TthelongabsentGIF ...

It didn't take long for Dr. No to revert to form.

Provide clarification and new rules for MPs' entitlements?

No.

Let the fuss continue ... I have sporting events to attend, and humble communities to honour with my grand presence.

Provide a sensitive, low key response to the ACT's gay marriage laws?

No.

Let the fuss continue ...

Was it only a few days ago that activists were still holding out hope and listening to the spinners, as in PM Shifting On Gay Marriage, Says Sister.

Yes he's shifting his arse to shaft it ...

Same as it ever was, but it left the pond pondering a cosmic question.

Could it be that a long absent but still vengeful god has sent Clive Palmer and PUP to persecute Abbott and drive the reptiles at the lizard Oz into a foaming frenzy, and will She go on making life hard for the luddite until his inevitable demise?

What else?

Well fortress Murdoch offers the splendid sight of Graham "Swiss bank account" Richardson sounding very solemn about entitlements:

Oh sure, having an acceptable basis for reasonable claims is perfectly in order, unless you happen to be Tony Abbott.

It's just the irony of Gra Gra saying it that titillates the pond ...

And the reptiles weren't done - there were other flourishes to admire:

Well played Randal Stewart. Ever thought of joining the Australian cricket team or the Wallabies? The pond hears there are openings for expert logicians ...

Yep, as a summary of the bleeding obvious for the digital splash of doom at the top of the page, that's a splendid effort, and a significant disincentive for reading any further.

It's a reminder - if you ever wanted one - of how the Friday lizard Oz always trots out a second eleven for its opinion pages. 

Oh sure there's Hedley Thomas getting agitated about Clive Palmer turning up on the ABC, and more specifically Lateline (here's Clive, said in your best Jack Nicholson imitation), and there's Peter van Onselen getting agitated about Clive Palmer keeping his deal with the indie Senator hidden, but the rag really does go into a TGIF dive ...

But it still remains reliable and profoundly predictable, its deeper tabloid instincts always ready to surface:

57 fires and 37-41 degree heat and it depends on the pond as to whether it's perfect?

The story itself is a perfect piece of fluff, with bikini-clad women for illustration, as you can see if you click on Sweltering or perfect? That depends on your point of view (outside the paywall), but the pond finds it admirable because it conforms to Murdochian editorial standards.

Ssssh, whatever you do, for the love of the long absent lord, don't mention climate change.

The silly old Fairfaxians tackled this issue head on in Sarah Perkins' Sydney heatwave: Is it hot enough for you?

One of the great oddities of recent times in Australia is that during our increasingly frequent and intense fire seasons – when we're losing houses and, unfortunately, lives – it is seen by many as rude or in poor taste to talk about climate change. 
It is quite a bizarre response considering an ever-growing body of research highlights that increases in heat waves, fire danger and extreme temperatures are intimately linked to global warming. 
More importantly, these three areas are considered to be the earliest, most responsive and well-defined impacts of climate change.

Oh dear, poor Sarah, it's like she's flashed her knickers in public.

Look, there she is doing it again in The Conversation, Climate change 'unprecedented' by 2050: study, and damned if she isn't turning up in good old Adelaide for a chinwag at Greenhouse 2013, and there she is blogging away here.

Please, please Sarah, please, whatever you do, don't mention climate change ... you know it gets the Murdochians agitated, and it sends the Bolter into a frothing, foaming frenzy.

Let's face it, yesterday was as close to perfect as it could get, if you sat inside an air-conditioned office, delusional and entirely removed from the real world ...

Here you go, it's bikini-clad nirvana, and surely it smells a lot like teen spirit:

The bottom part of the front page of the rag features a story announcing that the new Minister of Transport, Warren Truss, is opposed to Badgerys Creek, confirming the pond's expectation of a second Sydney airport as soon as 2080.

But let's focus on the bikini story.

A few petulant comments in the rag attempted to draw attention to climate. A naughty Patrick (and a few others) broke the golden rule and were terribly impolite:

What is the statute of limitations before u have to say climate change is real, hottest winter ever, hottest September, ipcc says it real. Maybe seawater flooding into ruperts office in Sydney.

U naughty goose, and what about the spelling?

As you'd expect in la la Murdoch land, the Terror's piece Sweet, cool relief last night after mercury topped out at 37.3 degrees in Sydney thoughtfully omitted any mention of climate change, or climate science.

You see, Sarah? That's how it's done in polite company.

Proving it's advanced in its thinking, inside the Terror abandoned bikinis for cute kids scoffing fluids and having fun in the surf.

Oh it was terribly polite and caring, and after that bout of Murdochian tabloidism,  the pond hungered for something a little more edgy.

What else to do but head off to the United States and a binge-drinking dose of Stewart and Colbert?

No, the pond doesn't pay the Murdochians at Foxtel or the Jobsians at iTunes for delivery. As mentioned long ago, courtesy of certain IT trickery, we have come to a separate arrangement with the Comedy Channel, though perhaps not entirely to the channel's satisfaction.

Never mind, the two joints were really humming and zinging with craziness. What with the crazy Republicans being really barking mad Mafia shakedown crazy ...

The pond had missed out on Bill O'Reilly in intimate conversation with god, but by golly Colbert made the most of his delusional outbursts ...

And Stewart did a great smackdown of Shephard Smith doing a tour of the 'revolutionary' Fox News deck, wherein Smith managed to mix frivolity and a flashy, astonishingly vulgar and useless fit-out, with talk of football tragedies mingling with off-hand chatter about real deaths and real massacres ...

It was a reminder that two comedians still provide the sharpest commentary on the woeful state of America.

But it was also a reminder of the codependency involved.

Stewart and Colbert need the crazies. Without the crazies their shows would be like any other chat show on the US circuit, with actors plugging their films about the assassination of Kennedy and such like ...

And that's when it came to the pond. We depend on the loons, and when it's a "slow loon day", like it is every TGIF day, the pond is inclined to get lost and to ramble.

We need the loons, there ought to be loons, send in the loons, we worry when they're not here or feeling tired or a little out of sorts ...

We need them happy and racing like mad dogs and Englishmen through the noon day heat, and never once mentioning climate change ...

Sure, it means we're all plunging into the heart of the sun, but at least we'll have a few laughs before we  burn to a crisp ...

Never mind, let the pond know if your loon alert has sounded recently and in the interim, here's evidence of the binge.

Remember, binge only on Stewart and Colbert. Binge drinking the reptiles at the lizard Oz or other Murdochians can lead to blindness, and certainly to madness ...

Or why Dennis Prager is a total hoot ...

(Above: or modern art or young people or leftists or utopianists or whatever else you've got).


Every so often the pond comes across a post which makes its day.

Any discovery of any distilled essence of "get off my lawn" outburst is to be treasured as a day-maker ...

Truth to tell, the pond knew very little about Dennis Prager, when it stumbled across Why the Left Hates the Old , but let's be fair, it immediately resonated as a classic bit of silliness and nonsense.

The thesis is that the old hate angry white males - presumably on the basis that there can't be any old white angry socialist or commie bastard males - are always being dissed by upstarts and young 'uns, and worst of all, pinko leftie perverts ...

Where it gets fun is when Prager ventures on to turf he clearly knows little about, which is to say art ...

What he knows about theory and practice could be written on a pinhead, or perhaps by a pinhead:

The left's attack on teaching the works of "Dead White European Males" was one such example. It infuriated the left that Shakespeare was studied so much more than, let us say, living Guatemalan playwrights. As a result, one can now obtain a college degree in English -- let alone every other liberal arts department -- without having taken a course in Shakespeare.

Prager probably thought he'd scored a hit to the jugular with his note on Shakespeare and a huge laugh with his joke about living Guatemalan playwrights.

But he's only just getting going:

So, too, in art and music, the new is almost always favored over the old. New composers and artists -- no matter how untalented -- are studied as much as or more than the great masters of old. And the old standards of excellence are neglected in favor of the latest avant-garde experimentation.

Now let's forget this is nonsense - check the repertoire at your local symphony or opera company before proceeding - because we have to skip along a little to keep the art theme going:

That is a major reason for the left's problem with the old: If the old is great, then they and their new ideas are probably not that great. 
Just about everyone who is not on the cultural left knows that all the great masters were incomparably superior to Jackson Pollock and other 20th-centuries artists who produced meaningless and talentless art. And because there are so few artists at any time who measure up to the old standards (standards that are synonymous with standards of excellence), the old standards have simply been abandoned.

Uh huh. So he doesn't like Jackson Pollock.

But what's this talk about standards of excellence, and is Pollock all he's got as evidence?

Sure, nobody can touch Rembrandt and Vemeer for their use of light, but then nobody can touch the Impressionists - oh those Manet waterlilies at the Musée de l'Orangerie - and what on earth does he make of van Gogh?

If you don't like the abstract expressionists, what are you going to do with twentieth century artists like Edward Hopper?

Or what about Picasso? Or any number of talented artists who enlivened the twentieth century.

The idea of a golden time, of perfected standards of excellence, is pure and sublime horseshit. Art didn't get to be perfect, and then stop dead in its tracks, so that we could all keep doing the same riff over and over again ...

The same applies to music - nobody out-Beethovens Beethoven (or out-Mozarts Mozart) but then there's no one who out-Shostakovichs Shostakovich, unless it's Bartok sending him up ...

And so on and so forth, but here's the capper. This utopian ratbag, yearning for a long lost past of genius dead white males, then has the cheek to scribble this:

What, then, is at the core of the left's contempt for the old, and its celebration of the new and of change? There are two primary answers. 
One is the yearning for utopia. Since Marx, the left has sought utopia in this world. And that means constantly transforming every aspect of society.

No, no, you wonderfully comic goose. That's not what utopia means, you with your blather about the past is the utopian:

1. an imaginary island described in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) as enjoying perfection in law, politics, etc. 
2. (usu. l.c.) any ideal place or state. 
3. (usu. l.c.) any visionary system of political or social perfection.

You know, you're the one that's talking up a past utopia ... a perfect standard-setting past, where Rembrandt is the house painter, until he gets ragged and wild in his old age, and Shakespeare the house playwright, until he starts to lose interest or writes a dud like King John, and Beethoven heads the band on the Friday night gig, at least until he starts doing arrangements of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones ...

So when you come to this line, you realise Prager is either barking mad or clueless, or most likely a bit of both:

By definition, those who seek to transform consider the old essentially worthless.

You know, you don't have to seek to transform - death does a perfectly good job of it.

It's impossible to live in stasis. You can't spend your time just copying down Shakespeare word for word, or Beethoven note for note, and the notion that the twentieth century was an aesthetic void is pure alienated stupidity. I mean, let's keep it xenophobic and parochial, in the approved American angry old man style, and just note that jazz and the American musical have made enormous contributions to the y'artz...

I mean, there are some cluckheads and dunderheads who want to write off the movies and television as incapable of hosting any kind of art ... Tell us Charlie ...

“The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.” Charlie Chaplin, 1916

But wait, there's more, plenty more, and usually thuck as a bruck, as our NZ friends say:

Rejection of the old is a reason the left has contempt for the Bible. To progressives, the idea of having 2,000 and 3,000-year-old texts guide a person's behavior today is ludicrous.

Which is incredibly silly. If only because the bible and Christianity is the perfect haven for genuine heaven-believing, heaven-seeking utopians ...

Let's leave aside the splendid poetry in the King James version, which, it has to be said, has been varied and ruined by fundamentalist American Christians these past few centuries, in various new translations of an American kind, always wanting to change the past, always contemptuous of the old ways and the old days and the old, sometimes erroneous words of the King James version ...

Let's instead just mention all the tensions between the Old and New Testaments, as that relentless change monger, Jesus Christ, decided to give the old rules a good going over, and install himself as the centre of the action, and the son of god - and worst of all, he was only 32 or 33 or thereabouts when he carried on about the angry old Judeans then running the show ...

Naturally Prager also works in the American constitution, presumably not understanding that Britain has got on perfectly well without all that written down bit of ancestor worship, and then builds to this closing sign off rant:

Nevertheless the left has transformed "old" -- a title that commanded respect in every civilization prior to the pre-1960s West -- into a pejorative. 

Yep, never mind the senility or the silliness, feel the grey hair. Never mind that young or old, you should earn respect by sounding half-way sane rather than by simply sounding off ...

As a result we live in the age of new music, new art, new families, new morality, new education, and now new marriage. If you think all these are good, then "old white males," like almost everything else old, do indeed constitute a threat. 
If you think the left's belief in "new" and "change" hurts society, "old" sounds good.

"Change" hurts society?

Dude, you can't avoid change. Rust never sleeps, entropy always wins, you can't live in Thomas More's utopia, it's done and dusted, and we're all going to die ...

It's better to burn out than it is to rust 
The king is gone but not forgotten

Now the pond doesn't identify with the words "left" or "progressive", but one thing's for sure, Prager is clearly a dumb old angry white male, with a very limited understanding of art, life, pain, love or the whole damn thing ...

But he's a great comedian. which possibly helps explain why it turns that he's a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, syndicated columnist, author and speaker in the United States.

Why he even has his own wiki here.

It says a heckuva a lot about mainstream America and its current political situation.

Apparently one of Prager's quotes is this:

"The absurd keeps you sane".

Actually it's the loons that keep you laughing, and so we have to give credit to Whiskey Fire for introducing us to a man it dubbed a Jurassic fart ...  cruel until you actually read the words on offer.

But as a bonus, the pond forgot about the domestic commentariat and the reptiles at the lizard Oz for hours and hours and hours ...

(Below: XKCD on this age issue, which it has to be said, torments the pond. More XKCD here)

The internecine commentariat come out to play ...

(Above: found here, but also a cue for Ben Pobjie to ask today The Abbott-Putin man-off: which leader wins the macho award?).


The pond has noted a general rule, more certain than Darwin when it comes to political reporting.

Once the Liberals are safely in power, the commentariat can smugly turn to sniping at the Liberals in power.

It makes them seem balanced, even-handed, fair-minded, sound, solid, at one with the citizenry, when actually all it does is show off some splendid internecine feuds.

1. Of or relating to struggle within a nation, organization, or group. 
2. Mutually destructive; ruinous or fatal to both sides. 
3. Characterized by bloodshed or carnage. (more details about changing meanings here)

Thus it was that today Janet "Dame Slap" Albrechtsen could fire off a salvo at the NSW Liberal Party's executive, and in particular state director Mark Neeham, in Nothing liberal about it. (behind the paywall to keep you sheltered from the bloodshed and the carnage).

It turns out that the state Liberal executive is given to sending Dame Slap most stupid emails, part of the flotsam and jetsam of absurd emails she receives, while routinely conducting a Star Chamber on their own, threatening anyone with a five year suspension if they dare talk to the media.

It seems the state Liberal party is deeply anti-democratic, and full of branch-stacking and bad candidates and rorting, and skewed towards maintaining this deeply unsatisfactory status quo, and operates on the same level of involvement and engagement as in the days of apartheid-era South Africa (with 5% voting for the president).

Reform has come to naught, lobbyists are part of a toxic mix in a debilitating factional system, and big Bazza O'Farrell is a malingerer supporting a weakened code while factional warlords run amok in a decrepit body:

As Norm Abjorensen, from the Australian National University's Crawford School of Public Policy and co-author of Australia: The State of Democracy, wrote a few years ago: "Is it too much to expect in a political democracy that the political parties contending for office practise internal democracy?" Whether it pursues Ruddick's suspension or not, or slaps him on the wrist for being a bad boy, the state executive, many believe, may have signed its own death warrant. 
As one senior NSW Liberal says, the foolish overreaction has revealed how vulnerable the state executive is to Ruddick's allegations of factional corruption and the need for democratisation. The noise members of the NSW executive hear, and don't much care for, is the sound of their decrepit body clashing with democratic reform.

Oh indeed, it's shocking and shameful, but not to worry, because when elections roll around, the NSW Liberals will get the nod, and the factional games - aided and abetted and played by the commentariat with fetching vigour - will continue apace ...

The sudden discovery by Paul Sheehan of a conscience can be slotted into the same basket. He too was at it today, having discovered buyer's remorse, in Tony Abbott must stop the perks to retain authenticity:

Authenticity is the greatest asset a politician can have. Yet Tony Abbott and his staff are wasting no time dissipating Abbott's authenticity. It's only taken them three weeks. Abbott has a problem. He's a perker. Over the past three years he has claimed more than $50,000 in what I regard as spurious demands on the public purse. He has charged the taxpayers for his own self-promotion, his fitness obsession, for going to weddings, everything from the Birdsville races to the Hervey Bay Ocean Swim. Abbott's actions, and the justifications presented by his office - that the other side does it - are symptomatic of something far deeper, a culture of double-standards and double-dipping in Australian politics. The culture extends to both sides of the political divide.

Uh huh. But surely you'd have to be delusional - or Paul Sheehan - to believe that Abbott entered the office with anything remotely resembling authenticity ...

Meanwhile, poor old Niki Savva is trembling and anxious about when the axe might fall:

The trouble is, the commentariat rewarded Abbott's bad behaviour in opposition, and now expect him to be able to reform, and run a government safe from hot-blooded scalp hunters.

Greg Jericho, in a piece for The Drum, What is said in opposition stays in opposition, catalogues with some care the many ways that Abbott, in his brief weeks in power, has turned his back on many of the positions, policies and nattering negative stances took during his time in opposition - a litany that Sheehan, once number one ticketholder and chief dispenser of kool aid, regularly regurgitated in his columns.

Jericho is particularly telling about jolly Joe Hockey and debt:

I guess wasteful government spending is a bit like the adage about a weed just being a plant you don't like - debt raised for NBN spending off budget is bad, debt raised to build the East-West Link is good.

And so on, and unlike Sheehan Jericho hits the ground running with a joke:

You can't deny that the Abbott Government has hit the ground running. Their increase in productivity has been quite breathtaking. Usually it takes a few months for a new government to become comedic punch line, but the Abbott Government has been able to achieve this level before Parliament has even sat! 
This spring at weddings around the country, the probability of a best man's speech including a joke about claiming travel expenses must be close to 1.

Indeed.

The various points that Jericho makes applies to all sorts of policies that cut to the bone.

It's symptomatic of Sheehan that he never gets beyond the bleeding obvious, which handily relates to both sides of the aisle:

If Abbott could make an immediate move against lobbyists seeking to use the party as a cash machine, his next step should be to admit that a culture of junketeering exists and has to end. No more overseas study tours. No more non-urgent charter flights. No more weddings. No more sporting events. That would be authentic.

Actually what would be authentic would be Sheehan admitting that he was a cheer-leader for Abbott of the most grovelling and obsequious kind during Abbott's time in opposition, and that there are many more authentic and serious policy issues than parliamentary allowances where Abbott has been inauthentic.

He was inauthentic as a viciously negative leader of the opposition, and now that negativity has come home to roost in a a startling way, with more inauthentic backflips in the first month than many politicians manage in a year ...

Where was all this talk of the inauthentic when it mattered? Abbott was a serial offender, as authentic as Putin, and now all Sheehan can do is splutter about weddings, parties and not much of anything else ...

He should form a band ...

Meanwhile, David Rowe has been having something of a field day.

Rowe is about as close to Bell as we get down under with his love of the grotesque, and lordy lordy has this scalp-hunter got some grotesques to work with.

Best men, sharpen your quills.

(Below: more Rowe here, where you'll catch his latest on the tea party follies).

The jellyfish are on the move ...

(Above: portrait of Greg Sheridan, with some friends).


Item for the day: jellyfish.

No, that's not code for Australian politicians of the constantly changing Abbott kind, or the jellyfish hagiographers of fortress Murdoch, or even a bright eyed bushy tailed piece by Bjorn Lomborg reassuring us all is well and a few bucks in R and D will fix everything.

Rather, it's a reference to a review in the NYRB of Lisa-Ann Gerswhin's book Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean, which proposes that jellyfish plagues around the world herald deeper structural changes to the oceans ...

The review, They're Taking Over!, (outside the paywall for the moment) is by the great Satanist, Tim Flannery, which ensures it will be ignored by Fortress Murdoch, but it isn't Flannery who writes these words, but rather quotes them:

Gershwin leaves us with a disturbing final rumination: 
When I began writing this book,… I had a naive gut feeling that all was still salvageable…. But I think I underestimated how severely we have damaged our oceans and their inhabitants. I now think that we have pushed them too far, past some mysterious tipping point that came and went without fanfare, with no red circle on the calendar and without us knowing the precise moment it all became irreversible. I now sincerely believe that it is only a matter of time before the oceans as we know them and need them to be become very different places indeed. No coral reefs teeming with life. No more mighty whales or wobbling penguins. No lobsters or oysters. Sushi without fish. 
Her final word to her readers: “Adapt.”

One of the ways Gershwin proposes we adapt is by learning to eat jellyfish. The pond agrees, provided the reptiles at the lizard Oz and the Bolter are force fed the stuff first, in the hope that it will give them a little spine ...

While on the subject of reading matter, can the pond be bold and recommend that Nick Cater - he of the Soviet gumboot joke - take a moment of his time to read Mariana Mazzucato's book The Entrepreneurial State.

The pond happened to catch Ms Mazzucato on the BBC - you can hear it here - noting that all the key structural innovative elements in the iPhone - touch screen, connectivity - were developed by innovative government programs, though some might be disturbed by the key role defence played in the funding.

No matter, and with quibbles aside, even The Economist gives her book a fair hearing, as in this review by Schumpeter here. Will Cater set aside his silliness and his feeble Soviet gumboot caricatures for a moment?

Only if you believe jellyfish don't sting ...

But enough of the intelligent reading.

Let's see how the jellyfish hagiographers are doing.

Splendidly, it turns out:

A brilliant trip? Splendid efforts with Malaysia?

You mean insult the shit out of someone, and then spend time providing a smirking, smarmy apology saying you didn't mean to be so rancorous? It was just a little collateral damage, a little friendly fire ...?

In the pond's world that establishes you as untrustworthy, expedient, and creepy crawly. Waiter, we need some of the kool aid that Mr Sheridan is drinking, it looks like brilliant stuff ...

No link, the pond is too tired, tired of Sheridan and tired of fortress Murdoch. Will Sheridan be able to keep up this relentless hagiographic pace for the next few years? Sadly, the pond suspects he will, and sadly it will be difficult to balance competing bouts of nausea and laughing until we cry ...

Meanwhile, what a pity the Ernies are done and dusted for the year, though the mainstream media seems a little reluctant to publish the details of the winners.

Otherwise the pond would have nominated Barry Cohen's delightful entry in Why Shorten's quota is not worth an iota (apparently outside the paywall because not even the reptiles at the lizard Oz have the cheek to charge for this one):

What those who rabbit on about men keeping women out of politics ignore is that in the 1950s and 60s most women were not interested and active in politics. There were a handful who played a role, but most seemed satisfied to take the minutes and make the tea.

And don't forget the lamingtons and the scones, women were immensely satisfied to do a good bake, oh they were good little biddies, ever so happy, knowing their place, and pleased to stay in it.

Yep, we've moved from jellyfish to silly old farts, and it's well worth remembering that Cohen's only, and very modest claim to fame was that he served as environment minister in the Hawke government (he might have also managed to do nothing about the arts for a period of time), and Bob himself was up for an Ernie with this effort:

"I don't think she's a candidate for the leadership - she has a three-year-old child - the most that Tanya would be interested in would be, as I say, Deputy.'' - Bob Hawke on Labor frontbencher Tanya Plibersek's leadership prospects. (here)

Yes, poor Bob has also become a silly old bugger, and all the more poignant as people rushed to point out that Bill Shorten had a three year old daughter.

Never mind, there are deeper questions afoot here, which is why Fortress Murdoch only feels comfortable publishing the opinions of old Labor renegades, silly recalcitrant conservative old farts of the Gary Johns and Barry Cohen kind?

It's a sure indication that their key demographic is aging, angry, embittered old white males ... not the best demographic to have as your tree-killer business model goes down the gurgler and you beg young people to take out a digital subscription.

There's a lot more that's delightful in Cohen's epic effort. The pond was particularly beguiled by this:

Gay marriage is silly enough, but these latest proposals are a step too far. 

Yes, that's a classic silly old fart line, harumphing into his keyboard as he pounded away with glee. Or was it a typewriter? Or perhaps, Bob Ellis style, he sports a fountain pen, and dictates to the copy girl when she's not busy making the tea and getting the scones?

 Ever notice how the gay-marriage enthusiasts become quiet whenever a referendum is suggested? With only 4 per cent of the population ranking gay marriage of any concern to them, they are aware of the defeat they would face if the matter were put to a vote. They know how bodgie their polls are, which is why they never call for a referendum.

There's no small irony in this, because Cohen is always ready to bang on about the rights of the Jews, and hark back to his Polish Jewish grandparents escaping Russian-occupied Poland in the 1890s ...

It's easy to slag off minorities and dismiss their concerns and accept that the bigotry of the majority is fine. That notion was popular in Germany in the 1930s. Is it remiss of the pond to note that only 0.4% of the Australian population in the 2006 census identified as Jewish, and that on Cohen's logic, no one should give a flying fuck about their rights and interests, save for that 0.4%?

But wait, thus far we've only done over women and gays, surely we have a line for the blacks ...

I am opposed to a lot of the gobbledygook that is enacted at every public gathering, but there is a strong case for a quota of two Aborigines in the reps and the Senate. New Zealand introduced special seats for Maoris. The fun would start once the parliament had the job of deciding who was an Aborigine and who wasn't. 

Ah gobbledygook ... yep, it's all Yiddish to the pond ...

As for working out who might be black, wise words. After all, as Andrew Bolt keeps pointing out incessantly, you can get filthy rich pretending to be a black in Australia, what with living on the dole in your Toorak mansion, cashing the cheques on a fortnightly basis to keep you in champers and caviare ... just think what those whities would do with a couple of quota seats.

But by now you might be wondering how you can pick a silly old fart about to spring into verbal action. You might, for some strange reason, not have a silly old fart as a parent.

Well here's a sure guide.

Look how Cohen starts his piece:

When I first read that aspiring Labor leadership candidate Bill Shorten had suggested that quotas be extended to include a range of minority groups with different sexual proclivities - lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender and intersex communities (whatever they are) - I assumed he was exercising his quirky sense of humour or he had taken leave of his senses.

Yes, never mind the question of the narcissist Bill Shorten's suggestion regarding quotas, designed mainly to get himself a little leverage in the leadership race, it's the way Cohen tags the debate that tells you where he's coming from.

Sexual proclivities ...

Intersex communities (whatever they are) ...

Truth to tell, it made the pond deeply nostalgic for the 1950s, for the whiff of plum-flavoured smoke coming from grandfather's pipe, the smell of grandmother's 4711 cologne as she plumped her purple (or rose) tinted hair into shape, before wiping our faces clean of any dirt with her embroidered handkerchief smelling of lavender and naphthalene...

The old world is rapidly changing, and it's amusing to see Cohen, a defender of a particular minority, rail at other minorities with exactly the same blinkered bilious prejudice as is still sometimes doled out to Jews for their proclivities, whatever they are...

More importantly, however for the lizard Oz, is why he continues as a guest columnist, and why therefore the rag reeks of the 1950s, plum tobacco and 4711 cologne, perhaps with a whiff of mothballs ...

It's probably a silly question, because all they want is a little padding, between all the articles scribbled by hagiographic jellyfish busily going about their work ...

(Below: Pryor doing over Barry Cohen in the trees in 1985, courtesy David Attenborough, and in the Daintree in 1986. Some things never change, as the jellyfish keep on the march).

Another day with the barking mad ...

The pond usually doesn't do snippets - we leave that sort of gadfly behaviour to the likes of the Bolter and Tim Bleagh, padding their blogs up by linking to the works of others ...

But really, the completely loonatic world of the United States is irresistible, and we just wanted to note Mchele Bachmann, who was at one time running for the Presidency of the United States:

"This happened and as of today the United States is willingly, knowingly, intentionally sending arms to terrorists," she said. "Now what this says to me, I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, as I look at the End Times scripture, this says to me that the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in God’s End Times history.” 

"Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand," Bachmann added. “When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.” (more here under the header Bachmann: Obama Funding Al-Qaeda Proves 'We Are in God's End times')

Barking mad.

Now Bachmann was pitching to her demographic, a Christian radio show, but all that shows is how barking mad and widespread the rapture movement is ...

And if that isn't enough for you, how about this profile of Antonin Scalia, In Conversation with New York's Jennifer Senior:

Senior: Can we talk about your drafting process—
Scalia:[Leans in, stage-whispers.] I even believe in the Devil. 
You do?
Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that. 
Every Catholic believes this? There’s a wide variety of Catholics out there …
If you are faithful to Catholic dogma, that is certainly a large part of it.
Have you seen evidence of the Devil lately?
You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.
No.
It’s because he’s smart.
So what’s he doing now?
What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way. 
That has really painful implications for atheists. Are you sure that’s the ­Devil’s work?
I didn’t say atheists are the Devil’s work. 
Well, you’re saying the Devil is ­persuading people to not believe in God. Couldn’t there be other reasons to not believe?
Well, there certainly can be other reasons. But it certainly favors the Devil’s desires. I mean, c’mon, that’s the explanation for why there’s not demonic possession all over the place. That always puzzled me. What happened to the Devil, you know? He used to be all over the place. He used to be all over the New Testament. 
Right.
What happened to him?
He just got wilier.
He got wilier.
Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?
You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

Barking mad. (And more on the Catholic devil here for hair shirt lovers)

What's even more astonishing is that Scalia is on the Supreme Court of the United States, and poses as an originalist, but it turns out that he's actually a medievalist ...

Of course as any barking mad evangelical will tell you, it's the Catholic church whore of Babylon and its deluded followers that are under the influence of Satan, but that, as they say, is another barking mad story ... (Satan Masquerading as an Angel of Light)

The pond merely reports and you decide on the most Satanic of the religions ... if in doubt, why not ask Satan for help?

Unfortunately Senior didn't ask the crucial follow up question, as posed by Huffington Post here:

He's got a point there. 
While hell is not as popular as heaven and the devil is not as popular as God - an easy majority of Americans believe in both hell and the devil. 
 However, they are not all on the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Unfortunately, Ms. Senior missed the obvious follow-up question: 'How does belief in the Devil influence Justice Scalia's Supreme Court opinions?' 
 The world may never know.

Actually the world does know. Scalia's opinions, dressed up as originalist, routinely verge towards the medievalist ... and clearly it's Satan wot done it ...

There are many other examples of why the United States - as it heads down the path to financial disaster - is truly stuffed in the head, and it's a tragedy that all the rest of the world can do - as it waits to be stuffed by the stuffing of the United States - is shake its head and marvel in wonder that a country currently exploring the surface of Mars could also feature as key parts of the political and legal landscape the likes of Bachmann, Scalia, Cruz and Boehner ...

(Below: Ruben Bolling at Boing Boing)

Damn it, where's that rattan cane ...

(No links or video, screen cap only)

Rancour?

A very intense and at times somewhat rancorous debate?

Well there was only one side producing the rank discourse and the rank insults, aided and abetted by the Murdochian tabloids, who just couldn't get enough of the rattan cane.

Even if the unseemly sights were "too gruesome to be broadcasted" ... (sic and so and thus, you can see it with your own eyes)

Please sir, can we have another?

Scott "speaking in tongues" Morrison was the most expert at the rancourous biliousness, as per the story above:

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison has likened the treatment of asylum seekers in Malaysia to the treatment of Australian cattle in Indonesia. 
Both were equally shocking, he said, as the Coalition succeeded in pushing for a Parliamentary inquiry into Australia's immigration detention network. 
Mr Morrison said he was shocked by an ABC TV report showing graphic footage of cattle being mistreated at a number of Indonesian abattoirs. 
“I'm equally shocked by the fact of the treatment that people receive in Malaysia on the basis of reports that we receive,'' he said today. 
“If we are going to be consistent about these matters then I think the conditions these people will be held and treated in Malaysia is a relevant question this parliament should be asking the prime minister.'' His comments come as refugees in Kuala Lumpur's suburban slums say they have been tortured in Malaysia's detention centres. 
Gruesome personal accounts include claims of beatings with rattan canes and whippings - a fate that could await the 800 refugees the Federal Government intends to send to Malaysia as part of its controversial detainee swap.

Consistent in these matters?

No doubt that explains Tony Abbott's "act of contrition" to the head of the people abattoirs, the vindictive beast who in other days might have been caught running Belsen, as you can read in Abbott offers 'act of contrition' to Malaysia over asylum seeker criticism.

Apology?

Indeed. There in black and white in the sensationalist tabloid stories - replicated dozens of times, too many to be repeated here - can be found direct criticism of Malaysia, its government and its "cattle people rattan cane culture" by the Liberal party's head honchos.

So what does Abbott say?

"Our criticism was never of Malaysia, it was of the former government."

Which is a lie, and a rather bold, bald-faced lie, which even the wretched Fairfaxians point out in their story was a nonsense, with Abbott himself, Morrison and jolly Joe all pinged for abusing Malaysia.

So in order to repair a shameless lie you tell a shameless lie? Strange, the pond can't remember the Dominican nuns running that line ...

In the usual way, the hagiographers have been running the line that apologies and saving face are big in Asian culture, and this is true, but it's also true that many Asians have long memories of the demon activities of the colonialists.

Luckily for Abbott, Malaysia is used to politicians who lie to stay in power - a politician who lies to get power, and then lies about the lies with a glib apology is perfectly within their remit.

Also lucky - and in the way of bullies - he picked on a country with less clout than Indonesia and China, and likely enough the Malaysians will stay pragmatic, even if in the manner of the Irish they don't forget ...

What the pond finds extraordinary is that Abbott thinks all can be wiped from the slate, and from the chrysalis of lies a statesman has emerged, as opposed to a used car salesman and exploiter of parliamentary benefits in order to attend sporting festivals.

Never mind, perhaps the mood change came about because of Barners one day expert tour of Malaysia, thanks to the taxpayer.

Yep, good old Barners, showing the benefits of rorting, by bringing the government up to speed, as he discovered that Malaysia had actual highways of the sort you might almost find in Australia, unless heading north on the Pacific highway ...

Whatever, it's now clear the smirking, smarmy Abbott thinks you can piss all over your neighbours - including PNG - and then a few apologetic words will set things right.

Uh huh. So where are we now?

Well yesterday, the Fairfaxians in an editorial judged the Abbott government as on the nose, after only one month in the gig, as you can read in Abbott one month on: too many excuses, too few surprises.

What's astonishing about this is not the judgment on Abbott - all the excuses on offer for the rorting, and the hypocrisy, and the denialism about buying the boats and paying informers, or the new "discuss stopping the boats and hope for the best" or sundry other bits of revisionism, or the way these transparent excuses reflect a disdain for voter trust ...

As if Abbott cared for trust when what he wanted was the precioussss ...

Abbott has always been shameless, and if Peter Hartcher hadn't been so busy recycling the thoughts of former chairman Rudd, and the Fairfaxians so intent on digging the dirt on Labor, they might have actually paused occasionally to note it ...

Not that there's anything wrong with endless recycling of the thoughts of a grand narcissist, if that's your kink, but there are other things in life, and the Fairfaxians never took their eye off the narcissist.

No, what's on the nose is that the rag thinks it can spin on a dime, and discard the vote of confidence it gave Abbott little more than a month ago - The Age the only exception - as the Murdochians and Fairfaxians clustered like sheep in the top paddock, and only now seem to have discovered they were in the grip of a woolly-minded group think.

The time for giving Abbott and his lack of policies, or his policies - sure to change once in power - or his rorting Slippery ways - a tough time was back then.

Now it's too late, and the sanctimonious righteous indignation of the Fairfaxians is as comical as the excuses being invented by the rorters ...

It's too late to point out the wretched region-wide activities of Abbott and his minions, and it's too late for this sort of pious indignation:

After a disappointing first month, the government needs to move quickly to meet the standards it set itself. No excuses.

Oh pull the other one. The very nature of the way Dr. No came to power has tainted so many areas where level-headed consensus would have been so much better, and abusing Malaysia as a people abattoir is just one of them ...

If Abbott is using excuses, then what pathetic excuses can the Fairfaxians offer for their pathetic coverage of Abbott in opposition?

Now you can't ask this question of the reptiles in the lizard Oz. The hagiographers are too busy writing a steady stream of excuses and ongoing denunciations of whoever refuses to worship at their Liberal shrine ...

The pond however is feeling pleased.

After all, we predicted that the Abbott government might well come to reputation as low and as wretched as Macolm Fraser's government - having inveigled itself into power by faux rage and ill-tempered hysteria, but then not up to the actual business of governing. Thus far we're exceptionally pleased Tony Abbott is on track to fulfil this vision thingy.

And we have every optimistic expectation that the free trade agreement with China will be as useless and as pathetic as the Howard government's free trade agreement with the United States, wherein the Australian negotiators got done like a dinner.

With a little bit of luck, the Liberals will preside over endless alarmist internal squabbles over Chinese businesses seeking to buy (some might call it invest in) Australian infrastructure, especially agriculture and land, and there's a fair chance that an FTA will herald the destruction of US manufacturing of cars in Australia, (currently only managed courtesy of government subsidy), and there will come an end to the weird notion that internationally owned brands such as Vegemite or Arnott's Biscuits or Holden are in any way remotely Australian.

Oh there'll be much agonising, and no one will bother with a cost-benefit analysis, the pet words of the hagiographers when it comes to the NBN, and the pond will just happily frolic and head back to Mind the gap: benefits from free trade haven't quite gone the distance:

Five years on, it is clear the free trade agreement between Australia and the United States was a dud. Despite the fanfare with which the Howard government introduced it, no tangible benefits have resulted for Australia.

Ah well, at least Prof Tiffen will get to do another piece ... on how Abbott fucked up with China ...

The pond has a modest proposal for an opening par for the Prof, with no charge if it comes in handy in a few years time:

Five years on, it is clear the free trade agreement between Australia and China was a dud. Despite the fanfare with which the Hockey government introduced it, no tangible benefits have resulted for Australia, but the Chinese government has made out like a bandit ...

Or some such thing.

But let's be fair. There might be a few positive outcomes. Thanks to the Liberals, Barners and his rural mates might have to learn to drive Chinese utes ... go away Ford ... and if they haven't developed a taste for one minute noodles, cheap at German chain Aldi, now could be the time to start ...

Oh yes, it'll be a tough time for the xenophobes ... now where's that rattan cane ...

(Below: more Nicholson here)

A host of daffodil-coloured ironies ...

(Above: meals you need to eat at the start of a working week. More cartoons here).


Could there be any greater irony?

Abbott repaying expenses for attending Peter Slipper's wedding?

Presumably at last becoming aware that the professional opportunities and obligations of said attendance now looked a little worn and torn?

Well there could be other, richer ironies if you look for them. 

Why not start with Greg Hunt cheerfully explaining in Q and A how MPs should just apologise, pay back any errant expenses, and move on ... easy for Hunt to say, a tad harder for Slipper to do ...

Or Barners, always short a sheep in the top paddock, explaining how Gina Rinehart had saved the taxpayers a motza by springing for half his wedding trip, not pausing for a second to contemplate how exposing himself to this sort of generosity might pose a potential conflict of interest ... possibly because Barners, aspirational climber, and Gina, mountain to be climbed, preferably with African sherpas at two  dollars the day, are as one ...

Or the infamous Peter Reith going into bat for the wedding guests, and indirectly his own profligate careless ways, but never a word about Slipper  ...

All the dangers of the feral behaviour of sundry Liberals and double standards was pointed out long ago - try How Finance defied protocol to crucify Slipper - but those were the days when a witch hunt would score you a front page on the Murdoch press portraying Slipper as a rat. 

Any chance of a front page dedicated to the wedding party fraudsters as champagne-sipping and cheese-sniffing rats? In your dreams ... why that's like wishing rank hypocrisy wasn't central to politics ...

Meanwhile, speaking of crucifixions, another pond prediction has come to pass.

This morning there's a campaign on several fronts to abuse the ABC.

First out of the blocks is Nick Cater, one time BBC worker, now lickspittle fellow traveller with the Murdochians, for all those lovers of ironies:

It is of course classic Cater, which is to say meaningless gibberish, with nothing new to say and no new insights, and the splash shows how to do it, by throwing in a reference to the digital age. It sounds dreadfully modern, but it is in fact code for the ABC is free on the intertubes and it's killing us ...

Should you make the effort to get around the reptiles' lite barrier to their paranoid musings, and google Outdated Aunty needs new act, you will cop all the usual Soviet rhetoric of the 1930s, even an illustration in the approved social realist in house style:

Sometimes the pond wonders whether the reptiles have a central desk where witty references to the Soviet Union and the fascists and Orwellian pigs are assembled and distributed so that the hacks don't have to think too much as they go about the business of preparing diatribes ...

You can if you like go back decades to find this sort of bog standard ABC bashing, updated only because now Cater can make reference to a Tweet about Tony Abbott, and deplore an anti-Semitic comment on Facebook, and the usual critique is dressed up to explain how the ABC is failing in the digital age, because nobody watches it and nobody likes it ...

The irony of all this coming from a newspaper whose readership and circulation is in free fall is beyond irony ...

What the chorus builds to is also beyond the predictable ... what this country and this broadcaster needs is an enquiry. 

Being Cater, and therefore being a bear of very little brain, we're never quite sure why. He doesn't go as far as demanding the ABC be privatised, and instead he offers up waffle as a solution:

A growing number of those on the unsentimental Right would like to the see the ABC sold off, but that would be a mistake. 
Despite its transparent failings, the ABC largely retains public trust and is a significant national institution with a history and a reputation worth defending. 
It will need to be rebuilt from the bottom up, however, if it is to operate in the public interest in the digital age. 

What exactly does Cater mean, with operate in the public interest in the digital age?

He never says.

Does he mean go populist and bury the Murdochians by dominating ratings and the intertubes? Or does he mean abolish Triple J because it sets youff and the ABC off on the wrong path?

The only clue?

The extent of its responsibilities, and the limits of what it should attempt to do, must first be prescribed by parliament, in amendments to the ABC's 81-year-old act.

The limits of what it should attempt to do - yep, code for not making it hard for the Murdochians and the Fairfaxians, those purveyors of top notch, first rate journalism, long on quality and very short on Stakhanovite quantity, and if you believe that after reading all the Murdoch tabloids in a single sitting, the pond has a choice set of size 12 gum boots waiting for you ...

Meanwhile, over at Fairfax, long time user of the ABC, and constant frustrated dreamer of getting a gig, any gig at all as the conservative voice broadcast to the nation, our very own prattling Polonius, Gerard Henderson is also at it yet again ...

Here you go.

The nakedness of the job application is either beguiling or tragic, depending on your viewpoint. 

Polonius - inevitably - uses the Chaser lads as his cudgel to give clap happy Mark Scott a sound thrashing, but he too veers away from the notion of privatising the joint.

Instead:

The best that can be hoped for is that Scott finally delivers on his 2006 promise to ensure that a greater diversity of views is heard on the public broadcaster.

Oh yes, it isn't too late, it's never too late.

But as it's likely not to happen - is it possible to imagine Henderson doing anything at all on the ABC without sending its ratings into freefall, even on Radio National where an * is marked a top notch effort?

So all that's left is spleen and vindictiveness:

From a taxpayer's point of view, the best outcome would be if governments denied the ABC funds for new projects. In recent years, the ABC has effectively moved into print and is dumping written material on its electronic news and opinion outlets.

Yes, let's stop anything new, anything original, anything innovative, and above all anything interesting.

At least Henderson nakedly acknowledges the real point - hobble the ABC, stop the dumping, end the competition, degut them ...

On Insiders last Sunday, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that the commercial print media's essential problem turns on declining advertising revenue. However, the ABC's dumping of news for free does not help. 

Dumping the news for free!

Outrageous and shocking, and all the more so because both the Murdochians and the Fairfaxians have adopted a faux paywall as solid as a piece of tissue paper ... and never mind news.com.au dumping the news for free ...

But wait, the pond is always looking for irony, and by golly, does Hendo do irony.

Here he is getting stuck into clap happy Scott for recycling content:

Last Friday, Scott defended ABC TV's running of repeat programs since it ''can't afford to buy as much content as we once did''. This suggests that Scott has erred in recent years in extending the ABC's outlets at the expense of its basic programs.

So what does Hendo do? Yep, he recycle his very own content:

The August issue of The Sydney Institute Quarterly (now online) documents serious errors in Paul Clarke's Whitlam: The Power and The Passion which was advertised as ''definitive''. 

August and it's now online in Ocober? By golly, that's dumping the news for free, and quikstix too!! There, that's how you do it, Aunty.

What follows - after a little bashing of the ABC for its fact checking unit competing with an allegedly commercial fact checker - is a classic Hendo whine and whinge about a documentary - Whitlam: The Power and the Passion - now long gone into the ether.

The obsessive compulsive Hendo has given this show a dust-up before, and you can just imagine the satisfaction he felt when he put down his quill after rebutting an arcane alleged comment by Mao wrongly featured in the show, and his secretarial assistant typed this into the computer:

No doubt the ABC Head of Factual will declare this a ''lyrical'' truth and reject all criticism. A non-lyrical truth is that the ABC should refrain from spending taxpayers' money checking the facts of others, while it runs fiction in its self-declared definitive documentaries.

Silly old Hendo. The program, by featuring many re-enacted scenes, should at best be called a drama documentary, and like most other dramadocs, it is by definition a fiction. The actor Mao is not the real Mao, the actor Whitlam not the real Gough, and so on and so forth ...

The thing represented is not the thing itself, and getting a few details or comments wrong is the least of the failings of the monstrous cult of the dramadoc, the documentary way of getting around all the tired old devices that focus on real people doing real things ... the newsreel footage and interviews with actual witnesses and the Ken Burns' style zooming in on photographs and documentary evidence ...

You can have too much reality in a documentary!

Everybody does it of course - the plague began in the United States and quickly spread around the world - and it's an indication of Hendo's singular paranoid blindness that he should fixate on one flaw in one re-enacted scene in one dramadoc show on the ABC, while all around him dramadocs flourish and bloom like the zombies in  World War Z.

Does anybody at Fairfax ever bother to read and check his tired old columns and the amount of repetition and self-promotion contained therein?

But after this orgy of ABC bashing, let's end on a high.

It turns out that the Bolter was cancelled on Sunday because of "sporting commitments" and never mind that the Ten network managed to find space for a gormless US talk show The Doctors, an episode of Good Chef, Bad Chef and a gormless well meaning local doc about Canine Angels between said sporting commitments.

The real news is that the primaryABC channel managed to defeat the Ten network primary on FTA share, 9.6% to 9.1% on the Sunday, and if you think that's skewed because of the football grand final (here), take a look at Saturday, with the ABC doing 24.6% and Ten doing 8.9% (even worse, the ABC's total all channels was 30.9% and Ten's a humble 14.6%).

So where's your Gina and Lachlan now, Nick Cater?

Where's your idle chatter about ABC audiences?

No wonder they're all shrieking out in Murdoch and Hendo la la land.

But the pond has a simple explanation, which might either be a prophecy or a curse. So long as the Ten network carries The Bolt Report, it is doomed to lurk in the commercial wilderness ...

The pond was so moved by the figures that we began to work on a poem

It is an ancient Mariness, 
And she stoppeth one of three. 
'By thy long grey locks and glittering eye, 
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? 
The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, 
And I am next of kin; 
The guests are met, the feast is set: 
May'st hear the merry din.' 
She holds him with her skinny hand, 
'There was a Bolt Report,' quoth she. 
'Hold off! unhand me, grey-locked loon!' 
Eftsoons her hand dropt she. 
She holds him with her glittering eye— 
The Ten programmer stood still, 
And listens like a three years' child: 
The Mariness hath her will. 
The Ten programmer sat on a stone: 
He cannot choose but hear; 
And thus spake on that ancient crone, 
The bright-eyed Mariness ...

O TV Programmert! this soul hath been
Alone on the wide wide sea 
Of Bolt Report and Ten Sunday ratings.
So lonely 'twas, that God herself
Scarce seemed there to be ...

Well it needs a bit of work - there's a lot more to do - but you catch the drift, and we can expect a fine old flurry of ABC bashing in the coming months, as the reptiles begin to feel the crunch and they turn to the nearest whipping boy to explain their own commercial failings and their inability to connect with an audience which long ago left their feral outrage for the rich ironies of the intertubes ...

(Below: and so thanks to The New Yorker, we turn to another existential question, link at top of page)

Labouring away on a holiday Monday can lead to aggression ...

So what news this holiday Monday?

What's that, you don't have a holiday?

Oh go and sob into your weetbix you sandgropers, and sundry other states, here in the east we still celebrate Labour day. You labour, and we bank the profits ...

Never mind, the good news is that after his epic dummy spit, it seems legendary grump Paul Sheehan is off on another junket, or is maintaining the silence and the rage.

But the pond was so impressed by his presentation by the Fairfaxians, above, that we thought it worth preserving in digital aspic ... hinting as it does that Paul Sheehan wrote the immortal line Paul Sheehan is a right-wing wanker ...

What else? Well the hagiographers at the lizard Oz are strangely, unnervingly silent. They must not like holiday Mondays, or school ...

Or perhaps no one seems to have worked out a satisfactory explanation as to why Tony Abbott might get to repay a six year old expense for attending Sophie Mirabella's wedding - presumably without interest at two points above prime - while poor old Peter Slipper, who disgraced himself with remarks about female genitals, should get hauled before the courts for arranging sundry junkets ....

There is however a challenge arising for any intrepid taxpayer - claim all the expenses involving attending weddings as a necessary work-related expense, what with all the mingling, and the contacts, and the wheeler-dealing and the deal-making, and and such like, and see how the Tax Office responds to the notion that they're deductible.

If you get away with it, let the PM know. He'll be ever so pleased at the success of a soul mate.

If you get to re-pay the ATO, with interest, don't blame the pond.

Naturally the Murdochians are silent about this nasty business, and it's left to the Fairfaxians to dust off the moths and drag John Hewson and his mouldy old cake out of the closet:

Abbott's warned?

But Sophie has been hitched - and ditched by her electorate - Slipper tossed out like a worn slipper, and Dear Leader now as favoured as North Korea in his special relationship with China ...

To the victor goes the complete shamelessness and the spoils...

It is of course a nonsense, and both sides of the aisle have strayed, with hapless Queensland Labor MP Bernie Ripoli forced to explain why he too is a lycra-clad lout - MAMIL if you will - on a study tour in MP explains tour de good luck.

But surely that top MAMIL, Tony Abbott, must scoop the pool for sanctimonious hypocrisy ... watching Sophie Mirabella get hitched is work?

Oh wait, when you put it like that, he might have an excuse ...

As usual, we can rely on Peter "send in the hounds" Reith, "here son, have a use of the phone" to plead the case for junkets:

"Since when is that not being part of being a politician, you know, going out for lunch with a shock jock or going to his wedding? You'd be a mug if you didn't go to a shock jock's wedding if you're invited.''

Oh yes, you'd be a mug not to go, and to screw the taxpayers for the pleasure of gong. What a very fine model of a modern day scribbler for the ABC's The Drum Reith makes.

Never mind, while we're on the Labor side of the aisle, let's pause to consider the complete and utter gormlessness of John Robertson, leader of the NSW opposition, certain to be unknown outside the state, and generally completely unknown inside the state.

Robertson is the latest victim of the Daily Terror, but this time it's completely deserved. It's alleged that Roberson received a $3 million bribe offer when he was a union boss, but failed to report it to police ($3 million bribe revelation has Labor vultures circling NSW Opposition Leader John Roberston)

It's a quintessentially Sydney story, rum and the lash and all that, and murdered heavy Michael McGurk and the sale of Currawong, a union retreat long lost to workers - yes, the pond once stayed in this idyllic quaint spot, but oh so long ago, it feels like another country.

Quoth the Terror:

Mr Robertson again defended his actions yesterday, saying: "I immediately rejected the offer outright . . . and therefore I was satisfied that was the end of the matter."

Now the pond might have flinched a little at crossing the line with McGurk, but in the world of the law, it's never the end of the matter. Indeed as any bush lawyer knows, in New South Wales, the effect of section 316 (1) of the Crimes Act 1900 is that a person who fails to report conduct which amounts to a serious indictable offence is liable to imprisonment for two years.

Indeed Clayton Utz - that upstanding law firm which behaved so abominably during the matter of Rolah McCabe and BAT, as you can read here in End to a 10-year wrestle with smoke - provides comprehensive general legal advice - please seek your own hugely expensive personal advice on particular matters - as you can read in Conceal or Reveal? Reporting White-Collar Crime:

The elements of the section are: 

•  a person (including a company) has committed a serious indictable offence; 
• another person (including a company) knows or believes that the offence has been committed; 
• that other person has information which might be of material assistance in securing the apprehension of the offender or the prosecution or conviction of the offender; 
• and that other person fails, without reasonable excuse, to bring that information to the attention of a member of the Police Force or other appropriate authority.

What a pity it doesn't apply to the destruction of incriminating documents, or to persons who prepare rorting claims for PMs to attend weddings, or else we might see the splendid sight of Abbott standing alongside Slipper, and clapped into irons and given a good solid Port Jackson lashing ...

The local mob may as well dust off Nathan Rees and give him another run, if only as a reward for his immortal line way back when:

''Should I not be Premier by the end of this day, let there be no doubt in the community's mind, no doubt, that any challenger will be a puppet of Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi.'' (Discredited, despised, but still pulling all the strings)

Hello Kristina Keneally - goodbye Kristina Keneally.

But enough navel-gazing - golly how you can spend endless hours plucking fluff from the navel when thinking of NSW Labor - because the pond has to note a sense of personal desolation and loss.

Devotees of Miranda the Devine will recall that at one period of time, the Devine was infatuated with Susan Greenfield. No, more than infatuated, devoted and alarmist and completely dazzled and blinded by the light.

But now it seems that she has dropped the brain scientist like a cold potato, even as the tireless self-promoter does another tour of the antipodes.

These days the bee in the Devine's very small brain involves "needless illiteracy" - remarkable, really, when you consider how reading the Daily Terror, or the Daily Mail, provokes a kind of simian illiteracy. (Daily Mail is setting poor example to children, says top headteacher, and please keep enjoying The Guardian's coverage of the Miliban-Mail frolic by clicking on the tag Daily Mail).

Never mind. The tireless self-promoter recently launched a novel, 2121, which was dismissed by Colin Steele here:

2121 often reads more like a lecture than a novel, as Greenfield expounds her well-known concerns, such as ''mind change'', the deleterious effect of internet use on young minds, and the links between computer use and obesity. Greenfield wants a debate on where society is going: ''What do we want people to do? To be? We've never asked this before.'' Many surely have? Greenfield's constant references to the problems of contemporary society slow the plotline, itself burdened by characterisation that verges on caricature.  

With the Devine out of the game - will "Lord" Monckton ever recover from the same cold shoulder? - it was left to the ABC to carry the flame.

Elizabeth Jackson distinguished herself by starting off:

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Psychologists say there is now irrefutable evidence that the human brain can be changed in unprecedented ways by playing violent video games.

But by the time she got through all the half-baked equivocations and rambling Greenfieldian modifications, we actually came to this:

SUSAN GREENFIELD: Oh, I know a lot of people will say there's no evidence, and a I refer your listeners to my website, where under the screen technologists section I've put about 500 references from all different types of areas of study. 
So of course it's not exhaustive or conclusive or definitive - no paper ever is - but it's just not the case that there's no evidence. There is evidence. (Video games on the brain)

Yes, it's not exhaustive or conclusive or definitive, or even bloody irrefutable ...

But well done, Elizabeth Jackson, the new Miranda the Devine, working for AM on the ABC ...

It so happens that Susan Greenfield even has her own tag at The Guardian here, and the latest piece on it is Teenagers and social networking - it might actually be good for them ...

What gets the pond is the way that Greenfield, in a way that used to suit the tabloids and now suits the ABC, gets away with this sort of vague smear:

The data at the moment is pointing to, as we've been saying at this conference, adaptions that we might not find necessarily altogether desirable - really, a large amount of evidence suggesting that that can lead to aggression and can lead to compulsive ways of behaving that we should start to think about how we deal with.

Indeed. Pointing ... might ... really ... can ... should start to think ...

The first and second world wars, as brought to you by Grand Theft Auto V. Who'd have imagined that all that video game aggression should have led to such compulsive ways of behaving? We really need to start thinking about how we deal with it ... and there the pond was, thinking it was silent movies and comics and pulp novels, and it was the intertubes and video games all along ...

Never mind. It's holiday time - oh go cry into your porridge, NSW doesn't stop for a horse race.

To fill in the day, the pond is off to do a tour of Sydney weddings - how people love to get married in the spring - and give guests Peter "send in the hounds" Reith-inspired advice on how to claim the costs of attending these tedious work-related events ...

I mean, you'd have to be a mug not to go, and an even bigger mug not to stiff the ATO.

And so to a final confession.

On the weekend, the pond watched The Insiders. For a moment there, we were thinking that Malcolm Turnbull's devotion to the Roosters, who monstered vile Abbottian Manly, might in some way be an indication of things to come.

Could big Mal do the same thing to Abbott in the year ahead?

Sadly big Mal has an albatross, rather than a chook around his neck, and it's Tony Abbott's vision of the NBN, and big Mal will be done like a flailing, failing dinner before next year is out ...

So we settled for the cartoons, while you can endure the show here, all fluff and navel-gazing as it is: