If wouldn't be Monday without Paul Sheehan blathering on about bureaucrats and progressives ...

(Above: but if she didn't start the fire, how to cook the sourdough?)

First up, a note in honour of the Duffster.

Michael Duffy inspired the pond to get underway long ago, by scribbling columns for Fairfax designed to provoke. But over the years, either he or the pond has mellowed, or perhaps both.

His allegedly right wing ABC program Counterpoint, designed to irritate lefties and right wingers like Gerard "It should have been me" Henderson, long ago began playing music designed to shock the average conservative, and its guest list has become increasingly polymorphic perverse.

Today's the Duffster's last program, and it seems he might now be covering the day and night crime beat for the Sun-Herald.

If he keeps delivering stories like How a stolen mobile phone brought down a brutal killer, he'll be doing much more useful work than posing as a neo-con amongst the cardigan wearers. The only (minor) thought is that he misses opportunities when he follows up the fate of some of the minor players. True crime is a morality tale, and there needs to be a full accounting.

Speaking of useless neo-cons, today of course is Paul "Generally Grumpy" Sheehan today, and he's in fine form mounting a stirring defence of Gina Rinehart in Rinehart didn't start the fire.

Well it sort of starts off as a weird kind of defence of her, but there's also an argument it's more anal-retentive naval-gazing from Fairfax by an expert in anal-retentive naval-gazing, as Sheehan gains an easy half-column by doing a cut and paste from the transcripts of Q&A on the subject of Rinehart, with a few bonus cut and pastes from the Herald.

Who knew journalism could be so easy? Call it a snapshot of a combat zone - lordy that sounds impressive - and you're half way there. Why it's worthy of good old Alan "Scissorhands" "Cut and Paste" Ramsey, the absent lord bless him ... (Journalism has changed forever, says Alan Ramsey).

Strangely, at the point that Sheehan stops cutting and pasting, he directly contradicts the header to his piece, by grandly announcing that Ms Rinehart has also lit a fuse.

So maybe she didn't start the fire, but instead somehow set off an explosion.

But then you can never expect coherent analysis from Sheehan, though to be fair, the fate of Fairfax seems to bring out all sorts of emotional rhetoric. It's simply not possible, for example, to work out what Jonathan Green is saying in his naval gazing Don't just blame the web for Fairfax's failure.

From the sound of it, the problem hasn't been the internet, but marketing people, demographics, focus groups, revenue streams and advertising. Bizarrely Green concludes:

... there was never a business model for quality broadsheet journalism in this country, only a media company that simultaneously sold a lot of little ads and by coincidence produced thoughtful well-reported newspapers.

There never was a relationship between the two things, and in the end, as it turned out, precious little readership for the journalism once the little ads walked out to the door to a brighter, more sympathetic and compelling environment online.

Which is of course a nonsense because just as the little ads walked out the door, so did the journalism, which found itself on line and available around the world ... for free ... in a brighter and more compelling environment online ... for free.

Advertising has always been the basis for tabloid and broadsheets. The purchase price has always been a token towards production costs, but the gravy has been in the advertising. When you give away your content for free, losing your token dollar or so to the production cost, and you also lose your advertising base, it's beyond the bleeding obvious to say you've got a problem. Sadly Jonathan represents the new lightweight ABC ...

But back to Sheehan, and an understanding why he should stay a columnist and never be given a role in the business:

None of what has transpired has so far addressed the structural problem that has obliged Fairfax to make extensive job cuts to staunch losses at its flagship newspapers.
The company's deepest structural problem is not the internet, nor changes in technology that are obliterating the distinctions between television, computer and phone. Its deepest structural problem has been the bureaucratisation of the company.

Read that and weep. Now the cynics out there might argue that the biggest structural problem Fairfax faces is paying a large retainer to Sheehan to write nonsense on a bi-weekly basis - how can that be a value for money activity? - but others might say that without Sheehan Monday would be short of a laugh.

All the same, how could anyone write with a straight face that the internet isn't the company's deepest structural problem, it's the bureaucratisation and the bureaucrats? What's the bet in the next minute or par the ABC will be invoked?

Fairfax has behaved like the ABC except that it does not have the almost $1 billion a year in annual government tax-funded subsidy.

Ha, you lose. Resentment and envy will always win the day ...

Of course in an indirect way this is an attempt to justify the management's attempts to cut, or at least contain costs - so many cardigan wearers lurking the corridors wasting the money that could have been spent on Paul Sheehan's salary - but finally Sheehan makes a choice between analysis and loyalty:

The portrayal of this ominous stand-off between Fairfax Media and its biggest shareholder has seen self-absorption on both sides. The narcissism of the metropolitan media in reporting about itself has been evident, especially at Rupert Murdoch's subsided ideological mouthpiece The Australian.

So what are we to make of Paul Sheehan, a subsided ideological mouthpiece if ever there was one?

Oh I know, it's too cruel, but he could have meant subsided, and not subsidised, and have they shipped all the subs to NZ yet, and does Sheehan ever read his own copy, or is it beneath him? The rot, they say, starts at the head ...

And so for the rest of the piece, Sheehan trots out a conventional line about how Fairfax is one of the biggest newspaper groups in the world, and how it is far from a sunset company and how it's got at least a billion dollars of enterprise value trapped inside its current structure and not reflected in its market value, and how it's got a big, profitable and growing internet operation, and how it has more readers and reach before, and how it can go on forever if its costs are contained, and then comes this furphy:

Most of the Fairfax newspapers and niche publications are small and humble but profitable and sustainable. They are below the radar of the internet. They are key information hubs for their local communities. They are thus the sort of newspapers that the world's most successful investor, Warren Buffett, has begun buying.

Say that line again: They are below the radar of the internet.

Actually they're not. If anyone outside Armidale noticed the arrival of the NBN in town, they didn't say much about it. But somebody at the Armidale Express should take note, and so should the people at Rural Press, because over the next ten years, the way that country people access information and deal with the world is going to change in the same way that it's changed in the capital cities.

The inherent advantage in this context is the masthead, the brand, the familiarity, which allows the established business to present itself as a focal point, as a way of cutting through the extensive amount of noise on the endless intertubes. But the notion that a tri-weekly like the Armidale Express will keep on relying on a print-based future in the medium to long term is delusional.

Thank the lord that Fairfax management at least understands this and in the annual report for 2011 (here in pdf) promised an accelerated rollout of an enhanced digital presence for our regional mastheads ...

Naturally by end of piece Sheehan has positioned the argument as ideological:

What Fairfax needs most is a proprietor who is a media entrepreneur. What it needs least is a self-appointed priesthood of the status quo willing to fight to the last dollar of other people's money.

Uh huh. But Rinehart isn't a media entrepreneur, and Fairfax's position in the market is as a centre right, rather than tabloid Murdoch ratbag right, publication. If Sheehan thinks disembowelling "progressive" journalists is the way forward, then he will be actively participating in the destruction of the Fairfax group. Oh wait, he does:

If an ongoing public power struggle breaks out between progressive union activists and a libertarian who despises progressive journalists the most likely outcome is that Fairfax Media will be broken up so that its viable elements can prevail and its shareholders can salvage their investments.
As things stand, the Herald and The Age are worth more dead than alive. The market is indifferent to their survival. This is no time to bluff.

No time to bluff? Does that mean lie down and take whatever Rinehart dishes out? And pretend that the radio division isn't a waste of breath, and the future lies in regional rags that are immune from the internet? And that somehow, despite everything, the internet isn't the basic, fundamental, key (are there any more adjectives needed) worm in the structural rose.

Let's just imagine the internet does play a fairly fundamental role.

Here's a different calculation:

ROGER COLMAN: Well we've done calculations on this. And if you take let's say 550 journalists that you might have had in Sydney and Melbourne metros, right? You know, two years ago, and you go completely online with revenues of let's say $50 million, you're down to 250 journalists a maximum - at maximum. You have to get rid of half of them. And that's optimistic. On our analysis of online and ability to spend, you need about 44 per cent of budget for a purely online business to be in journalism. (courtesy the wretched Alan Kohler).

Get rid of half of them? And not a word about the bureaucrats?

Sorry Mr. Sheehan, there's work for the bureaucrats to do, your pink slip is waiting at the door ...

The market is indifferent to blather. This is no time to pontificate in a half-baked, superficial way. Time to get someone who can make more sense, and costs less in the process ...

But there's an upside ... you can always become an unsubsided blogger ...

(Below: oh dear Doonesbury, click to enlarge).

An idle Sunday media fantasy involving Gina Rinehart, Andrew Bolt and Bob the builder ...

By golly, the spectre of Gina Rinehart has got the Fairfax faithful going.

The weekend AFR, handily thrown on to the pond's porch for free, is full of speculation and stories about Rinehart.

Naturally news of the book about Rinehart - jokingly called an extended suicide note - has also been splashed around Fairfax rags, the latest example being 'We were children of a lesser dad', which recycles a dose of the book's family gossip. Then there's Iron wills mine a deep vein of bitterness (forced video at end of link), and the first extract from the book, What Gina did next.

Throw in a splash Get Up ad prominently featured next to the stories ...

... which leads here, and you have a serious case of Gina fixation, Gina obsession.

And there's been plenty of other Fairfax coverage of the spectral wraithe. For someone who never talks to the media, seems even to loathe the media, Rinehart has been managing to generate a lot of coverage.

Meanwhile, the smug Murdoch mob have spent their time explaining to Fairfax how to do real journalism, seemingly unaware that Kim Williams will shortly start swinging the axe.

The smuggery involves much praise of Rinehart and other billionaires and their business skills, and how that might rescue Fairfax (at the same time telling Fairfax not to do lifestyle sections, because it's not what readers want, which makes you wonder why the Daily Terror has a lifestyle section. Not to mention body+soul ...)

You can always rely on News Ltd journos for a good dose of hypocrisy mingled with stupidity (yes David Penberthy, come on down, and bring Dennis Shanahan and Simon Benson and their outrageous coverage of the G8 with you, as noted in Gillard-Swan "lecture" on Eurozone, which was also covered in extensive detail here at Grog's Gamut. If you think Fairfax being in trouble means News Ltd is the answer, lordy lordy, did you ask the wrong question ...)

Never mind, here's some figures to hearten the soul and lighten the Fairfax mood:

The Bolt Report Ten 123,000

The Bolt Report Ten, repeat, 126,000

Bob the Builder ABC 2 179,000 (Sunday May 20 2012)

Go Bob. Helping children learn how to build things seems so much more useful than tearing people and things down in relentless right wing ranting rages.

Even when the figures go up, they stay the same:

The Bolt Report Ten 160,000

The Bolt Report, repeat, 156,000

Bob the Builder: Ready, Steady, Build! ABC 2 176,000 (Sunday June 3rd 2012, all figures here)

It's particularly amusing to read these figures in the light of Greg Fraser's damning piece for Fairfax, Hot stock: Ten.

Fraser flays into network Ten in a way you shouldn't expect Alan Kohler to do for ABC TV News in the near future.

The pond particularly enjoyed this put-down:

Ten's content revival is looking to move away from what the company describes as a ''one bet, one punch'' mentality. If that means putting vacuous content such as Being Lara Bingle in prime-time viewing then maybe Ten really needs to administer itself a swift uppercut.

Oh come on Greg, the Bingle bump is famous, play fair.

Fraser charts the decline and fall of Ten, in share price, advertising revenue, and crappy content, while failing to mention the indulgence of The Bolt Report, which is so far off the ratings radar as to be completely irrelevant to the network's fortunes.

But he does remind us that Gina Rinehart is at the heart of this particular stew:

Worth buying? A select group of billionaires think Ten is worth owning, but it hasn't paid off so far. They have all supported the capital raising, along with institutional investors, probably as a means of averaging down their entry cost. Will it save their blushes?

Well the pond has a tip. Just by buying Bob the Builder and running it Sundays instead of Andrew Bolt, the network can immediately lift its ratings ...

That's the pond, always helpful ...

The usual explanation and justification for Bolt being on Ten is that it was done during the days of Lachlan Murdoch, and had nothing to do with Rinehart, as if that changes things and if there's no such thing as a nod and a wink.

Given the figures, a sensible proprietor would ring up and shout down the phone "Get that shit off the air, and put Bob the Builder on", as Kerry Packer so memorably did in the case of Doug Mulray and Australian's Naughtiest Home Videos. Oh okay, they put on Cheers instead of Bob the builder, but you get the drift.

In the end, you can either run a media outlet as a business or you can treat it as a platform for an ideology, but what if the punters don't buy the ideology?

Thus far all the News Ltd blather has been about how Rinehart would bring some decent professional and business acumen to the running of Fairfax. Her completely useless presence at Ten, and the sop of that dolt fop Bolt blows that out of the water from the get go ...

And some day not too far down the track the not-for-profit The Australian is going to find out what applying a sensible business model will mean to a wretched, ideological band of right wing scribes intent on zealotry ...

Of course back in the day, the rumours about Rinehart transplanting Bolt into Fairfax were all the go.

Before he hared off to News Ltd, Alan Kohler tried to pour cold water on the scheme in Rinehart's Fairfax investment experiment:

It's a little hard to tell since she hasn't yet given us the benefit of her views in either a book or a long interview, but Gina Rinehart appears to be an unreconstructed Thatcherite/Reaganite as well as a full-blown climate sceptic.

But to force Andrew Bolt into the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, I'd say she would need to buy 51 per cent of the company, and even then she'd struggle.

But what about Bob the Builder? Sorry, just the pond trying to be helpful ...

Meanwhile someone has at last noticed how Rinehart is now pretty much at her share-buying limit.

She must now rely on her board bullying at Fairfax with what she's got, to get her board seats and whatever that minority stake would give her in political sway - most likely the result would be an even more dysfunctional and dislocated board - or she must put her foot over the magical 20% shareholding mark, as Ian McIlwraith noted in ASIC boss fires off warning shot at takeovers by stealth.

The point, as explained in Packer and Rinehart on ASIC radar, is that raiders at some point have to declare their intentions in relation to a full takeover bid, or stop buying shares, and that has implications:

" ... as a general understanding, if you want to have the benefits that come with control, then normally attached to that we would expect the bidder to pay a premium over the pre-bid share price,'' he said.
He (corporate governance expert Ian Ramsay) pointed out that the law set 20 per cent as the threshold for control ''in a somewhat arbitrary fashion''.

Personally the pond would love to see Rinehart go further down the track, and make a full take-over bid, and heck go the full hog, install someone she trusts to run a strictly ideological ship. Like someone who's second in the popularity stakes to ... Bob the builder.

She's already done a substantial amount of dough on Ten, so why not on Fairfax.

And if Andrew Bolt or similar zealot was ever installed in a position of power at Fairfax, she'd comprehensively wreck the joint, and her investment.

Bolt, for example, is a destructive gadfly, now perfectly placed to do damage, all care and no responsibility, but if promoted out of blogger status, he would rise to a level of incompetence that would perfectly demonstrate the Peter Principle at work. As he's done with his TV show ...

Bob the Builder would be a more constructive and positive solution, but if Rinehart's determined to destroy her investment, who would want to stop her?

At least we wouldn't have to keep reading about her dysfunctional family life, and in due course Bolt could retire to listen to his opera collection.

From where the pond sits, that's a win win solution in these troubled media times.

(Below: Andrew Bolt ready for another day's wrecking with protective glasses as required by needless bureaucratic socialist government regulation).

Angry Sydney Anglicans, and bollocks to Barney Zwartz and a nuanced discussion ...

(Above: the Sydney Anglicans at it again, no link, screen cap, the pond just wanted to memorialise these graphics by sending them off to Google images).

Sex sells, so when you're on the nose like a bunch of angry Sydney Anglicans, it's time to get out the sexegesis.

But will a half-baked merging of 'sex' and 'exegesis' stop the Census rot, and return the faithful to vigorous explorations of Anglican-approved sexual activity? Is there more to life than the missionary position in Africa?

Sadly it's likely the pond will never know, because it turns out that "Sexegesis" sounds just like another excuse to bash gays, as if angry Sydney Anglicans don't do that every day of the week.

"Many of us know of Christians struggling with homosexuality; their stories are normally very complex, often tragic and painful. They need to know that God loves them, we love them, and there is a better way to live outside that which society says" said the publishing director of Youthworks, Marshall Ballantine-Jones. (here)

Yes indeed, it's simply impossible to be gay and happy and proud. And perverted society instructs gays to lead a gay life, and the poor hapless gays don't know there's a better way to live ... angry Sydney Anglican style, brooding about hellfire and eternal damnation and the writhing for ever in the fire and the flames like a coal in the lounge room fireplace ... (go on Phillip Jensen, lay some of that hellfire and damnation and brimstone on us again, and why not do an Elmer Gantry impression while you're at it).

But back to Sexegesis, which sounds like it lacks the zing of Henry Miller's Sexus, Plexus and Nexus:

"I am glad Sexegesis has a pastoral chapter for church leaders reminding them of our core responsibility to love and support them, as we call them into repentance and obedience to Jesus Christ."

Oh dear, looks like we're going to cop another bout of missionary position nonsense.

The funniest thing? Here's Bishop Forsyth launching the book for Youthworks Publishing:

"What's interesting is that this is not a book by the usual suspects. We in Sydney have had almost nothing to do with it. It's a book written by evangelical scholars and ministers in places where I think the debate is much more urgent and severe".

Now quick, rush off to the wiki on Anglican Youthworks, and here's what you read:

Anglican Youthworks, otherwise known simply as Youthworks, is the youth and education department of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, Australia. It exists to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the young people of Sydney and beyond in partnership with the churches and schools of the diocese.

Yes it seems that the Sydney Anglicans had nothing to do with it ... they're only the publisher ...

And giving it a good flogging on their website, and others they own. So Anglican Youthworks has a piece of puffery about the book featuring an extract from the introduction, here. And WTF, it's all because Sydney Anglicans think things are more urgent and severe in Melbourne and Brisbane on the gaydar front?

Not to worry, if we can be so bold as to summarise the thinking, Justice Michael Kirby is a sweetie but he's wrong, African bishops are new to the faith but exemplary in their persecution of gays (hang 'em, hang 'em high and hard), Kinsey was wrong and Anglicans know better, gay genes are dead as a concept, and gayness might be a predisposition, not a pre-determination, whatever that means, though perhaps it means there's hope the filthy perverts might change their ways after hours of being prayed over by Sydney Anglicans. Unless sterner measures are required. Now where did we leave that electro-shock machine ....?

And if that bout of gay bashing wasn't enough to get you going, why you have a chance to read the Archbishop's letter 'Redefining Marriage'. Naturally the Jensenists can't manage to distinguish between 'race' and 'species':

... the Bible teaches, and our general experience shows, that marriage between a man and a woman is one of God’s blessings upon us as a race.

Indeed, and geese tend to mate for life, thanks to god's blessings, while hooligan penguins in the Antarctic - as noted before on the pond - don't mind a little rough stuff as they take a walk on the wild side.

Little Happy Feet never once gave it away,
Ev'rybody had to pay and pay.
A hustle here and a hustle there
Antarctic snow is one place where they said:
Hey Babe, take a walk on the wild side,
Said hey penguin, take a walk on the wild side. ('Sexual depravity' of penguins that Antarctic scientist dared not reveal)

Are Sydney Anglicans routinely ignorant of nature studies and what goes on in the world? Do Sydney Anglicans seriously think marriage is God-given, in which case we need to sort through which god should be given the god-credit.

Did the Anglican god have something to do with Chinese marriage, long before Jesus hit the turf to save angry Sydney Anglicans? Strange, you'd think she would have sorted out concubinage and such like follies, and why did she send them Confucius?

Oh wait, the old testament doesn't mind a little rape, plunder, sex slavery and polygamy (the evil bible is always fun).

In his usual way, Mike Carlton had it right in Last tango for critics of gay marriage, looking back at Christians blathering on about the tango and mixed bathing, and their inclination to moral panics... and reminding us of H. L. Mencken's wise words: they have the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy ...

Well hell will sort out that happiness lark.

Moving right along, let's leave the angry Sydney Anglicans and turn instead to Barney Zwartz, doing it for The Age, with his call for nuanced debate in On gay marriage, both sides are guilty of bollocks.

Yep, bollocks is Barney's idea of nuanced debate, so can we just say amen and bollocks to that.

Of course the call for nuance is really just Barney's way of saying bollocks to gay marriage, but in a subtle and nuanced way. Here's how it's done:

... of the many Christians who do oppose gay marriage, very few of them oppose it for reasons of power or to preserve church influence. They do so because they think it is a slippery slope that could lead, for example, to polygamy, because they think it is against nature, because they think it is bad for children. In other words, they hold a position in good conscience to which they think reason and evidence have led them.

Yep, you too can be amazingly stupid and dumb, and use ridiculous 'slippery slope' arguments in good conscience, like polygamy, or bestiality, or evoke a peculiar concept of 'nature' which leaves out penguins, or shriek how we should think of the children, as if heterosexual marriage was the only way to go because it's been such a success at training people for a couple of world wars and more than a few minor ones... and Barney will give you a free pass.

Because in good conscience you're showing every sign of reason and evidence in your thinking. Cue the domino theory, and why don't we invade Vietnam before the whole world turns Communist ...

Poor Barney can see which way the world is heading, and takes his cue from the Catholic church's attempt to forbid artificial contraception:

It brought tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Catholics into the habit, which has become still more widespread, of simply ignoring official church teaching when they find it inconvenient or distasteful.

Indeed, religious superstition found out, displaced by the simple experience of reality, though in the day, and even now, you can still read learned clerics offering allegedly reasonable evidential theological arguments held in good if foolish conscience, but Barners still wants a nuanced view:

In saying this I am not endorsing any view of gay marriage. I simply want to see a more nuanced level of debate in which neither advocates nor opponents are stereotyped and therefore dismissed. The more heated the issue, the more important it is for both sides actually to listen to what their opponents say.

But why the need for nuance, why the need to listen to blathering babbling Christians in the grip of a moral panic? Did we need to listen to them about the tango, mixed bathing, or blacks consorting with whites in marriage?

Consider the Christian stereotype of gay people beyond the pale and in perpetual sin and destined for hell unless they live a life of chastity, and such like narrow prejudiced nonsense.

Must we - if we can borrow from Barners - listen to a load of bollocks?

Barners attempts to sow seeds of confusion and chaos, by proposing that the opposition to gay marriage doesn't just come from Christians, as if prejudice also coming from atheists like Julia Gillard and fundamentalist Islamics is somehow designed to make gay people feel more comfortable.

And he gets most anxious lest anyone confuse the local fundies with US fundies:

Don't be misled by the claim that Australia has a powerful and influential religious right akin to that in the United States, because it doesn't.

Not even the Pellists (deeply at one with the likes of Rick Santorum on this and many other matter)?

Or the Jensenists, off in deepest Africa working with other evangelicals to make sure that perverse homosexuality doesn't get a foothold? (Sydney Anglican, Russell Powell critiques the public media).

Or Barney's favourite, Danny Nalliah at Catch the Fire Ministries, whom Barney tells us is a dab hand at raising people from the dead? (I was raised from dead, woman tells), and always up for a bout of gay bashing ...

Yep, you can get plenty of stories from the Pellists, the Sydney Anglicans and others about the persecutions of Christians, but you hear very little about the persecution of homosexuals, perhaps because the Anglicans in particular have got an unseemly amount of skin in the game.

In the end, and contrary to Zwartz's plea to give fundamentalists a break and listen to their wretched, foolish slippery slope arguments, with the bestiality and the polygamy and the end of the world yadda yadda, it's actually a simple matter.

Either you accept consenting adults can choose a life partner with societal approval, without legal, social, or economic prejudice and disadvantage in their path, or you can prefer discrimination and intolerance as offered by Christians. That's not so hard to understand, and bugger the pond if it needs to be nuanced ...

And truth to tell is there any difference between a Jensenist blathering on about the human race, and the sort of nonsense spouted by fundies in the United States, given that the aim of the arguments is a shared desire to persecute gays?

If you want an example of hate speech, why not have a read of Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, and her portrait of evangelicals in How Bryan Fischer is Making Mitt Romney More Conservative (sorry, inside the paywall):

In Idaho, Fischer attacked homosexuality with growing fervour. In 2007, he sponsored a summit where he hosted Scott Lively, the co-author of a widely criticized book, "The Pink Swastika," which argues that homosexuality was at the heart of Nazism. (In fact, the Nazi regime persecuted gays.) More recently, Lively has expressed support for anti-gay initiatives in Uganda. He has been a guest on Fischer's radio show, and Fischer often promotes Lively's theories. "Hitler himself was an active homosexual," Fisher has said. "Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Storm Troopers... Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough." On another occasion, Fischer declared that "homosexuality gave us Adolf Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine, and six million dead Jews."

Obscene really, and so much for the "rosa winkel" homosexuals were forced to wear before they were sent to die in their thousands in Nazi German concentration camps.

And Barney Zwartz wants a nuanced conversation? Bollocks to that, and bollocks to Sydney Anglicans blathering on about the joys of the human race and the ways of the 'natural' world, when all around them is evidence that the natural world and human history denies their simplistic, hell-laden spin ... (should we even be talking about race these days?)

Hell, after all that, the pond is feeling mad as hell and wild.

For a moment we thought of memorialising more Anglican graphics, but enough already, a song please maestro YouTube, and a shout out to all those in Adelaide hanging out at the Mars Bar.

It turns out that according to the census, Adelaide leads the way with the highest percentage of 'no religionists' amongst the states. Clearly patrons of the Mars Bar are to blame.

Never mind, you don't have to settle down and get married if you don't want to, but if you do, that's fine by the pond, and who knows you can then become a decent, solid, staid, law-abiding, conservative pillar of society.

Dull, but there's an upside. You don't have to become a Sydney Anglican as well.

Conflicted? Not really, and anyway Rupert's a terrific dancer ...

Ben Eltham asks the obvious question about Alan Kohler and his conflicts of interest in relation to his cameos on ABC TV news, versus his new gig at News Ltd, in Kohler's untenable conflict of interest.

Let's assume for a moment that the current crises in the media, Gina Rinehart, Fairfax and News Ltd are of occasional interest in the financial section of the news.

Now how likely is it that Kohler will express a frank opinion about Chairman Rupert, as he did back in 2005? He might - did you bring your cash with you - or he might not, but either way, it would be nice to know which stable he was coming from ...

It's a measure of the decline and fall of the ABC under the Mark Scott/Kim Dalton (director of television) combine that Kate Torney, director of news, should offer such a gormless rebuttal by way of the ABC's response, in her piece Kohler conflict of interest claims:

Alan will continue to provide accurate, balanced and editorially ethical journalism for a range of media outlets, including the ABC, and we are very proud that he is part of our business team. And we will manage any potential conflict of interest in an appropriate way.

But precisely how can he provide balanced coverage of the media, which is not just balanced, but perceived to be balanced? Is silence on certain issues, like Rupert Murdoch being a disgrace, accurate and balanced?

Kohler's now taken the dollar from the man - actually a bunch of dollars - and good luck to him. (The pond is available for a buyout at any time, and is most attractively priced considering its recent astonishing Bingle bump).

If the issue of News Limited does come up in relation to Alan's work for us, the ABC would expect the kind of appropriate disclosure that all good journalists routinely undertake - the kind of disclosure, in fact, that Ben Eltham happily adds to his own article, and yet seems determined to deny to Alan Kohler.

That's because Eltham suggested Kohler should be stood down, but by seeing that extreme solution as the question, Torney skips over a simpler, straightforward question. Why isn't Kohler tagged as a News employee each time he turns up on camera?

You see, it's not just the issue of News Limited, it extends to their rivals, to the media scene in general, and to other reports on big players as they relate to the media (to name just a few obvious ones, Kerry Stokes, Gina Rinehart), and to politicians who all have views on the media, and its regulation, and to businesses all caught up in the same hoopla. And these ripples go on rippling through the business community ...

Kohler is no longer independent, he's an employee. And instead of reverting to his days on Fairfax as a plus, Torney should have acknowledged the problem began there:

At the time we first contracted him to provide a range of content for us, Alan was working for Fairfax. The ABC looked closely at this and determined that the accurate, balanced and editorially ethical journalism he was producing for Fairfax was entirely compatible with the accurate, balanced and editorially ethical journalism he would be providing for the ABC.

Balanced journalism? So Rupert Murdoch is a disgrace? Strange, don't remember that causing a storm on ABC TV news.

A perception of balance would have been much more credible if Kohler's pieces had actually contained an acknowledgement he was an employee of Fairfax, and any piece he now offers should now contain an acknowledgement that he's an employee of News. Then the forewarned punters can judge for themselves how accurate, balanced and editorially ethical the Kohler comments are ...

Back in the good old days, the ABC took the editorial guidelines seriously. And back in the day, Kohler dishing it out to Murdoch sounded like the pond on a grumpy day, or a Fairfax hack, or a tea and scones ABC employee tired of daily bombardment by News hacks.

As usual, we have to look elsewhere for insight. It was Crikey who put up that Fairfax image above, which you can find here. And there's also a handy link to Stephen Mayne celebrating Alan Kohler's feral attack on Rupert Murdoch back in 2005.

What's the difference between life in 2012 for Kohler, and life in 2005 scribbling about Rupert Murdoch, with talk of poison pills and charisma machines and a badly performing business run by untrustworthy people, and Murdoch as disgrace rather than hero?

Apart, that is, from the phone hacking and News of the World and The Sun scandals, Fox News even more in the ascendant, The Australian on a crusade to spread confusion and ignorance on matters of science and social policy, and the major local tabloids more mad than a cut snake, as well as being home to professional ratbags like Andrew Bolt?

Well clearly a little settlement helps sooth savage breasts and murky waters, and it might be a long time before we read another little outburst like the one Kohler delivered for Fairfax under the header Shock! News screws punters.

Not that Kohler was wrong. In his usual way, he sounded quite astute:

....A board can unmake a policy as easily as make one. One minute you have a policy, next minute you don't. Never mind that it was agreed in good faith, sealed with a handshake, agreed and minuted at a board meeting and then conveyed to shareholders so they would vote in favour of something they would otherwise have voted against. This is Rupert Murdoch's company, don't you know, so the normal rules don't apply...

...The proposition - put forward in the Murdoch press - that the broken promise doesn't matter because it was a good profit result, the dividend was increased and the share price went up, is preposterous.

Ah the good old days when Rupert was a snake-oil dealer offering preposterous nostrums.

And now the ABC can't imagine that it was wrong when Kohler was working for Fairfax not to acknowledge potential conflicts?

This won't go away, as Kohler turns up to do his usual piece, and the ABC tries to pretend that it's business as usual.

Already just in dealing with the controversy, there have been a flurry of acknowledgements and egg shell disclaimers, as with Ben Butler admitting he once worked for News Ltd - it's okay Ben, we forgive you - before he put together a piece titled ABC's Kohler embroiled in conflict of interest claims about the fuss for Fairfax.

Kohler did no disclose any conflict of interest during segments on Tuesday, Monday and Friday that discussed the financial woes of News and AIBM competitor Fairfax Media, owner of The Age.

Uh huh. And yet surely there's a clear potential for a conflict of interest. Go on Ben:

Alex Wake, a newspaper veteran and journalism lecturer at Melbourne's RMIT University, said the ABC should disclose Kohler's position during his segment. ''I believe that any journalist should disclose who they work for and their interests, and I don't see why this couldn't be run across the bottom [of the screen] on the ABC,'' she said.

Done and dusted. It's not Kohler's fault, he's just making a living, it's the ABC's fault for not producing a simple, quick disclaimer that at least alerts the punters and gives them fair warning.

Why won't they do it? Well perhaps because it might disturb the pristine sense of objectivity - so ugly to have a disclaimer disturb the surface of the unsullied, unsoiled ABC - or perhaps it's too hard for them to dig up their own financial journalist with the clout of Kohler.

Kohler has also reached for the precedent clause:

The Age could not reach Kohler for comment, but yesterday he told Sky News - in which News holds an indirect stake - that he had no conflict of interest.''I have always worked for someone else while working for the ABC,'' he said.

Yes, but that precedent was also wrong. The ABC should have been putting up a disclaimer when he was working for Fairfax. Out of fairness to News Ltd (yes sometimes you have to be fair to News) the ABC needed to acknowledge a conflict of interest which was just around the corner all the time, and which comes out to bite you on the bum when Kohler rants about a badly performing business run by untrustworthy people and that disgraceful Rupert Murdoch ...

And now? As Ethlam notes, as Kohler told PM, these days he couldn't be happier, he's very, very happy to be working with News Limited, it's a fantastic organisation, they've been really great to deal with, and now he's a salaried employee with this wonderful organisation.

Rupert a disgrace? Quoi, moi?

Lordy lordy, how the stars have shifted in the skies between 2005 and 2012. And as Eltham notes about the spruiking on PM:

Is anyone else a little disconcerted by this exchange? Kohler is the news. Here we have the guy who fronts the ABC television news every night telling ABC audiences that he now works for one of the largest companies in the Australian media industry, and that he's very happy with them.

And on Tuesday, without disclosing this deal, he was writing a prominent piece of commentary about Fairfax Media – the mortal enemies of his new bosses. The new bosses that he didn't tell us about.

You can't get a clearer example of a conflict of interest than this. Every time Kohler goes on the television, there is a conflict, involving money, between the interests of the ABC's audience and the interests of the other audience – the corporation that also employs Kohler.

Mortal enemies? Too right. You don't call your friends Pravda on the Yarra.

Kohler's piece for The Drum had a statutory set of pedigree notes at the bottom of the page, if not the crucial one, but there's no need for any of this on ABC TV News?

How far away are the days when James Dibble read the news ...

And now for a disclaimer.

The pond has absolutely no connection to anyone mentioned in this piece, but it's the fond hope of the pond that when the ABC finally buckles and starts running a disclaimer under Kohler, it will spill across those damned pesky, irritating graphs he keeps producing like some PowerPoint presentation gone mad, designed to send the average viewer running from the room shrieking in fear.

I know, I know, it's because he cares, but it's actually factoid gibberish, like the gibberish that always turns up at some point during, in or after the news, about the market being up a nano point, or down a micro second, or how the market has totally corrected the correction which was due to an unnerving correction arising from talk of a major correction ...

Enough already with the graphs. You can get that sort of set dressing from the graphs in The Big Bang Theory.

Truth to tell, the pond's bigger gripe is that the ABC News is now lazy and second rate, done by rote and as predictable a half hour as you could wish for.

Open with a little or a lot of ambulance chasing, depending on the suburban crises of the day, throw in a couple of federal and state political stories (skewed for local interest in each state), drop in a Sophie Scott medical story, fling in Alan Kohler and eek, a PowerPoint graph, do a little sport, toss in the weather for flavouring, and round it all out with an arty or odd spot bit of fluff. And every so often fling in a promotional piece for a bit of ABC product which in the old days would have been treated as a shameless advertorial and despatched to the outer rings of hell.

The television news too frequently has the depth and insight of a salad bowl ... and its international coverage is abysmal, since the ABC clearly lacks the staff, disdains the BBC, and no one had the nouse and to do a deal with Al Jazeera ...

Thank the absent lord for radio, though for some curious reason on the powers that be decided to put PM on a slimming diet on Radio National. Radio still has the luxury to treat matters with some depth, when allowed ...

It's not drawing a long bow to suggest this little Kohler incident - which could have been quickly and easily sorted - is actually symptomatic of a larger, endemic disease ...

Torney should get her act together, or someone upstairs should wake up from their extended nap and help her ...

A disclaimer on every Kohler piece thank you very much, however much it gets up the ABC's nose, and then you won't have to worry about the arduous business of getting someone else to fill the Kohler spot with more graphs, though there's probably more than a few at Fairfax and News becoming available...

(Below: maybe the ABC's forgotten how to do a super. Here's how you do it ...)

As Team Angry Athiests storm to a winning lead, Penbo's angry about ponciness yet again, and ponces angry about plagiarism provide a Friday joke ...

(Above: click to enlarge. Graph via ABS).

Great news for the Angry Atheist team, by which we mean the placid, irascible, inert, indifferent, inchoate bunch of no-religionists who took the trouble in the 2011 Census to advise the bureaucrats of their view on imaginary friends.

Angry Atheists have soared past Angry Anglicans, who dropped by 1.6% to 3.679m, way below the happy band of no-religionists at 4.796m. (by Angry Anglicans we mean that bunch of true believers who seem to accept that Sydney Anglicans are right to be consistently angry about women priests and gay marriage).

That's a clear gap and lead, 22.3% to 17.1%.

How long before the Angry Atheists topple the troublesome tykes, still sitting on 5.439m, but shedding 2% since 2006, and now sitting at a very gettable 25%?

How it must have troubled, shocked, disturbed and alienated Barney Zwartz. Perhaps he shed a tear as he typed Godless overtake Anglicans, as Hinduism doubles.

Yes, the cows are looking forward to a new world.

The best news for Team Angry Atheists, is that not only are the no religion mob up from 15%, (as the no religion mob came out of the closet), but that, of the people in the 15-34 age demographic, some 28% reported no religious affiliation (an interesting tweak poor Barney overlooked, but which can be found here at the ABS summary).

And dammit if Jedi followers aren't also on the move up - feel the force Angry Anglicans.

Well the young people will inherit the earth - what's left of it - and it seems that the siren song of secularism falls on fertile ground. (yes the young are a better bet than the meek and the mild to cop the raw future prawn).

It almost seems as if all these Angry Christians, giving all sorts of minorities a hard time, might just be talking themselves into minority status. Time for a little more peace and love and forgiving, perhaps, and a little less anger? Or is it time for some mergers? Perhaps a reverse take over of the Angry Anglicans by the Scientologists, as a way of avoiding a Catholic flanking move?

The pond's partner advises that if New South Wales defeats Queensland, all will be perfect in the secular world. Somehow it seems wrong to associate Queenslanders with agitated Christians, or with lions in the colosseum, but it does suggest that point scoring should be taken in fun, and not too seriously.

In the meantime, how to maintain the rage?

Well the pond's still brooding over Anthony Sharwood's dickheaded attempt at humour in A guide to Ecuador, home of the "Julian Revolution", but it's a day old and already rotting blog meat.

Can someone give Sharwood three years in Guantanemo or just a year of what's been dished out to Bradley Manning, and then let's see how funny he can be about human rights in the American system, vis a vis Ecuador.

And then there's dickhead David Penberthy, who while running a blog, valiantly predicts that the future for newspapers lies in tree-killing, as he explains at tedious, maudlin length in Never mind the Fairfax bollocks, papers can survive.

You have to admire Penbo for his relentlessly bogan, philistine mentality, and the repetitive way he manages to drum up the same old stereotypes. His last par is a ripper, full of cliches and stereotypes:

Many of the papers which have suffered the most in the US have been the high-end, la-di-dah ones who have fed their readers a steady stream of lofty and impenetrable yarns about the peace process in the Middle East, and yuppie lifestyle supplements about inner-city bars, when they would rather be reading about local crime, feel-good stories, property prices, suburban restaurants, shopping and sport. It is possible, to borrow a phrase, for newspapers to sack their readers, and we have no intention of doing that.

Lordy, lordy, lah di dah, and so it's on into the future with newspapers carrying on as usual in a tabloid way, standing by to serve as fish and chip wrapping and lino underlay (Do they still make linoleum? Does anyone use it? Is there any way to usefully recycle The Punch as lino underlay? Is there thus still a genuine need for tree killers?)

If we take this approach, newspapers can and will survive because so many people still want them. They like their format, they like their authority, they turn to them for explanations of big events such as a federal budget or a terrorist act. They like the simplicity and clarity of the writing, especially in their dominant tabloid form.

They like the Daily Terror and the HUN for their authority?

Oops, sorry, I didn't mean to send all those jaffas spraying into the air.

Simplicity and clarity? Shouldn't that be galleries of tits, and the simplicity of seeing Pauline Hanson nude?

Onwards News of the World, you're the future of newspapers. Oops ...

Never mind. Go the Sun Sunday. What's that you say, it dropped 24%, and the other tabloids also did it tough in the land of the tabloid, but the Daily Mail is doing nicely with its online strategy? (here).

The newspapers with the best chance of survival are those which share the values and interests of their readers. Much is written and said by right-wingers about how supposedly left-wing the Fairfax papers are. I don’t think the problem is ideology, rather a tendency towards squeamishness and pretentiousness in the way they select and edit stories.

Well you could never accuse Penbo of pretentiousness. Stupidity in spades, yes, but never pretentious, and how lucky for News Ltd that his confused thinking isn't determining the digital future of newspapers in Australia. Especially The Australian, which would be on life support except for cross-subsidy within the empire that keeps its tendency towards squeamishness and pretentiousness alive and well.

Enough already. Here's hoping the pond will be around in five years time to gloat, and we can repeat Penbo's futurist predictions, and we'll see what juice is left in his rabidly defensive and remarkably silly approach.

Speaking of repetition, now for a truly bizarre Friday odd spot, a kind of Ripley's believe it or not (1):

The science writer Jonah Lehrer, author of the runaway bestseller “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” has become the latest high-profile journalist to be caught up in a plagiarism scandal, with a counterintuitive twist that could come right out of his own books: The journalist he has been accused of borrowing from is himself. (here)

Plagiarism? Off to the dictionary the pond went:

...an act or instance of using or closely imitating the language and thoughts of another author without authorization and the representation of that author's work as one's own, as by not crediting the original author: It is said that he plagiarized Thoreau's plagiarism of a line written by Montaigne. (here)

That's right, to plagiarise the dictionary, there is no crime of self-plagiarisation, the crime is to plagiarise another, and here's the kicker, without acknowledgement. You can beg, borrow and even steal, provided you acknowledge the act and offer a credit, and don't do too much of it. Even a schizophrenic can get out of jail with this definition ...

So what Lehrer was really accused of - by media blogger Jim Romenesko - was repetition, recycling, self-borrowing, self-duplication or some other bizarre wording to explain that people continually repeat themselves, and borrow from themselves, and nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong with that.

The pond was immediately of the opinion that Romenesko was a fuckwit, but of course that would be a repetition of a concept regularly deployed by the pond.

And then blow the pond down (a repeat of a favourite phrase) if The New Yorker hadn't published an apology regretting the duplication of material, and then Lehrer himself expressed remorse, saying it was wrong and a mistake and it wasn't going to happen again.

Well good luck with that, but suddenly there were two additional fuckwits at the scene of Romenesko's original crime, and now the sweet lad is going to start footnoting himself. (2)

Is it time to bring back William Shakespeare so he can stand trial alongside Lehrer for their shocking acts of plagiarism? As for that serial self-plagiarist Bach, to the musical gallows me lad, string him high and string him hard (3).

Oh well, it makes for a silly Friday, and what better way to prepare for a silly weekend, and a look at the way the Angry Anglicans try to twist the Census figures into a winning scenario ...

(1) the reference to Ripley is a homage, not a passing off, infringement of intellectual rights, or a form of plagiarism

(2) the pond appends this footnote to indicate that while this material is derived from another source, the pond might well use it in the future without a footnote, and if you've got a problem with that, go take a flying leap ...

(3) the pond was unaware that it was plagiarising, or imitating the verbal style of Long John Silver, and offers profuse and profound apologies to Mr. Silver.

The Bingle bump now scientifically confirmed ... and a bit about Caroline Norma and prostitution destined to benefit from the Bingle bounce ...

(Above: the Bingle bump in action).

Casual readers might be unaware that the pond has been conducting a rigorous scientific study as to whether the "Lara Bingle bump" exists, and its effectiveness up against the Colbert bump.

The results are now in. Brass and drum roll please ...

The two pages devoted to the Bingle bump, the Bingle effect, the Bingle box office biz, the Bingle hit (out of hundreds on the pond) are the most clicked on by a multiplier of five and six over next best clicked ...

In a mere week, the last 'Bingle bump' research page zoomed to the top, according to google stats ... six times ahead of idle talk of Alan Jones and chaff bags.

It seems that if you put up 'Bingle' and 'nude' in the one sentence, an unseemly amount of men - clicking on their mouse with their cock - rush off to the page like lemmings to a breast feeding.

Is it fair to troll these hapless, driven men and boys?

Not really, but the quest for truth in science is never-ending, and truth to tell, Being Lara Bingle is quite harmless, with viewers dropping less than ten IQ points after each screening, way less than was anticipated by early studies of the Bingle brain bump lesion.

After all, Bingle is just making a living as best she knows how - thank the absent lord there are career paths for models - and the exploitative media are helping, and so of course is the pond.

Who knows, some of the lemmings might even stick around to consider the issue of prostitution, and so to a Thursday homily:

None of the daughters of Israel shall be a cult prostitute, and none of the sons of Israel shall be a cult prostitute. You shall not bring the fee of a prostitute or the wages of a dog into the house of the Lord your God in payment for any vow, for both of these are an abomination to the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 23:17-18)

Sound advice from the good book, written around the 7th century BCE, and with plenty of other handy advice: wounded stones or your cock cut off, and you don't get into the congregation of the lord, nor bastards, not even to the tenth generation (so long John Gorton, and bugger off Ammonites and Moabites for ten generations), and unclean men who need a wash also miss out, and by the way, if you come across your neighbour's vineyard you can eat your fill, but not put any into your container ...

But where is this heading? Why right in the direction of Caroline Norma's most excellent cri de coeur Standing up for sex workers is standing up for pimps.

Deuteronomy is near to her heart:

The criminalisation of pimps and sex industry customers is a necessary first step towards this goal ...

Which goal is to eliminate prostitution, assist women to leave the sex industry and build lives that reflect their worth as full citizens, and good luck with that, at least as much luck and help as the long absent lord provided when he first laid out his injunctions millenia ago.

What's most curious about Norma's piece is the role in all this that she assigns to hated, hateful, hurtful liberals and in particular that wretched liberal Catharine Lumby - did we mention Norma's an academic, and there's nothing more frightening than the sight of one academic (Norma lurks at RMIT University) abusing another academic for being ... quelle horreur ... an academic ... (Lumby lurks at that hotbed of academia UNSW).

Fortunately Norma has a limited vocabulary, as befits an academic with a disdain of academia.

She deploys her favourite term of abuse - liberal - no less than five times, and she offers up "elite academics" four times, while helpfully counting herself amongst this damned elite.

It seems these wretched, hapless liberals have no idea how prostitution operates, and instead can only think in stereotypes of the happy hooker kind, and it's up to Norma to set the record straight:

Most significantly ... liberals must avoid mentioning pimps, traffickers, and sex industry customers in making their argument that prostitution is a legitimate form of work for poor women.

That's the sort of sweeping generalisation designed to set a liberal's teeth on edge.

It's so hard to respond politely in a liberal way, especially when confronted by a column that fails throughout to mention male prostitution (perhaps Norma never ambled along the wall in Darlinghurst Road when it was at the height of the trade).

It seems female prostitution is all the go. Sheesh, even Deuteronomy showed a broader canvas - especially that bit about dog's wages.

As usual, the great divide is between the prohibitionists, the abolitionists, the people who want to drive prostitution underground, make it illegal as if that will make it go away, and those who take a more pragmatic view - regulate and enhance and improve the personal and health outcomes for those caught in a seamy trade as much as possible - and in the process, try to bring under control the pimps and the traffickers (oops, should these be mentioned by a liberal? Aren't liberals completely incapable of mentioning pimps?)

Put it another way. Is there any point trying to ban Lara Bingle, or ignore the Bingle bump?

As can be expected of someone who conducts her arguments in cliches - must liberals always cop abuse from all and sundry? - it's the business of Norma to present a glossy facade:

They (that's to say liberals) must overlook the good results that governments in Sweden, South Korea, Norway and Iceland have achieved in declaring prostitution a violation of gender equality, and criminalising the sex industry and its customers.

But actually Sweden didn't criminalise the sex industry, it merely criminalised those who buy sexual services, not those who sell them. And as for the success of the policy, well that depends who you read.

If you read Susanne Dodillet and Petra Östergren's paper The Swedish Sex Purchase Act: Claimed Success and Documented Effects (here in pdf form), you get this:

... when reviewing the research and reports available, it becomes clear that the Sex Purchase Act cannot be said to have decreased prostitution, trafficking for sexual purposes, or had a deterrent effect on clients to the extent claimed. Nor is it possible to claim that public attitudes towards prostitution have changed significantly in the desired radical feminist direction or that there has been a similar increased support of the ban. We have also found reports of serious adverse effects of the Sex Purchase Act – especially concerning the health and well-being of sex workers – in spite of the fact that the lawmakers stressed that the ban was not to have a detrimental effect on people in prostitution. (more discussion here).

As for South Korea, the 2004 Special Law did result in a successful export of some prostitutes to other countries, including Australia, but if you read newspaper reports, all that the attempted banning has achieved are new and ingenious ways of going about the business (Sex trade still problem despite tough law).

Their promotional skills are getting cleverer. Some brothels operate popular online websites where clients post their comments after using their prostitution services. Others scatter thousands of name card-sized flyers using a vehicle with a hole at the bottom.
“Moreover, such punishment is possible only when their sexual affairs are proved with obvious evidence,” he added.
Amid the ongoing demand for prostitution brothel owners hire women through more shady deals, making prostitutes more vulnerable to abuse.
Having enduring years of abuse under an unfair contract with their employers, some women risk their lives seeking help from the police. But some police officers, bribed by pimps, often ignore their reports or the women also should be questioned as a suspect.

If that's Norma's definition of success, the pond would be interested in her notion of failure. When you criminalise the business, the women involved are perforce only able to deal with criminals.

As in Sweden, after legislative changes, the level of visibility of street sex work dropped in Norway, but recent reports have indicated that it has returned to its previous levels, and at no point does Norma mention that the main target of the 2009 law was African women working the streets (you can wiki more here).

So does Iceland offer the way forward? (It too criminalised clients in 2009, while the selling of sex remained decriminalised). Not really, unless you think that having a vigilante group to enforce the law is the way to go, driving activities underground. (wiki it here).

There's something weird going on in the Scandinavian countries, and not just in the matter of Assange, and by way of contrast, it would have been useful for Norma to attempt to explain why the more pragmatic policies of the Netherlands and Germany are any more of a failure than the flailing attempts by the Scandinavian countries to abolish rather than regulate the trade.

Prohibition has never worked. It didn't work with alcohol in the United States, and it certainly isn't working with the war on drugs that is still being fought at the moment (the pond has always believed that bureaucrats selling weed - heavily taxed and available in dour licensed premises and presented in government-stamped brown packaging and covered in health warnings - would do more to de-glamourise the stuff than the war has done since Nixon set it going).

It's also never worked with pornography, but along the way it did considerable harm to literature that wanted to contemplate human sexuality (where would the world be without Nabokov's Lolita?).

And it won't work with Lara Bingle, bless her bump.

Prostitution has been under the hammer for at least nine thousand years, if we trust the bible is accurately dated, and yet it still turns up like a bad penny, accompanied by even worse pennies, which is to say traffickers and pimps.

There's nothing glamorous or joyous about the lifestyle - yes the pond has been in the company of hookers for extended periods, and they weren't happy campers, preferring drugs and a lesbian lifestyle to the odious ways of the men who paid for their company - but there's no benefit in sounding like a righteous, sanctimonious hypocrite, and Norma manages that feat with exceptional skill throughout her piece.

She also managed to stir up the punters, so in that sense her column can be considered a great success. One comment seemed to capture the flavour:

Just when the liberals are seeing off the churches, along comes a certain flavour of feminism to impress its prohibitionist ideology on society at large. (corrected for egregious typos)

So there you have it. You can never get rid of the prohibitionists, but the sight of feminists aligning themselves with the Pellists and the Jensenists and the mad mullahs of the world is enough to send a shiver of fear down the pond's liberal jelly spine ...

But at least you can also see what joy Lara Bingle can offer.

Not only can she be deployed to troll the men who use their cocks to click on a mouse to do a google search, she can be deployed against the puritanical, prohibitionist, anti-liberal, academically elite Caroline Norma...

Is there anything Lara Bingle can't do?

Donuts. Is there anything they can't do?

Rock stars. Is there anything they don't know?

The answer to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a bottle, they're on TV! (Homer Simpson)

(Below: and look, to prove the pond is fair dinkum, and plays fair, here's more Bingle snaps from the show for the Bingle maniacs who just love to google, or is it to bingle for their dingle...

First up, those nude photos we mentioned for SEO reasons. Sure the pond has totally nude photos of Bingle, they're only a click away, but what's the point of trolling and titillating if you deliver the goods? Here's what the TV show delivers ...


So that's your nude lot. And then there's sideboob flash, made famous by Huffington Post, and discussed by learned journals like The Guardian and featured on Jon Stewart, and if it's good enough for those socialist pinko pervert liberals, it's good enough for the proudly liberal pond ...

Will the titillation and excitement never end? A make-up session!

And there's always time to sit at the feet of the rich and wise, and learn stuff. Like Kyle. As Yoda said, size matters not. Look at me, judge me by size do you?

And then a final flash so Lara can go water-skiing.

Conclusion?

Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All her life has she looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never her mind on where she was. Hmm? What she was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.

Thanks Yoda, but we're more excited about the definitive scientific confirmation of the Bingle bump. Star Wars and Lara Bingle nude? How can it miss? Start your SEO motors now ...

A Chris Berg farce, doing the chaplain dance, Paul Sheehan in Woolies ecstasy, and a dash of XTC ...

... every animal, including the human being, is a criminal, and every move in life is a part of the vast process of crime…. The basic and primary moves in life amounted to nothing more than this business of taking, to take it and get away with it. A fish stole the eggs of another fish. A bird robbed another bird’s nest. Among the gorillas, the clever thief became the king of the tribe. Among men… the princes and kings and tycoons were the successful thieves, either big strong thieves or suave soft-spoken thieves who moved in from the rear. But thieves,…all thieves, and more power to them if they could get away with it. (David Goodis, found here, though much of the NYRB review is behind the paywall)

The pond was reminded of this insight from a burglar and career thief, courtesy of noir novelist David Goodis, while reading Chris Berg's valiant defence of Rupert Murdoch, and his denunciation of the Leveson inquiry ...

It's a truism - ever since they shipped convicts to Australia for stealing bread - that the rich can get away with looting, pillaging and ransacking, while the average punter who does a break enter and steal might get cop any number of penalties (here's a handy list of crimes and punishments in case you're thinking you're in need of a lawyer for a break and enter).

It seems that institutional corruption is all we can hope for, and any attempt to deal with it will automatically be marked down as a farce in the IPA Bergian world.

That Brooks's artless text message is now seen as a scandal illustrates how farcical the Leveson circus has become. (The farce that is the Leveson inquiry).

Never mind Leveson is jolly good entertainment, as well as a way of sorting through the festering underbelly of grime and corruption and outright criminality that can be found amongst people wearing elegant shoes and white collars, and that it's supposed to consider ways it might be better, and part of its duties involves consulting widely with politicians.

Never mind that the farce has been provided by Brooks and Cameron and Murdoch and all the lickspittle fellow travellers and power brokers who've turned up to give evidence (and along with the farce fair evidence of criminality and more than just of a 'break and enter' a mobile phone kind, what with the lies, and deception, and cover-ups and multiple untruths).

And never mind the tenuous absurdity and farcical feebleness of Berg's pronouncements:

...what was a serious inquiry has devolved into a strange sort of puritanism. Participants are being judged against ethical rules unheard of before Leveson convened. For a newspaper to back a political party is apparently a breach of these novel rules. And friendship between politician and proprietor is outrageous.

Ethical rules unheard of before Leveson convened ... Unheard of? Well maybe within the hallowed walls of the IPA, which has always had problems with ethical rules, and in particular the disclosure of its shadowy sponsors.

It verges on the hysterical that Berg should get hysterical about Brooks' 'artless text message', because it suggests he hasn't seen an hysterical Murdoch tabloid in full flight, breaking into mobile phones and running hysterical stories derived from criminal sources. As for the notion that Leveson has proposed a newspaper can't back a political party, date and time please.

As for the notion that friendship between politician and proprietor is outrageous ... oh just go read the fable of the frog and the scorpion again, and try to understand it.

The absent lord knows what Berg will make of the next phase of the Leveson inquiry when it gets down to considering proposals in relation to regulation of the media in Britain. In Berg's eyes, there's nothing wrong with any of what's gone down. It's just politicians in bed with the media, and the media in bed with politicians, and a jolly free for all, and good on Chairman Rupert for calling on the Iraq war in the expectation that oil would be US$20 a barrel ...

Politicians cultivate relationships with journalists. They have to, if they want to achieve their political and policy goals. That might seem distasteful. We all share a romantic ideal about the fourth estate being implacably at odds with the first estate. But let's not be too delicate. Democracy is about coalition-building. Journalists and editors are stakeholders. A politician that does not make friends in the media will not be a very successful politician.

By golly, David Goodis had it right about the amoral world of thieves, and politicians, and the media ... the fix is in, and nothing wrong with that.

Meanwhile, a brave soul has achieved a little turmoil in relation to the school chaplaincy issue, and good luck to him.

There's no need to bother with the media coverage if you prefer the horse's mouth, because you can head off to AustLII and read the decision there, under Ronald Williams Plaintiff and Commonwealth of Australia & Ors defendants. (and while you're there you might want to fondly remember Roadshow v iiNet, and a small defeat for the US industrial military intellectual property complex).

There is of course no meaningful protection for secularism in the constitution, as the High Court's narrow interpretation of the business of being an officer of the Commonwealth reminded the world, but at least the School Chaplaincy Programme took a temporary blow.

For a truly sickening spectacle, you have to look at the fallout amongst Labor politicians.

Yep suddenly there's the remarkable sight of Labor party heavies rushing to stand by one of John Howard's more cynical exercises in pandering and vote buying.

There's Nicola Roxon rushing to the barricades in Roxon stands behind school chaplaincy program, and there's Education Minister Peter Garrett bravely vowing to fight for what's true and just, and for John Howard's chaplaincy program (Garrett vows to continue chaplain program, may be paywall affected).

And standing proudly behind them is Julia Gillard, who promised to expand the scheme to a 1,000 extra schools and continue funding until 2014, to the applause of Campbell Newman and Liberals throughout the land ...

And the Labor party wonders why, given a choice between an erzatz party of sycophantic Howard followers or a party of genuine sycophantic Howard followers, people think they may as well vote for the genuine brand ... since as Tony Abbott pointed out, it was the coalition that implemented the program, continues to support it, and wants to see it continue.

Who knows, Garrett is so accustomed to selling out, he might yet join the Abbott team ... (and for a straighter consideration of the verdict, there's George Williams writing School chaplains ruling alters concept of federal funding).

And finally for the comedy item of the day, there's Paul Sheehan scribbling And the winner is ... creative advertising.

It turns out that Sheehan, who watched The Voice - I know, I know, but he libelled himself, it wasn't the pond that made him do it - also watched some ads for Woolworths, and became enraptured, and ecstatic, and preferred them to the program, and so decided to turn his column in to a bit of free promotion for the chain:

What has kept Woolworths from being an unpopular company is price. And competition. It does not gouge its customers. It keeps costs low. It is efficient. It makes healthy profits but not excessive profits. It employs, directly or indirectly, more than 100,000 Australians. It has enormous scale and reach, and extracts a punishing exchange from its suppliers.
Woolies, along with Coles, has such a commanding commercial position that it also has a powerful cultural position, and a powerful political position. Australians want cheap food and beverages, and generally get it. Australia has a supermarket oligopoly. The oligopoly companies want us to love them.

That's it? That's what you get from Fairfax's allegedly hard-hitting controversial chief columnist, the General Grumpy of the opinion-makers? Feeble copy a junior in Woolies' PR unit could have turned out?

How about copy like this?

Woolworths and Coles together are the largest owner of poker machines in Australia, with more than 15,000 machines.

Woolworths alone owns more poker machines than the top five Las Vegas casinos combined, taking in an estimated billion dollars a year - four hundred million dollars of which is estimated to come directly from problem gamblers.

The same trusted corporate giants who pride themselves on offering quality products to millions of Australians are simultaneously bankrolling a product that takes the food off far too many family dinner tables.

Owning such a large share of the industry puts these corporate giants in a powerful position to enact and inspire, real change. They can lead Canberra by example and minimise the harm posed by poker machines - starting with those at their own venues. (here)

And how did they get into their game? Why by buying into the pub market, and seeking to control the supply of retail liquor (Woolworths arm takes over pubs).

How about this for a pitch? Get your fresh food and get as pissed as a parrot at Woolies, and then you can piss your money against the wall, all thanks to the fresh food people ...

Will Sheehan work that up into a spot for The Voice?

Truly is there any reason for Paul Sheehan to exist?

And if you have to ask that question, how about the obvious sequel to it ... is there any reason for Fairfax to exist?

Come on down Gina, Paul's busy preparing the path for your arrival ...

(Below: speaking of short memories, amazingly a Midnight Oil turned up on this DOA album

Festival of atheists? Perhaps these poignant lyrics get more to the point:

I hear you say the truth must take a beating
The church and chaplains a camouflage for your deceiving
'Cause I know, yes, I know it's written on your soul
I know, we all make mistakes

This is not a case of blurred vision
It's a case of black holes, pocket holes, soul holes

and chaplain holes

Did I hear you say

My school chaplaincy program right or wrong
My school chaplaincy program, oh so strong
My school chaplaincy program, right or wrong

Take it away, XTC: