Another outing in the wealth-creating business of blogging ...

With things going so spiffingly well in Iraq, it was handy to catch up on Mark Danner's Donald Rumsfeld revealed, though it's currently inside the paywall for The New York Review of Books.

Happily however, those who like things for free, you can catch the piece in full at Mark Danner's site here, together with Danner's earlier meditation on the folly of being Rumsfeld, here, though in sum, the pair of articles make for a singularly depressing read.

Suffice to say that it reveals Rumsfeld to be an unimaginative goose who did indeed end up with his own Pearl Harbour in a way that requires much talk of the unimaginable to explain his folly, and that of the administration he served.

And now, like the brutal folly of the colonial British, drawing up the boundaries (Iraq: Conflict in Context) with a casual stupidity, the world, and more importantly, the people of Iraq go on living with the consequences.

It's likely to make the viewing of Errol Morris's film about Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known, a singularly depressing experience.

And no doubt in a few years time, the same sort of entrail sorting will be all the go in relation to a fragile Afghanistan ...

The knowledge that Tony Abbott was part of the war monger government that participated in these colonial follies does little to assuage the pain, especially as he and Scott Morrison now continue their Christian crusade against invading refugees by all means possible (the stench of humbug coming from Rumsfeld about the torture he authorised and his flippant comment that he stood eight hours a day and so should his victims is something to read, and is no doubt a favourite Morrison text).

It's all too much, and if contemplated too long, likely to induce a bout of melancholy in the pond, or some more futile raging against the machine, so it seemed right to catch up with the meandering mendacity of Paul Sheehan, the Fairfaxian answer to the Murdochians.

It turns out that while the pond was away, the cat would play, and Sheehan decided he would ruin the career of Tony Burke.

Yep, he scribbled Tony Burke likely to be next Labor PM, and thereby doomed the lad to a life of thwarted expectations.

The "likely" in the header is of course the coward's way out when making predictions, so let's face it, it's highly likely that, if the "magic water" man taps you on the shoulder and promises you life at the top and a golden crown, all you can do is prepare for a really long and hard fall.

Sheehan did the same thing a little earlier when he also offered the top job to Christian Porter, in Christian Porter: Meet Australia's future Prime Minister, and it made the pond deeply afraid for Porter.

The expectation of course is that in these troubled short term memory loss, intertubes warped times, no one will pause to remember the risible sight of Sheehan bestowing the Prime Ministership like a drunk farewelling a ship with a flurry of confetti ...

In the case of Burke, his ascension only lasted a week, before a truly exhausted and sputtering Sheehan came up with One wedding, three stories and fish porn.

Fish porn? Yep, that's the way it goes in the world of the Fairfaxians these days, as click bait reigns supreme.

How did Sheehan earn the header? Well he talked with a fisher person who sounded like he was three sheets to the wind at the wedding party:

Along with the rest of his industry, he believed Australia was engaging in what I term fish porn. Thanks to the zeal of the environmental movement, personified by the Greens, Australia has shrunk its fishing industry by 90 per cent even though it is one of the most highly regulated and scientifically scrutinised in the world.

Uh huh. This from a man who on other days likes to fancy himself as a real environmentalist, unlike the greenies ...

What a pity that Sheehan proceeded to quote the same fisher person claiming that the carbon tax was responsible for a 40% increase in his electricity costs over three years, the sort of common gossip that does nothing to separate the impact of the tax from the many other rorts in the world of electricity.

When you're an alleged member of the crony commentariat, it seems these days that recycling common gossip, without challenging wacky notions or figures, provided they're suitably rabid and right wing, is all the go.

And so it was with Tony Burke:

He singled out as a particular villain Tony Burke in his role as minister for sustainability and environment in the Gillard government. I listened knowing that my column coming out the next morning, last Monday, singled out Burke for praise and offered a prediction he would be the next Labor prime minister. The column also noted he was a former union official who had never spent a day working in a wealth-creating business.

Because, you see, Sheehan himself has spent many days in a wealth-creating business ... a wealth of bile, bitterness and paranoia.

So there you go, Tony Burke, future PM one day, a bludging union official the next ...

Sadly the click bait only produced forty odd comments, unsurprising because it was such a shoddy, lazy festive season piece, dull column filler as wretched as the foam balls in bean bags that are soon crushed flat.

So in the next outing Sheehan moved to safer ground and a little Muslim baiting, in Arab spring yields to Muslim winter, with most of the column dedicated to regurgitating the views of the current reprehensible government of Israel.

Yep, you won't find Sheehan scribbling a column with the header, Rumsfeld and Bush's folly yields to tribal, ethnic and religious conflict, and a heady brew of fundamentalism.

It got the pond to wondering whether it was possible, instinctively, to disagree with almost anything a member of the crony commentariat writes, and sure enough today proves it's possible as Sheehan scribbles Paul Sheehan: Agenda is suspect as police union leaders put politics first in fiery comments over assaults.

Now this required a shift from pushing the right wing/fundamentalist Jewish government's line, as Sheehan did in Muslim winter, to union bashing, and Sheehan was up to the challenge.

He transforms a debate on what to do about alcohol-fuelled violence in the streets of Sydney, into an assault on representatives of the police union.

In Sheehan's sights is one Sergeant Prue Burgun, who was allegedly punched in the face by a drunk on New Year's Eve. Cue Sheehan:

Normally, this would prompt natural sympathy for a member of a police force that has, for too long, had to deal with too many drunks. But I think Burgun has a problem. She concluded her opinion piece with this taunt to the state government, which was typically shrill: 
''Get out of the pocket of the Australian Hotels Association, get out of the pocket of Tourism Australia and represent the people who should matter in this state. They want something done about the scourge of alcohol-related violence and so do the people who mop it up every night. The decision is easy. Just have the guts to make it.''

This is typically shrill? Typically shrill is a statement of the bleeding obvious?

Sheehan, in his typically shrill way - yep he knows what really is typically shrill - then goes on to sink the boot, wield the truncheon, zap the taser on the hapless NSW coppers, claiming that they're behaving like bogans with badges.

It's a classic example of conflation and confusing of issues, denouncing the coppers for union activism while ignoring the bleeding obvious in relation to street violence. Standing up for the O'Farrell government while failing to note its complete inertia on the matter.

George Souris. Do we need to say more? George Souris. Yes the pond knew Souris long ago, and he was a doofus then and he's a Rumsfeldian doofus now.

So what's the worst of the coppers' crimes according to Sheehan? An open letter by Inspector Pat Gooley, which inter alia says:

''It is time for the Premier, Barry O'Farrell, to demonstrate that he is running this state for the benefit of his constituents. Because at the moment it appears the Australian Hotels Association is running the minister's policies for the benefit of a handful of licensees who hold late night trading licences. If your government is willing to take $11 million a month out of drivers' pockets through speed cameras to reduce crashes by 42 per cent in black spots, why won't you tell your minister to trial the Newcastle model to reduce assaults by 37 per cent in violent black spots?''

Somehow Sheehan manages to construe this as Labor party favouring, police union political activism of the kind the police and the public sector unions have been indulging in since big Bazza came to power.

But truth to tell, the government is acting as if it is running its policies for the benefit of the powerful Australian Hotels Association. It has the Newcastle trial as a model and it refuses to embrace it. There are any number of other policies that could be embraced but inertia is all the go.

In this context, all the blather about union feather bedding and the NSW Labor machine sounds exactly like the sort of rhetoric you'd expect from the Australian Hotels Association.

You only have to pause for a moment and remember that the NSW state Labor party was also in the pocket of the Australian Hotels Association during its time in power to confirm it ...

Why not do a Greg Hunt, and head off to the AHA wiki, here, and get all the footnotes for this?

The AHA is considered one of the most influential lobby groups in Australia, and the AHA NSW Branch provides considerable financial support to the Australian Labor Party. Between 1998 and 2006, the AHA NSW Branch contributed over A$700,000 to the NSW branch of the ALP.
In April 2008 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the AHA NSW had frozen all political donations. The association's new president, Scott Leach, announced the decision to freeze the donations 2 weeks after his election as president. Mr Leach said "the move was part of a review of how the association operated. Political donations made by the AHA are under review - we've pressed the pause button."
However, the AHA (NSW) donations declaration lodged with the NSW Electoral Funding Authority in February 2009 showed that its political contributions had resumed the next month in May 2008, with donations to political parties between May 2008 and December 2008 reaching nearly $100,000. 
The AHA (NSW) made another $81,317 in donations to political parties in the period of January 2009 to 30 June 2009, bringing contributions in the period from Leach's announcement to the end of June 2008 to over $180,000, twice as high as the average annual donations made in the 8 years preceding leach's election to the AHA Presidency. In 2010, in anticipation of a Coalition victory in the next state election, donations to the Coalition rose, while those to Labor fell.

The result? The extraordinary sight of the pond agreeing with the NSW coppers, while wondering exactly what sort of piss Paul Sheehan was imbibing over the festive season ...

It must have been a blinder if he couldn't see how the AHA is the piper and others are playing its tune.

Somewhere along the way, an envious Sydney tried to emulate Melbourne's excellent civilised laneway culture, which the pond enjoyed over the break.

Instead Sydney ended up with the worst of King street, and mated it with the worst of Kings Cross, and all Sheehan can do is blather on about unions and political machines and the need for more punitive sentences, as if locking more and more people up is the only way forward.

Sheesh, the next thing you know, Tim Wilson will be having a bash at the crypto-fascist state of Campbell Newman's peculiar state.

Oh wait, he has: Tim Wilson: Queensland's anti-bikie laws are violating human rights.

The truth of any matter is that rabid ideology will always blind insight.

It did with Donald Rumsfeld, who bungled on a large stage, and it does with the frothing, foaming Paul Sheehan, who week after week, trots out mind-numbing stupidities, while berating people for not being part of a wealth-creating business.

Mindless stupidities as a wealth-creating business?

No wonder the Fairfaxians are now well down the tubes in their very own version of a ''wealth pissing against the wall'' business ...  

On some gloomy pond days, it seems like there's only one Fairfaxian who knows how to staunch the flow ... and you can of course always find more Popery here.

Another day with Australia's least trusted newspaper ...

And another thing.

You see, it's charming to watch the Daily Terror, the least trusted newspaper in Australia, step into the new millennium.

This is featured in its "From around the site" front digital page effort at click bait:

Uh huh. Amazing enough that the Daily Terror knows Stewart exists, let alone links to a piece by him mocking the usual Fox dingbats, Murdochian cousins of the least trusted tabloid in Australia.

So the pond went along for the ride.

If you click on Jon Stewart drops F-bomb on The Daily Show when attacking Fox News reporters on global warming mockery, you get a brief video segment and a brief story, as a reward for swallowing the click bait.

At the bottom of the story, you get this:

Tell us what you think? Isn't thinking and the Daily Terror mutually exclusive?

Never mind, the urge to "start a conversation" confirms it's click bait, but it's the link that's the killer.

If you follow it, you end up on a Mediaite page Stewart Rips Fox on Global Warming: 'Your F*cking Opinion' Is Not as Valid as Scientific Fact!

And here's what you score "for the extended version, go here".

You were probably hoping to see this sort of thing, featuring freezing body parts, and the mindless stupidity of turning to the Trumpster for an insight into climate science:

Instead this is what you copped:

Ah, the old territorial restriction, put in to protect the studio empires, one of which is controlled by Chairman Rupert himself.

No doubt the Daily Terror, the least trusted newspaper in Australia, is having palpitations about the arrival of a down under version of the online Daily Mail, the lowest, most pandering, demeaning form of right wing, rabid, perfected click bait, online propaganda sheet imaginable, an aspirational guide to the dreams and delusions of the Terror, but they really will have to do better if they want to staunch their current bleeding - circulation falling, paywall not working, clicks not muscling up ...

Meanwhile, if you want to watch Stewart outside the USA, there are ways and means, including spoofing Firefox and Chrome (here) or using a VPN. You cop US advertisements and geotargeted ads, but these have a certain quaint charm.

Going to the source has several advantages, not least meaning you don't have to bother with click bait from the least trusted newspaper in Australia, while doing your bit to undermine the world hegemony of Chairman Rupert ...

The pond only presents this information in a fair and balanced way. The choice is yours ...

Of course there are interesting insights into what might be causing the current chill - there's a brief summary in 'Polar vortex' blamed for American chill (forced video at end of link) but you hardly expect any kind of informed discussion amongst the Murdochians, down under home for denialism.

Oh and online, Stewart's "Fuck" was bleeped in the usual way, so that it came out "F*cked".

Fuck the pond dead, even that click bait header about Jon Stewart dropping the F word on TV was f*cking silly ... he's been saying f*ck for f*cking years ... in a bleepy sort of f*cking way ...

There's a reason why the Daily Terror is the least trusted newspaper in Australia ... just like its kissing cousin in the United States, Fox News can only be trusted to deliver hysteria and misinformation...

Speaking of a child speaking as a child ...

(Above: as close as we'll get to the book. Click to enlarge if you want to read the fine print, and remember there's always fine print)


For some obscure and bizarre reason, Crikey proposed that everybody should ignore Cory Bernardi and his latest epic work, as somehow being a good, sound and sane way to start the new year.

What silliness, what nonsense.

It's the pond's duty to draw attention to the splendid reviews Senator Bernardi's tome has attracted at Amazon, which you can find at the tome's listing The Conservative Revolution (yes, the pond uses tome when seeking to inflict the maximum amount of linguistic pain).

In case you can't be bothered clicking on the link - really to lift a finger or smell a sparrow's fart might be too hard when it comes to caring about the thoughts of  comrade Bernardi - please allow the pond to present a few screen cap samples:

Childish? Of course, but remember that famous biblical saying, 1 Corinthians 13:11, which perhaps helps explain Crikey's stance.

Presumably Bernardi thinks he is following his fearless leader, who published Battlelines on his way to power, but he failed to understand that when you think and write like a child, a zealous rabid ideological child, you're likely to be treated as a child rather than as a visionary, an intellectual and a future leader:

Another bit of click bait fluff aspiring to be high culture ...

(Above: a new slogan for the Liberal party? Noted at the Ian Potter branch of the National Gallery of Victoria, which truth to tell, is really the state gallery of Victoria. By Tony Garifalakis, born 1964, titled 'Horsemen', part of a larger assembly)

It was irresistible of course.

There's no greater fool than a cultural snob, and by golly Christopher Bantick plays the role of snob and fool with exceptional style, as you can read in Another brick in the wall of Gen Y cultural decline.

Yep, it's another angry rant du jour, this time about the failure of the youff of the day to appreciate "high culture", whatever that profoundly silly term might be taken to mean.

Here's a classic example of the style, and the stupidity:

Taiwan-born director Ang Lee says he makes films to, wait for it, ''understand more about himself''. If that isn't a 70-millimetre selfie, what is? Then there is the toe-curling indulgence of those music stars, like Sydney singer-songwriter Josh Pyke. He's a 36-year-old who claims that he now ''feels he has learnt to sing''. Oh please! Can you imagine Pavarotti saying anything so crass?

Um, does taking to the stage with Celine Dion count? How about Pavarotti taking the entire staff of an Italian restaurant accompany him to Beijing for a performance of La Bohème?

Does an inclination to vanity produce a certain kind of crassness?

“Luciano used burnt cork to darken his beard, and mustache, and hair, and to cover the bald spot . . . Half the time he just looked dirty. It didn’t endear him to the hotels he stayed in, either, because all his sheets and pillowcases were black from the stuff ... ” (and much more in this review of Herbert Breslin's tell-all book, The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti's Rise to Fame by Hims Manager, Friend, and Sometimes Adversary, which can be found under the header My Big Fat Obnoxious Opera-Singing Client)

The trouble of course is that classical music people can be just as vain, shallow and silly as any pop star, and the pond could bore everyone to tears by recycling many many examples of this vanity and silliness at work.

The other trouble, the pond suspects, is that as a fan boi for "high culture", Bantick has never actually moved around behind the proscenium arch, and never had to deal with the eccentricities of all kinds of artists (don't get the pond started, that's how blogging as therapy started).

For some reason Bantick seems to have taken a set to Pyke. Perhaps one of his students said he liked Pyke, and it was enough to send Bantick off into a frothing, foaming frenzy:

Or how about this kind of Pyke self-centred twaddle: ''I know I can write a song every day and sing it in my voice and it will be OK, but that is not what I do it for. It's about figuring out what your reason is for doing what you're doing.'' 

Indeed, and while we're speaking of self-centred:

Engaged by the conductor Riccardo Muti to sing Don Carlo at La Scala’s opening night, Pavarotti only barely learns his part, gets nervous, and comes unglued during the performance: “There was a sense of unease from the moment the tenor walked out onstage . . . You had the feeling he might not make it. In one of the big recitatives, early on, Luciano cracked. At La Scala, they don’t take that lying down . . . people began booing.”

Now don't get the pond wrong. Pavarotti had his moments, and the pond is particularly fond of his work with Joan Sutherland and Zubin Mehta in Puccini's Turandot (go on, Gramophone the review here).

Nor does the pond encourage anyone to rip up seats at a performance of classical music, though it has happened, but is perhaps a tad too Rolling Stones ...

But on another day, why not listen to Leonard Cohen? Or Bob Dylan? Or Kurt Cobain's Teen Spirit?

Not if you're the insufferable Bantick (oh have pity for his poor hapless students):

In Australia, elitism is a dirty word. But maybe our jingoistic egalitarianism has gone too far with the sense of cultural equity. Who knows what a sonnet is, a partita, a motet, or who was Goethe or Christopher Marlowe? As for ballet, forget it. There are many other examples. Why this matters is that without a sense of cultural elitism, then the high cultural markers will atrophy. We'd rather get all teary with Leonard Cohen than concentrate, really concentrate, on Mahler.

Yep, it's that old saw that to be "high culture" it must be hard work, a real slog, an arduous bout of concentration and intense focus, or else the end of the world is nigh.

Of course Mahler, being a melody-maker with cowbells, doesn't require that much concentration. Have a bash at Iannis Xenakis some time and see how you go ...

It's a particularly useless way to approach y'artz, and it leads to all sorts of slippery slopes and pitfalls. The pond remembers being told at an early age that Gilbert and Sullivan were useless scribblers of light operettas of the most pathetic kind, and Tchaikovsky a mere melody-maker who would have been at home writing tunes for ABBA.

If you couldn't concentrate, really concentrate on Shostakovich, you were a dummy and a dodo.

But if you were stuck in Tamworth, the doctors, lawyers, teachers and bankers doing G and S were a wonder to behold ... and later you could cut your teeth on Shostakovich if that's your kink and your desire.

But there's nothing particularly profound or virtuous in making only one choice - it's a bit like listening to the radio, or speaking languages, or roaming from comic book and movie to so-called 'literature'. The more stations, the more channels, the more enlivened the mind, the further removed from the mindless pedantry of the Harold Blooms and the Leavis-ites (let no one stand between the pond and David O. Russell's hugely amusing and well performed American Hustle).

In any case, is there such a gulf between T. S. Eliot climbing down off his high Anglican extremely conservative banking tower to scribble Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, and the damn thing being turned into a damned Broadway musical?

There is if you're a pretentious ponce, but just because the pond dislikes Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cats - we could be here all day counting the ways - doesn't mean we have to go on about it at tedious, Bantickian length.

Next thing you know people might be taking an attitude to Stephen Sondheim and that's less easy to forgive, though like most artists he has a fair share of turkeys.

The funniest moment?

This goes beyond subjective taste. Does Lou Reed compare with Segovia? It's a no-brainer. Still, Lou Reed took endless column inches of adulatory, valedictory prose recently because of what he achieved (not a lot).

Alas, the mention of Segovia dates Bantick and puts him firmly in the 1950s and 1960s Ed Sullivan middlebrow movement:

In the mid-50s, one out of every four Americans tuned in to The Ed Sullivan Show regularly. 
Yet his programming instinct soon led him beyond what was then considered standard variety-show fare. Not only did the Broadway-conscious Sullivan air scenes from such plays and musicals as Cabaret, The Member of the Wedding, My Fair Lady, Picnic, and West Side Story, but also Maria Callas, Van Cliburn, Rudolf Nureyev, Itzhak Perlman, Roberta Peters, Andrés Segovia, Edward Villella, and Jerome Robbins’ Ballets: U.S.A. all performed for his cameras, some of them repeatedly (Peters made 41 appearances on the program). 
 “If a comic, an actor, a singer, opera star, ballet dancer, or a lady who knits with her toes pleases me,” Sullivan said in 1968, “the chances are she’ll please everybody in town or the country.” More often than not, he was right. But he also took great care to make such “difficult” fare palatable by integrating it into shrewdly balanced mixed bills. A typical 1966 show featured the soul singer James Brown, the comedian Stan Freberg, the impressionist Rich Little, Nancy Sinatra, the U.S. Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon—and a scene from Maxwell Anderson’s 1930 play Elizabeth the Queen performed by Dame Judith Anderson. 
This willingness to present so wide a range of artists in the setting of a popular variety show was largely without precedent in TV or radio. But it was all of a piece with the tone of American popular culture in the 50s and early 60s. Throughout this period, America’s deep-seated collective longing for self-improvement, enabled by the power of the mass media, fostered a “middlebrow moment” in American culture, a period when ordinary middle-class Americans took a greater interest in high culture than at any time before or since. (The Middlebrow on Sunday Night)

Oh dear, poor Yorick and Bantick. Middlebrow Ed Sullivan viewers determined on self-improvement.

As for Bantick's students? Poor bastards, the lot of them:

Sure, private schools are in effect nurseries, or, if you like, the last bastions of elitism. I teach in one and I teach serious, classically demanding literature. Yes, it is elite, consciously so, but anything is elite if it is not pandering to the lowest common denominator. How can a book about a vacuous Sydney teenager reflecting on school, like Melina Marchetta's Looking for Alibrandi, be compared with Jane Eyre? It can't.

Indeed. And how can a short illogical rant by Bantick be compared to a reasoned essay by Francis Bacon? It can't, but you do get plenty of comedy:

 Compare the immortal lyrical beauty of John Keats, who also died young and said, ''I feel the daisies growing over me.'' 

Oh dear sweet lord, is that the best quote of Keats that Bantick could come up with?

Is he trying to make the Ween's song Push th' little daisies and make 'em come up sound like a masterpiece?

How does he feel about the Eels proposing I'll pick some daisies from the flower bed of the galaxy theatre while you clear your head, I thought some daisies might cheer you up? (Daisies of the Galaxy if you want to google it). 

Or how about Insane Clown Posse's chorus, Oh shit I've seen a beaming of a daisy Our will to survive It's amazing Look motherfucker look it's a daisy our will to survive (Daisies, if you want to google the rest of the lyrics)

Look motherfucker, you need to come up with something better than daisies or even a host of golden daffodils these days. But do wrap it up:

The ambivalence Australia has to any mention of cultural elitism is reflected in its suspicion of what appears to be difficult to understand. In this sense, schools have opted out of their responsibility to simply lift the cultural standard from Banksy to Hogarth. 

Oh okay, that's a seriously offensive comparison, insulting to both Banksy and Hogarth. But do go on:

The fear I have, is that ignorance will be seen as preferable, even desirable, while serious theatre is unviable, serious literature is not published, concert programs are reduced and other forms of cultural elevation are lost.

Cultural elevation? Won't elevator shoes do the trick?

Yep, it's the age old paranoia routine, yearning for some lost mystical golden age of y'artz and fearing for a philistine future, trotted out by mindless paranoids for centuries, and never mind the way the y'artz keep reinventing and continually astonishing for all those same centuries ...

Oh sure, the pond will admit to having spent a number of wasted hours roaming the galleries of Melbourne in recent days, trawling exhibitions where artists who couldn't draw were invited to draw, and any gaggle of post-modernist nonsense was assembled under the generic title Melbourne Now.

It was generally pitiful stuff, but there were some nice moments too, and a reminder that brave souls do, or attempt to do, and those who don't do, generally teach and write angry rants.

The pond has been on both sides of that divide, but the odd work that titillates and intrigues is worth a thousand angry rants, and if like Picasso, the work has been arrived at by way of rip off or homage, who cares, given that a genuine twentieth century genius like Picasso had no problem ripping off popular culture, African mask-makers and poor old Georges Braque...

It turned out, in the usual way, that hapless Bantick was just being used as click back and the few who bothered to write a comment were on to it immediately:

Mate, this is lazy generationalist clickbait at its worst. Ang Lee turns *60* this year. Sixty. Do some research.

And so on and being click bait, it didn't take long for a response, in the form of Emily Day's Hey Teacher! Leave them kids alone.

The most amusing piece of that piece? The typo of course:

Take that, Christopher Bentick! From Josh Pyke with love ...

The whole melancholy farcical affair turned the pond to thinking about another piece it had read recently:

....newspapers have long printed lifestyle puff pieces next to hard news, but the analogy between that practice and the current model doesn’t hold. As someone who’s written hundreds of newspaper entertainment pieces in my day, I can tell you they still, thankfully, do not take inaccuracies lightly, even minor ones. And as someone who’s written hundreds of hacky blog posts, I can tell you that it’s a practice that rots your guts from inside. Trust me. 
Actually, don’t trust me—that’s the entire point. We the media have betrayed your trust, and the general public has taken our self-sanctioned lowering of standards as tacit permission to lower their own. (The Year We Broke the Internet)

And now Christopher Bentick is doing his very best to help break the full to overflowing intertubes with another bit of click-baiting fluff ... and the Fairfaxians are helping him in their very own
Bentickian ways ...

(Below: Patricia Piccinini, born 1965, arrived Australia 1972, "The carrier", 2012, also noted in the pond's tour of Melbourne. No resemblance to Bantick's thesis is suggested or proposed).

A dangerous disdainful elitist delivers yet another blow to the classless society, thanks to the reptiles at the lizard oz ...

Remember this promising development?

As usual, the devil was in the detail, and as usual, you simply can't stop a bad penny turning up, and so we've had a weekly dose of Caterism ever since he was supposed to depart the ranks of the reptiles, and at last leave the world in peace.

So now we cop this:

But what's so funny about this burst of Caterism, locked behind the paywall because you need to fork over the readies to read the thoughts of the 'leets?

Well those with a good memory will remember Cater railing about the dangers of dangerous elites, as explained by that solid Caterist supporter, Miranda the Devine:

Cater's thesis, formed during the 2010 election, is that Australia has become increasingly polarised, not between right and left, but between people he calls the insiders and the outsiders. 
A new ruling class of university-educated "progressives", "sophisticates", "elites" and "latte-sippers" have emerged as an un-Australian clique trying to lord it over everyone else. Controlling media, law, education and the political class, they threaten Australia's great egalitarian democratic project: "For the first time there were people who did not simply feel better off but were better than their fellow Australians. They were cosmopolitan and sophisticated, well read (or so they would have us believe) and politically aware. This was not the classless society I had signed up to join."

Yep, those pesky elites were really problematic:

... Australian egalitarianism is threatened by the assumption that "some citizens, the educated ones, are smarter than the rest, and that therefore their opinions should carry more weight". 
He (Cater) traces the rise of the new insider class to the extraordinary expansion of higher education from the late '50s, in which the number of universities doubled - and became "degree factories". 
The unintended consequence was the creation of an "intelligentsia with a narrower, more homogenous" outlook, marked by a "progressive world view, snobbery and self righteousness". The intellectual class has for almost half a century "misrepresented Australia's history, misread its present, misjudged its people and projected a miserable vision of the future", while maligning "patriotism as akin to racism". (Timely warning of danger within)

Indeed, indeed, harumph, shocking, appalling stuff, I say, wot wot, have we got time for a dry sherry at the Melbourne club?

Yet what to we read today?

Why it's an impassioned Caterist plea for the unfashionable notion of excellence and unashamed, unabashed elitism:

How many dreams of Olympic glory have been shattered by the ludicrously restrictive admissions policy of the Australian Institute of Sport? 
The unmet demand for Australian gold medals at the 2012 Games frustrated the patriotic sporting public, yet millions of coodabeen champions who would have willingly graced that podium were never given a chance. 
The demand-driven funding model for higher education introduced by the Gillard administration stopped short of including the Australian Sports Commission, where a somewhat unfashionable notion of excellence still prevails.

Yes, you there in the blue collar, stop giving yourself fancy airs and graces, and get back to your menial work, we'll have none of this nonsense that you're good enough to join the elites ...

What we need is a snobbish, self-righteous world view, where the universities are dedicated to excellence, and all this modern talk, this idle chatter about a nirvana of inclusiveness, in which every player gets a prize, is given the right royal order of the boot.

Oh okay, the pond really only indulged in this bout of Caterist whimsy for one reason:

A natural break on supply?

Well so much for applying the brakes, but do go on mocking the lumpen proletariat and their foolish attempts to emulate David Williamson's hero Petersen (made in 1974, a reminder of how tediously repetitious the Caterists can sound):

Mere consumerism!

Bain-maries in the tedious low rent cafeteria of life! Existential ennui!

Oh yes, you can just hear, if not see, the withering sneer at the thought of all these students lining up at a cafeteria, eating chaff, when really their brains only make them fit for a hand out from the Salvos or Vinnies ...

But wait, there's more, and it's as rich and as ripe a form of sniggering condescension as we've seen in many a long year from an unashamed elitist who resolutely refuses to apply the breaks.

And what's to blame? Why it's that pesky bloody free market, as exemplified by the good old USA:

Aw shucks, we couldn't resist throwing in that bonus picture of Warney, nestling right next to all this ripe socialist talk of market failure. 

But now we know that there's just too much over-education doing the rounds - them's the brakes - let's get back to peasant bashing:

The sons and daughters of peasants! Shameless upstarts, forgetting their places in life, wanting to be upwardly mobile. Back in your boxes, you peasants, you rustic boors, you churls, you provincial hicks, you yokels, you country bumpkins, you hayseeds, you paysan, you campesino.

And so on and so forth. Not that the pond has got anything against the peasants, coming from Tamworth and all, it's just a question of standards and proper elites ...

A university's reputation cannot survive on sophistry for long, of course ...

Naturally that's immediately followed by much Caterist talk of lowered academic expectations, downwardly reviewed pass marks, mollycoddled students, and potential customers twigging that quality has been sacrificed for quantity, thereby debasing the good name of institutions which should have remained unashamedly elitist:

Quantity instead of quality!

Such a perception is fatal in the international market, where prestige and ranking matter most.

Where, not to put too fine a point on it, the unashamed, unabashed elitist reigns supreme.

But there is hope, and it revolves around the reality that Nick Cater is completely useless and completely helpless, and so is in urgent need of subservient workers with skills in plumbing, electrical wiring, roofing, guttering, gardening, cooking, butlering, maiding, nannying, and all the other odd jobs an unabashed elitist needs for work around the house, especially if working on yet another analysis of why the classless society has failed in Australia:

Something practical with their hands! Paw power! And we don't mean pounding on a keyboard, that's reserved for the Caterists.

Back in to your boxes, you Whitlamite peasants, your proper place is to do Nick Cater's plumbing ...

Say what Miranda?

The Lucky Culture is a migrant's ode to the adopted country he has loved since childhood. Cater, 54, chose to move here as an adult in the late 1980s, finding it "tremendously liberating" after what he describes as a lower-middle-class upbringing in Britain: "There is no recourse to status. In this country everyone gets a fair go. There are no institutional barriers to success."

Except if you want to go to university.

Really, a line has to be drawn somewhere. Please, please, good people, it's time to create some decent institutional barriers to success.

This wouldn't of course preclude the peasants from attending a class in Caterist irony 101:

... when Rupert Murdoch was in Sydney recently, Cater, a senior editor at The Australian, handed him a copy as he was leaving for the airport. By the time Murdoch got back to New York he was so taken with the book he asked for 10 copies to be sent over.

Why even the billionaires just love fair-minded, righteous classless, fair go Caterism.

And now, please be upstanding, and sing along with the Caterists:

When I was a little boy 
Daddy used to say to me 
"Son, we got a lot of land 
We got a lot of work to be done 
Go get your marbles put 'em in the house 
Tear down your castles in the sand 
Come with your poppy to the cotton patch 
Get a little dirt on your hands, 
Get a little dirt on your hands
Forget that useless uni degree 
Get a little dirt on your hands, son 
Get a little dirt on your hands 
And you girl, why you out of the kitchen
You need to get a little flour on your hands girl
Just like a boy needs to get a little dirt on his hands
If he's gonna grow up to be a big, big Caterist man 
You need to get a little Caterist dirt,
Get a little Caterist dirt on your hands 
Get a little Caterist dirt on your hands.

Or just sing along with the Delltones' cover of the tune while we wait impatiently for Nick Cater's next exposition on the classless society, provided you're willing to work as a ditch digger, or perhaps a night carter or a garbologist, and carry away Cater's verbal garbage and  confused, confusing diarrohea about elites:

 

Memo to L'Age: David Brooks: Been There. Done That ...

Let's start with a sample to set the tone:

Amazing stuff, and so to the heart of the matter.

Now that the reptiles at the lizard Oz have won the title of 'loon paper of the year', thanks to publishing Maurice Newman (along with many other splendid efforts), and with the Daily Terror clinging proudly to the title of 'least trusted Australian newspaper', the pond is in a state of dread and fear about the Fairfaxians.

You see, the pond had the pleasure of sojourning amongst Victorians for the summer break, and while spending a few days away from the rellies at the Hyatt (sssh, don't call it grand, it'll only give them delusions), L'Age was the house paper, turning up each morning.

It was all part of the Victorian experience (of course we were only at the Hyatt to observe the decadent rich in an ethnographic way, and to run down the points).

There were a few wins in this ethnographic Victorian experience.

In the old days it was common for New South Wales' folk to arrive at the border and marvel at the dual carriageways ...

Now if you arrive in the electorate of the Deputy Premier of Victoria, Peter Ryan, you certainly marvel at the state of the roads.

You marvel that people don't kill themselves every day.

But somehow, with a wry shrug, the brave Victorians of South Gippsland, swerve and shrug ... and on they go ... and never mind that an actual freeway still has a speed limited and signs saying 'uneven surface', because, it seems, signs are way cheaper than building half-way decent roads ...

As for broadband, it's salutary to be reminded of dial up. That'll teach the urbanites to be grateful for the pitiful pleasures of HFC.

And it was fun to watch a New South Welcher, carrying those cacky yellow plates, attempt to turn right in front of a tram.

The simpleton! Everybody knows that to turn right you swerve violently to the left and nudge a few pedestrians before careening off against a red light.

So he was dinged and donged as the locals laughed and jeered, until he donged his way out of there.

Luckily the pond was in basic black and could pass as a native Melburnian.

But what's this got to do with David Brooks, you ask, who set the tone in such fine style at the start of the rant?

Which brings us back to L'Age, in genuine tree killer printer's ink newspaper form, as suave and as tempting as the T2 teas, and the gluten-free meals that are all the rage in Melbourne town. (Oh it was heaven for the coeliac in the family and never mind that it was clearly a hipster driven craze).

After the excitement - a free rag at the door each day - it turned out that free was about all it was worth.

Take the couple of pages devoted to World News as an example. These days the news is sourced from the UK Telegraph, AP, Reuters, the New York Times, and whatever else the editors can rip from the intertubes and recycle. And a fair number of the opinion pieces are also freighted in from overseas.

Amazingly this strategy works ... if you have dial up.

The pond was strangely drawn to L'Age in last Sunday's edition. They published David Brooks' Weed: Been There. Done That. (access limited), which had first been given a run in the New York Times the Thursday before.

Heck, what's a few days late when you've got dial up? Call it a Victorian state of mind, and the pond guarantees Queen Victoria would understand ...

It turns out that Brooks had scribbled an epic piece of princely poncedom, which would have guaranteed him the pond's 'international loon of the year' award for 2013 ... if only it had been published a few days earlier.

As it is, the pond has only caught up on all the fuss back in New South Wales, where right means right, and black means bloody hot clothing, and the HFC cabling allows you dial up speed all day long/

It turns out that Brooks had become an internet meme:

Even crueller, some vicious people dug out high school photos (no, the pond couldn't pass the high school photo test):

(It was the gothamists wot done it, here).

Everybody piled in, including ibtimes,  Gawker, and New York, and Think Progress, and Mediaite, and Vanity Fair, and naturally Huff Post recycled all the twitter jokes because that's what recyclers do, and Slate got a little serious here, and here, and American Prospect had a go, and there were the usual spoofs like this one:

Oh dear. Colloquailly speaking ...

It was a perfect storm, and there's much more to google, but just in case you've missed it, perhaps the funniest contribution came from Gary Greenberg, who wrote I smoked pot with David Brooks.

He didn't really, but what fun he has riffing on Brooks - like for example Brooks muffing an English class presentation:

... did we have some uninhibited frolic! He wrote in his column about the time he got high during lunch and then “stumbled through” a presentation in English class. Too bad he didn’t go into the details. But I remember it pretty well. It was senior year. We all had to give a 10-minute talk about one of the leitmotifs in Lord Jim. We’d both chosen “one of us,” an idea that was totally Dave’s. He’d gotten after we smoked some insane Thai stick and went into Philly to see “Freaks” at the TLA. We’d figured out our talks on the train back home. Mine was going to be about how Conrad was being ironic, and the “us” weren’t exactly people you wanted to be one of. His was going to be about the way Jim’s “selfishness of a higher order” was a model for Hamiltonian government. Mine went off without a hitch, even though I was as stoned as he was. (But I was probably already the full-on stoner, so maybe I had a tolerance.) 
But when Dave got up there, I think he was trying to be literary or casual or something, and he started in by saying that the idea had come to him watching Freaks, and he got totally sidetracked, the way you do when you’re good and high. “Oh, man, you shoulda seen it,” he said. “These, like, total freakazoids. This one? Prince something or other? No arms or legs, but he could roll a cigarette and then light it—with his mouth, man! He’d fit right in here at Radnor Get High…” and here he started giggling uncontrollably, and all he could say was “One of us, one of us, gobble gobble gobble” until Mr. Sedgwick had to tell him to sit down. (Later Dave told us he told Sedge he’d never done it before and he was really sorry and Sedge said he wouldn’t call his parents, but he (Dave) was such a good boy he knew he wouldn’t do that again.)

Amazingly, Ruth Marcus had joined in the game on the 3rd January with The perils of legalized pot, and did her very best to get herself a share of the butt-kicking, but it was Brooks all the way, and the pond has barely scratched the surface of this doofus's surge to ever-lasting internet glory and fame ...

Never mind, the ineffable Brooks can look after himself.

What he did was get the pond thinking about the hopeless case of  L'Age, and the Fairfaxians and their future, and there seemed to be a take home message in all this.

You see, the David Brooks' piece itself is fair enough as an example of a ponce being an utter ponce and a complete prat, likely as not at home in Toorak or roaming the streets of South Yarra, except in the parts where you might find young people, honing a disapproving stare ...

But Brooks' burst of prattishness was only a minor part of the game.

For the rest you needed the internet, first to read the Brooks' piece in its natural prattish New York home, and then branch out and explore, what with the all the memes and everybody piling in and having great fun whacking the ponce ...

Trying to do that with a tree killer hard copy newspaper is about as meaningful as trying to turn right by going right, or imagining the Victorian government knows how to build roads or hoping against hope that Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott will succeed in their fiendish plan to return Australia to dial up, South Gippsland style ...

Well good luck with that and fare thee well Victorians and all the best Fairfax ...

And then there was a Sydney Fairfaxian capper that confirmed the pond was right to be worried.

Here's what the pond confronted in the Sydney digital edition in the New Year:

Did you spot it? No, not Peter FitzSimons attempting a red-caped Brooksian 'look at me, look at me' manoeuvre.

Did you see the hideous monstrosity? It's sugary claws?

Do they hire stoners for subbies these days?

Now the pond has more than its fair share of errors, but that's because we don't pay a dime to our NZ subbies, and you get what you pay for. It's amateur hour at the pond, and heck, it's our right and our pleasure to make errors, colloquailly speaking ...

But if the Fairfaxians claim to be professional and demand subscriptions and cash in the paw, and what do they do? Commit egregious typo crimes and reprint David Brooks, freely available elsewhere to the very few who might care.

If they don't watch out, this year could be the year the pond sues the Fairfaxians ... for producing a frothing and foaming fit of the 'its', and for publishing David Brooks without even one cartoon hinting to the readers a genuine, certified internet meme ...

Oh wait, Brooks was already an internet meme ...

Not to worry. Ex-stoners write really stupid things, that seems basically the point:

Announcing the results of the annual loon of the year competition ... and may the best loon win ... and, please pass the envelope, the winner is ...

Now where were we?

Looking back, it has to be admitted that the pond mishandled the seasonal transition with a singular lack of grace and style.

No top ten worst lists, no top ten best lists, no new year's resolutions, not even an award for the 2013 loon of the year.

It turned out that this was just as well, because a late-breaking streaker, a stout-hearted stallion made a very late rails run, and turned the rest of the field into mere amateur idlers and dilettantes - or a wrong 'un of English cricketers, if you will ...

Yep, good old Maurice Newman caught everyone napping and convincingly won racing away, with his epic Crowds go cold on climate cost (behind the lizard oz paywall because you have to pay to access 'loon of the year material' of this quality), which just made the cut by being published on 31st December at 12.00 am. Talk about a narrow squeak! But what a squeak!

The quality of the paranoia, the awareness of an international conspiracy at work, was  both breath-taking and inspirational. Black helicopters? Bah, humbug:

Since its first report in 1990, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change progressively has applied mass psychology through a compliant media to spread the delusion that wicked Western industrialists are causing irreparable damage to the climate.

Mass psychology!

But it got even better. You see, Germany is in ruins and so is Britain and so too is Australia, and forget all that nonsense about dollars and wages and Gina wanting people to work like Africans for a couple of bucks as the reason for Australia's manufacturing woes. The dollar and labour costs and anything else those foolish free market economists might come up with simply fail to cut it.

It's all to do with the madness, the complete and utter insanity:

Australia, too, has become hostage to climate change madness. It has been a major factor in the decimation of our manufacturing industry.

Newman doesn't quite manage to explain how the Germans seem to keep manufacturing people's wagons and führer wagons like the Merc (ah yes, we drove a Merc on the break), while Holden retreats to Detroit, but then you're not reading any of Maurice's ramblings for business insights, but for the luxurious pleasure of reading the rant of the year.

The real theme, you see, was the complete madness,  the utter insanity, with only Maurice in the grip of truth, as established in the opening par:

In his marvellous chronicle of human gullibility, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay wrote: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one."

Now it has been well said, by many marvellous chroniclers of human stupidity, that when men don't know the first thing about the subject at hand, they will revert to gibberish and talk of herds and religion, and never recover their senses.

Newman showed how it was done by converting science into a religion:

The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling.

When in doubt, always go the religion routine.

It means you never actually have to speak of the actual science.

Of course, it can also get atheists going, what with people like Tony "climate science is crap" Abbott believing in transubstantiation (cannibalism and an orgy of blood drinking at your local Catholic church, dressed up as wafers and wine to fool the suckers), virgin births, loaves and fishes, burning bushes, parting seas, rising from the dead - was heaven so bad?- and all the rest of the hokum. But that's actual religion, and if you think about it long and stupidly enough, it's a kind of science ...

Speaking of religion, it turns out that one of Newman's cited sources, Roy Spencer, is a keen intelligent designer:

In TCS Daily, Spencer wrote, "Twenty years ago, as a PhD scientist, I intensely studied the evolution versus intelligent design controversy for about two years. And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as 'fact,' I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism. In the scientific community, I am not alone. There are many fine books out there on the subject. Curiously, most of the books are written by scientists who lost faith in evolution as adults, after they learned how to apply the analytical tools they were taught in college." In the book The Evolution Crisis, Spencer wrote, "I finally became convinced that the theory of creation actually had a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution, for the creation model was actually better able to explain the physical and biological complexity in the world. [...] Science has startled us with its many discoveries and advances, but it has hit a brick wall in its attempt to rid itself of the need for a creator and designer." (and more on the "official climatologist to the Rush Limbaugh" show here and any number of entries here).

Yep, the religion behind the anti-climate science crusade seems to be firmly creationist. Sucks boo, Darwin ...

There is of course plenty more to be found in Maurice's work, including many swipes at wind energy, and delusions - yes, 'delusion' gets trotted out six times, in a epic flurry of delusionalism - with only Maurice to hand ready to tilt at the wicked, wretched windmills ... before Maurice rounded it up with this almost biblical denunciation:

From the UN down, the climate change delusion is a gigantic money tree. It is a tyranny that, despite its pretensions, favours the rich and politically powerful at the expense of the poor and powerless. But the madness of the crowds is waning and, as Mackay writes of the perpetrators: "Punishment is sure to overtake them sooner or later." We can only hope it comes before most of us descend into serfdom. 

Punish the wicked perpetrators, the damned sinners! Now what was that about religion?

And here's the kicker, here's the killer. The reptiles tagged Newman this way:

Maurice Newman is chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council.

So it's official then!

Oh it was a right old rumble after that. Graham Lloyd, long accustomed to spreading fear and confusion about the climate science conspiracy by parroting any guff that crosses his desk, was faithfully at hand to spread the word and conduct an interview with Maurice in Climate policies helped kill manufacturing, says Maurice Newman (behind the paywall because conspiracies don't come cheap).

It was poignant, heart-rending, as Newman explained how Senator Madigan (yes he too believes in cannibalism and human blood-drinking in churches) had explained that the windmills were ruining everything:

He said the issue involved "the pain and suffering of little people living in rural Australia, environmental damage, fraud on a grand scale, deception, lies and concealment".

It's an international global conspiracy, perhaps reaching into the furthermost recesses of the universe!

Naturally the reptiles knew they were on a winner, and quickly cobbled together a follow up, Newman faces a storm on climate (behind the paywall because sustaining a conspiracy theory is so damned expensive), with a quote from a Labor party chap, because you know, teh rag is so fair and balanced ... and scientific ...

The reptiles even ran a piece by Mohamed Nasheed, Denialists defy tradition (behind the paywall because it costs to publish the controversy), blathering on about the Maldives sinking, while claiming at the same time to be a conservative believer in free markets, small government, globalisation, Thatcherism and Reagonomics.

Rubbish sir, you're a delusional part of a massive international conspiracy, a mere pawn. Don't bother Maurice with your petty concerns. Sinking islands indeed ...

And there were other responses, typically led by those arch-conspirators at Fairfax and The Graudian. Jonathan Swan's piece, Tony Abbott's business adviser says Australia taken 'hostage' by 'climate change madness', (forced video at end of link) used this photo, both apocalyptic and comfortably religious, as an illustration:

Oh Lord, save us from the crazed, crazy climate scientists

The Graudian, in Tony Abbott's top business adviser accuses IPCC of 'dishonesty and deceit' favoured a rather more glum illustration:

Still, there's a whiff, a hint of paranoia in the glumness.

Then there was Australia, 'hostage to climate change madness'? To say so is madness indeed, and at least one proposal for a new year's resolution- Tony Abbott's new year's resolution: disavow climate change extremist Maurice Newman - and David Karoly even accused Newman of being a flat earther who'd mistaken the new year for April Fool's Day in Maurice Newman's flat-earth thinking ignores climate change facts. (forced video at end of link)

Of course that's just part of Newman's boldness, and bravery - perhaps the source of his greatness.

How wonderful that he should have decided to hit out, just as newspapers were faithfully recording the news that Åustralia had just experienced its hottest year on record since records began.

It naturally led to obvious stories like Australia swelters under a sham climate change policy after hottest year on record.

Pshaw! Silly Alexander White! Fancy not understanding that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology is one of the key players in the gigantic fraudulent international global conspiracy ...

But for the real measure of Newman's genius, you just have to look at the opposition.

Oh sure, the Fairfaxians tried it on, by publishing John McLean's Lack of accountability clouding the climate change debate. 

McLean also did a heap of IPCC bashing, but the main thing clouding the Fairfaxian approach was the way McLean's credentials were distorted (you can find McLean here in Climate Misinformer: Favourite climate myths by John McLean), resulting in an angry note to L'Age by reader Jason Good, who mentioned McLean's preferred organisations were favoured by ExxonMobile funding (here).

Way too obvious Mr. McLean! And a pitiful effort from the Fairfaxians, who really don't get the denialist spirit that's the sturm und drang of the Murdochians.

Naturally the Daily Terror tried its little heart out. The most distrusted newspaper in Australia missed out on Newman, so there was much amusement about the Antarctic explorers getting stuck on board ship while heading south.

The Terror dusted off the moths and the smell of napthalene flakes to give the jolly rogered Roger Franklin a run In the icy grip of fear that global warming is claptrap, but it was feeble, pitiful stuff.

Oh there's no doubting that the Roger is a wonderfully insightful climate scientist, but the best he could manage was a few jokes about warmists and grants, because taking a dime from Rupert Murdoch and the least trusted newspaper in Australia is so much more ethical ...

Miranda the Devine was also on hand, but since her hero Lord Monckton ran off with the fundies she's never recovered the zest, and it has to be said that Warmists trapped by irony off Antartica  was a tepid effort.

Oh sure, there was a flurry of 'warmists' being in pathological denial, but it surely takes an expert form of pathological denialism not to mention once Australia's record year of heat...

That's the way the ironical argument proceeds in the tabloid fundamentalist mind, certainty to the exclusion of all other possibilities ...

Of course there's an irony about denialists seizing on a weather event, when they relentlessly whine about warmists seizing on weather events, but somehow it lacked any pizzazz.

One hapless Graudian journalist bit on the tease with Five basic Antarctic facts for climate change sceptics, but it was a storm in an Antarctic teacup.

What gives Maurice grunt is that he dared to sign the federal government's name to his rant.

Now where was Tony Abbott? In France, so they say. And Greg Hunt? No doubt off at a meeting of the flat earth society, or taking advice from his government's business advisor.

The capper to all this?

Well at the same time that Newman was breaking into the press, news came that one third of the US population rejected the theory of evolution and for some bizarre reason the news.com.au website determined it would run a story Are the very mental shortcuts our brain has evolved for efficiency working against the acceptance of evolution?

Never mind that this is an old story, given a fresh coat of paint by a new survey.

What was amusing was the way the Murdochians cannily outlined the challenged comprehension at work in the world of the "teach the controversy" Murdochians ...

But let's ignore all this talk of science, which is really a religion, and religion, which is really a science.

The pond has a most unexpected winner, a champeen of international global conspiracies, even if the news is now so last year, and already new challengers are surging on to the track, eager to show their stuff ...

Bold, brave Cory Bernardi has made an early run in the new year for the prize that rightfully should have been his in 2013.

Oh yes, Cory Bernardi calls for debate on abortion in controversial new book (forced video at end of link) suggests that 2014 is going to be a grand year for the pond, and for aspirational loons who want to tilt at windmills, and who knows, achieve the ultimate heights scaled by Maurice Newman.

Now if only we could present an autographed copy of David Pope's cartoon as a prize - and remember, there's always more Popery here.

Why the wicked lad even had something to say about that record so studiously ignored by the Murdochians, suggesting he probably sketches while flying to work on a black helicopter ...