A bag of mixed Christian lollies for a Sunday, from a Catholic denialist sherbet to a trinitarian all-day sucker to a Mormon bullseye ...

(Above: eek, watch out Harry, the beasts and the Medowie Christian School are out to get you).

And so to our usual Sunday tour of Christian eccentricities.

Pride of place this week must go to Medowie Christian School, located in the Hunter Valley, which marked book week by banning Harry Potter garb, for fear the children might be introduced to witches, warlocks and wizards:

Ms Van de Mortel said the Harry Potter series, which is about witches and wizards, was not available in the school library because it had been the subject of many international debates.

Indeed. Shocking to imagine a book subject to international debate! Books should be debate-free!

And Lisa Taylor chimed in with a most incisive point:

"In the lead up to Halloween the shops are full of so many grotesque, frightening costumes and I've got two little boys," she said. "It's supposed to be a celebration of literature." (Harry Potter banned by Christian school).

Yes, indeed. A celebration of literature. Excluding the bible, of course, which is perhaps the most amazing collection of grotesque, fanciful stories about ghosts, ghoulies, angels, devils, Satan, crucifixions, and risings from the dead (way better than a vampire flick), genocidal murder, rape, pillage, burning bushes, demons, the anti-Christ, plagues, rivers turning red with blood ... and yadda yadda, more than enough to appeal to that showman Cecil B. DeMille ...

It goes without saying that that the Medowie Christian School has been regularly sucking at the teat of state and federal government taxpayer support since its foundation. And its statement of faith is a classic (pdf the full text here):

k) We believe in water baptism and the sharing of Communion.
l) We believe in the existence of Satan and the reality of spiritual warfare.
m) We believe in all the works and gifts of the Holy Spirit according to the biblical witness.
n) We recognise the jurisdiction of civil authorities except in matters conflicting with the biblical witness and/or conscience.
Note: These doctrines are intended as evangelical interpretations of the Old and New Testaments. Where further clarification is required, the 1979 Baptist Statement of Faith should be consulted.

Your educational taxpayer dollars at work. Hallelujah. Well done wild rocker Peter "Short Memory" Garrett ...

And by golly they can spring for a fancy flash intro to the website. Caught out right there. Don't they realise that Flash is the devil's work?

What next? Well a poignant lengthy profile of Jerry DeWitt in the New York Times, under the header From Bible-Belt Pastor to Atheist Leader is well worth a read.

DeWitt was an evangelical preacher in the small town of DeRidder, La., when he lost his faith, and rather than pretend, he outed himself to family and friends, with dire consequences to his marriage, his job, and his home ownership.

The pond can sympathise with what it's like to be out of step with other people in a small town (oh Tamworth, Tamworth, what a heartbreaker you are), but the funny thing is that being an evangelical preacher, DeWitt did what seemed right and proper by becoming an evangelical in the cause of atheism.

It's a curious journey, treated with sympathy and understanding and insight by reporter Robert F. Worth, especially when it comes to dealing with the trauma of DeWitt in relation to his love of the people and the place, and the trappings of his lost faith

“Religion does a lot of good, especially the loving kind, like at Grace Church,” he said. “I know people who went to a more liberal kind of Christianity and were happy with that. The problem is, for me, there was a process involved in moving from Pentecostalism to a more liberal theology, like Grace Church. What makes me different is that process didn’t stop, and it took me all the way. In the end, I couldn’t help feeling that all religion, even the most loving kind, is just a speed bump in the progress of the human race.”

Amen, brother. The pond isn't big on evangelising - live and let live, and just leave the pond and gay marriage and women's rights alone - but when fundies get to banning Harry Potter, it's time to make a stand. Next thing you know Santa Claus will be on the hit list because of his willingness to share his North pole retreat with Superman ...

What next? Well the Sydney Anglicans have attracted attention with yet another epic effort to role back the clock on women's rights, as celebrated in To love and to submit: a marriage made in 2012:

Brides will be promising to submit to their husbands under a new marriage vow the Anglican diocese of Sydney is expected to approve at its synod in October.
It requires the minister to ask of the bride: ''Will you honour and submit to him, as the church submits to Christ?'' and for her to pledge ''to love and submit'' to her husband.

Truly the Jensenist fundies are off in a la la theological world of their own. Naturally it produced a few snappy responses about the patriarchy and bad theology and derogatory wording, but it's enough already for the pond to think for a nanosecond about submitting to a Sydney Anglican. Eek, nightmares for a week.

Mr Judd, 27, who is studying to be a minister, said a Christian marriage was akin to dancing: ''The male always leads, even if he's not necessarily the best dancer … as long as you take the definition of male leadership that we're operating on, which is giving yourself up and putting others' interests ahead of yourself.''

And an agony of stubbed toes and trodden-on feet for a lifetime. No thanks.

Strong is the spirit of Todd Akins style fundie Republicanism in Sydney Anglicans.

Or perhaps Fifty Shades of Grey?

Not likely, they don't have the imagination, but the pond would like to let loose a femdom amongst them. Just for fun.

Meanwhile, instead of finishing off his seven epic sins of Sydney, Michael Jensen fudges with a review of a book by Sam Allberry, The Trinity: what's the point?

Trinitarianism is as absurd as transubstantiation, and it never fails to amaze the pond how Sydney Anglicans can swallow a three-way elephant while baulking at a crackers camel. All the same, it provides an epic moment of Jensenist gobbledegook:

Human beings resemble God the Trinity in many ways, but crucially not in others. For example, we are embodied; God is Spirit.

Except of course that God was embodied in Jesus. But do go on:

Our unity with each other in marriage and in church is not exactly the same as the divine unity, though it resembles it. Likewise, the pattern of gender relationships that Allberry explores, is not to be simply understood as a direct analogy between the relationship of the Father and the Son. Also, while it is true that God is in eternity as he is towards us in history, it is also true that God is not simply as he is reveals himself to us in history.

Phew. What a slippery, tricky fish this long absent god is ...maybe more like an eel than a fish.

There are a few other distractions on offer - Jodie McNeill is tortured by ugg boots and tracky dacks in The call of casual Christianity - but really the best own goal of the week has been the splendid work of Cardinal George Pell, as outlined in George Pell puts abuse at arm's length (paywall protected):

Australia's most senior Catholic, Sydney Archbishop George Pell, has authorised an extraordinary 4000-word statement publicly distancing himself from responsibility for the church's mishandling of sexual abuse investigations around the country.

It's an old riff, but a goody. There's no head of the church, no one to accept responsibility, no one with Australia wide authority, no way to sue, etc etc. While at the same time you can't stop the average Catholic priest from yammering on about personal responsibility and personal guilt:

"The church is very clever in dividing the different dioceses around Australia. It means that if a priest has molested a child in diocese A, and only that diocese's bishop can do something about it, he is able to transfer the priest to diocese B and not tell the bishop there," he told The Australian.
Dr Keon-Cohen said the NSW Supreme Court in 2006 held the church cannot itself be sued, and litigants who are successful against individual priests are unable to win significant damages, as church assets are "concealed behind a corporate veil of property trusts".

Oh yes, as Keon-Cohen points out, it's right up there with the tobacco companies. Or companies who've set themselves up in nice tax havens in the Bahamas. Your friendly local tax-dodging church at work ...

Here's how you wash your paws in a bowl of water, in best Pellist style, as explained in Countering Sexual Abuse:

As Cardinal I am not the head of the church in Australia. My authority is limited to the Archdiocese of Sydney. The Catholic Church does not have a state or national general manager. There is a division of responsibility in the Church somewhat like the separation of powers in a democracy. Each diocesan bishop supervises his own priests and church workers.

Yep, I'm not the king of the dirty castle, you can't get me.

And a further irony? In his homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Pell had this thought to offer:

We all know that it is no defence legally for someone travelling over the speed limit to reply that he was only following the traffic, part of a group, all of whom were travelling at the same speed.

Uh huh. But what if I'm not responsible for any of the other drivers? After all, I'm only a cardinal, nothing to do with me, if they get caught it's their tough luck for not knowing how to set up a decent defence and a handy corporate tax-free structure, so if the children suffer when they come unto me, they can just bugger off ...

That just leaves enough time to note a recent piece by Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker, I, Nephi Mormonism, giving context to the LDS and its meanings (currently outside the paywall).

Gopnik writes the way the pond would like to write, and right at the moment, as he notes Mormonism is everywhere, what with one of its leading members aiming to be President of the United States.

It's a bizarre, concocted religion, with strange beliefs (anyone want a planet of their own?), made up in the nineteenth century the way scientology was made up in the twentieth (a remark, as Gopnik notes, guaranteed to get teeth on edge).

Gopnik covers all the bases in a sympathetic way and with just the right edge. Here's a taster:

Scholarly opinion on Smith now tends to divide between those who think that he knew he was making it up and those who think that he sincerely believed in his own visions—though the truth is that, as Melville’s “Confidence Man” reminds us, the line between the seer and the scamster wasn’t clearly marked in early-nineteenth-century America. Mark Twain read the Book of Mormon and, knowing what Smith would have read, not to mention knowing about frontier fakery, came to conclusions about both the sources of its prose and the sequence of its composition:

The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James’s translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel—half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern—which was about every sentence or two—he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as “exceeding sore,” “and it came to pass,” etc., and made things satisfactory again. “And it came to pass” was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.

The pond must be one of the few, apart from Twain and thee, who've actually read the wretched inflated absurd thing. As Gopnik notes:

The powers that possession of the Book of Mormon conferred mattered more than the doctrines that it contained. “Rarely did missionaries draw on the verses and stories of the Book of Mormon in sermons,” Bowman explains. “Rather, they brandished the book as tangible proof of Joseph Smith’s divine calling.” Some holy texts, the Gospels, for instance, are evangelical instruments meant to convert people who read them; others are sacred objects meant to be venerated. The Book of Mormon is a book of the second sort. As the French religious historian Jean-Christophe Attias points out, in traditional Judaism the physical presence of the Scripture is at least as important as its content: when the Torah is unrolled during the service, it’s meant to be admired, not apprehended. That the Mormons had a book of their own counted for almost as much as what the Book of Mormon said.

The New Yorker recently had a presence at the Melbourne Writers' Festival. They seem to have finally realised that there's a market in Australia for signs that wit and intelligence still live in the United States (none in the current crop of Republicans, but any sign will do, especially when done Gopnik well).

Gopnik is particularly fine on why Mitt Romney is a flip flopper - the whole religion routinely flip flops (sssh don't mention the blacks) - and why adherents just love to make money:

Elsewhere among the Western democracies, the bursting of the last bubble has led to doubts about the system that blows them. Here the people who seem likely to inherit power are those who want to blow still bigger ones, who believe in the bubble even after it has burst, and who hold its perfection as a faith so gleaming and secure and unbreakable that it might once have been written down somewhere by angels, on solid-gold plates.

Oh yes, a holy salutation unto Mr. Gopnik for providing a fine meditation on the bizarre world of exceptionalist native American Mormonism ...

And so ends the readings for the week.

(Below: Harry Potter? Eat your heart out, William Blake knew how to draw a damn fine demonic diabolical biblical beast, fierce enough to make the Medowie Christian School quiver and quake with fear).

Now if you've managed, by a Herculean feat, to get this far, here's a bonus, David Letterman's ten excuses for Kevin Yoder, committed Christian, skinny dipping in the Sea of Galilee. (Politico broke the yarn here). There should be more of it. Come on Sydney Anglicans, come on. Don't let Republican Christians steal a march, get down to Bondi and do some skinny dipping. Dorothy promises to watch submissively, while finalising the epic tale of an ancient tribe of Israelites who landed in Australia just before Christ ascended to heaven. If you need any good excuses, here they are:

Oh dear sweet absent lord, not another day with the birthers, strike that, the Brucers ...

The baying hounds, the feral pack of flacks, still can't let go of their favourite bone. Have a look at the sordid collection above, on digital display for all the world to see, in today's weekend Australian (remind me again why you pay for the rag?)

When you've got nothing to write about, you resort to colour and movement, and David Crowe's piece is a doozy, dragging in Artem Naumov:

Ah yes, it was Artem Naumov what got her off the hook.

Then there's Hedley Thomas's mea culpa and cry from the heart, about the Media's shameful silence, and it indeed it was an extraordinary shame and a shocking silence for a few days before the media began reporting on the prime sources for The Australian's daily display of smear and smut and mud-flinging.

And now, after the orgy, and Gillard being unexpectedly feisty, comes the remorse?

Not on your nelly, now comes the snide Australian editorial, justifying it all, in Gillard opens a file on spin.

It's as convincing a display of paranoia as we've seen from the castle, curiously known by itself as the "heart of the nation" when the "barking mad backside of the nation" might be a better psychiatric fit.

It turns out that the rag has been treated shamelessly by everyone, and most especially Julia Gillard:

...Julia Gillard decided finally to confront the issues surrounding the end of her legal career at Slater & Gordon in 1995. Her tactics were as clever as they were transparent. The Prime Minister had spotted a clear but relatively minor error in a page six corollary story to our investigations into the affair. Our reporter referred to a "trust" fund when he should have written "slush" fund -- you be the judge. Having demanded and received an apology, Ms Gillard decided to go on the attack, accuse this newspaper of recycling "false and defamatory" information, conflate our coverage with a vicious online blogger's efforts and try to put the issue to bed.

Oh the deviant, spiteful hussy. Fancy demanding an apology - why fancy getting one, how it must hurt, having it imposed from up high for a simple slip - and then fancy conflating The Australian's remorselessly vicious pack of hounds coverage with the efforts of a vicious online blogger who once worked for the rag as a cartoonist. Shocking, shameful.

And the hapless rag was dudded and diddled. Key questions were asked, but some were not, because somehow the rag didn't have the wit to ask them, no doubt because its valiant reporters were shocked and startled and distracted by Artem Naumov turning up.

It turns out that Gillard is at fault because not only did she fuck a cad, she failed to turn him into the coppers:

When Ms Gillard became aware of the alleged corruption, she ended her relationship with Mr Wilson. We do not know what other action she took, if any, to alert authorities.

Yes, the witch is guilty, guilty, we tells ya. And then - in a ritual familiar to those who read the lizard Oz's editorials - it's time to strike out and slash at the vipers and the snakes and the enemies surrounding the valiant troops in their fortified castle.

You might think of it as a prime bout of paranoia, not understanding that the miscreants are everybody else in the media, some of whom took a more proper approach than the screaming tabloid way of the Oz. And some who, shamefully, shockingly didn't:

The Prime Minister has not attacked The Sydney Morning Herald for reporting on Thursday that she might have broken the law -- something this newspaper has never alleged.

You see, the witch is a Fairfax lover, which is an extreme rag, unlike the moderate careful Australian, except when it has to apologise, and even then it really shouldn't have. Shocking, shameful.

The Australian has been ever so controlled in its approach. Why there hasn't been any more than a dozen spiteful, malicious stories and columns provided by a vicious gaggle of hounds and run in the rag on a daily basis ...

Yet, astoundingly, their political editor Peter Hartcher accuses The Australian of being "dedicated to the destruction" of the government.

Oh that's way below the belt Peter Hartcher. That's shocking, that's shameful. What right minded person could read the right wing ranting of The Australian and possibly imagine it was dedicated to the destruction of the government and the elevation of Tony Abbott?

It's simply preposterous, absurd.

Yep, that's how easy it is to step into cloud cuckoo land when you read an editorial in The Australian.

They can't even be honest about their painfully obvious intentions. Has the rag ever mounted one of its crusading pack of hounds crusades against Abbott? In your dreams ...

It's okay, rabid pack of hounds. It's your right, but please enough of the stench of hypocrisy. Just be honest about it ...

Oops, sorry, that's just so unfair.

You see the poor rag has been harassed and bullied and tormented, and it's just so damned unfair:

The Age also has been spared Ms Gillard's wrath, despite following our reports with accounts of its own.

Oh diddums, there should be a law against a woman bullying a hapless, innocent paper just going about its daily job of vilification.

Should the rag maintain the rage, stand defiant against the herd? Of course it should:

But then, commentary by its political editor, Michelle Grattan, has seemingly sought to build a bridge with the Prime Minister ever since suggesting in April that she should resign. Many journalist have accepted the invitation to move on.

But not The Australian. It's determined to sulk and carry on, and naturally the ABC must be included in its wrath:

At the ABC, political host Barrie Cassidy has demanded journalists place Tony Abbott under more scrutiny. Yet he argues Ms Gillard should face less. Perhaps instead of writing about journalism, he ought to practise some.

Oh what a pathetic bunch of paranoid anal retentives. Talk about opening a file on spin, and a false heroism under fire.

And so the Brucers have their Birther cause.

That it's corrupted and tainted by its sources - most notably Ralph Blewitt - is a never no mind.

Peter Hartcher, for example, in his piece this morning PM and a fistful of questions for Fairfax, mentions Blewitt as a key source, without at all delving into Blewitt's history and why he might be demanding immunity from prosecution to dish the dirt.

Yes, it's more questions, yet more questions, and never mind who's asking the questions or why.

It's as shameless and scurrilous an effort as any The Australian has mounted, and it leaves the pond wondering why at the same time Hartcher didn't bother to mention some of the controversy surrounding Blewitt, as outlined for example in that slander sheet Vexnews, with Bad to the Boner: PM's accuser is sleazy sex tourist, preying on vulnerable young Thai women.

And if that involved too much nose holding, how about a mention of the details about Blewitt in Fairfax itself, in the Phillip Coorey story Union official in PM row fled Indonesia, which helps explain why Blewitt might be asking for immunity from prosecution for dishing the dirt. And let's not even begin to contemplate the racist, sexist, anti-Semitic rantings of Larry Pickering, whose cartoons are too vile for the pond to run.

If you're going to get down in the gutter, at least include the full story. There's little doubt that Gillard got herself involved in a nest of union thieves, but right at the moment, many of the journalists involved in this story are quite happy to stay involved with the same nest of thieves, and push their cause and their barrow, and then get agitated when anyone points out there's more than one side to the story.

Or they just bung on a massive paranoid sulk, like The Australian. Because all they're doing is asking questions, just questions, not accepting the right of others to question the questioners and their Brucer motives.

Ah well, it's Saturday, and the sun is shining, and it's time to get the nose out of the gutter and that rag The Australian, and look up at the bright blue sky, and perhaps leave the final word to Mike Carlton as he broods about the capacity of the lunar right to embrace sinister conspiracy theories in Geniuses at work scaring the punters:

The latest in the genre is the Julia Gillard-Slater & Gordon shock horror. This is being furiously peddled on the internet by Larry Pickering, a purveyor of obscene cartoons and anti-Semitic filth, with a shove along from the fine, Italian hand of John Pasquarelli, former speechwriter to Pauline Hanson.
Naturally, the radio shock jocks and Melbourne's village idiot Andrew Bolt have been all over it like flies at a cow pat, and The Australian has been indulging in a week-long fit of hysterics on the thing, climaxing on Wednesday with no fewer than six opinion pieces ordering Gillard to 'fess up. Fans of the Oz editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, will recall another of his global scoops when he was editing Brisbane's Courier Mail in 1996: forests died and rivers of ink ran dry to prove the historian Manning Clark was a Soviet spy who'd been awarded the Order of Lenin.

Melbourne's village idiot all over it like flies at a cow pat?

Love it, why it's a metaphor worthy of Tamworth ...

And yes, this morning's editorial is extraordinarily revealing of the pugnacious, obnoxious crusading "Manning Clark was a Soviet spy" atmosphere that now fills the air at The Australian, in much the same way as that smell in the nostrils can suggest that to a reader that they've trodden on a cow pat. All you can do is pick up a twig and scape it off - rubbing the shoe on grass also helps. Or a newspaper if it's handy. But is that a good enough reason to buy The Australian?

Gillard and the union movement of seventeen years ago might not emerge too well from the frothing, foaming frenzy, but the sordid behaviour of Chris Mitchell and his pet pack of rabid hounds has emerged even more tainted.

That self-righteous, brooding, paranoid, wildly accusatory and resentful editorial says all you need to know about Mitchell and the way The Australian is currently run.

Oh look, squirrel, Soviet spy, Julia Gillard ...

(Below: and a special honourable mention for John Shakespeare for his illustration accompanying Carlton's piece. Caught it in one Mr. Shakespeare, well played, or should we say well drawn. That portrait of Chris Mitchell leaping high above the pack to catch a morsel is unnervingly accurate).

Elisabeth Murdoch and profit without porpoise ...

(Above: a late nineteen sixties Siemens teleprinter, found at Brisbane's living heritage network).

It would be remiss of the pond to head into the weekend without mentioning Elisabeth Murdoch's fine flurry at the MacTaggart lecture.

In its own inimitable way, Fairfax covered her speech by recycling Dan Sabbagh's Humanity over profit: Elisabeth Murdoch attacks family in speech.

That would be Fairfax, still waking up to the way the world is wired.

At what point will they realise that in the new-fangled world of the intertubes, the punters can just trot off to read the piece at The Guardian under its original header Elisabeth Murdoch rounds on brother in MacTaggart lecture?

It reminds the pond of the good old days, when local newspapers were hooked up via teleprinters to their British masters.

One rag, of the pond's intimate acquaintance, could fill up half the paper with recycled bits from The Observer, and the other half with communications from its masters on North Terrace.

Sob, but the good old days are gone, and so if you hare off to The Guardian online, not only do you get Sabbagh, but you get the full text of Murdoch's MacTaggart lecture here, and you get Lisa O'Carroll explaining how Elisabeth Murdoch seeks to distance herself from family's woes, and you get Greg Dyke delivering yet another broadside at the family (and the Daily Mail) in Murdochs and Daily Mail are 'damaged goods' after Leveson, says Dyke, and if that's not enough for you - there will be tests after all this assigned reading - you get a Guardian editorial, Murdoch shows off liberal sympathies.

Frankly after this barrage, there's not much for the pond to add.

It is piquant to compare and contrast Elisabeth's lecture with that of her brother at the same venue in 2009, when the war on the BBC was going full steam ahead, but again The Guardian has got that covered with coverage that contains not just the full text of the failed Murdoch's speech, but the BBC Trust's response (you can find both of them here).

And you get bonus English comments below the fold in relation to James' petulant, childish outburst, vainglorious, which was then, and now even more clearly, the work of a petulant peacock that would one day lose its tail feathers:

So, another self-serving speech by a Murdoch with an attack on the BBC. Who could have guessed?
It's like one of those Doctor Who's where James will turn out to be the Master with lots of overcomplicated schemes to take over the Interwebs.

Damn you Murdochians, how dare you attack the home of the good Doctor.

Well Elisabeth has learned that lesson well, praising the BBC, contradicting her brother, talking of values, and decrying his emphasis on profit:

"Profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster."

Run that one around in the mouth, savour the after-taste as you would a good red. Sure when you break it down it doesn't quite add up. It might sound just as well as if it were profit without porpoise, because "purpose" needs a modifier to make the point. Perhaps profit without pious pieties of porpoise?

Never mind, could we work up a variation for The Australian and Kim Williams' benefit?

A profitless rag with only malicious crusading malevolent purpose is a recipe for disaster ...

It has to be said that the pond regards the output of Elisabeth Murdoch's production company Shine has - in Australia and elsewhere - lowered the collective television audience's IQ by at least ten points, a phenomenal achievement considering the valiant efforts of other producers and the entire Ten network to reduce it to zero.

But at least her role as a producer of content means she's aware that the BBC is a handy market for her product, and she's willing to embrace creative types who look askance at Rupert:

There was even praise for another former MacTaggart lecturer, the late Dennis Potter, who famously named the cancer that killed him "Rupert". She said she was "firmly with" the television playwright who said "the job of television is to make hearts pound" – a vision of the medium whose core purpose is "to form human connections" as opposed to a vehicle for the exercise of raw political power.

Ah well, if The Shire, Wife Swap, WAG Nation, Australia's Next Top Model and Dating in the Dark (all stunning, as in stunned mullet Shine Australia productions, read about them here) are all about human connections, it's time for the pond to turn into a dalek and run about shouting "exterminate, exterminate".

If that's the sort of product designed to make hearts pound, then the pond would prefer to pound heads.

Meanwhile, questions will linger.

Is Elisabeth playing a long game to get to the top of News?

Will the local brigade of rampant chauvinist ABC bashers in News Ltd sense there might be a changing of the guard, and the rush of the tide going out on the old order? Will the triumphalist ABC bashing subside?

Perhaps wisely, The Guardian wasn't having any of Murdoch's beguiling words and conciliatory stance, on the basis that she remains a Murdoch, and within the tent:

To compare the siblings' speeches was like one of those cop-pairings: Good Murdoch, Bad Murdoch. But Murdochs nonetheless. As Ms Murdoch admitted, throughout her career she had been helped and bankrolled by her father. And aided by her surname. She is the third member of her close family to be given this platform, the most prestigious lecture in British broadcasting. What better demonstration of the Murdochs' dominance in British media? One of the conclusions of the phone-hacking scandal is how desperately the media industry needs greater plurality – whereas up until the hacking scandal it was heading the opposite way. The answer to that conundrum lies not in speeches about values, but in structural reforms. Those will start not in a media gathering, but with Lord Justice Leveson.

Still, it's a measure of how things have changed in the UK - would-be Emperor James departed, and a new possible Empress making speeches - and how in due course those changes will wash up on Australia's shores, and not just via a teleprinter or Fairfax regurgitating a Guardian story.

In a market that's becoming ever more limited, there's very limited upside in alienating a substantial swathe of potential readers.

Will The Australian ever get back to the glory days, when an editor like Adrian Deamer could write an editorial criticising the Springbok tour of Australia? (and got sacked by Murdoch for his troubles, as noted in Deamer's wiki here).

The point, as Gina Rinehart is only just discovering, is that acquiring shares in the media to deliver ideology is an uncertain and bad business model. (Rinehart tries to sell shares after Fairfax $2.7 b slump).

Rinehart hasn't done anything to help the Ten network as it spirals down into the depths, with I Will Survive the latest dire outing to reveal how board and management are out of tune with the times, and now the network Mott-less (Ten's programming chief David Mott departs - though it should have been the gormless board and Lachlan Murdoch that first departed, which only goes to show the benefit of power, lineage and money over talent).

Whatever Rinehart had in vague mind in relation to Fairfax - perhaps turning it into a new front for like-minded Andrew Bolts - it was silly and redundant, since the raving ratbag loony market is well enough catered for by the dominant Murdoch press.

Who knows if the Murdochs down under will come to understand the dangers of zealotry and crusades, but all things must pass, even Rupert Murdoch, and his desire to elevate Paul Ryan to the vice-presidency so the Republican war on women can continue to roll out (who knows what Elisabeth thinks about this).

And the current braying, crusading, alienating regime of The Australian will also one day discover the revolving door.

So the pond will settle for the sound of a conciliatory note in the air in Elisabeth Murdoch's speech.

It's just a straw in the breeze, but the pond will always settle for a straw as a way to access a milkshake ...

(Below: and it being a kind of Guardian day, who could pass up Steve Bell on Rupert? More Bell and others at The Guardian's comment page, here).

Graham Lloyd, environment editor for The Australian, a chenius at spinning ...

(Above: once again First Dog is a chenius, though not in way that the Late Show hailed Ivan Reitman as a chenius - Youtube. The pond feels guilty at the cartoon above still being behind the paywall for the moment, so has split the work up. You can get it in its original form here if you're a subscriber. The rest is below, and the only connection to what follows is the sound of a braying donkey blathering about a carbon tax. Crucial research which helps explain it can be found at the 7.30 Report here).

So here's an interesting exercise in spin.

Graham Lloyd for The Australian, reporting on the findings of Robert Mulvaney of the British Antarctic Survey, produced a piece with the header Ice-core warming 'within bounds' (behind the paywall, you're expected to pay to be misinformed, so why not Google?)

Now that's a cracking start. How to maintain the spin, worthy of the surgeon who worked on Shane Warne, on the scientific study's findings?

Easy peasy.

Stress that recent warming might be unusual but "not unprecedented relative to natural variation". Then lead with a blatant distortion of the findings:

The research by Robert Mulvaney of the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, countered assumptions that human factors were responsible for the warming of the Antarctic ice shelf.

Uh huh. Yet The Australian a little later ran with this report by the AFP headed Humans partly to blame for Antarctic ice shelf collapse: study.

The results "are consistent with a more rapid human-induced warming on top of a slower natural warming," Robert Mulvaney, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), told AFP.

Keep spinning Mr. Lloyd:

Although temperatures have risen by about 1.5C over the past century, the authors note that this increase is within the bounds of natural climate variability over the past 600 years.
The Nature report said the long-term climate history provided by the ice core confirmed a close connection between past temperature and ice-shelf stability.

Strangely the AFP report in the very same rag just didn't get it:

Meteorological stations have shown a rise of 2C in the past 50 years in the Antarctic peninsula, which is roughly triple that of the global temperature rise.
"If the warming continues, then ice shelves further south in the peninsula that are believed to have been stable since the last ice age may also break up in the next few decades," Mr Mulvaney warned.
Ice shelves are floating mats of ice, attached to the Antarctic coast, that are formed by flowing glaciers. In recent years, several major ice shelves have broken away from the peninsula, a result of what scientists say is an upwelling of warmer water from the Southern Ocean.

A result Mulvaney and his team attribute in part to human-induced warming.

Remarkably Mr. Lloyd presents himself as the environment editor of The Australian.

His qualification? Well it would seemingly be an infinite capacity for perversely misrepresenting the findings of a scientific study, published in Nature.

Now if you want to read the story in Nature, you'll have to brush the red back spiders out of your purse to access Recent Antarctic Peninsula warming relative to Holocene climate and ice-shelf history.

But if you want a short form Reuters/Scientific America summary, you can find it here, and you can also head off to the British Antarctic Survey for background, where you'll find a discussion with Mulvaney here, along with this quote from him:

"The most significant thing ice cores have told us is that greenhouse gases are so well-related to climate, and that at no point in the last three-quarters of a million years have carbon dioxide and methane reached anywhere near the levels they are at today."

Is that what within bounds means Mr. Lloyd? Within bounds?! Or are you just another bounder drinking the kool aid that flows freely at The Australian?

If you happen to be a subscriber to Crikey, you can also read Simon Copland's Antarctic melt alarm as scientists find 'very unusual' warming.

Copland took the indecent stop of interviewing an Australian researcher on the team, Dr Nerilie Abram from ANU:

Dr Abram says the warming over the past 100 years has been dramatic. ”The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming places on Earth at the moment,” Dr Abram said. ”The last century of warming has been unusually rapid with the mean temperature increasing by about one and a half degrees — one of the fastest temperature increases seen in the ice core record.”

A real live actual Australian scientist who's been doing observations in Antarctica.

How supercilious, how pretentious, how reprehensible. That's totally out of bounds.

“The ice shelves along the west coast are showing signs of becoming less stable, but we haven’t seen the big collapses that we’ve seen on the Antarctic Peninsula so far,” she said. “The big concern about that area is that it is where the West Antarctic ice sheet is. The amount of ice being lost there is accelerating and this is contributing to global sea level rise.”
It paints a worrying picture, according to Abram: “The main finding of our research is that warming as fast as this is very unusual. We should be very concerned about that.”

Not if you're Graham Lloyd, used to drinking nicely iced kool aid. No reason to get concerned about things within the natural bounds of simplistic distortions.

No doubt the Bolter will chime in and explain one more time how actual scientists conducting actual observations in the actual Antarctic don't have a clue, especially when put up against an armchair keyboard expert like the Bolter.

Which leads the pond to ask for the umpteenth time: do you get your science from Graham Lloyd, The Australian and the Bolter, and do you realise that as a result, your News is Limited?

* * * *

And now a new segment. Know your Brucers.

Just as the Birthers have mighty dedicated folk burrowing away in the exceptional USA, down under has the Brucers, and the pond has been mightily impressed with the Brucing of Ean Higgins in recent days in relation to matters involving Julia Gillard. After all, it takes exceptional skill to weave a story out of a trek to talk to a person who won't talk ...

Higgins has a tremendous track record, and will be fondly remembered by New Zealanders for the clever questions he asked during the Pike River Coal Mine disaster. Like:

"Why is the local country cop doing it (the rescue operation)?" he said.

The thin-skinned New Zealanders labelled the question disgraceful and offensive (merely because it drew gasps from the assembled throng), and called Higgins a "typewriter interviewer" and "boorish" and an "utter tosspot".

"Australia are so focused on us, their prayers and their best wishes to all involved and they get some utter tosspot like that over here who mars all them.
"We know he's not representative of Australians."
He said the newspaper needed to be named.
"Their editor needs to give some explanation of why they've sent such a boorish fellow to this sensitive situation." ('Boorish' Australian journalist infuriates)

Silly Kiwis. The Australian sends boorish chappies all over the place, much given to reporting sexism and the thoughts of Larry Pickering (about his cartoons no one should say anything).

How dare they defame one of Australia's finest Brucers, and that in a herd of most excellent Brucers stabled at The Australian?

Go Brucers.

Will the Brucers give up? Of course not. Here they are at it again, collectively, a herd, a pack, a howling ravening tribe:

Be careful if you try to snatch away a bone from a Brucer.

There's way more smut and smear to peddle ... and never you mind if in throwing the mud, you might reveal yourselves to be little better than smut merchants, worthy of a job on the Melbourne Truth, and there might be a little muddy blowback coming your way ...

(Below: the pond isn't alleging anything of course, just wondering, just asking how a senior journalist for The Australian could get himself called a boorish utter tosspot? Just a question, only a question of course. We only ever ask questions at the pond, in a fair and balanced way, and you decide).


And now for a rousing finale. Support the Dog! And did we mention the carbon tax?

The pond joins the Brucers at The Australian in abject, grovelling, creepy crawly apology ...

In its previous post the pond provided a link to a story by champion Brucer (and journalist for The Australian) Ean Higgins, which ran under the header An old flame faded into black.

Sadly if you click on the link, all you get these days is a 404:

The pond apologises profusely.

If you link to the gutter, occasionally all that turns up is mud.

Here's a link to a story in Crikey which might last a little longer and which might help explain why it's been a bad day for the Brucers: Gillard secures apology from The Oz over AWU story.

Now let's run into the visual record the apology, attached to the masthead, so that Google may circulate to all the record of the dismal day for the Brucers:

Andrew Crook's story also provides a link to an anti-Semitic rant posted under Larry Pickering's name on his website.

It's amazingly rich and vile stuff. And it's not just the Jews that cop a serve. So do lazy Arabs, racist Japanese, racist Chinese, wretched Aborigines, and so on and so forth.

The pond isn't in the habit of reproducing vile racist rants, but if you read Crook, he gives you more than enough of a serve. Ain't Google cache a handy thing ...

But by golly, do the Brucers at The Australian keep odd company, or what.

And over at Fairfax, finally a little truth surrounding Ralph Blewitt has broken into the mainstream, as you can read in Union official in PM row fled Indonesia.

Ralph Blewitt, the former union official who wants to give evidence about the alleged rorting involving Julia Gillard's former boyfriend, fled Indonesia in 2009 to avoid arrest after allegedly selling Australian expatriates land he did not own.
One couple, Deborah and Paul Storck, told the Herald from Lombok yesterday that Mr Blewitt still owed them $190,000 for land they thought they had purchased on Gili Gede, Lombok.
''He's not a credible fellow,'' Mrs Storck said. ''Be wary of anything he says. He still owes us a lot of money. Who does he think he is to bring up stuff from 17 years ago?''

There's more, though this might be old news for those who love to saunter in the gutter with the Brucers.

Now Gillard has been forced to come out and denounce the smear campaign against her as sexist and defamatory, as you can read in PM defends conduct as lawyer.

Well you'd have to say that the cruel photo selected by Fairfax to illustrate the story is first class evidence of sexism at work.

There's nothing new in what Gillard said in her denial. She's said it before, and she's said it over and over again, and meanwhile the Brucers are off with the likes of Larry Pickering and Ralph Blewitt.

The pond wonders how Kim Williams - sophisticated man about town, cultured member of the elite and lover of classical music - enjoys presiding over a cesspit.

Meanwhile, all the pond can do is congratulate the Brucers for their epic work.

Well played Brucers.

You've reduced the status of journalism another notch or three. Keep going and Fairfax will have more to boost about than carelessly losing a couple of billion, and The Australian carelessly failing to achieve a profit ...

It's gold, gold, gold for the Brucers ... along with lots of gossip ...

(Above: watch the hands, watch the hands).

So here's a pleasant note to start the day.

Not only did Peter 'the smirk' Costello set the Reserve Bank free of regulatory oversight, he's as proud as punch of his achievement, as he explains in Key to unearthing facts in Securency case:

In 1996, on behalf of the government, I entered into an agreement with the governor of the Reserve to give it much greater independence.

We keed, we keed. 'The smirk' isn't talking about letting the Reserve and its subsidiary Securency play fast and loose in the matter of international bribery:

From then on the government has taken no role in the setting or announcement of the official cash rate. But such power could not be given to a statutory body without some mechanism to ensure public accountability.

For the rest of the column, there's a lot of harumphing and puffing and blowing hard about the way the smirk knew nothing about corruption within the Reserve's operations:

It is now alleged that some of the contracts that were obtained by the polymer company - Securency International - may have involved the payment of irregular commissions. I have no knowledge of the facts behind such claims. Certainly the Reserve reported no suspicion of wrongdoing to me in the period I was treasurer up to November 2007.

Bring that man a bowl of water, he needs to wash his paws.

Oh hang on a tic, he's already washed his paws:

If there were any doubt about how these laws could render conduct in faraway places to be a crime in Australia, it would have been dispelled by the highly-publicised dealings of the AWB in relation to wheat exports to Iraq. A (then) little-known Labor frontbencher by the name of Kevin Rudd conducted a vigorous campaign to try to implicate the Coalition government in a ''wheat for weapons'' scandal. Eventually the Coalition called a royal commission on the matter. In 2006 it completely exonerated ministers in the government.

Yes, yes, nothing to do with the government.

All this talk of regulation and oversight and the buck stopping in the kitchen where it gets very hot is so tetchy and petty-minded. Never mind that if you cultivate a climate away from regulation and oversight, and let loose the pretties, who knows how far the pretties will fly.

It's one of the greater absurdities, the way that the de-regulators routinely use their deregulatory activities to absolve themselves of any responsibility, when the greatest responsibility of all was not to get themselves into a position of absolving themselves of responsibility.

The buck has to stop somewhere, and in the Westminster system, it should stop with the likes of Costello. The fact that Costello presided over a rort unknowingly - adopting the three wise monkey philosophy - says it all ... and ditto the wheat scandal, where the government of the day and its minions got off lightly, because that's what happens within the gentleman's club of politics ...

In the world of the free market libertarian fantasists, regulation is a bad thing and onerous. In the world of reality, people free of regulation are apt to stretch their wings and do naughty things. If the smirk taught the world one thing, it was the limits of its deregulatory fantasy life.

And another thing.

Followers of pundits will be pleased to see Paul "Chicken Little" Sheehan in best 'the sky is falling', 'there might be aliens' form in Population clock is ticking for O'Farrell.

Put simply and shortly - Colonel Grumpy goes on interminably - there's too many people in Sydney and Melbourne and too many people in Australia.

It's just as well Sheehan doesn't live in Beijing which at 20 million plus is only a few million off the total population of Australia. Maybe Shanghai at 13.5 million would be more to his taste.

Anyhoo, Mr. Little is terribly worried about the NSW government, and its approach to public transport. It seems it can't even produce a north-west rail link. It seems there are too many cars in the city.

It all sounds dangerously Clover Moore, though there were no signs of Sheehan in plus fours on a bicycle.

Not to worry. The pond will be by-passing such minor traffic difficulties by travelling to Canberra by car, to alight at Bazza O'Farrell's visionary siting of the second airport for Sydney ...

And another thing.

Yesterday the pond was flicking through Fairfax online and came across this, under the header For her own sake, PM should explain.

Was it mere opinion?

Yep, that's what it said. Or was it something else?

Oops. It was an opinionated editorial!

Even more sadly, the editorial turns out to be regurgitated re-hashing of ideas coming directly to Fairfax via the Brucers at The Australian.

Today, as is their wont, the Brucers are out in force at The Australian, hunting in unison as a rabid pack, evoking the feeling of what it would be like to be a fox at the other end of a feral gaggle of baying hounds.

The crusade continues!

A special commendation must go to that top Brucer Ean Higgins for a first class bit of Brucing with An old flame faded into black (behind the paywall, but hey you know how to google).

The salivating Brucer Higgins delivered a number of poetic insights, but none top this one:

...what is certain is that while Ms Gillard's political career reached the top, Mr Wilson achieved, at least until now, his self-sacrificing goal of fading out of sight. While Ms Gillard hosts state dinners at The Lodge for Barack Obama, Mr Wilson helps cook the $6.90 "Bingo Buster" pensioner special on bingo nights at the Fingal Bay Sports Club on the NSW mid-north coast.

By golly those investigative Brucers would head off to Hawaii if it thought it would bring them closer to the truth and the birther conspiracy.

But please don't be depressed:

The Australian yesterday caught up with Mr Wilson as he briefly ventured out of his comfortable modern apartment with a superb view out over the sea and mountains around Fingal Bay to collect the morning newspaper.
He declined to speak, but some of his colleagues at the club, all of whom spoke warmly of Mr Wilson, were more forthcoming.

He declined to speak! All that colour and movement, and the central figure in black wouldn't break his silence. Oh it breaks a tabloid's heart:

According to the manager, Mr Wilson is sad and regretful, but not bitter, that the political fortunes of the former couple moved in radically different directions, and he still has high regard for his former flame. "He said: 'That's just the way it is.' "

High regard?

For a lying, cheating, witch who should be ditched? Shame on him. Move along Brucers, you need a better witness than this.

But first class Brucing, Ean Higgins. More colour and movement and bingo and pensioners than you could find in Hawaii, and such sympathy and regard for the man in black, so cruelly spurned and brought low by the wicked witch.

Now back to that Fairfax editorial:

For her own sake, Gillard would be well advised to give her own review of the affair to Parliament, to authorise Slater & Gordon to make available any personal records to any official inquiry, and to encourage her political ally, Paul Howes, to open AWU records as well.

An official inquiry?

Even the Brucers at The Australian aren't going that far. All they want are answers to questions, to questions that need to be answered, to questions that need to be asked, to questions that need to be questioned, an open and honest debate, which is to say, an honest and open debate, which is to say a mortified confession of guilt and abject failure, which will culminate in the resignation of Gillard, because she's a harridan and a witch, as explained righteously in their editorial No minister. Dodging the issue is not good debate.

What's needed is a good solid debate about how Gillard is a harridan, and how there are too many lawyers in politics (watch out Liberal party), and how politicians should be drawn from a wider gene pool, which unfortunately excludes Brucers, because all they know how to do is ask questions and savage unionists, braying and frothing and foaming in a quite unseemly hate-filled way.

Oh yes, as that old brand had it:

Remember Wapping! Once more over the top, top Brucers ...

(No need for intelligence genes if you're just a Brucer listening to your master's voice).

But back to the Fairfax editorialist's proposal for an inquiry. The stupidity is enormous. The editorial first of all exonerates Gillard of legal guilt, while pinning her with a couple of peccadilloes - the failure to open a file, and fucking a cad.

The conclusion? Launch an inquiry.

Death by a thousand cuts as the coals are interminably raked over and over and top Brucers like Ean Higgins once more head up the coast to share a top pensioner meal and a bit of bingo with the man in black.

It would have been a lot more honest of the Fairfax editorialist to simply join with the baying Brucers and demand Gillard's resignation, for failing to open a file and for fucking a cad.

Meanwhile, the pond is demanding another inquiry.

Who let the editorial go out in the first instance as an anonymous opinion piece? Did someone fail to open a file? For that matter, is someone in Fairfax fucking a cad?

Sure, shit happens, but there should be consequences ...

Oh let's just cut to the chase. The editor should step down now, at once. The pond might be only asking questions, but the conclusion is clear. People might plead ineptness or a momentary failure, but heads must roll!

Alternatively, do not ask where Gina Rinehart lurks. She lurks in the shareholding of Fairfax, and already the signs are strong that they've sipped deeply of the Brucer kool-aid in the editorial board room.

Gina will be pleased ...

And finally a special award surely must go to Tony Abbott, top Brucer, for not bothering to listen do or heed what BHP was saying, or indeed even caring to read their statement before shooting off his mouth:

Olympic Dam's minerals are not affected by the mining tax - which is levied on profits from iron ore and coal sales - but the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, who admitted last night he had not read BHP's statement, said the new taxes were a factor in BHP's decision because they had trimmed the total profits the company had available for new projects. (Olympic Dam on hold as boom peaks)

Never mind what BHP or its head actually said. That counts for naught when constructing an alternative universe.

Top Brucing, gold medal Brucing ... every day it's gold, gold, gold for Brucers ... and remember Brucers, never mind the truth of what you're saying, provided it's nattering and negative and neigh, neigh, neigh ...

(Below: the pond always loved the HMV logo, so let's run a couple more versions. But should it have been His Master's Voice is a Her? For that version, Gloria Swanson sets the mood).

In which the theme is common gossip facilitated by fibre to the home ...

(Above: in your dreams. Common gossip is common).


Before we go any further, please let the pond note the descent of Radio National into the garbage dump, courtesy of Jonathan Green, who conducted one of the most inept interviews with Larry Pickering imaginable.

The only excuse that Green can offer is that he was dropped into the show late because of the sickness of the usual host, Waheed Ali, but even so, it's interview 101 skills to be across the material being discussed.

Green was embarrassing, the ABC is embarrassing, and no doubt Pickering is sniggering away at the snow job. It was shoddy, slack and lazy (and if you can stand it, no doubt it will turn up here in due course).

Green next interviewed Andrew Wilkie, who demanded that Gillard make a statement to parliament to answer the questions.

But once you've denied the matter to hand, what further statement could clear the air, or clarify matters?

Is it so that she makes a statement on the record and then can be hung, drawn and quartered for misleading the parliament? Or is a gratuitous repetition of a denial, over and over again, the point here? The pond is of course just asking questions, which is all anyone seems to be doing, just asking rhetorical useless questions ...

The pond almost hoped that the super trawler would fuck over Tasmania, just to teach the impudent dingbat Wilkie a lesson.

The point is that the hounds involved in the witch hunt don't want answers, they don't want denials, they want a confession, they want an admission of guilt, they want Gillard hung, they want her to go in a ritual exorcism, and they'll settle for nothing less. There's no point in conducting a pleasant discourse contemplating the meaning of fanaticism with fanatics.

Naturally the hounds at The Australian are in full rabid intoxicated cry this morning, the mud in hand, fling it, fling it, the smell of blood in the nostrils, like a gang of white pointers, with their dull grey leaden eyes, the full weight of the feral pack wheeling in unison as the rag embarks on yet another crusade:

Yes it's the full panoply of kool aid drinkers.

That pathetic pompous puffed up shadow of his imagined self Paul Kelly, Janet 'Dame Slap' Albrechtsen just asking questions (as she did on the wretched Q&A), and Dennis "the tie" Shanahan also demanding answers to questions.

Questions, always with the questions, and the speculation, and not much else.

Meanwhile genuine scandals such as the one swirling around the Reserve Bank, or Fair Work Australia are shuffled down the chain (just as the Australian Wheat Board scandal disappeared up its fundament once people lost interest in the outcome, and never mind the comfort given to a villain so bad it required a war and thousands of civilian deaths to save the world from him).

Why does any of this matter? Apart from the stupidity and ineptness of Green, which we can take as a given?

Well the pond doesn't have much time for Mark Latham, except when he's doing lunch with poodle Pyne and turns in a tremendous comedy routine, but in Lunar right crusades against Gillard, he gets more than a few things right, as he notes how the Birthers have transmuted in Australia into the Brucers:

Like the Birthers, they are obsessed with ancient history: in this case, a belief that Julia Gillard should resign over a trade union financial dispute 20 years ago involving her then boyfriend, Bruce Wilson. No one has ever been charged with an offence and, despite repeated investigations by her political opponents, there is no evidence of Gillard having broken the law.
The Brucers are an example of the damaging impact of obsessiveness in public life. They fit the first rule of fanaticism: when all is lost, redouble your efforts. These political fringe dwellers specialise in myth-making and the harassment of innocent people – not just Gillard, but media figures who stand up to them and refuse to peddle their conspiratorial theories.
Not surprisingly, the anti-Labor newspaper The Australian has given succour to Smith and Pickering, deploying a so-called investigative reporter to pursue the Prime Minister. So far his efforts have not taken the story any further than when the matter was first raised by the Liberal Party in the Victorian Parliament 17 years ago.

The Brucers! The Australian is full of bloody Brucers!

By golly, if only for that conceit, the pond owes Latham a lunch in the local kebab shop (or perhaps Faheems Fast Foods on Enmore road, a local secret which the pond never reveals to anyone for fear it will be rushed, and so must remain a secret between the pond and any stray reader lost in the inner west of Sydney).

Latham can now add the ABC to the list willing to peddle conspiracy theories by allowing a half-baked interview, that was alternately soft, inept, meandering and useless. No hard questions were asked of the man asking questions.

Green tried to claw it back later in the show by reading some SMSs called Pickering a nutter, and a scaredy cat misogynist and so on, but by then the ass had bolted through the open gate.

It's troubling times for the pond in relation to RN. There's also the problem of the constant nausea induced by listening to Fran Kelly and the incessantly repeated stings in the morning show. The sting, the sting, it sounds in the mind like a tolling bell of doom.

Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the sting,
Of the sting, sting, sting -
To the sobbing of the sting;
Keeping time, time, time,
As it knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the sting
Of the sting, sting, sting -
To the tolling of the sting,
Of the sting, sting, sting, sting ...
(you can catch the rest of Edgar Allan Poe's poem about bells here, in unabused form).

Okay, it's a little OT, but you catch the drift. Bringing Australia together? Bringing the pond into contact with Jonathan Green, Fran Kelly and her sting? They've got to be dreaming.

For the past few weeks the pond had cultivated false hope.

With nothing on television - thanks to Gina Rinehart and the complete collapse of Lara Bingle's dreams - there was a chance to listen to an interviewer on Late Night Live who didn't talk over his guests, didn't interrupt, listened and asked intelligent questions, and was genteel and reluctant to lead with his own opinions, remembering that the reason you have a guest on the program is to find out what they think, rather than having them and the listeners suffer the interminable pompous meandering opinions of the interviewer.

And then Phillip Adams came back.

Adams did have the grace to propose that Norman Swan did it better than him. Damn right and in spades.

But as a result of all this, RN is off the pond's list. It seems simpler just to tap away at the noggin with a baseball bat, and see if brain damage can be induced in a less painful way.

In one dangerously experimental moment, we've even listened to Richard Glover play Kenny Rogers' Island in the Stream (with Dolly of course).

Oh yes it's an edgy Sydney experience and the pond knows how to live dangerously, but no doubt listeners in other states to Local Radio can tell of similar hair-raising near-death experiences.

Hey nonny nonny no, on we go, if only so we can note the deliciousness of the Fairfax story Turnbull likes fibre to the home - in France. And before we go any further, kudos to the Fairfax designer who came up with this splash. Oh you do big Mal proud, in an ethereal wired sort of way:

Because Australians tend to be myopic and don't get out and about enough - even though these days you can travel with the click of a mouse - there's a segment of the population who are routinely startled to learn that other countries are doing something about climate change, and take seriously the prospect of a broadband wired economy (the myopia is cultivated by rags like The Australian, always ready to crusade, rarely willing to inform).

So there's a nicely piquant spicy sauce of hypocrisy served up with the news that big Malcolm Turnbull has been caught out investing in France Telecom, which is planning to connect sixty per cent of French households by fibre to the home by 2020.

Big Mal's spokesperson fired back:

"France is utterly unlike Conrovian Australia,'' the spokesman said. ''There is no government monopoly building a near-universal fibre-to-the-premises network.
''Private telcos are building fibre to the premises where they think it is viable and, to date, take-up is not very high.''

So either big Mal is a terrible investor - France Telecom performs a little like Telstra and its take up isn't high and so Mal and his investment doesn't have the first clue about what the public wants.

Or he's resolutely opposed to the notion that rural citizens should be disconnected from the intertubes, because connecting the bush, especially remote locations, isn't particularly viable on a commercial level.

Of course the bush badly needs to be connected, and benefits from the connection, but ain't it grand to see big Mal denouncing the agrarian socialism that runs rife through the Nationals.

The Labor party has catered to this socialist tendency by making the bush a priority for connections. Will the bush care and reward them? Almost certainly not ...

Will big Mal ever acknowledge that fibre to the home is the way to go? Probably ...

But not until the hornswoggling has served its purpose and Tony Abbott wins the election ... and then we'll see whether Dr. No has the first clue about broadband and climate science.

Probably not ... but will big Mal then come out of his shell and admit that fibre to the home is the way the rest of the world is heading ...

Well even a turtle sticks its head out occasionally to see what the world is doing ... except perhaps if you're a turtle working at The Australian.

(Below: and now thanks to old time radio, something for the gentleman reader, found in the ABC archives Flicker account here).