loftily waving his hands and saying make it so and make it right.

It's the sort of pompous preening pronouncement that no doubt sends hard-working, under-paid people in the field into a frenzy.

The pond was reminded of a practice endemic in an area in which it once worked, which involved the routine "employment" of interns, which is to say people who were expected to work for free to get a toe up in the game.

Oh there were ways around the insurance issues - even when one of the interns barreling around in a truck knocked down a verandah pole - but there was no way around the way the business was in fact ripping off the interns, and in due course an even more ingenious way forward was devised - get the government to fund some cheap as chups internships, so the business could keep ripping off the interns, with less of a guilty conscience, while the government could feel it was discharging its on the job training responsibilities at a much cheaper price ...

Did many of the interns fed into the system go on with it? Not really, but it gave the pond enough insight to know that Sheehan is talking through his hat when he concludes:

There may be immense social reserves in volunteerism but my experience in watching Pieta Thornton battle with bureaucratic territoriality and legalism tells me that the monster would rather see tens of thousands of children continue to be neglected than allow mere ''amateurs'' onto the turf of the professionals. 

The point is, if you want a professional response, you pay for a professional response. If you want a decent team of well trained firemen, you pay for professional firies. If you want decent social services, you have to pay for them.

If you want an amateur response, you get what you pay for ...

Still, it makes the pond much happier about breaching the Fairfax paywall.

In the future, it seems, all we need is mere "amateur" journalists, working for nothing, and all will be well. Let's hope they start by paying Sheehan what his columns are worth, which as they say in Tamworth, would most likely amount to three fifths of fuck all ...

Oh yes, a gentleman journalist filling in his spare time in a volunteer way, devising and publishing ingenious ideas for the betterment of society, without a hint of sordid money or recompense ...

And while we're at it, there's someone else who deserves to be read for free.

Yes, The Australian has absolutely no shame, and today has put up yet another Bjorn Lomborg piece, despite the pond taking a very severe attitude to their last outing which saw a Lomborg piece made part of the lizard Oz's paywall.

Here he is at number one in the revolving digital carousel of doom at the top of the page:

And yet the portentously titled Forget subsidy-bloated feelgood energy, gas is the solution is available for free at Slate, under the simpler, if equally stupid and misleading header, The Gas is Greener, where it was posted earlier.

In his usual way, Lomborg achieves the distinction of writing about the benefits of gas, without at any point discussing any of the issues and environmental concerns that fracking involves. It's up there with Sheehan's lofty wave of the hand.

It's a singular achievement, and so the piece is worth what you pay for it at Slate, which is to say, absolutely nothing ...

By golly, the pond is getting the hang of this Sheehan amateurism, and so it seems should Fairfax and the reptiles at the lizard Oz.

Why pay for the work of alleged professionals, when the nonsense they scribble should be done for free and the pieces they republish at a premium aren't even worth the effort of clicking on for free ...

(Below: a few fracking jokes)

Is Ming the merciless rolling in his grave at the sombre sight of Menzies House?

It's been a long time since the pond dropped in on Menzies House, and what a surprise and disappointment it turned out to be.

Now let's not get into an argument as to whether Bob Menzies, aka Ming the merciless, actually owns the house, and it should therefore be Menzies' House. It's much better to assume that Bob Menzies wouldn't have touched the site with a barge pole and certainly wouldn't have wanted a possessory credit.

It seems the vital spark, the enthusiasm has gone, and the place has dead into a dead zone for links. First out of the blocks right at this moment is a link to the ABC and then to Quadrant online, and a piece of profound stupidity from Michael Galak about PC:

It started slow and easy. I remember, for example, when “black” and “negro” were just words, no more and no less, that designated skin colour and had no other meanings.

The pond is not sure which alternative universe Galak remembers, but since he wants us all to ruffle a few precious feathers for liberty's sake, the pond feels free to call him a dickhead first class.

Clearly also he's never been in a room where someone has whispered an aside, such as "he or she is black, y'know" or perhaps elaborated with colourful talk of a touch of the tar. But you didn't really need to say black bastard for the meaning to be clear, just the word black said it all - bone lazy, idle, a wastrel, a source of malaise and ruination. The pond recommends that Galak tries these lines:

First laconic Tamworth lad: He's black, you say?
Second laconic Tamworth lad: Yeah, he's black.

Clearly Galak wasn't in touch with the zeitgeist out Moree or Bourke way in the good old days. You can do the same with "negro" when next passing through Mississippi, though there inflection, tone and the bending, shaping and enunciating of the word is everything.

I mean, the pond doesn't generally mind obdurate thickness, but wilful blind stupidity and an ability to forget the past is simply beyond the pale, though it does evoke memories of old men sitting in leather chairs sipping a port and murmuring wot wot. It turns out Galak came from the Soviet Union in 1978, and therefore really doesn't have a clue ....

But back to Ming's house, and there's a dash of original content, bizarrely provided this day by something called Toby's Sunday Light, which wouldn't pass muster in a student newspaper. Toby's opening prediction will give you a taster:

1. A daring tv producer will show two men kissing. He will be praised to the max by the ABC, the SMH, the NSW education minister and every forward thinking organisation in Australia. On TV he will state that his intention was to shock Australians out of their complacency and homophobia.

Oh the sweet darlings. They must still be watching repeats of Are You Being Served? and chortling at the jokes about pussies ...

And that's the opener! It gets pathetically feeble pretty quickly after that:

11. The term ‘Climate Change’ will be replaced by the term ‘Climate Uncertainty’ and the UN will demand that industrialised countries will hand over half their GNP to Somalia to fight the Global Climate Uncertainty caused by air conditioners. 
12. A member of the Royal Family will make a joke causing reporters to laugh. 
13. It will be hot enough to fry an egg on the pavement somewhere in the world, and old blokes in skimpy cossies will dive into a swimming pool in midwinter somewhere else. 
14. The date for the end of the world will be announced causing millions to get pissed at end-of-the-world parties. 
15. The Australian government will slaughter all of the nation’s 1.2 million wild camels in a bid to reduce carbon pollution because they fart.

Oh a fart joke. Now there's a genuine touch of class. How about an oyster up the nose, and eating the snot, Stork style?

The pond quotes these at length simply because the pond has long argued that conservatives generally don't have much of a sense of humour, and if they do try to feign one, a bit like Spock trying to feign human emotions, the sight is spectacularly woeful ... as are the jokes.

And then came this:

Editor's note: We realise that some MH readers may not find hunour or accuracy in Toby the Elder's predictions. Given his advanced age MH seeks your understanding and indulgence by refraining from rude and abusive comment. 

The pond's not sure which readers couldn't find any hunour in Toby the Elder's work, but damn straight, it's way too easy to understand why some MH readers might not find any humour.

There is one other recent bit of original content, from one Viv Forbes of Queensland with a cheerful insight into science and many good wishes to those filthy, vile greenies and their delusional ways:

If you were so silly as to want a sustainable long-term method to keep locking away the sparse carbon resources of the atmosphere using “carbon farming”, the ONLY way to do it is to harvest regular crops of trees, pastures, cereals and grazing animals. Then use these carbon-rich products to build homes and feed families, thus creating long-term storage of the carbon in buildings as timber, or in human bodies as flesh and bone. Finally, when these carbon carriers reach the end of their life, bury the old timber and the dead bodies in deep holes so that the carbon never gets back into the biosphere. Such burial should attract carbon credit payments. Such a scheme will methodically remove carbon dioxide, the gas of life, from the carbon cycle – a sure way to starve life on Earth. It is the road to biocide, but that seems to be what the Deep Greens want. Let’s hope they starve first.

Uh huh. So Menzies House is still a home to cranks, but below that there's a link to re-heated Miranda the Devine getting agitated about current Chairman Rudd in the Sunday Terror - keep the line moving folks, nothing to see there -  and below that a link to Charles Waterstreet scribbling in Fairfax - good old Charlie, man about town, and with about as much of an ideological bone in his body as he has milk in his blood - and below that a link to a Fairfax poll daring to suggest 3 out of 5 Australians are happy with the carbon tax, and below that another link to Fairfax, this time to a story about Abbott slamming Rudd on the carbon tax, as if he'd do anything else, being Dr. No and all, and below that a link to a story in the lizard Oz on Rudd's shifting to an emissions trading scheme, bizarrely titled Rudd robs the Coalition's nest, as if an ETS was somehow in the Coalition's nest, as opposed to a glimmer in the eye of one-time thesis scribbler Greg Hunt, MP who has long since forsaken his heretical addiction to the marketplace and substituted direct heroic action by a cohort of strong, brave comrades, 15,000 strong, swearing they will go on the long march to save the planet ... more heroic than the comrades who undertook that long march with Mao ...

And below that a link to Richard Farmer, and if you flip the page, another link to the ABC, and you begin to think, what the heck, all the young Liberal lions do these days is languidly link to the ABC Fairfax conspiracy ...

Oh sure right after that there's a satirical piece about K. Rudd by an "Insider" which is about as funny and as well-targeted as being hit about the head by a haddock in a Monty Python sketch, and then more links to News Corp, the Daily Terror, Fairfax, and so on and on, and it becomes clear this is now a site that's really little more than a place dedicated to place holding, given a form of life by leeching off and linking to the mainstream media.

And yet ostensibly it's being edited by Tim Andrews, doyen of Ayn Rand devotees (ah yes, nothing like taking a little government welfare later in life, provided there's a name change to disguise the takings), but it turns out that the arduous day to day linking to the main stream media might the the responsibility of one Tim Humphries, "responsible for the day-to-day running of the website".

A couple of Tims, so come on Tims by two, let's see some proper content, of the appropriately weird kind, and not just a note from Queensland, and comedy routines you couldn't pass off on Honi Soit.

But look, the pond is here to help, and if it's links you want, why not link, Tims by two, to Lenore Taylor's tidy analysis of Tony Abbott in Tony Abbott takes a fall in the battle of the 'stunt' men:

...when Abbott says Rudd is interested in media “stunts” there’s the small pot-and-kettle problem of his own three years of almost daily picture opportunities in fluorescent vests warning of the “unimaginably” dire consequences of the aforementioned tax (which turned out to be a pretty easily imagined one-off cost of living increase of somewhere between 0.4 and 0.7%).

Oh I know we could argue for hours as to whether she's right in calling it a small pot-and-kettle problem, when it might easily be argued that it's like one of those giant-sized super duper extra large kettles they used to make tea for shearers in the shed.

But the pond can see where you're coming from with this linking thing, it's remarkably easy. You take a neat point by a writer, and quote it:

Abbott’s attack on Julia Gillard for being a “liar” worked because he could back it with the “no carbon tax under a government I lead” grab from her interview before the election, obliterating the nuanced difference between a “tax” and a floating price, which she was supporting, through the endless repetition...
...When Abbott says Rudd is too negative and focused on criticising the opposition, it's hard for voters to forget that he was the most effective and aggressively negative opposition leader in recent times, even if he did start wearing suits and talking about being kinder and gentler as we entered the election year.

By golly, you're right collective two Tims (could we call you Tim and Tam as a point of product differentiation?), this is fun and easy, and best of all, it helps kick the Fairfax/Daily Terror habit, which truly can ruin an individual's mind as much as sugar or junk ...

Now it's true that The Guardian has a long way to go to get its Australian edition feeling like an actual Australian edition - click on editorials, for example, which are ostensibly in the Australian pages, and you get Golf: is it too much to ask Muirfield to make room for women?, which is peculiarly British, when of course a more relevant question might be put to the Liberal and Labor parties and the selection of candidates: is it too much to ask both sides to make room for women? (just read Women shut out of plum seats to see what the pond means, though beware, it might cost you a Fairfax click).

But then click on Ashbygate: the great disappearing scandal about to roar back to life, and you get David Marr giving the rough Brough the sharp end of the pineapple:

Since his glory days in John Howard’s cabinet, Brough had a rough political ride. After losing his seat in the Ruddslide of 2007, he quarrelled fiercely with his Queensland colleagues over the formation of the LNP. The former army man and champion of the Northern Territory intervention then abandoned the party, politics and the state. 
Many in the Liberal party were happy to see him go. Brough is not widely liked on his side of politics. There are those who think him lazy, unlikable and arrogant, a man with his best political years behind him. But Brough has always enjoyed the support of two powerful patrons: Howard and Abbott.

Oh we could spend pleasant hour after hour arguing whether "loathed" might have been a more appropriate word than "not widely liked", and why Tony Abbott stands by the rough gruff Brough through lots of thickness and very little thin. After all:

Abbott’s loyalty to Brough also survived the Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail affair. The leader of the opposition accepted Brough’s assurances that the menu with its crude references to the prime minister’s “big red box” never came out of the kitchen.

Of course if you're seeking a light-hearted moment of comedy, you might prefer to link to a featherweight pamphlet promising real policies and real action and ... well, just like, for real, man, can ya dig it ...

Ah well, it fills in a Sunday, and the humiliation doled out to the image of Ming the Merciless, great and fearless founder, is really just too delicious to bear ...

Fundamentalists hurrah, tackling everything from tampons to music and dancing...

(Above: the pond stands with Texas women. Follow the blog here, where these images came from, and discover why Texas men fear tampons but not guns).


A friend kindly sent the pond a link to a gobbet that says it all about Rick Perry's Texas, and what's more, says it all in the header:

TX Police Force Women to Throw Out Tampons to Enter Senate Gallery, While Allowing Concealed Guns

Because of course tampons are a deadly weapon, while concealed guns are the right of every American.

It got the pond to thinking just how universal fundamentalist conservatives are in their desire to control and repress.

One of the most painful reads the pond has indulged in recently was Jon Lee Anderson's State of Terror for The New Yorker. 

It's behind the paywall, but its sub-header also said it all: What happened when an Al Qaeda affiliate ruled in Mali.

What happened was the country was fucked, hands were chopped off, music and dancing were banned, women and children persecuted (but so were men and the once thriving music industry), and so when they turned up, the general population treated the French as liberators. 

Memories of Calvinist hostility to any form of fun trickled into the pond's brain. Yes, Calvin, the hero of angry Sydney Anglicans was agin dancing, theatre going, card playing, obscene songs, drunkenness, luxurious living and luxurious dressing, with the banning of plays and attempts to introduce religious pamphlets and psalm singing into Geneva's taverns.

He was a classic killjoy, much like angry Sydney Anglicans and fundamentalist Islamics. And a classic killer - witness his insistence on the death penalty for  Michael Servetus, who had harmlessly noted that the Trinity of god was an absurdity. And Geneva was home to a hearty dose of witch-hunting 1542-1546, with some 58 men and women sentenced to death.

Now the past is the past, except if you're a fundamentalist who insists on living in the past and conducting yourself according to the strange rituals and beliefs of ancient fanaticism.

It so happens that there's a handy guide to Calvinist thinking on view in pdf format here.

Let's just see how in synch Calvin and his followers were with the Taliban on the matter of dancing:

It may be instructive to review the anti-dancing campaign of the Geneva reformers. Their opposition to dancing is laid down in the catalogue of vices in the Confession of Faith (1536), Art. 19, and in the Articles (1537). The Draft Ordinances of 1541 include among the vices from which the ministers must be free, "dances and similar dissoluteness: (LCC, 22.61). Among the later proclamations, one (Laws of Geneva, ET, 1643, 29) enjoins the citizens "to haunt and come diligently to the Sermons of the Word of God" and "to live holily and peaceably, to be obedient according to their duties to Magistrates, Fathers, Mothers, Lords and Masters, defending and inhibiting all blasphemy, despising of God and his Ministers, dishonest words, vain songs, drunkenness, dissolutions, excess arrogancy, and insolency, plays or games, idle running from house to house, cut or embroidered hose, chiding, dissensions, fighting or brawling, injuring of others, and all other things not lawful and contrary to the holy word of God and his Commandments and the Acts and Proclamations heretofore made." In the schedule of fines (ibid., p. 36), among other items, is the following: "that no manner person do sing any vain, dishonest, or ribald songs, neither to dance, nor make masques or mummeries, or any disguisings in no manner or sort whatsoever it be, upon pain to be put three days in prison with bread and water and 40s. for every time so offending."

Cut or embroidered hose! Worse than tampons.

And so to Mali, recent past:

Music and television were banned. graven images were destroyed, and men and women were obliged to wear conservative dress. Transgressors were publicly punished with amputation, whipping and stoning. Three hundred thousand people fled.

The banning of music was particularly devastating, given Mali's rich history of music, and Anderson talks to a number of musicians who suffered.  Singer Khaira Arby:

Musicians in the north told her that the jihadis had destroyed their instruments and sent her a message. "They threatened to cut off my tongue...".

Shrines were demolished, document destroyed, memories of ancient cultures blown apart, schools closed.

Like vandals, the Islamists had scrawled graffiti and painted over road signs that showed human and animal images, leaving messy swatches of brown paint. Hair salons, which in Mali advertise their services with portraits of men and women, had also been targeted. There was little electricity, and not much water; the Islamists had also destroyed the city's tele-communications system before they left.

The controlling impulse is the same. Back to Calvin:

Is dancing - providing there be no illicit intercourse - so bad? Calvin stubbornly answers that it is in fact the prelude to such adultery, and both opens the door to, and announces the entrance of Satan (Serm. Dt. 5.18, XCR, 26:340f.; Wallace, Calvin's Doctrine of the Christian Life, 175, n.4). In keeping with his "interiorization" of the Decalogue through the Sermon on the Mount, Calvin's exposition of the Seventh Commandment ((nst. 2.8.41-44), while it does not expressly mention dancing, broadly treats fornication as including, besides the act itself, "the seduction of another's modesty with wanton dress and obscene gestures and foul speech." That dancing remained a topic for preaching to the end of Calvin's life is demonstrated by Serm. 41 on 2 Sam 13.11-14 (1562, Suppl. Calv., 2.363.14f.): "Why do the men wish their wives and daughters to dance? In order that they may be adulteresses and go to perdition and acquire everlasting ignominy." Again in Serm. 80 on 2 Sam. 23.2 (1563, Suppl. Calv. 1.699.45ff.), Calvin contrasts the effect of David's "holy song" and that of the drum and flute, which causes the crowd in their dancing and dissipation to lose control, honor, shame - like "unbridled calves".

Anderson does provide a little ray of hope at the end of his gloomy tale of Mali, telling of a musician, Baba Salah, a guitarist who was once given a guitar by Jackson Browne, and has been playing it ever since:

Onstage, he picked up the guitar and said a few words about how happy he was that the north was free, which drew applause and joyful shouts. Then he and his band began playing. Their music, driven by his guitar, was a looping, riffing, electric sound that evoked the sixties underground yet was distinctly African. Baba Salah's singing was casual, comfortable, and as he launched into the first song people filled the floor to dance.

Now the pond's not much for dancing, but that's more a matter of technique than theology, and at the end of that harrowing read, the pond felt like standing up and dancing like an unbridled calf, dancing defiantly in the face of the Islamic fundies and the Calvinists and all the other god botherers who attempt to make a misery of this life on earth.

Oh but you say, this is all too much, too long a bow, linking Calvin and Islamics and the angry Sydney Anglicans, but truth to tell, they're all infested by and tarnished by their own forms of puritanism.

Of course the Angries claim they're moderate, and that their hero has been unfairly tarnished, with Michael Jensen leading the way:

He is a byword for bigotry cast in the role of the austere, humourless and cruel preacher of an austere, humourless and cruel God. He was held responsible by Max Weber for the rapacity of late capitalism. He is remembered as the persecutor of his opponents, including the hapless heretic Michael Servetus, for whose burning John Calvin is held responsible. Calvinism, the form of Christianity he spawned, allegedly shares its fatalism with Islam. It is a church of prigs and wowsers, of Talibanesque idol-smashers and woman-haters, of middle managers and bean counters. It is a faith that broods on the depravity of humankind rather than celebrating its glorious capacity to build, to create and to redeem. It is the religion of Ned Flanders and the ironically named Reverend Lovejoy. (Decline of John Calvin)

Yes, indeed, because it's true, but the Sydney Anglicans can't get enough of Calvinism, and seek to dress him in modest garb, perhaps a fetching nicely cut black - no embroidered hose please! - so he can appeal:

Calvin was not without flaws, some of them serious. Yet if we are to judge him cruel, we are failing to recognise that he was a man of remarkable moderation in an age of often extreme judicial cruelty. If we are to judge his view of humanity too bleak, we are seriously overestimating our own capacity for moral heroism. If we are to celebrate the waning of his influence, it is quite possibly because we have accepted too lazily the caricature of his critics. As Robinson reminds us: "There are things for which we in this culture clearly are indebted to him, including relatively popular government, the relatively high status of women, the separation of church and state, what remains of universal schooling and, while it lasted, liberal higher education, education in the humanities. How easily we forget."

Indeed, how easily we forget that Calvin locked up dancers in clink, and so did the Islamists when they had the chance, and so the war on fundamentalism and its apologists and fellow-travellers must continue.

On an upnote, the Jensenist heresy sees another farewell noted this Sunday - Phillip Jensen scribbling  Retirements and Beginnings - but remember, the man who took over at Moore College, Mark Thompson, was responsible for "Engaging with Calvin", and the Sydney Anglicans are still busy engaging with African Anglicans intent on making life on earth a living hell for African gays ...

Not that they're the only ones that are trying to make Africa a living hell.

The second most depressing read the pond had this week also came in The New Yorker, with Patrick Radden Keefe's Buried Secrets, How an Israeli billionaire wrestled control of of Africa's biggest prizes (hurry, outside the paywall at the moment).

The next big looting of Africa has begun, and the Calvinists are small beer in the looting, though not if you're gay or a woman, and it got harder to dance reading President Condé musing "How can we be so rich and yet so poor?"

Perhaps because the fundamentalists look at the trees, and all they can see is the need for fig leafs scattered over gays, women, dancing and music, while the rich make out like bandits ...

But try as they might, it's hard to ban laughter, and so the YouTube poster below refused requests to take down what surely must be the zillionth re-working of this riff, featuring at last our very own Sydney Anglicans ...

(Below: thanks to Calamity Jane for reminding the pond how weird the world of the splitters and the feuders and the schemers is).

There's nothing like chatter about hippies and big government for a laugh fest ...

(Above: dangerous members of a dangerous international elite).


The pond had the most peculiar, quite dizzy experience yesterday.

By sheer coincidence, the pond came upon a repeat of Counterpoint, ostensibly and allegedly the national broadcaster's opportunity for local conservatives to stake their claim as challenging intellectuals ready to discuss the issues of the day.

So it came to pass that the pond listened to a whinging Pom, one Brendan O'Neill, interview a moaning, whinging, whining British academic, one Frank Furedi, an elitist poobah at the University of Kent.

The topic? Groan, you guessed it. The culture wars.

When did the culture wars begin? Why did they begin and how can they be described and why have they come to dominate modern public debate? (Where did the culture wars come from?)

Only on not my, and quite possibly not your, ABC.

Only the in the fluff-gathering navel-gazing world of a most dubious elitist would anyone contend that the culture wars is front and centre of modern public debate.

The pond tried to imagine the scene in a meeting of the program's producer with the head of RN, convened no doubt in a converted broom cupboard.

Congratulations, the head of RN says, I didn't think we could make the program even more irrelevant, laughable and risible to an Australian audience, but you've done the job. Henceforth our guaranteed * Neilsen rating is secure.

O'Neill is besotted, driven crazy by the concept of elites, which is somewhat disturbing given he's some how got his elitist paws on what's supposed to be the pride of Australian conservative intellectuals on ABC radio (oh okay, the pond is joking, come on down Amanda Vanstone).

That explains how the next bit of the show was a tedious rant by O'Neill, who seems to living in a kind of 1960s dreaming, about hippies. Hippies!

How did this happen? How did the apparently free-wheeling, spliff-smoking counterculture of the 1960s give rise to the soul-destroying environmentalism and speech-policing feminism of today? How did the outlook of those tradition-trampling outsiders become so insider, and also so fundamentally killjoy? (A hippy dictatorship?)

An even better question would be how the Australian taxpayer came to be funding this specious tosh and humbuggery. How did O'Neill collar Countdown? How did this bizarre killjoy ranter make off with the prize?

But then came the pièce de résistance, an argument - let's not call it a debate or a meeting of minds - between the crazed O'Neill, a token leftie in the form of Guy Rundle, and a bizarre relatively recent Murdoch import, Nick Cater, who understands Mr Murdoch and Australia much better than any token Australian.

The subject for debate?

One of the key most contested questions in the culture wars is Who Rules? Who are the opinion formers and behaviour shapers of the modern era? Is it a right wing cabal or is it a liberal elite?
So who is it? Who runs the show today? Is it a right wing cabal or is it a liberal elite? Is there really such a thing as a liberal elite or is that something of a conspiracy theory? (Who rules the culture wars?)

Yes, more navel-gazing on the show about elites. And the reason why it should be called an argument is that O'Neill wasn't in the business of moderating the discussion like a polite moderator.

No, he was in there, steel-toe capped boots and all, doing over Rundle in consort and cahoots with Cater, who managed to sound as thuck as two brucks whenever he opened his mouth.

It turns out, qua Cater, that Murdoch doesn't control or run anything, and is comprehensively not an elitist, and instead it's the rabble running out in the street - the crypto-fascist hippie greenie hordes - who have their hands on the levers of power.

Because, you know, City Hub has so much more dynamic market-place power than the reptiles at the lizard Oz, and never no mind  that they're forced to run a full page ad for hand jobs at Kings Court to survive (that's a Sydney joke).

It was such a bizarre, preposterous argument that the pond, drifting in and out, found it quite entertaining, and it seems so did others, because on the rare occasions the pond has previously dropped in on the show's website, you'd be lucky to find a comment or two.

Instead there were quite a few, and the comments began to take on the tone of submissions to the blogs of Murdoch rags, some outraged, some astonished, some upset, and some stupidly supportive. You know, the sort of trolling and baiting you can experience on the Bolter's blog when the moderators are at home, or on Akker Dakker's blog, patrolled by feral pigs ...

There were a few sensible remarks, which is to say others who agreed with the pond.

A correspondent by name of Russell came out of the starting blocks firing:

I couldn't believe my ears yesterday. The preceding monologue from O'Neill was absolutely bizarre. Where did the ABC get that guy from? Mars? An incoherent, rambling sequence of unjustified opinions over a sweeping range of topics, all presented in the manner of a sooking schoolboy. 
Then the next segment came on... now Guy faced not only O'Neill's bizarre convictions, but also Nick Cater's textbook presentation of the corporate propaganda line, cheered on by O'Neill...
...Really ABC, it is time to axe this programme. At least with Michael Duffy we had a reasoned and thoughtful look at contrapuntal positions. With Amanda Vanstone and now Brendan O'Neill we lost first the thoughtfulness and now also the reason and rationality. I can't believe Australians are paying for this rubbish.

Russell's a little moderate for the pond, a tad genteel calling O'Neill a sook schoolboy, when really it should be noted how bizarre it is that a card-carrying argumentative Marxist libertarian contrarian should find a home at public radio.

It always reminds the pond of that Walt Whitman line, Very well then, I contradict myself, I am large, except what's extraordinary is how narrow and small O'Neill's concerns are.

Oh sure they're dressed big, but when you're raging on about the reign of the hippies, like the reign of the zombies, you're just a bad Roger Corman movie looking for the nearest derelict drive-in last picture show.

Never mind, will anyone note what Russell says? Does anyone at the * RN read the comments on *RN Nielsen-rating shows?

Did somebody at RN disinter Sam Beckett as the show's producer, who then decided that the only way to go was to get post-ironic post-modernist taxpayer-funded elitists to babble on and blather about the tyranny of elites, excluding Rupert Murdoch, who's certainly not a member of any elite, no, none at all.

Curiously it left the pond in an exceptional state of happiness. It's rare these days that you get any decent comedy on RN - The Goons seem to have disappeared into the vault - and this show has all the classic signs of a British comedy ...

How mortifying to miss it on the first run, but what joy to discover it on repeat, and lurking on the full to overflowing intertubes so the masses can flock to this dissection of filthy elites by academics and broadcasters and journalists on their behalf ...

Meanwhile, all is well in Murdoch land.

It turns out - yes people warned the pond - that Christopher Pearson's replacement, Chris Kenny, is something of a predictable dullard - though, the pond hastens to add, certainly not an elitist of the Murdochian kind, given a national newspaper platform on which to perform like a pompous ponce, and  run at a loss for no other reason than the chairman's desire to enhance intellectual debate, and certainly not to carry out an agenda and dearie me, oh certainly not to influence things in one way and another. Oh no, it's the fiends at the City Hub promoting Kings Court handjobs that do that ...

Anyhoo, does Kenny once mention Campbell Newman and team voting themselves a handsome package in Journey from largesse to restraint too far for our handout MPs? (behind the paywall because 'leets need their cash in the paw).

Of course not, instead he rails at big government at tedious length, and worst of all, he uses examples to explain his position:

Last month, retiring independent Tony Windsor boasted of the "financial contribution from the commonwealth government" for the Barraba water pipeline, how the minister "found some money" for the Grace Munro aged-care facility, the "enormous expenditure package" for the Tamworth Base Hospital and the "quite large grants" for the University of New England.

Uh huh, and it seems in Kenny's world ipso facto these things are bad, yet the pond knows for a fact that the good citizens of Barraba needed the pipeline, that the Tamworth Base Hospital was in urgent need of improvements (it now services a very large area), and after its international follies, the pond's old alma mater the UNE needed a little help, not as a reward for the stupidity of its management but so its actual students wouldn't suffer too much.

You get the idea. These speeches referred to many other fine achievements and messages, and these politicians can rightly be judged on their contributions, good and bad. Yet these snippets serve as examples of the handout mentality.

Actually the pond gets the idea. Various communities have needs, and ensuring that some money flows to these needs isn't an example of a handout mentality, it's a sign that the community values decent hospital facilities and properly funded tertiary education.

But that's the way it goes when you get the zealots and neolibs at fortress Murdoch on their hobby horses blathering on about how there needs to be less government, better governance, as if that tragic slogan actually means anything.

Instead of just spouting off examples of politicians spouting off examples of their funding initiatives, it behooved Kenny to go through each specific example and show how they represented wasteful, extravagant government, instead of just waving his hands and denouncing the handout mentality.

With that rhetoric, you can not just do over roads, schools, and hospitals, you can also do over Medicare, public transport, pensions, single mother allowances, etc etc, as signs of the handout mentality.

There's something cringe-making about this routine parsimoniousness, this greedy notion that what's mine is mine, and buggered if I should pay taxes to fund all the bludgers out there leeching off me like ... leeches ...

It represents the worst of American survivalist thinking, and it helps explain why gated communities and dying cities like Detroit jostle together side by side ...

It's also reminiscent of all this talk of how regulation stifles things, but the next thing you know, the deregulators are yammering on about the lack of regulation in relation to the installation of pink batts (never mind if they're yellow) or the lack of regulation in relation to asbestos in pits, and the fly by night nature of the newly sprouted contractor rackets, where the dodgy brothers go about their business unsupervised... because regulation was stifling their game.

And sometimes these dodgy brothers can be quite large, as witness Coles passing off food as Australian grown when it was imported all over the place ... and copping a laughable $61,200 for their efforts (Coles fined).

You'll never cop a Kenny or the other reptiles yammering on about where the lack of regulation leads us, except when it comes to bashing the government of the day around the head for failing to effectively regulate.

Now this can be handy for tabloids - where would commercial TV be without dodgy brothers, and where would the ABC be without chiropractors rightly sending Catalyst into a frenzy here - but is it too much to expect that the reptiles at the lizard Oz produce a more measured discourse than cheap sloganeering?

Of course it is, just as it seems it's too much to expect the ABC to home grow its comedy shows on RN ... not when they can find such excellent comedy writers in the UK, still mining hippies for laughs in a way that would make Maynard G. Krebs weep for joy in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis ...