Bugger all wit, bugger all wisdom this lightweight Thursday ...

How offensive does it get on a daily basis?

Well there's always the wit and wisdom of Bob Carr.

Back in the day they could only get 122 pages out of the wit and wisdom of Billy McMahon:

It is, of course, a noble tradition in Australian publishing, though they could only get 96 pages together for this one:

'If homosexuality is a fashion statement, it is a very dangerous fashion statement. '

Don't keep it in the family Bob. You tell 'em Bob...

Meanwhile, the reptiles at the Daily Terror are having a field day with Bob Carr, but for once, who can blame them?

All the same, the pond was deeply shocked and horrified.

No, not that Carr was in charge at the time that Eddie Obeid began his rise to infamy, or that Sydney copped Olympics rather than infrastructure during his reign, or that Carr could conflate first class PJs with the unfortunate fate of Palestinians in the middle east, or that single-handedly Carr has done more to tarnish the Labor party than a gaggle of faceless Liberal heavyweights - all that was to be expected - but that the Terror should use the quaintly English word "tosser", instead of the honourable Australianism, "wanker".

Sad to say, the cane toad Currish Snail committed precisely the same thought crime:

Both words come from across the sea, of course - the whole bloody language did - but "wanker" has always been the Australian word of choice.

As usual, even in a worthy cause, the Terror and the Snail manage to dishonour Australia. Luckily for them, Bob Carr manages to dishonour Bob Carr and the Labor party without raising a sweat ...

As always with Carr, the pond has mixed feelings. Contempt that he immediately broke his promise to hang around in the Senate - politicians are so used to lying they expect people to see a broken promise as just another day's business - mixed with fear and loathing. Imagine if he'd actually hung around in the Senate, instead of strutting around like a plucked peacock ...

Can anyone come close to Carr? Well credit and a big shout out to Joe de Bruyn for doing his level best and handing the reptiles an EXCLUSIVE:

Do a Greg Hunt if you like on the rabid Joe, here, but the best the pond can say is that it seems like Joe and the Bolter would find a lot in common, and perhaps should set up a political party together. Go double dutch if you like:

De Bruyn has come under scrutiny for voicing his conservative views while being secretary of a trade union and holding a position on the National Executive of the centre-left Australian Labor Party. He has repeatedly voiced opposition to abortion, and to legalising same sex marriage. At a quarterly SDA members meeting in February 2011, de Bruyn moved a resolution against gay marriage, without giving any members a chance to speak or vote on the issue.

Yep, that's honest Joe's idea of democracy in action.

Meanwhile don't propose a cup of coffee to Joe. He'd probably see it as a manoeuvre for factional advantage ...

Dinosaurs the lot of them ...

But, you say, all this is well known, and it's the pond's job to do a Randy Stone and cover the wanker right wing commentariat for the daily pond ....

Ah, those were the days of OTR, and more on Randy - who was in fact never randy - here ... though he could always spot a wanker at ten paces.

Speaking of wankers at ten paces, the pond reserves a particular hostility, fear and loathing for people writing about the private lives of others in order to churn out a bit of cheap copy.

Cue the wretched Paul "Magic Water Man" Sheehan, scribbling away:

Sheehan shows no sign in Peaches Geldof's life not so peach keen of having met Geldof, even in passing.

The usual style for that sort of colour piece goes something like: I once saw John Lennon standing on the corner of west 54th and Broadway, and the intimate contact made me determined to set down the full story of John Lennon the man I knew ...

How low does Sheehan go? Well he starts off quoting the resident doctor on ITV's This Morning program, courtesy of the good doctor's thoughts as they were refracted in the tabloid Daily Mirror.

Now there's journalistic research at its finest.

Now leave aside the reality that you could, if you wanted to stroll in this particular gutter, by heading off to the Mirror on the intertubes. Pause instead to wonder why the Fairfaxians would bother to print - nay to feature - this sort of common gossip clucking and tut-tutting, except as the lowest form of click baiting trolling village green twaddle.

Does Sheehan have any novel or interesting insight to offer into Geldof, her life or her death? Nope, because it's all cobbled together from a cursory compounding of news files, which the pond won't bother to reprint here.

What's just as offensive as Sheehan's foray into Geldof's life are the life lessons for young women that he draws from it. How hypocritical does the stench get?

Scrutiny: then there is the new pressure from social media, the peer scrutiny, the semi-public profile, the capacity to project a public image. 

See, it has nothing to do with ghouls like Sheehan checking the runes and the tea leaves, it's the social media, and peer scrutiny, and the semi-public profile, which is presumably a bit like being semi-pregnant.

And then there are the other generalisations:

Image: the images presented of feminine beauty have never been more oppressively and unforgivingly outlandish. The freakish body type of the tall, thin, leggy model is presented as the feminine ideal. These images are often airbrushed or photo-shopped or film-edited into even more outlandish unreality.

Oh indeed, indeed. The pond simply can't think of or imagine another time when women might have been objectified:

Mummy, mummy, where did all the pubic hair go?

Perhaps Sheehan fancies himself as being in the grand tradition of Norman Mailer, though when you look at it, Mailer had a few issues:

Mailer did not actually kill any of his wives (unlike the French philosopher Louis Althusser, who strangled his), but he stabbed his second wife twice in the neck and his fourth accused him of beating her. His fascination with hyper-masculinity drew him to boxing; it also resulted in tragedy when Mailer was instrumental in securing the release of a convicted killer, Jack Abbott, who then stabbed a waiter to death. (here)

Hmm, perhaps it's time for the pond to extrapolate from Mailer's life to make a few gross generalisations about men.

Sorry, that would mean interrupting the generally grumpy Sheehan's stream of drivel:

Weight: a fetish with weight is reflected in the great majority of women being dissatisfied with their appearance according to numerous social surveys. It is reflected in the current mania for hard exercise among many young women (and young men, for the same reasons).

Oh indeed, indeed. Where could all that have come from? Why the mania is completely preposterous:

Hmm, is that a lump in the lycra, or is the PM just pleased to see the photographer?

I know, I know, the pond is wilfully misusing a Mae West quote.

But West had other quotes, ones that nailed the likes of Sheehan to the wall:

Or in the case of Sheehan, what they write:

Excess: the number of young women who are bulimic, anorexic, self-harming, binge-drinking or taking illicit drugs is, collectively, as high as it has ever been.

Now that sounds impressive, for a nanosecond, as if actual research has been done, statistics compiled and analysed, findings reviewed and cited ...

And then you pause to contemplate what Sheehan is actually saying.

Excess, in one form or another, collectively, is as high as it has ever been. Or presumably, contrariwise, as low as it has ever been, or perhaps, if we're inclined to avoid the little or the big end solutions, collectively, as median as it has ever been ...

It's gibberish, just like all the other gibberish that saw Sheehan seize on Peaches Geldof's life to dump on young women ...

Yep, it's a proud tradition that goes back to Exodus and no doubt was alive and well before that:

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live ...

As for why anyone would want to read the preening Bob Carr, or the second hand regurgitated insights of Paul Sheehan - with about as much substance as the mound left by a dog after it's eaten a little Tamworth grass - remains a mystery to the pond ...

But that's the lightweight out of the way for the day, and time to get on to a serious matter.

Yes, that hagiographic serial knob polisher and philosophical fellow traveller Tim Wilson has been out and about in recent days, explaining just why he can vary his views on free speech according to the days of the week, and a change in the direction of the wind.

Hot air works that way.

You can waste precious minutes of your life, if you like, reading Free speech, the public service and civilising behaviour - "Sigh" - if only for the pleasure of observing the many contradictions inherent in the argument, which seems in a nutshell to amount to this:18C bad; making sure public servants toe the line good...

Apparently it's all part of a "voluntary" code of conduct, if you understand "voluntary" to mean sign this, or piss off and go starve or try to live on the dole ...

The pond could never quite believe that Wilson had let loose on Twitter his real idea of freedom of speech. It all seemed like a bad dream, or an internet meme:

(found here)

But it seems Tim "send in the water cannons" Wilson really did tweet it, and now expects his maundering hagiographic knob polishing defence of the government and the Bolter to be taken seriously.

Which makes the pond ever so grateful that there are cartoonists like Pope to send up the rambling, prattling, prating, blathering, chattering, jabbering, gabbing, gabbling, babbling idiots as they go about scribbling their drivel ...

And that's the very last lightweight hypocrite for the day.

Call in the Pope, the one that resides in Canberra, and more of the Pope that's better than the Roman papish pope, here:

Stuck in Mobile with the Memphis blues again ... and they call that the joy of free speech ...

 (Above: Leunig sets the scene for ennobling suffering. More Leunig here)

It started with a throbbing and a pulsing hum.

Was it an avant-garde composition unfamiliar to the pond? A lesser Stockhausen?

No, it was just another early morning start on Radio National, and soon enough the intriguing sound turned into a repeat of the Law report, with nary a hint of an explanation. Perhaps the pond was just hallucinating, perhaps it was an acid flashback ...

Mark Scott should bottle this stuff and sell it at the school fair ...

Meanwhile, simply by a quirk of the browser, the pond came into touch with sanctimonious tosh of the first water.

But you already knew that you could cop a dose of preening self-satisfaction from David Brooks any day of the week, didn't you? Brooks, a remarkably self-satisfied and self-centred man, in the usual way of the commentariat, delivered what he no doubt considered an ennobling set of sentiments on happiness and suffering:

The right response to this sort of pain is not pleasure. It’s holiness. I don’t even mean that in a purely religious sense. It means seeing life as a moral drama, placing the hard experiences in a moral context and trying to redeem something bad by turning it into something sacred. Parents who’ve lost a child start foundations. Lincoln sacrificed himself for the Union. Prisoners in the concentration camp with psychologist Viktor Frankl rededicated themselves to living up to the hopes and expectations of their loved ones, even though those loved ones might themselves already be dead. (What Suffering Does)

Or you might be Primo Levi, and fall from a balcony and leave the world to argue whether it was suicide.

The pond has absolutely no explanation of why Brooks should, from his smug eerie, take on the unctuous hand-wringing superiority of a half-baked Anglican minister offering the holy and the sacred to suffering folk (perhaps you could also score a cheese and cucumber sandwich, though you should never drink American tea), but sure as shit, you can guarantee he won't be walking a mile in the shoes of the long suffering.

Next week, as with so many of the American commentariat, he'll be back to explaining how an increase in the minimum wage is a deeply moral question:

Low income is the outcome of these interrelated problems, but it is not the problem. To say it is the problem is to confuse cause and effect. To say it is the problem is to give yourself a pass from exploring the complex and morally fraught social and cultural roots of the problem. It is to give yourself permission to ignore the parts that are uncomfortable to talk about but that are really the inescapable core of the thing. (The Inequality Problem)

Yep, bugger an increase in the minimum wage, that's morally fraught, let's keep on with the noble and sacred and holy cause of suffering ...

What humbug and moral hypocrisy, what a comprehensive and gigantic goose.

Waiter, is there a hot poker in the house?

Well if this level of delusion and grandiose piety is what can be found in the alleged American paper of record, you can see why a chastened pond quickly headed back to native Murdochian turf for a dose of local grandiosity ...

Sure enough, there was Dame Slap blathering on about 18C, and this time enjoining a couple of Canadians in the cause to set the Bolter and his commenters free to be wild-eyed bigots.

Dame Slap concludes grandly:

So, has Canada become a haven for bigots without section 13? Of course not. 

It is, of course, a haven for Mark Steyn ...

And this is the sort of historical perspective that Steyn offers:

While we wait for intellectually honest members of the Left to emerge, Steyn says we must also relentlessly push back against the jackboot bigotry claims. “You have to say ‘You’re insulting Australians’, just as we said: ‘You’re insulting Canadians saying that.’ We’re not people who have a dark, fascist totalitarian past — Canada and Australia are two of the oldest, settled, constitutional societies on earth. They haven’t gone through third empires and fourth republics, and all the other stuff. People can be trusted to decide for themselves.”

Now that's how you sweep memories of the White Australia policy under the rug, and dis-remember that Australia was a member of the British Empire, its power as an independent war monger in doubt right up to the ratification of the Statute of Westminister in 1942, and inter alia teaching pesky blacks, those damned Boers and those wretched Turks a damned good lesson, before lately dishing out the same medicine to those bloody Iraquis and Afghanis ...

And through it all this proud country has never shown the slightest inkling or awareness that there might be any hint of prejudice or jackbooted bigotry in its past. Waiter, is there a flag with a Union Jack on it in the house?

Anyway, if you can be bothered to get around the paywall, you can read Dame Slap going on endlessly about wonderful Canadians and the hapless blight of the Bolter in One voice on free speech but truth to tell, it's been scribbled so many times in such repetitious form by so many Murdochians you could write it yourself in your sleep ...

But being the pond, there must be irony, surely there's an irony to be found, and sure enough, it comes with the juxaposition of all the Murdochians rabbiting on about the plight of the Bolter - when, judging by the comments reprinted on the pond's pages, he and his commenters can indulge in the most outrageous free speech, enough to make a cesspit smell as sweet as a rose ...

... up against this effort from the Abbott government:

Prime Minister Tony Abbott's department has taken the bizarre step of declaring that its advice on how staff should use Facebook and Twitter is a secret, even though it was reported across the country.
The department's leaked Social Media Policy attracted controversy because it urges public servants to dob on colleagues who use the internet to criticise politicians or policies, even if they do so anonymously.

You can read more in Public service's leaked guide to dobbing on colleagues is now 'secret', which concludes:

Ms Banerji wrote to Attorney-General George Brandis on Tuesday, saying the bureaucracy's policies on using Facebook and Twitter were "a 'trip-wire’ for public servants in that, while on the one hand the guidelines state that public servants are encouraged to enter into robust discussion, they are in fact, not permitted to criticise government as private citizens".
She asked him to declare "that all public servants, as a class of persons, enjoy the constitutionally implied freedom of political communication in their capacity as private citizens, whatever their platform of expression".

Say what?

Public servants should be allowed to express themselves, rather than trudge down endless corridors in dour silence, carrying bundles of files because the department forgot to order sufficient USB keys?

Oh no, no, no, that will not stand. You see, free speech is essential for the minions of Murdoch but anyone who dares to suggest the Abbott government is fucked - while they do its dirty work - is going beyond the bounds of decency ...

Let's not get carried away. It's absolutely essential rabid bigots have the right to free speech, but public servants imagining that they're citizens? It's indecorous at best, and downright offensive at worst. If thine eyes or thy servants offend thee, pluck them out and sack 'em ...

As for the Murdochians, what exactly do they do with their free speech?

Well if you're Miranda the Devine you write an absolutely childish and incredibly mind-boggling, condescending piece about political manipulation, which you can read in Doing The Block on PUP, but only if you want to lose ten IQ points in a single go. 

What it shows is a mind rotted to the core by reading Swiss bank account Gra Gra in the lizard Oz, and watching too much reality television:

When Steve and Chantelle were teamed up with the unfortunate twins, the result inevitably was disharmony. They worked against each other as individuals. They could not get on. Their energy was spent on arguing, sulking and bruised egos.
Against the sunny, socially-skilled dream team of the Super Ks and Brad and Dale, they didn’t have a chance.
So there we have it for Project Clive: the road map from Richo and the script from The Block.
All that’s left is to choose the Dream team. The government leader in the senate Eric Abetz already has his job cut out schmoozing the other crossbenchers. Senator George Brandis seems to be positioning himself as chief Clive Wrangler. While the Attorney-General has a brilliant mind, he doesn’t have the social skills.
When it comes to wrangling Clive, you need to call in the cavalry.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has been cooing sweetly about her “friend” Palmer since the weekend. If there’s one thing Bishop is good at, it’s getting on with people. That’s how she ended up being Kevin Rudd’s best friend in parliament. But she’s also pretty busy as Foreign Minister.
Step forward Senator Cory Bernardi, socially adept and woefully underutilised. Since being banished from Abbott’s inner sanctum for political incorrectness, he can relate to Palmer’s outsider mentality. He’s also friends with Family First’s Bob Day, who will likely be the driving force of the crossbench. Bernardi and Bishop are the Kyal and Kara of parliament, The Super Bs, ready to destroy Clive’s team with a smile.

It's bizarre, it's childish, it's politics for pre-schoolers or on a good day the kindergarten set ... and it's a reminder that free speech doesn't guarantee sensible, insightful, useful or remotely intelligent speech ...

But it surely suggests what we're likely to be getting soon enough. The Abbott government as a TV reality show enacting policy and conducting relationships like grasping, conniving people on free to air television...

Take that David Brooks. Take your pious talk about suffering being ennobling and sacred and shove it. There's nothing sacred about being stuck in Mobile with the Memphis blues again ...

As for the rest? Well David Pope says all that needs to be said, and more Pope here.

Forget that waxing and buffing, get a little dirt on your hands ...

The pond likes to learn a little new history every day ...

For example, it came as a surprise to learn that, while there were plenty of beards in ancient Greece, there were absolutely no bears.

It turns out that men indulged in daily waxings, and waxing studios littered the land. And the entire point of belonging to the Greek city state was to be able to afford gym membership, since what's the point of being waxed if you're not incredibly buff and cut?

Themistocles' battle with Xerxes came about because the vile, perverted Persians were against affordable gyms, and preferred decadent Goth personal decorations to a decent workout. Oh and it turns out Australian actors are most adept at re-enacting this history, because, like the ancient Greeks, they're incredibly cut and buff.

But you say, this isn't really history.

Well it seems the pond has as much of a grasp of history as readers of Andrew Bolt's blog. The pond couldn't believe it when alerted by a correspondent to this comment:

International Jewry is hell-bent on widening censorship laws all over the Western world. Some imam in western Sydney is not going to change that. And before Bolt start crying “antisemenism!”, may I point out that even Jews like Ezra Levant and Paul Gottfried have been pointing this out. 
But why would Jewry act in this way? That question raises some of the deepest and most uncomfortable facts that are hidden in twentieth century history. And it is precisely in order to keep these facts untouched, or “beyond discussion” so to speak, that censorship is pushed so intensely. Because when you start to untangle the common held view of events in the last century the very power complex that Jewry rely upon starts to disintegrate. 
Dr No of Sydney (Reply)

Indeed. And even more bizarre, it's still up there, and available online, as bold as brass. There's not much to say, except that clearly the moderator of the blog aspires to be Joseph Goebbels, and courtesy the Bolter's blog, the HUN is well on the way to being a modern Der Stürmer. No wonder they say 18C is useless ...

And when you roam through the rest of the cesspit, it's astonishing what else is on view that's worthy of a posting on Stormfront.

International Jewish conspiracies, international Islamic conspiracies, hapless persecuted white minorities ... what else you got?

But where does this paranoid fear and loathing come from?

Okay, the Godwin's Law swear jar is filling nicely, and soon enough the pond will be able to afford a post graduate degree course at the David Dukes' university. Here's hoping they can afford the Bolter as a senior professor ...

It's important to learn the mental toughness of a skinhead neo-Nazi, or a super buff ancient Greek, because at some point the hardened commentariat warrior will leave the HUN cesspit and stumble off to the reptiles at the lizard Oz for some light reading. 

Like this:

What is there to say about the ineffable stupidity of Gary Johns? Except to say that his trolling, click-baiting ways are like little boys in Lewis Carroll poems:

Speak roughly to your little Johns 
And beat him when he scribbles and he sneezes 
He only does it to annoy 
Because he knows it teases. 
I speak severely to my little Johns 
I beat him when he scribbles and he sneezes 
For he can thoroughly enjoy 
The pepper when he pleases

You see, the point about inner-city elites is that they're ridiculously, ostentatiously, sickeningly wealthy and 'leet (and probably buff and cut, what with all the waxing, and the gym work).

Johns seems to think they'd be better off weeding corn. So much for the clever country, bring on that NBN made of sealing wax and copper ...

You can read Ignore inner-city prattle, islander work scheme is a win-win, if you care to avoid the paywall, but only if you want to confirm that Gary Johns is indeed a bubble-headed booby with many significant chips on his shoulder.

Johns opens up this way:

Blackbirding is back in Bundaberg and elsewhere in regional Australia. Where Australians do not want to work in “menial” jobs in horticulture, rural producers have had to look elsewhere for a workforce. Backpackers have been a standby, but producers wanted a more reliable source of labour. That source is Pacific Islanders, just as it was 150 years ago in the infamous blackbirding era. 
Bundaberg region, for example, has a Samoan population of about 150, with more than 50 in Childers and another 15 scheduled to arrive in the near future.

Blackbirding is back in Bundaberg and elsewhere in regional Australia?

Yes, it's history as refracted though Gary Johns doing Frank Miller. And he doesn't even look buff and cut.

Blackbirding was the coercion of people through trickery and kidnapping, often of an ugly kind, to gain a form of slave labour (you can do a Greg Hunt on the word here).

So Johns, in a stupid and idle way, casually defames the Australian government and government officials as blackbirders:

They are part of the commonwealth government’s Seasonal Worker Program, established by the Labor government. At least it got one thing right. The scheme offers employers in the horticulture industry the ability to employ workers from eight selected Pacific Island countries and East Timor when they cannot find enough local labour to satisfy seasonal demand.

Oh wait, it's actually a voluntary scheme, there's no coercion or force used, and so the use of the word "blackbirding" is gibberish, unless you happen to be a devotee of Humpty Dumpty.

(Above: a modern Queensland blackbirder, c. 2014. Read Frank Miller if in doubt)

And wouldn't you know it, Johns then spends the rest of his column explaining how the ancient art of blackbirding wasn't so bad at all. What next? Johns explaining how the forced shipment of blacks to the United States saw them end up in the promised land, so they should stop their whinging and whining?

Johns makes any number of errors, suggesting that it was the vapid intelligentsia and rent-seekers that bewailed the notion of blackbirding, thereby ignoring the actual descendants of those who'd been black-birded and thought it a bit rich.

And so he comes to his conclusion:

Australians are not racist. The inner-city mob and their thin-skinned Aboriginal moral shields should take a look out bush sometime and move to a job.

Could Johns sound more fatuously stupid if he tried harder and boned up on Frank Miller?

Probably not. But here's a suggestion. Some Australians are racist, and some aren't. Live with it. And instead of carrying on like a pork chop, why not give up pissing in the wind in the lizard Oz, and piss off to do some hard yakka in the bush? At least it'll save people the onerous task of getting around the paywall to gaze with bewildered fascination at the reptiles in the zoo ...

But wait, there's more:

Yeay, it's Caterist day, and if the Labor party wanted any indication why any attempt to label it the "progressive" party of choice - whatever that stupid word might mean - then it flew out the window with the Caterists celebrating honest Joe Bullock.

Yes there it is, in that header. They imagine that they're aspiring to being called the "progressive" party:

And the funny thing? How did Mark Bishop establish his case for "progressive" in the story here? 

Why by sounding more Tony Abbott than Tony Abbott on any number of policy issues ...

Is there something in the waxing and the buffing that's harmful to the mind?

Anyway, if you can be bothered to give a flying fuck, and get behind the paywall to read Caterist thought in action, you'll be disappointed at the enormously predictable outpouring that constitutes a Caterist diatribe.

But you knew that already, and you only bothered to read Embracing Bullock worth cost because you like the taste of the lash, and the sight of the blood spattering on the lens in 3D (can't they control blood when doing CGIs?)

Of course if you happen to be a Labor party apparatchik and follow the advice of a Caterist, you'd be following a fool determined to do an Icarus ... it's that wax problem all over again ...

Caterists have only a notional idea of history. Here's how it's done:

What we are witnessing in Western Australia is the grotesque end game in a decades-long battle for control of the ALP. On one side are members who have dirt under their fingernails, on the other those who do not. 
It is a battle between the workers and the intellectuals that began in the early 1960s and flared under Gough Whitlam, a prime minister who Bullock helped vote out of office in 1975.

Yes, it's another pale - looking at Cater, it's tempting to say effete - keyboard pounding city-based ponce, obsessed with people who have dirt under their fingernails, seemingly oblivious to the way Solvol fixed this problem decades ago:

Hmm, that child looks vaguely demonic.

So much for the clever country, so much for the NBN, made of sealing wax and cabbages and pigs with copper wings ...

Never mind, what's so completely bizarre is to see the Caterists argue strongly for the ALP to remain captive to crazed conservative unionists. Anything, anything at all to keep the party out of the hands of actual "progressives".

How bizarre does it get? As bizarre as Frank Miller's view of Greek history:

Once, Labor could accommodate working-class conservatives such as Bullock. Indeed, one of them, Arthur Calwell, used to be in charge of the party. 
In a mournful autobiography written late in life, Calwell drew attention to a new faction in the Labor Party comprising “aggres­sive, assertive, philosophical, way-out people” intent on building “an agnostic, hedonistic ­society based on Freudian ­philosophy”. 
“These people seek to challenge all accepted views and standards that govern our society,” Calwell said. They were “philosophical anarchists” and there were more of them in the Labor Party than any other party. He noted wryly: “The newspaper, radio and television media have been the object of similar penetration.” 
It was encouraging to see Labor’s Tanya Plibersek and ­Anthony Albanese extend an olive branch to Bullock last week, even though his views would be anathema to their inner-city Sydney constituencies. It is important, not just to maintain Labor’s voting bloc in the Senate but also to help prevent the party sinking under the weight of its own irrelevance. 
If the cost of keeping Bullock and those of a similar persuasion in the tent is an exodus of votes to the Greens, as occurred in Western Australia at the weekend, it is the price the party has to pay.

You can see why the reptiles would like this thinking.

Even at the height of the 1961 recession, and despite the bizarre sight of Earle Page contesting a seat and dying without even knowing he'd lost, Calwell could only get to within a couple of seats of Ming the merciless (election result here).

It's an exceptionally cunning ploy by the reptiles.

Berate the ALP for being an out of touch bunch of servile pollies dominated by unelected faceless unionists, while at the same time gravely explaining how the party should kow tow, bow down to and be run and represented by said faceless unionists:

That is a pity since, while the discussion may not suit Labor’s prevailing mood, Bullock deliv­ered a cogent analysis of why the party is failing to win elections. 
“Labor should be interested in regular people,” Bullock said. “When the Labor Party says to voters, ‘Trust us, we have your interests at heart,’ the voters don’t trust them. “And the voters are right. The Labor Party hasn’t demonstrated that they are capable of being trusted to look after the interests of working people and their families. When they do, they will win and win and win and win and win, and the other side will never get a look-in.” 
Bullock is a committed Anglican with Calvinist instincts who represents Labor’s socially conservative tradition. Naturally, therefore, he was treated with derision by the bien-pensant commentators on ABC1’s Insiders on Sunday, host Barrie Cassidy urging Labor leader Bill Shorten to change preselection procedures in Western Australia. 
Yet Bullock was preselected fair and square with 109 state executive votes to Pratt’s 61. Since the Left is dominant in WA’s state executive, it was unusual for a member of the Right to snare the top spot, but Bullock was assisted by a blue-collar putsch, led by the Maritime Union of Australia, to regain control of the party on behalf of workers. 
When the union block split, Bullock won the support of United Voice and romped home. 
In a warning shot to Shorten as he tries to reform the party, Bullock insists that without the union movement the ALP is finished. “It provides significant ­financial resources and manpower to the Labor Party. But, more importantly than that, ballast,” he said. Branch-based members, the winners from Kevin Rudd’s leadership election reform, tend to be activists. 
In other words, said Bullock, they were “mad”.

Yes, in the topsy turvy world of the Caterists, anything is better - even unionists leading beer hall putsches - than those deviant perverted modernists with their trendy jibber jabber ...

So how does the Caterist wrap it up?

Shorten and Labor must hold their nerve. Bullock’s brand of conservatism has greater support than sophisticated columnists imagine. 
If the party is not big enough for Bullock, it will struggle to govern in its own right.

Say what? This would suggest that Nick Cater fancies himself as an unsophisticated columnist ...

Why he might even be drop kick and a boofhead ... eager to get a little dirt on his hands ...

Well amen to that ... and how grand to see that he's doing his bit to ensure that the old and ancient guard, heirs to Artie Calwell, keep on ruling the ALP for benefit of old fashioned unions and hard men trade unionists ...

Take it away, David Rowe, we need some bullshit on the dirt floor, because there's gonna be a fiddler and a dance on Sateerdee night ... (and more Rowe here)

Yes, the pond actually had an uncle whose hut actually had a floor made of dirt and dung:

The old hands told me how to build a clean dirt floor: 
Beat it hard with spades and tread of feet, 
Then soak with green cow dung and sweep again. 
Now sprinkle water, fire, and clear creek sand, 
And sometimes strew with cool green leaves; 
Sprinkle and sweep it twice a day 
Until, clean and sweet and hard, 
It gleams, black, polished like a board. (here, in pdf form, in a handy guide to getting dirt on your hands, feet, eyes and everywhere else)

It helps explain why the pond would prefer an NBN made of fibre, and why all this bullshit about dirt under the fingernails might die a stupid, unsophisticated death.

Nope, forget all that waxing and buffing, we gotta get a little bullshit in the mind, on the floor and under the fingernails.

How lucky we are that the reptiles at the lizard Oz supply a daily dose.

Warning, rough source, forced ad, but a song dedicated to blackbirders, unions, Arthur Calwell, Tamworth, and Caterists around the land. Better order a pallet of Solvol, and stop that jibber jabber about a clever smart country with an NBN made of fibre!

Speaking of travesties on a Monday ...

This invaluable graph explains why the geeks are nervous about what Michael Bay might have done to the immortal legend of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

There's been rumours circulating that indicate the film might be yet another Bay travesty, but if you circulate the rumours, you're becoming part of the Bay trolling, click bait rumour mill ...

Not to worry, invaluable research like this never goes away - you can also find M. Night Shyamalan's career here charted by IMDB, whereby convincing proof is offered that in due course he will achieve the perfect score of O ...

Speaking of travesties, once again Julie Bishop has got the wrong end of the stick, criticising Bob Carr for publishing a memoir on his brief time as foreign minister (you can see her and read about it here).

As if anyone will bother to read this memoir by a prime doofus, which certainly won't get around to explaining why Carr stood for the senate, and then on being elected, immediately decided to quit ...

The pompous blowhard who inter alia ruined the infrastructure of NSW while offering the panem et circenses of the Olympics spent a brief eighteen months on the job dabbling in foreign affairs - Bob Carr quits Senate, 18 months after entering Federal Parliament.

It takes astonishing ability to make a lightweight like Alexander Downer look like a heavyweight, but the opportunist butterfly Carr managed the feat with ease.

Will anybody bother to pay full quid for the book? Will anyone even bother to pick it up on remainder?

Carr has already given the world an idea of the delusional mind involved in the scribbling.

Suddenly he's turned into the next Edward Snowden, detailing all sorts of juicy things:

"The alternative to an Australian foreign minister writing a responsible account of his time as foreign minister is for Australians to wait until the next slew of secrets via Edward Snowden is spilt out to the world," he said. 
 "I think [Ms Bishop] is leaping at shadows and she should wait until the book comes out. 
 "Australians have got a right to know these things."

Bob Carr as a responsible Edward Snowden spilling out things the world and Australians have the right to know ... ?

Does it get any richer or sillier or more preposterous? Why it's even more bizarre than Norman Mailer pitching his book on Marilyn Monroe as a feminist tract.

The only thing the pond is likely to learn is the value of nodding off, drifiting away and sleeping soundly ...

Speaking of Monday travesties - the pond has never liked Mondays, though these days if you sing of silicon chips going wrong and shooting things down they're likely to lock you away - grumpy Paul "Magic Water" Sheehan offers his usual travesty of a political column in Christine Milne the luckiest politician in Australia.

It's so shallow that you couldn't even drown in the magic water spillage ... though it perpetuates the same meme, which is that life and politics is all about voodoo and magic and luck ...

If you followed Sheehan's profoundly silly theme to its logical conclusions, life is all about luck.

Oh wait, it's already been said:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods. 
They kill us for their sport

Thanks Bill, at least you're not recycling Bill Short-term or Bill Short-circuit jokes and calling it informed political commentary by the Fairfaxians' number one political commentator (if Sheehan is number one, what's the second prize?)

The only time Sheehan bothers to acknowledge that actual performance, between the original election and the re-run, had something to do with it, is when he gets around to contemplating the Labor party:

Typical of Labor’s dysfunction in this election, Pratt was lampooned last November by Joe Bullock, the No.1 candidate on Labor’s ticket, for being a lesbian who married a transsexual man.

You won't find Sheehan scribbling anywhere Typical of the Liberal party's dysfunctional time in government ...

No, no, it's bad luck, the gods smiling on the greenies - cue relentless Sheehan green bashing - a snide reference to Dio Wang not even being an Australian citizen four years ago, and it all being a fluke ...

Scrub that, Sheehan does acknowledge one Abbott folly ...

Prime Minister Tony Abbott also scored a spectacular own-goal in the run-up to the election when he revived knighthoods and dames, without consulting cabinet, or common election sense.

Which, when you think about it for a nanosecond, is even sillier, since there are many sins the Abbott government has committed, and is likely to commit in the near future, and the chance of anyone voting simply on the basis of knights and dames - monumentally absurd though that concept is - is bizarre and an insult to every sandgroper who drifted away from the major parties ...

Luck had nothing to do with that. Nor the electoral gods. And luck had nothing to do with the original bungle that necessitated the re-run. It was a bungle, and if the major parties had performed well - as opposed to having Joe Bullock as the lead candidate or being the Abbott government - they would have seen off the protest vote.

Now the lizards are crying into their spilt beer:

Now here's the thing for the reptiles as they look into the mirror this Monday morning and notice a haggard face and bloodshot eyes ...

There was already plenty of evidence, back in the days when Clive Palmer was a respected member of the Queensland Liberals, a go to man for money and opinions and influence, that he was barking mad, at least when the wind blew north by north west, and maybe in the other, real directions of the compass ...

Now, as a result of the Murdoch press pursuing him relentlessly and demonising him and braying at the slightest opportunity that he was barking mad, and the ABC a Palmer pawn, and so on and on, interminably and tediously, Palmer has formed a steadfast hostility to the Murdoch press and all that it stands for, and might well do something, anything in politics simply on the basis that it pisses off the Murdochians....

Revenge can be enjoyed whether served cold or hot ... and now the Murdochians must confront the Frankenstein's monster they've helped to create ...

It's already got the reptiles scratching their heads ...

Uh huh. Oh Brother, it's the Clive reality show (behind the paywall, because reality doesn't come cheap).

Here's how the reptiles, courtesy Phillip Hudson, open their negotiations with Palmer:

The hapless Hudson - one of the more sober reptiles - followed the standard reptile line, that Palmer was head clown in the circus, that it was all due to Palmer spending cash, and that Palmer had mounted yet another assault on the AEC.

But there's nary a mention of the Murdochians v Palmer feud, which has bubbled along during the campaign:

The MP took repeated swipes at Rupert Murdoch, slamming a story published in The Australian yesterday about the carbon tax bill for his company Queensland Nickel. 
“Mr Murdoch has done more for this country than you have,” Ms Markson said. 
“We know you’re crawling a little bit. Why don’t you crawl a bit further. I mean, the point about it is, I’m a living national treasure,” Mr Palmer said, to cries of laughter. (here, with a forced video because some Murdoch business models give away the news)

This sort of nonsense has gone on for years. Back in 2013 Palmer threatened to sue Rupert Murdoch over newspaper coverage (here) and he called the Murdoch press reporting bullshit (here) and he kicked out the lizards from a Perth press conference (here), and so on and tediously on ...

So if Palmer is the head clown, what does it say about the Murdoch press, which did the dance with the clown?

Why, if they weren't a pack of reptiles, you'd call them an alley or pratfall of clowns (get your collective nouns by subject here).

You see, Palmer followed the old, guaranteed showbiz saw that there's no good or bad publicity, there's only publicity ...

As Oscar Wilde himself said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about (and more on publicity at the phrase finder (here)

In the end, for all the work of fearless investigative reporter Hedley Thomas, the clowns couldn't lay a glove on Palmer, not in the same way that Joe Bullock landed a glove on Louise Pratt and the Labor party, and Arthur Sinodinos laid a glove on Tony Abbott and the Liberal party.

And now comes the reckoning, and come July the new Senate, and now Abbott has to pretend that he never said all those nasty, hurtful things about Clive splashing the cash and buying power and influence ...

Take it away Jason Clare ...

... Labor has warned Mr Abbott’s attack could backfire on him during negotiations with the Palmer United Party down the track. 
“I suspect they will rue the day they did that because come July 1, they will be in bed with Clive Palmer,” Labor frontbencher Jason Clare told Sky News. 
“I think Tony Abbott’s judgment in attacking Clive Palmer is probably a bad mistake on his part and he will live to regret that.” (here, at the same news location, with a forced video because some Murdoch business models give away the news)

Yes, they'll be in bed with Palmer, and the reptiles will have to pretend that when Palmer decides to support Abbott's program, he's no longer a clown in the circus, he's a wise businessman doing some hard-headed negotiating, an entertaining man who can entertain Julie Bishop. Cue Hudson:

The government hopes that Palmer will be a pragmatic businessman they can negotiate with rather than an entertainer, an ­attention-seeker or mischief-maker who will force Abbott to dance to his tune and sing for his votes. Last week’s attack by Abbott that Palmer was trying to “buy a seat” is giving way to the charm offensive led by Bishop, who is hoping for a constructive relationship.

Uh huh. Let's see how Tony "crash or crash through" Abbott goes about doing a charm offensive. Let's see how Palmer forgives and forgets the reptiles and their relentless campaigning ...

What's the bet the real circus is only just beginning?

And luck had bugger all to do with it ...

Everyone makes their own beds - unless they happen to be happy little vegemites and well off Murdochians with personal servants - and the Murdochians and the Liberal party have been making this bed for a long time ...

To paraphrase Xavier Hebert, poor bugger, this country ...

But what fun, at least for the cartoonists ...

More Rowe here.

In which the pond spends a Sunday moment meditating on the wealth of cultists throughout the land ...

(Above: Crumb doing the myth of Noah, kool aid story telling for cultists, if you happen to believe Noah was 600 years old when the genocidal god with management issues did her thing)

It's not easy being a liberal magazine, and trying to walk a path between crazed cultists and crazed cops.

Malcolm Gladwell does his best for The New Yorker in Sacred and Profane How not to negotiate with believers (outside the paywall for the moment).

But in the end he falters and falls into line with the believers and never mind that he's writing about David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, and a paedophile, control freak, gun freak who preached that the apocalypse was just around the corner, and surely did his best to bring that apocalypse on ...

Gladwell accepts the line of a Koresh follower, Clive Doyle, that given a couple of weeks, everything could have been amicably worked out. All Koresh had to be given was given a little time to write down his thoughts - put it in a manuscript - and all would be well.

Gladwell and Doyle make much of the way the cops didn't understand Koresh. Gladwell sees this as a failure on the part of the cops:

The second, more serious problem with the way the F.B.I. viewed the Branch Davidians was the fact that the agents could not accept that beliefs such as these—as eccentric as they were—were matters of principle for those within Mount Carmel. During the siege, two of the leaders of the F.B.I. team referred to Koresh’s theology as “Bible-babble” and called him a “self-centered liar,” “coward,” “phony messiah,” “child molester,” “con-man,” “cheap thug who interprets the Bible through the barrel of a gun,” “delusional,” “egotistical,” and “fanatic.”

But on the evidence Gladwell himself presents, Korseh was a child molester, a phony messiah, delusional, egotistical and a fanatic, a gun freak who'd stockpiled weaponry, and so on and so forth ...

Now the cops might have mishandled the situation - deploy a hammer and you're always likely to get an inedible cracked walnut - but the liberal ambivalence Gladwell deploys is also painful to behold.

He even drags in the nineteenth century cult of Mormonism and calls them quintessential Americans, like the Puritans.

So the quintessential American is a mug punter who falls for a huckster and a con man phony peddling a nakedly false cult replete with generous dollops of kool aid ...

Gladwell seems to want liberals to embrace cultists and the obnoxiously different. It's too easy to be a faux liberal:

The country club opens its doors to Jews. The university welcomes African-Americans. Heterosexuals extend the privilege of marriage to the gay community. Whenever these liberal feats are accomplished, we congratulate ourselves. But it is not exactly a major moral accomplishment for Waspy golfers to accept Jews who have decided that they, too, wish to play golf. It is a much harder form of tolerance to accept an outsider group that chooses to maximize its differences from the broader culture. And the lesson of Clive Doyle’s memoir—and the battle of Mount Carmel—is that Americans aren’t very good at respecting the freedom of others to be so obnoxiously different. Many Mormons, incidentally, would say the same thing. When the Mormons settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, local public opinion turned against them. Joseph Smith was charged with perjury and adultery, then arrested for inciting a riot. While he was in custody awaiting trial, in 1844, an armed mob stormed the prison and shot him dead.

To be genuinely liberal, you need to embrace the barking mad.

So the next time you meet up with a gun-toting crazy paedophile who calls himself the successor to Christ, the Lamb of the bible, remember to do your very best to embrace him in a generous and liberal way ...

There's a slightly different emphasis at work if you head off to the Adventists who had to deal with the way the wackos of Waco were linked with their more mainstream cult, as you can read in Branch Davidians (and Adventists) Revisited in The New Yorker.

The story itself is mostly a cut and paste with this concluding note:

As Adventists, we like to distance ourselves from what happened at Waco, but maybe Koresh wasn't so far removed from the Adventist tradition as we like to think.

Well that set the cat amongst the fundamentalist pigeons, and the main interest in the story is to read the comments below the fold.

Hang on, the SDA as mainstream thinkers?

Suddenly the SDA - which the pond always thought fondly of as a cult - began to sound normal and a little intolerant. This comment:

Construe_dat:
A recent convert to Adventism at the time, the Mount Carmel disaster alerted me to the dangers of associating with the fringe elements of the Adventist tradition. This ingrained adversion has served me well in navigating the peculiarities of Adventism. I was amazed that the connection between the Branch Davidians and Adventism was kept out of the press. As this article suggests, we are not that far from the extremism that manifested a Mt Carmel. If one has ever visited an Adventist self-supporting institution, it is easy to imagine that the mindset at Mt Carmel was not much different. 

... was followed by this response:

pagophilus: 
Branch Davidianism was never Adventism. They took the name, they had their roots (long ago) in Adventism, but they had departed and skewed the message so much that it had no relation to what they were promoting. LGT has no relevance to this discussion. LGT'ers are not following a cult leader who leaves the audience spellbound by his "knowledge" and interpretation of prophetic scripture. They follow the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy. 
By the way, as much as authorities failed in how they dealt with the siege, Koresh was not as harmless as some make him out to be. Talk to some people who were Davidians and left. Yes, he was a paedophile. Yes, he was obsessed with guns. Yes, he was a control freak and you had no business arguing with him. Yes, he even claimed to be Jesus Christ himself (at least to one person I know). Some who left had to think of schemes of how to get out without being suspected. A classmate of mine left school around the age of 14 and moved over there and became one of his "wives" and bore his child. (What her parents role in all this was I have no idea.)

And then it was on, the cult v non-cult, and Koresh v the 'mainstream' SDA rolled on for pages.

And the story reverberated elsewhere. Head off here, where the Sheperd's Rod preaches (you've been warned), and you can find an attack on the serious misconceptions perpetuated in Mr. Gladwell's article which devolves into a number of arcane questions. The alleged misconceptions included:

• David Koresh was the successor of a series of prophetic leaders going back to the ministry of William Miller in the early 1830′s. 
• That Christian religious traditions that expect the soon return of Christ (“millennielists”) are connected or associated with Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses. 
• That David Koresh saw himself as the one who was to unlock the secrets of the seven seals when in fact this was already done by Victor Houeff.

Well it's a relief to know that the secrets of the seven seals had been decoded before Koresh did the job, but it reminded the pond of how difficult it is for some liberals to deal with fundamentalism in what might be seen as a judgmental and disapproving way.

Even when judged by ordinary standards fundamentalists are locked into a barking mad unreality - which at various times has involved denying the sun rising because the earth revolved around it, the moon glowing because of the sun's light (rather than it being made of luminescent cheese), and gravity continuing to work as Newton explained it, and the theory of evolution even more solid than the day Darwin proposed it, and atoms splitting the way Einstein suggested it ...

And it reminded the pond of the fundamental mysteriousness of fundamentalism, and the way that some people are suckers for con men.

Like L. Ron Hubbard.

The pond was reminded of Russell Miller's excellent but now very old expose of Hubbard's cult in Bare-Faced Messiah, which it seems is at last going to get a run in the United States, or so Bare-Faced Messiah: The book Scientology tried to ban (forced video) suggests. The pond picked the book on remainder after its initial release, and was genuinely astonished, and now it seems the cult will have to endure the expose all over again.

Did Miller prevent thousands of people being defrauded and ruined?

Not really, but at least it makes a refreshing change to the way that Scientology is now treated by gossip columnists as a branch of showbusiness:

"A union between the Mission: Impossible hunk, 51, and 31-year-old Moss, who's also a Scientologist, would likely please Church of Scientology officials. 'Friends think it would be great for both of them - and Scientology,' said an insider. According to the source, church leaders would probably 'be delighted to have their leading member become involved with another celebrity Scientologist.' By all indications, Tom and Elisabeth - called Lizzie by friends - would make an ideal high-profile couple." (here)

Uh huh. Never mind that's a cult that's defrauded and ruined the lives of thousands, who's Tom Cruise fucking this week?

How do these simple and blatant cons hook so many?

But then you only have to think of Mormonism and Catholicism and Anglicanism and Hinduism and all the other cons offering the one true path to enlightenment and an eternity in paradise. The cults have been working these angles for centuries.

The main difference is that we don't give the same scrutiny to the more ancient cults that we give to new, freshly painted, modern cults.

Yet the old cults produce about the same amount of drivel.

There, for example, amongst the Sydney Anglicans, is John Mason trading off on a movie about a myth to produce Engaging with Noah.

Mason flirts with the practicalities of the myth, before settling the matter by treating the myth as historical fact, with an important moral:

What is important for us here is that Jesus regarded Noah as a historical figure and treated the event of the flood as a reality. 
Just as the flood occurred, just as Jesus’ predictions about his own death and resurrection, and the fall of Jerusalem, were all fulfilled, so too will there come a day when he returns in all his glory. 
Heraclitus, a philosopher of ancient Greece, taught, ‘Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find truth, for it is hard to discover and hard to attain.’ And G.K. Chesterton once remarked, ‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’ 
Our danger today is the same as it was at the time of Noah. The people then were so taken up with their own lives, so proud of their achievements, that they forgot they were but creatures and rejected the reality of God. If only they had been humble enough to turn back to God while they had time (17:26f). Jesus’ reference to Noah and the flood is a chilling reminder that we ignore God at our peril. NOAH, the movie gives us an opportunity to talk with others about the larger realities of life.

Where to start? So Jesus certifies Noah as an historical figure, and the flood as a reality, and that makes it a done deal?

So historical figure Noah lived to 950, Methuselah cracked 969, and Adam scored 930?

So truth is stranger than fiction?

So that's it? Here, have some more kool aid?

About this point, you realise you might as well attempt a discussion with Koresh about the seven seals.

And yet these cults have real consequences.

For reasons that are both bizarre and mysterious - verging on the mystical - the pond ended up in Bathurst yesterday.

In that town the Catholics have almost an entire city block at their disposal in the heart of town, and the school, St Stanislaus College, is perched at the top of the hill with the best views in town:

No doubt it picks up tidy subsidies from the state and federal governments, and helps explain why the Catholic church does so well in terms of wealth and turnover (the other not so big school in town is The Scots School, run by the Presbyterians, with it famously claiming a cult of the bag pipes).

Tax free, government money, assets in the billions, and making a profit by hiring lawyers to screw its victims? Now that's the way to run a cult. Why it makes L. Ron Hubbard look like an amateur ...

If you read its wiki, the school's claim to fame has now been overshadowed by the issue of child sexual abuse ... and some of the links still work and take you to stories like David Marr's Priests and Justice ...

The moral of this Sunday meditation?

Well surely it's to beware of cults, especially cults that speak of Noah being an historical figure and his story an actual reality endorsed and certified via god, through Jesus. And that's before you get on to other cultists who demand your 14 year old daughter and offer you an Armalite ...

And beware of liberals who tread softly around the cultists, lest the cultists take offence at liberals failing to understand the deep and abstruse thinking of the cultists ...

(Below: more Crumb, in which the genocidal god fails to control her anger management issues)

The day the reptiles tried to shun the comedy ...

(Above: Antony Green being silly, as you can read here)

So here's a bright idea ... the pond, always doing community service, offers it free of charge.

Worried about appearing out of touch, dominated by crazed conservative Christians using a union position to exploit the union's power to get a dominant position on the ballot?

Well you could just make a speech about dynamic new Labor, embracing dynamic new values, distancing said new Labor from unions, and distancing new Labor from recalcitrant angry old dinosaurs, and to show you mean business, keep them away from the ballot box ...

But the solution's actually much simpler ... appoint a crazed conservative Catholic using a union position to get a dominant position on the ballot. Numero Uno. And then let him speak ...

Such simple, poetic advice, and so useful, and will the pond get any thanks for the ALP following the advice down the path to electoral oblivion? Probably not. The comrades are too involved in fluff gathering and navel gazing ...

Meanwhile, the pond had the extraordinary pleasure - along with ABC News 24 - of contemplating the eight votes cast and counted and displayed at the beginning of the broadcast of the WA senate election.

It was a moment of zen. Eight votes. What could they mean? What did they imply? What did they portentously portend?

Oh the computer spent many happy minutes frolicking and throwing up completely meaningless figures ...

Spoilsport Antony Green had the modesty to look embarrassed and concluded they meant nada, zip, nothing, fiddled with the computer, and the eight votes were consigned to history.

News 24?

Why the next morning, if you went in search of an update, you could stagger out to see Geraldine Doogue having a stand up discussion with he of the whimsical name, Bishop Spong, and then a local Anglican, whose name the pond missed.

Want to find it and head off to the ABC's website to check the missing name? Good luck with that. Talk about skeletal and bare bones, here. You can find out more by heading off to TVtonight, here, including the news that it first aired back in August 2013.

It was too much culture shock for the pond on the day they took daylight savings down, but what was even more interesting was the way the eastern papers wiped any discussion of Western Australia's mini-election from the map.

It seemed the worst fears of the reptiles might now come to pass - PUP and the Greens looked in the running for a seat - so you could hunt  - at 7 am adjusted eastern time as the pond did - through  the front digital pages of the Sunday Terror, and the HUN, and the Currish Snail, and find diddly squat about the WA election.

The sandgropers had done wrong and so they were exiled from Valhalla, hunted and driven from the flock.

WA? Let it be excised from the mainland and drift off into the Indian Ocean where it and missing planes belonged.

The reptiles at the lizard Oz did run a story at the top of the digital page:

But compare that to the coverage on offer, without subscription, at The Graudian, and at the top of the digital page:

(no hot links, screen cap).

Now some of this was an aggregation of old stories, but it least it looked like the Graudian was interested in this remote, distant, likely deviant, certainly mysterious land ...

And Lenore Taylor knocked off a brief column, Tony Abbott's negotiating skills will be put to the test under new Senate, which did the math:

Under one possible outcome in the WA Senate rerun (Labor winning the final seat) if Labor and the Greens oppose a bill, Abbott is going to need the Senate votes of the Palmer United party bloc and also three votes from a diverse group of four – Independent Nick Xenophon, the DLP’s John Madigan, Family First’s Bob Day and the Liberal Democratic party’s David Leyonhjelm. Labor and the Greens would need only two of the crossbench to join with them to win the 38 votes needed to block a bill. Under the other scenario (the Liberals winning the final seat) Abbott would need Palmer and two more votes, and Labor and the Greens would need to find three to block. 
Of course Labor and the Greens will not always oppose the Coalition. The Greens, for example, are the Coalition’s best best bet to win passage for Tony Abbott’s generous paid parental leave bill, with some amendments. And it is not uncommon for the major parties to vote together.

It's easy to see why the reptiles got the sulks and decided to shun the sandgropers, hide them under a rock.

Get the backing of the Greens to pass a reprehensibly generous paid parental leave designed to benefit the well off, at a time when everybody in jolly Joe Hockey's camp is blathering about the age of entitlement and the precarious situation of the budget and the Bolter is shrieking that pensions must be cut?

Oopsie daisie ...

Get the backing of the PUPsters to abolish the carbon tax, give Clive and his companies an unseemly boost - will it be made retrospective to heal Palmer's wounds? - and then implement a risible, reprehensible, expensive and ineffective direct action plan, which is pissing money against the wall in this dangerous age of entitlement?

It's the stuff of comedy or of disaster - at least if your idea of comedy is seeing the Abbott government do endless pratfalls slipping on bananas and landing face first on conveniently placed custard pies ...

But is shunning the sandgropers the most professional response to the result?

Will that make the wounded pride of the reptiles heal a little easier?

It won't be so easy if the results make life hard for Abbott in the upper house. One of the ways Abbott effectively tarnished Gillard's minority government was by noting the company that it kept.

Abbott might now have to keep some sordid company of his own.

But was there another reason for the sulking and the shunning?

What did it mean? Could Scott Ludlum have retained his seat courtesy of a video of a speech that went viral?

Is social media having more impact than the reptiles, who did their very best to diss the greenies and the Cliveies?

Was all that abuse directed at the Cliveies in the Oz so much spit on a hot griddle?

Even the Fairfaxians got tired early, and ran a story courtesy of AAP, WA Senate count shows swing to Greens, PUP:

At 12.44pm local time, when 70.88 per cent of polling places had counted first preferences, there was a 5.91 per cent swing against the Liberals and a 5.33 per cent swing against Labor, while the Greens had put on 6.69 per cent. 
At the same time, there was a 7.51 per cent swing towards the Palmer United Party (PUP).

Who knows how it will all turn out, but what once passed as mainstream media in Australia now looks markedly tired and any political junkie who wanted to find out the details of the voting would have been better off looking on the internet at the Western Australian papers or the Graudian than taking a look at the Murdochian fish and chip wrappings being readied in the east ...

Online the Terror still had Akker Dakker at number one on its digital whirlpool of death:

Thereby entirely missing the rich comedy of Joe Bullock and Louise Pratt:

Labor Senator Louise Pratt has caused a political storm by defying party recommendations and voting below the line in the Senate election. 
In front of the media at Dianella Heights Primary School, Ms Pratt spent at least five minutes filling in every box below the line of her ballot paper – fuelling speculation she was protesting about being placed second on the ALP Senate ticket, behind former union leader Joe Bullock. 
 ALP pamphlets handed out at polling booths told voters: “Just place the number 1 in the box F above the line as shown. 
 “No need to fill in below the thick black line.” (more here)

Well would you vote Bullock number one if he'd taken a cheap shot at your sexuality and the gender of your partner?

All in all, this circus seemed to presage the grander circus that is to follow in Canberra very shortly, with an extended season that would have Ashton's circus salivating at the mouth ...

It's old news to lost souls clustered around Botany Bay. We've been in touch with circuses since at least 1798 ... (click on to enlarge)