The pond tackles the dangerous subversive world of academic latte-sippers, assisted by Miranda the Devine and Nick Cater ...

(Above: Australia facing one of its many crises, more details here. Now fair warning, if you're a filthy, perverted latte-sipper, stop reading right now and bugger off. We don't want your kind here, why don't you head off to New Zealand where your sort belong).


So many choices, so little time.

Only yesterday there was Gary Johns, no doubt in receipt of a handsome superannuation package from federal parliament, delivering up this logic in Many on the receiving end of middle-class welfare (inside the paywall so dole bludgers and welfare recipients are pointedly excluded from reading the deep thoughts of Mr Johns):

Pensioners always argue that they have made their contribution, but this is not so; taxpayers pay the pension and health costs of pensioners.

Indeed, and who were the taxpayers who paid their taxes in yesteryear? Bludgers!

Johns is outraged and indignant. These bloody working class yobbos are simply living too long and costing too much. In the good old days they had the decency to drop off the twig at a proper time and place:

The big one is access to the age pension and superannuation. In 1910 the age pension was paid to men from age 65 and to women at age 60. Pretty generous, hey? Yes, except for one small matter. Life expectancy at birth in 1910 was 55 for men and 59 for women. In other words, you were not meant to survive long enough to draw it.

Damn that was clever. Tax 'em dry and then watch them drop and keep the cash in paw for the pollies. But how things have taken an outrageous turn for the worst:

How times have changed. Life expectancy in 2011 was 80 for men and 84 for women. And the pension access age has barely shifted since 1910. If you were born before July 1, 1947, you have reached the qualifying age for the age pension.

Outrageous. The shameless bludgers. What a pity they didn't understand the way to a decent lurk, as you might discover if you care to wade through the fine print of Superannuation benefits for senators and members.

The pond looks forward to Mr Johns disavowing whatever little super treats the generous parliamentary scheme has set aside for him, and joining average pensioners on their lavish stipend. The bludgers!

Meanwhile, the lizard Oz offers up today more of the usual from Janet 'Dame Slap' Albrechtsen, getting terribly worried about the future facing the unborn. What? Climate change, pressure of population, pressure on resources, a world covered with humanity leeching it dry?

No, it's just the usual rant about governments living on credit cards, which makes the pond wonder when Dame Slap will publicly cut up all her credit cards and fling them in the faces of her wretched bankers. Fee fi fo, you usurers, take that for your private usury.

Never mind, Unborn are new forgotten ones  reads the header (behind the paywall so you can avoid a slapping), which is pretty much Johns in drag, since his column might well have been titled Old fart bludgers need to be the new forgotten ones. Put it another way: The Old Farts The (the pond assumes you know how to translate that into German).

Dame Slap wraps it up with a rip-snorter which would have done Maggie Thatcher proud:

There is no such thing as public money. There is only taxpayer money. And spending the money of future taxpayers to fund services for current taxpayers is exceptionally reckless.

Don't you just love it. There is no such thing as public money, presumably because there is no such thing as public ... just remember that next time you drive on mmmph roads or catch mmmmph transport to get to a mmmph beach where you might want to ...  piss in a mmmmph toilet ...

But while these are pleasant distractions, the pond would really like to draw your attention to a splendid piece by Miranda the Devine offering up a wondrous bit of puffery for Nick Cater's book.

News Ltd have been all agog about it, and gung ho in pushing and prodding it towards bestseller status. Why this lad is as stellar as Ian Plimer in his heyday. A new Lord Monckton, a kind of screaming Lord Cater ...

And truly it's thigh-slapping stuff. Let's start with this, in the same way that the Devine does:

Maybe it's because the author is a friend, but there is a buzz around a book by Nick Cater, The Lucky Culture, that feels like a defining moment in the Australian narrative. 

A defining moment in the Australian narrative. Oh that's good, that's rich, like the Xmas cakes we used to make in Tamworth ...

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

By golly chairman Rupert himself, the mogul's mogul, the insider's insider, the head of the ruling elite, the controller of the cliques, the owner of most of Australia's printed media, the head honcho, the ruling ratbag, the man in charge, the boss of bosses.

So what's Nick Cater's thesis?

Is he warning us how one man, via a family fiefdom, dominates Australia's media landscape?

Is he sounding the alarm about Australia's - and at one time the world's - richest woman wanting to get hold of Fairfax and the Ten network, and turn them into propaganda machines spouting her world view? Aided and abetted by little Sir Echos like the Bolter, ever ready to parrot the message to ensure a steady diet of presumptuous reds and operas ...

No, no, here's the punchline:

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

Now you might not think this high comedy, but truly it had the pond rolling the Jaffas down the aisles (actually we used to throw them off the balcony in the lounge at the plebs in the stalls down below).

That's a thesis?

You mean poor old Rupe is just one step away from being a hapless unpaid blogger like the pond because of the progressives, sophisticates, elites and latte-sippers who control everything and run everything?

I know, I know, it's so richly absurdist, so profoundly stupid - even when you have to allow that it's being refracted through the addle-brained Devine - that you might just think you've stepped into Alice in Wonderland, where nothing is but what is not.

But you do get a really tremendous idea of how stupid, dumb and ignorant of Australian history Cater must be, to think that he imagined that somehow he was signing up to a classless society, or that when he joined the ranks of the lizard Oz, he was signing up to an intrepid Godardian band of outsiders, repressed by dangerous latte-sippers ...

You have to wonder whether Cater, for example, ever read any Manning Clark:

"An obsession with the convict stain has obscured the colony's uplifting moral purpose as a place of rehabilitation. Until (historian) Manning Clark trussed colonial history in a Marxist straitjacket, Australia was considered the Enlightenment's most audacious experiment, an attempt to build a civilisation on a continent that had yet to be introduced to cultivation. It has succeeded beyond all expectation."

Marxist straitjacket? This is obscurantist stupidity of the first water. For its sins, the pond had to read a hell of a lot of Manning Clark, force fed by one of his worshipful students, and what becomes painfully clear is that Clark had a tragic, even religious bent, when it came to writing history.

Let's just take the quick way out by referring to his wiki, and the way Clark's father was an Anglican minister and his mother an old establishment family with roots back to the flogging parson, Samuel Marsden.

Let's note that for his big six volume history, Clark chose as models Carlyle, Gibbon and Macaulay - two conservatives and a Whig, as the wiki puts it, and had, in the process, abandoned the notion of progressive or Marxist historiography:

"I was beginning to see Australian history and indeed all history as a tragedy. Failure was the fate of the individual: success could be the fate of society. If that was a contradiction, I could only reply that it was but one of the many contradictions we must accept as soon as we can as part of the human condition."

In fact if the pond wanted to get up the nose of the Clark-lover, all that was required was to note some of the errors in his work, and then propose that he really wanted to be a tragic novelist, Dostoyevsky or Shakespeare...

The charge of Marxism is one of those easy, really pathetic and woefully ignorant notions usually led by someone who's never sat down and read the six volumes, which became more tragic and epic by the volume ...

But back to Cater and his thesis:

Cater's sees Australia as "an exceptional country, populated by exceptional people skilled at making their own luck. When fortune smiles, it is not by chance or benevolence, it is the dividend of an investment of human ingenuity, enterprise and energy. 
"Australians have been forging their own destiny for over 200 years; they subscribe to the idea of progress."

Uh huh. The idea of progress. Unlike Manning Clark, but very much like your average Marxist materialist dreaming of the millennium.

Yes, it's just another infatuated pommie bastard, as Bazza might say, eyes blinded by the sand and the sun and the waves pounding the beaches. And naturally there's a threat, though it isn't ten pound Poms, or the rabbit or sparrows or cane toads:

But Australian egalitarianism is threatened by the assumption that "some citizens, the educated ones, are smarter than the rest, and that therefore their opinions should carry more weight". 

Do tell. Do they write for chairman Rupert? Or is it a requirement these days for entry into the Murdoch factory that you reject coffee and carry no degrees, such things being surplus to requirement? Because Murdochian opinions carry more weight as the result of being carefree and ignorant, superficial and silly?

And if there's a threat, naturally there has to be villains, and it turns out that the villain is Robert Gordon Menzies, the man who in the 1950s decided it would be helpful if people got educated, some of them even at a tertiary institution. Damn you RG, damn you to hell ...

Who'd have thought such education would turn out to be more devastating and dangerous than Salvation Jane at producing bloat in stock?

He traces the rise of the new insider class to the extraordinary expansion of higher education from the late '50s, in which the number of universities doubled - and became "degree factories". 
 The unintended consequence was the creation of an "intelligentsia with a narrower, more homogenous" outlook, marked by a "progressive world view, snobbery and self righteousness".

This is of course completely different to the homogenous world view that infests the Devine, Cater, Albrechsten, and the entire pack of hacks who work away in the Terror, the HUN, the lizard Oz and the rest of the Murdoch rags.

The intellectual class has for almost half a century "misrepresented Australia's history, misread its present, misjudged its people and projected a miserable vision of the future", while maligning "patriotism as akin to racism". 

Oh steady on, the pond is as ready as anyone to drink a VB to celebrate war-mongering and to shout on buses at anyone with a slightly odd skin, who've somehow ended up in god's country though we thrashed them in the war.

But enough of Cater, let's now get a sweet distilled draught of pure Devine essence:

Australia is not a race or an ethnicity or a constitution. It is an idea, and thus exquisitely vulnerable to the narrative that is drawn for it. 
I spent a good deal of my youth in American schools, reading American children's books and absorbing American mythology. Every story, from George Washington to the Bobbsey Twins, reinforced the idea of America the Good. 

The Bobbsey Twins, instead of good old Enid Blyton and other solid British folk! At last it all becomes clear! She ended up in the magic faraway tree, but she never had the literary references to understand it ...

Australians have never bothered ourselves with American-style displays of overt patriotism. Our reticence is an admirable quality, up to a point. But in all our embarrassment about excessive pridefulness, we have vacated the ground where patriotism used to define who we are, and left it to the sneerers and the wreckers. 

Yes, the sneerers and the wreckers, always sneering at the sneerers and the wreckers ...

Cater's book is the spiritual sustenance our maligned nation needs. The Lucky Country should be on the curriculum of every high school history class, along with the complete works of Geoffrey Blainey.

Oh steady on, surely there should be room for a book by Chairman Rupert on the curriculum of every high school history class in the country. Bemoaning coffee drinking and elites and what they're doing to the country, and celebrating his humble status as a casual billionaire.

And what better title than a traditional one? The thoughts of Chairman Rupert ...

And if the clique and elitist hating freedom fighter is too busy, why surely the Devine and Cater and Albrechtsen and the whole gang at the lizard Oz can cobble something together.

Oh wait, they already do, on a daily basis, full of stupid superficialities, random abuse and material you wouldn't use to wipe a cat's bum in a history class, at least one where some sort of insight is required, as opposed to cliches, stereotypes and banality ... pure essence of distilled banality...

(Below: wouldn't you know it, if you google lucky country, all sorts of post-ironic post-modern things bubble to the surface. It's those bloody university folk ruining it for everybody with their smart-arse know it all airs and graces, completely unlike an average Murdochian, content simply to know it all, while never ever sipping a latte!)

The pond is at war ... with the commentariat. Waiter, a VB please ...

The time, it seems, has come for blunt talking.

A man who has acted as a pawn for the alcohol industry is in line to become the next gee gee. And the culture wars are back on.

And it's that dodo, that wet behind the ears Adelaide prat (the pond has no evidence he's an Adelaide hills prat), Christopher Pyne, who is once again front and centre digging the black armband out of the garbage can. 

That seems to be the lesson contained in Libs reignite culture wars over Anzac Day teaching.

Now the pond scoured Pyne's wiki here for a sign of his war record but it turns out he did his tour of duty by valiantly rooting files out of solicitors' filing cabinets before heading off to parliament. 

It's the sort of record people are fond of yabbering about when they complain about Labor party apparatchiks and faceless men being removed from reality by their work experience. Pyne was a mere 25 when he got called up ... to stick his bum on a cushy seat in parliament.

As for Cosgrove, the pond reserves a special contempt for him but pleads extenuating circumstances. You see, the pond's grandfather came back from service at the Somme in the great war, took to the drink in a big way - he'd been quietly sober before heading off to be a machine gunner in the freezing mud - and by the time the pond came to know him, he was a hopeless alcoholic, occasional wife-beater, and when drunk, maker of misery for everyone ...

Cosgrove has been out and about flogging VB like a professional harlot these past few years, ostensibly as a way of raising money for charity but in reality as a way of ensuring people stay on the piss and think somehow it's part of doing a good deed.

Now the pond isn't the first to observe this. Back on April 28th last year Suzy Freeman-Greene scribbled Heroes and booze: the unhealthy mix at the core of our culture. Freeman-Greene ended her piece this way:

On the one hand, tough new laws ban adults from offering even one drink to a child at home without parental consent. On the other, we let cricketing heroes be plastered with beer logos and barely raise an eyebrow as VB welds itself to the Anzac story.

Indeed. And this year there's more of the same, a sickly mix of sentimentality and hops, and together with it a rich serve of hypocrisy, as VB defends their 'raise a glass' campaign.

The General Manager of Victoria Bitter says that the brand's 'raise a glass campaign' is not about promoting the sale or consumption of alcohol on Anzac Day.

Uh huh. After you're picked up all the jaffas rolling around in the aisle - what fun you'll have reading the hypocritical dissembling and ingenuous bullshit about the VB branding exercise - you'll no doubt notice that the ads in no way feature the VB label ... in your bloody dreams.

Now the RSL is slowly coming to realise that if you do evil to do good, the doing of the evil prevents the good from being of much use, and there's been much fuss as NSW RSL branch pushes for split from iconic clubs.

You see, all they seem to care about is the money, and the gambling and the drinking and the turnover.

And so on and on, but no doubt it all helps explain why the Libs just love Peter Cosgrove.

Why he's way better than Willy Loman at pushing legal drugs on the young ... he gives getting on the piss a real gravitas and style ... a man's pissed as a parrot man, don't ya know, for a decent bloody charitable purpose ...

But look that's not the reason the pond has decided on blunt talking.

The pond is merely echoing Gerard Henderson's The time has come for blunt talking, so let's endorse his sentiments.

The time has come to call Gerard Henderson a dickhead, along with Alan Jones, and Bob Ellis ...

I mean, what sort of fool could write a line like this, ostensibly in support of Alan Jones, and denying he was a dickhead for shooting his mouth off and blaming the Boston matter on left-wing students.

Jones' prophecy was inaccurate. But it turned out he was not far off the mark.

That's right, he was wrong, but he was right. And welcome to Alice in Wonderland.

Now in the pond's world, a miss is as good as a mile, and it takes a real dickhead to try to turn around Alan Jones and give him some semblance of respectability.

No one would bother to try with the senile thoughts of Bob Ellis, and it makes it just as reprehensible that Henderson tries to rehabilitate Jones for being loose of lip and brain.

The way that Henderson goes about the business of defending Jones is to parade all the other geese that got it wrong, those who talked of extreme right wingers, though strangely he doesn't get on to the business of Ellis and the NRA.

But just because other people are dickheads doesn't stop Jones being a dickhead, or Henderson being a dickhead for defending him.

We're all wise after the event, and the truth is unveiled, though some of course are determined to go on being a dickhead. Like Henderson ... I mean, what sort of loon would write this?

It turns out that many commentators in the West were hoping that the Boston culprits were home-grown so-called "patriots". Like Timothy McVeigh, whose terrorist attack on Oklahoma City in April 1995 murdered more than a hundred. For understandable reasons, there was a hope that the Boston terrorists had not embraced the Jihadist cause. But they had.

Say what? People in the United Sttes wanted to know that they had a serious problem with seriously deranged right wing loons? But they already know that ... right wing extremists and white supremacists have been active for decades, way back beyond the glory days of the KKK, as with the attack on the Sikh temple (Right-wing extremist terrorism as deadly a threat as al Qaeda?)

And over the years left wing extremists have also been active ...

But Henderson is determined to have a war, and we're not talking about the war on drugs, the war on guns, the war on the car killing fields, or the war on soda and obesity ...

We're talking about that old paranoid favourite, the Islamic, the new and the foreign ...

Most of the Jihadist attacks on the US have been conducted by foreigners or new citizens.

The list includes the "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who attempted to bring down a plane over Detroit in 2009 and Faisal Shahzad who attempted to explode a bomb in Times Square the following year. The former was Nigerian, the latter a Pakistani-American citizen. 

Uh huh. Two failed and pathetic attempts at terrorism. That's the best he can come up with to crank up that war and get things going. Thank the lord he clearly doesn't head off to the movie theatre at a time when Batman's showing, and finds himself in a real war zone.

But it's enough to get him into rhetorical overdrive.

The time has come for blunt talking. 

Which is of course code for the time has come for dickhead talking.

But first we have the usual washing of the hands:

The overwhelming majority of Muslim resident in the West are law-abiding citizens. Moreover, the majority of Muslims who currently die violent deaths are killed by other Muslims. 

Oh yes, we luvs our Muslims, except of course we must hate and fear our Muslims:

Yet the fact remains that the West, including Australia, is under attack from a few jihadists who hate us so much that they are even prepared to murder children watching a marathon. 

Indeed and the fact remains that you'd be most unwise to attend a wedding party in Afghanistan, for fear the drones took out the children watching the wedding ceremony.

Yes, that's the way cheap pathetic paranoid rhetoric works.

But it turns out Henderson has another bee in his bonnet, as he seeks to justify the infringement of civil liberties. Suddenly you see, there are enemies all around:

In Australia, after the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, it was the civil liberties lobby on the left which railed against the national security legislation which John Howard introduced when prime minister with the support of opposition leader Kim Beazley. Today, however, the critics are somewhat bipartisan. 
John Roskam is a fine leader of the conservative Institute of Public Affairs. But in recent times the IPA has grown a libertarian faction headed by Christopher Berg and Stephen Breheny. Their attitude to surveillance by such security organisations ASIO and ASIS is not dissimilar to that of such left-wing lawyers as Rob Stary. 

Oh dear, the extremists defending civil liberties, right, left and centre are on the march, attacking John's and Bomber Beazley's heroic legacy. Where will it all end?

The Berg/Breheny libertarian position has been properly criticised by Labor parliamentary secretary Michael Danby and by the conservative commentator Colin Rubenstein, who heads the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council. 
The fact is that the Boston terrorists were detected by CCTV footage. What's more, the evidence suggests that if the FBI surveillance had been more thorough the attacks may not have taken place. Freedom invariably has to be curtailed at a time of war.

Freedom has to be curtailed at a time of war!

Does that mean we have to give up our freedoms to fight those other deadly and far more effective than jihadist killer wars, the war on drugs, the war on killer cars, the war on killer gun culture, and the war on soda pop and obesity?

The rhetoric is however a handy insight into the paranoid foam-flecked mind that lurks just beneath Henderson's authoritarian surface. Yep, he's authoritarian all the way down, deep into his surveillance-orientated spying bowels.

Presumably Henderson won't be happy until we reach the level of surveillance that East Germany once achieved, though it seems we might be getting there when it comes to the use of drugs in sport ...

Presumably amongst Hendo's heroes are Beria, Franco, the apartheid regime (well they did good business with Israel), Pinochet, the Chinese communist party - such an effective intertubes surveillance regime - and all the other repressive heroes of history who want to keep their citizenry on a leash and under control.

But actually at the moment, the one war in which Australian is involved - the occupation of Afghanistan - is the real problem, cheered on by these armchair chocolate soldiers who can't live without war and the rhetoric of war.

At which point, by golly the pond feels like a VB to slake its thirst ... come on down Peter Cosgrove and let's get drunks as skunks, because it's the dinky di Aussie thing to do, especially when contemplating the sacred day of piss-ups and two up ...

(Below: and now just for fun, because Crikey yesterday reminded the pond of one of its favourite Simpsons' jokes, in which Homer Simpson snatches a tot in the style of The Birds. You can see the moment here. Think jihadist tots and you too can experience Gerard Henderson's world view).

Keeping the company of fundies, part two ...

The occasional reader who drops by the pond might well wonder if the pond occasionally feels uncomfortable at the company it keeps.

There, for example, is Tim Blair banging away in the Daily Terror with Reluctance to blame extremist Islam a sign of our 'maturity'.

Blair is well known for his Islamophobia, and in its cause, he picks some of the easiest targets, like hapless Bob Ellis, who is - if we may use Ellis's skill with statistics - almost certain to be 99.9% wrong in anything he says.

Ellis, who has a blog that provides as easy pickings as the scribblers at Menzies House, and is therefore always too easy a target for anyone, including the pond to contemplate, wrote under the header The Boston Marathon Massacre:

I wouldn’t know; but it seems to me likely that this was not al-Qaeda or a lone madman (three bombs portend a conspiracy of at least three people and from me therefore a ‘conspiracy theory’ and from the FBI too, since they are paid well to imagine such wickedness), but more likely, much more likely, the NRA. 

Now of course he wouldn't know, and he shouldn't have said anything, if proving he wasn't a goose was his aim, but no, he had to go on:

For it diverts attention away from their gunning-down of the gun laws in Congress, and shows America — once again — a dangerous place whose frightened citizens must henceforth be armed to the teeth. Gun sales will go up after this, of course they will, and psychiatric checks diminish, and the NRA, as usual, rejoice.

You can almost see a glimmer of light, because indeed the reason the Boston suspects had access to such a heavy range of weaponry is thanks to the NRA - a point you won't find Tim Blair making, even through gritted teeth.

But then Ellis, who always dreamed of being a spin bowler, lobs up the easiest full toss:

No responsibility will claimed by any group, and there will be no second attack; and no culprit ever found. 
This is my prediction. 
Discuss.

It quickly turned out it wasn't much of a prediction, and there was sweet bugger all to discuss, and the likes of Tim Blair was hoicking poor old Bob into the stands.

But back to Blair, because where he and the pond part ways is that he's an apologist for certain forms of fundamentalism American style.

Here's how it works:

Imagine if the brothers Tsarnaev were instead Otis and Crandall, Alabama boys who'd driven up to Boston for a final bloody showdown with Barack Obama's liberal America. Right now you'd be reading reports about the menace of fundamentalist Christianity. Alas, both Tsarnaev boys were of the Islamic faith, a fact that sends media analysis into "we cannot know" mode.

Actually, you don't need to have a Boston matter to be aware of the menace of fundamentalist Christianity in the United States. Just be a woman in search of equal rights, or say an abortion, or a gay who for some completely mysterious reason wants to join the Boy Scouts.

As for the alleged "we cannot know" mode with regard to the American media, that's a childish slur, if not an outright blatant lie, since the American media has - from the moment the news of the Chechen connection broke - been all over the Cechyna angle, an angle which Blair himself ignores so he can rabbit on about Islam. Here's Blair:

The usual next step in any terrorism talk seeking to evade harsh views of Islam is to spread the blame. Sunrise host Sam Armytage asked guest Keith Suter. "Why would someone who pretty much has had an American education and upbringing perform an act of terrorism like this?" Suter's response: "This is the big mystery. Why do these people end up getting radicalised? Is it something about living in the local culture?" Yep. It's still America's fault. 

Which is a classic way to shut down any discussion. Sssh, whatever you do, don't mention the killer drones, which routinely and silently carve up wedding parties quicker than your average terrorist.

The Boston Globe's Kevin Cullen was on radio the morning after the big Tsarnaev hunt: "A caller came on the air and started talking about how we've got to look in the mirror and ask what we as Americans have done to create angry young men like this." 
There are those young men again. A mature investigation might look at another common factor. Whatever could it be?

Uh huh. So here's a notion, and an easy one. Pick an American newspaper, any paper at random, and see what you come up with. Google obliged by providing the pond with a story in The Salt Lake Tribune, deep in the heart of mighty Mormon territory, with the header Boston bombings suspects: The Chechen connection.

Which is already one more mention of Chechnya than Blair makes in his entire piece, as he contemplates possible factors in the Boston matter, and reduces it in his usual simple-minded way down to one thing. Islamophobia

Not one mention of the suspects' heritage or their relationship to their homeland. Bizarre. Here's what the Tribune suggested:

Nothing in their American lives seems to offer a plausible explanation for what they’re accused of doing last week.
But their connection to Chechnya might.

Now within that context, and a lecture on Checnya's woes, the Tribune went on to note:

Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s YouTube channel featured videos in support of fundamentalism and violent jihad. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev tweeted in March 2012: "a decade in America already, I want out."

Indeed. The point is that Blair, using straw men (and straw Bob Ellis) to make a snide remark - "whatever could it be?" - actually fudges the whole festering stew of fundamentalism, nationalism, the IRA, and American exceptionalism that might lead to an interesting perspective on and understanding of the way fundamentalism can grip the heart and soul.

It turns out you can find this sort of discussion going on in the American media, just not in the Daily Terror or in Tim Blair or in the rabid festering ranks of the right wing loons of America - since their ranks have proven fertile ground for acts of domestic terrorism..

The trouble is, to have a sensible discussion on these matters, first of all, you have to allow that all sorts of fundamentalism can be dangerous. Which is extremely hard for fundamentalists to allow ...

It's like Miranda the Devine scribbling yesterday We need to know if somebody radicalised Boston bombing suspects.

The Devine trawls through the same sort of turf the pond mentioned yesterday in relation to Sheik Feiz Mohammad, though at least the pond had the grace to note there was no proven connection.

There's the matter of Harry Potter and the uncovered meat routine that the Sheik indulged in at length in 2005. There's nothing like a fundamentalist Islamic for pure fundamentalist ratbaggery, except of course Jewish, Hindu, and Christian fundamentalists ...

But who knows what if any connection there might be between the Sheik and the Boston matter. He's already disclaimed any knowledge of the pair of suspects and any discussion of his views should be framed in the context of his weird views. Copping a like on YouTube isn't enough for a sensible discussion of influence ...

Which is where it gets tricky for the likes of the Devine. Because you see, she also belongs to a cult, and a cult which, for example, has extremist fundamentalist views in relation to say women's rights and gay rights and such like, not to mention Harry Potter.

You only have to head off to the wiki on the Religious debates over the Harry Potter series to get the good Catholic oil.

It turns out that along with some sensible people, the Catholic church harbours some right old nutters, including the former pope:


...in 2003, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – who later became Pope Benedict XVI – received a manuscript of a book critical of the novels from a German author. He stated in a private letter expressing gratitude for the receipt of the book, "It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly." He also recommended she send a copy of her book to Fleetwood at the Council for Culture. In a second letter, the cardinal gave the author permission to make his first letter public. These letters from Ratzinger prior to his elevation to the papacy have been used to suggest that the pontiff was officially opposed to the novels.

Naturally there was some walking back from this position by some in the church, but there were others:

Criticism against the books also comes from one of the official exorcists of the Archdiocese of Rome, Father Gabriele Amorth, who believes that, "Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil." He further told the Daily Mail that the books make a false distinction between black and white magic, while, in reality, the distinction "does not exist, because magic is always a turn to the devil." Amorth believes that the books can be a bad influence on children by getting them interested in the occult.

A church that still practices exorcisms as featured in Hollywood movies!

Now it's obvious enough that the church is home to some strange people ... after all, at various points, the likes of Miranda the Devine, Angela Shanahan, Gerard Henderson and Christopher Pearson have all gone on and on in public about their infatuation with its preaching and its sometimes fundamentalist and extremist teachings.

It's easy to send up bizarre routines about Harry Potter. In much the same way as its easy to send up the bizarre rantings of Pastor Danny and the Ministry of Fire, or his acolyte, Screaming against climate science Lord Monckton, at various times worshipped by said Pearson, Devine and so on and so forth, right along to the Bolter and the Blairites ...

As always, the matter at hand might involve some complexity, some attempt to unravel the deeper aspects of human behaviour.

You just won't find a desire for complexity or understanding in Blair or the Devine or the Murdoch tabloid empire, and since the pond spends much of its time in that swamp, you won't find it in the pond either.

Instead you'll just find a bunch of ratbags arguing the toss of a cat. If you want to understand things better, you'll have to look elsewhere, do your research, and come to conclusions more compelling than Tim Blair wondering whatever could it be, or Bob Ellis acting the fool, or Miranda the Devine ending her speculative piece this way:

Whether, and how, the suspects were radicalised will remain the crucial question for future counter-terrorism efforts.

Which is incredibly funny, when you pause for a second, seeing as how she is a radical member of the fundamentalist extremist wing of the Catholic church ...

Where was she, for example, when it came to the launching of the war on Iraq in the name of WMDs that didn't exist? It's enough to make the pond break into song:

Where have all the young men gone? 
Long time passing 
Where have all the young men gone? 
Long time ago 
Where have all the young men gone? 
Gone for soldiers every one 
When will they ever learn? 
When will they ever learn? 

Where have all the soldiers gone? 
Long time passing 
Where have all the soldiers gone? 
Long time ago 
Where have all the soldiers gone? 
Gone to graveyards every one 
When will they ever learn? 
When will they ever learn?

It's a naive business-friendly rag, but the pond thinks you'll be amused by its presumptuous poetry ...

Now in the past few weeks most people will have taken away as the main Australian Financial Review story the sacking of journalist Paddy Manning for making the mistake of talking truth to power.

The fallout resonated during the week with the Commonwealth Bank withdrawing its sponsorship of a column, as you can read in CBA sponsorship lost after Fairfax sacking. And there was titillation over at Crikey - original cause of the fuss by publishing Manning's piece - about a book by an AFR hack about the trials and tribulations of Fairfax - Killing Fairfax, no less, as you can read in First shots fired in the blockbuster Fairfax book wars.

Now it's hard to imagine why Manning imagined he could point out the state of the emperor's brand new clothes and get away with it, but any reader of the AFR will know that he accurately described the state of the clothes, as Jim Parker noted in The Stockholm syndrome infecting business reporting. (all Crikey pieces may be paywall affected).

Parts of the AFR rag are just junket heaven and sales promotions, the opinion pages are invariably poor and deeply prejudiced, and it regularly astonishes the pond that anyone would fork over $3.30 of the readies for the weekend edition.

That said, the rag also regularly displays an ability to amuse and amaze, and no, we're not talking about the Rowe cartoon, or the pathetic attempts at humour displayed by the astonishingly feeble Rowan Dean. They sack Manning and keep on Dean? Beyond the valley of the silly ...

Never mind, in another life the pond used to hang around with Adelaide hills prats - perhaps was even once a foodie and a whinie - so let's give a concrete example by taking a look at several fine examples of concrete poetry on view in this weekend's Life and Leisure section:

Sapid, souk-like spices
Plus dark, shiny fruitcake
And luminous carbon paper
Pepper and deep fruit aplenty
Fine tannins
And finessed oak treatment.

Carbon paper!

That about Gimblett Gravels Vineyard syrah, 2010, from Hawkes Bay in New Zealand, 95/100 and a snap at $45.

Now if you want that rasp of carbon paper on tongue, you know where to go ...

How about:

Light, fragrant, mossy
And maraschino cherry
Gentle, wet, leafy
Silky fruit flesh on the tongue
with succulence that lingers
Finishes with a smidge
Of toffee crisp

Wet! Wine that's wet?

Who could imagine such a thing? Who could imagine such an incisive insight? Now you know where to go to get wetness. And a smidge of toffee crisp.

That about a Te Muna Road Vineyard Pinot Noir, 2011, from Martinborough NZ, 93 out of the hundred and a more severe $56, presumably for the wetness.

And finally, let's admire:

Deep sexy-smelling 
Strawberry pippy creamy
Fab in the mouth
Has structural build
And then reduced succulence
Mouth-sucking and
vividly flavoured.

It's surely the weakest of the three.

Fab in the mouth is quite banal and socialite whirl as a metaphor, a saggy sodden pippy flourish that undercuts the deep sexy-smelling evocation of vagina and penis co-joined in vigorous coition (unless, unless, is sexy-smelling intended to evoke the taste of come in mouth, or the smell of anal sex? Is that what mouth-sucking means, is that what fab in the mouth means, has the pond missed the playful triple level cross-referencing evocation of a blow job in an eastern suburbs, perhaps Paddington lane?).

Anyway that poem's about a Calvert Vinyeard Pinot Noir, 2010, from Central Otago, NZ, somehow either 94 or 95 out of a hundred, depending on your ability to equivocate, and an equally severe $56.

Now the AFR doesn't usually do culture - a few film reviews here, a bit of chit chat about a Mao impersonator there - and that's your lot, because it's too busy complaining about how it should really be doing business in the United States where the slave labour, sorry the labour, is so much cheaper.

But surely these poems are a cause for celebration. The y'artz live ...

You'll have to decide for yourself whether this fine poetry adds to Manning's case or convincingly disproves it, because all the pond can do when confronted such aesthetic wonders is to fall silent ...

An ecumenical Sunday meditation on ratbag fundamentalism ...

Irrespective of any alleged connection between Sheik Feiz Mohammed and the Boston matter - Aussie sheik on Boston suspect's playlist (forced video at end of Fairfax link) might just be more Alan Jones' style mis-speaking - the piece reminded the pond that it doesn't spend much time with crazed Islamic fundamentalists.

This is as much cultural conditioning as anything - if you grew up like the pond with a Catholic father and a Protestant mother in a schizo feud which exposed the madness of both sides, you're likely to revert as first port of call to crazed Christian fundamentalists like the Pellists and the angry Sydney Anglicans ... because somehow, in a strange, warped, perhaps truly weird way, they're the fundamentalists you grew up with ...

The Fairfax piece drew attention to a Sheik Feiz rant about Harry Potter:

In the anti-Harry Potter clip, which Tamerlan Tsarnaev registered a "like", Sheik Feiz tells a story about visiting a house where Muslim children are watching a Harry Potter movie and the father describes it as "harmless fiction". 
"Harmless?" Sheik Feiz shouts in the video. 
"This film, whatever you think about it, glorifies, magnifies, promotes paganism. "... What does Harry Potter do in his films with his devilish school mates? 
"They cast spells, learn magic, brew potions, learn how to tell the future." 

Now it's a long stone's throw between a "like", or a "prod" or a "poke" and crazed fanaticism of a killing kind, but let's brood a little about Harry Potter.

Naturally the pond finds Potter offensive, but mainly because he acts as propaganda for the joys of private religious education of a superior English private school kind, when surely there's nothing wrong with a decent taxpayer-funded public school education drawing out the finer points of magic, potions, and future-telling (we keed, we keed).

But does the Sheik's rant remind anyone of anything else?

Of course. Fundamentalist Christian ratbags, and some of them quite mainstream, such as Peter Smith, the bizarre British union leader of the small but influential ATL (Association of Teachers and Lecturers):

'Children must be protected from the more extreme influences of the occult and be taught in a responsible and positive way the risks of journeying into the unknown,' he said.'The premiere of Harry Potter the movie will lead to a whole new generation of youngsters discovering witchcraft and wizardry. We welcome the values this will ingrain, focusing on good triumphing over evil. Though it is important not to over-react to this entertaining phenomenon, the risks are clear.' 
... Smith said the ATL had a long-standing concern over children 'meddling in the occult'. 'Increasing numbers of children are spending hours alone browsing the internet in search of Satanic websites and we are concerned that nobody is monitoring this growing fascination,' he added. (Teachers warn of occult dangers in Potter movie magic)

And so on and so forth, in a self-serving, publicity-seeking way, and next thing you know Smith is being quoted by crazed fundies offering up Twelve reasons not to see Harry Potter Movies.

In fact, it's easy to lather up fear about increasing numbers of children spending hours alone browsing the internet in search of crazed Islamic and Christian fundamentalist websites, and the pond is truly concerned that nobody is monitoring this weird fascination with fundamentalist ratbags.

Just Google Harry Potter and Christian and evil and see what you get - chances are you'll land on Last Trumpet Ministries blowing their bizarre trumpet in Harry Potter? What Does God Have To Say?

As parents, we will answer to God if we allow our children to read witchcraft books. The Word of God will prevail mightily in your life only if such things of Satan are destroyed.

And if you scratch the surface of these fundamentalists, you'd find they share other sorts of obsessions - the Sheik also attracted attention by blaming women for being rape victims and moaning about the way telly cartoons glorified nudity.

Which is where the fundamentalist rubber craziness really hits the road - sex and sexuality, women's rights, homosexuality and gay rights. And before you say such extremism doesn't count, just look at Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott's shared denialism in relation to gay marriage. Children of the fundie Abrahamic mind, even while purporting to be atheist, still carting around several thousand years of superstition, prejudice and bile ...

According to his wiki this is what the Sheik said to over a thousand who'd forked over fifteen bucks a head to listen:

"A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world. Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world... 
"Strapless, backless, sleeveless, showing their legs, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses, miniskirts, tight jeans: all this to tease man and appeal to his carnal nature. 
"Would you put this sheep that you adore in the middle of hungry wolves? No... It would be devoured. It's the same situation here. You're putting this precious girl in front of lustful, satanic eyes of hungry wolves. What is the consequence? Catastrophic devastation, sexual harassment, perversion, promiscuity... (wiki here)

It's the same old uncovered meat routine, cranked up to eleven, and the Sheik produced any number of other rants, advocating violence, abusing Jews as pigs, and carrying on like a pork chop ... perhaps because he can't eat a pork chop, or at least not in public ...

Apparently he identifies himself with the Wahhabist cause, which reminds the pond that the US's alleged friend in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia, is responsible for a huge amount of hypocrisy, hysteria and Islamic fundamentalism. ('Jihad' sheik to face new probe). Some friend ...

Now it's taken centuries for secular societies to bring religious fundamentalism under control, some more successfully than others. The United States has struggled, its struggle compounded by the way its gun fanatics make it easy for religious and secular crazies to pick up a fearsome amount of destructive weaponry. The Boston matter produced another display of destruction on parade in a country where gun death numbers (31,076 in 2010) are up there with car death numbers (32,885 in 2010).

And Israel has gone off into theocratic madness and apartheid, such that it more and more resembles Iran, a pity when it started off with such hopes for a secular state and even had socialist kibbutz inspirations.

What's even more difficult is how easy is the fundamentalist way and how difficult the way of the moderate secular or religious person. It's easy to be extreme, it's so much harder to take a deep breath, step back, and let the loon next to you go about their business, which might well be to exploit and abuse the liberality of the moderate. It's hard to be intolerant of the intolerant and remain tolerant ...

(click to enlarge)

There are remedies - laughter and satire are the most valuable, and that helps explain why the Egyptian government recently decided to persecute satirical news show host Bassem Youssef (here).

Unfortunately the conservative commentariat aren't part of the solution, they're part of the problem. They spout the same sort of fear, loathing, anger and hostility that still drips from the keyboards and the sermons of fundie clerics - the hostility to gays getting married is just the most recent and most common example, with the usual bunch incapable of admitting New Zealand might just have taken a step in the right direction.

All that can be done is to keep harrassing and harrying and laughing at them, albeit mostly in a moderate way, though perhaps extreme laughter should be allowed.

This can produce results. The Sydney Anglican website, for example, is in turmoil, getting more obscure, prosletyising and other-worldly by the day.

The re-vamp, makeover, call it what you will is supposed - in the site's words - to help visitors hook up with people and a church (Revamp to welcome visitors).

It's a remarkable mis-understanding of how the web works, proposing that a bland, banal introduction will somehow lead visitors into the world of Sydney Anglicans.

Discover Jesus, hear a testament, a postcode find a church is all you've got for a visitor?

Imagine a rough equivalent, say a newspaper or a magazine throwing up a minimalist portal as a front page, not much more than a splash page in terms of content  and thinking it was somehow beguiling (imagine a retailer doing the same - oh okay no mention of Hardly Normal's incredibly pathetic web presence).

So that's the Sydney Anglicans online, spiralling out of control into confusion. Naturally the pond refused to look any deeper - surface is the deep - and turned to the week old thoughts of the prattling Pellists for the Daily Terror.

It always amuses the pond to take a draught of Pellist thinking, as it frequently involves comments about sex and sexuality from an organisation dedicated to the fantastically weird and hugely unnatural notion that the way to wend through life should involve chastity and sexual frustration and all the warping and the wefting that involves ...

And what do you know? In this week's homily, A New Judge, Cardinal Pell explains why judges and priests should wear frocks:

I think it is useful and appropriate that at least senior judges wear distinctive robes to emphasize the majesty of the law, which transcends them as persons and which they are bound to uphold even, or perhaps especially, against interfering governments.

Translation. Any excuse to wear a frock! Time for a frock parade:

Sure enough, Pell - after praising learned judges for donning ceremonial scarlet robes and donning long white plaited wigs - immediately sinks the slipper into activist judges:

To my mind judges are appointed to implement not so much to make the law, which is the function of governments. This is why I opposed a Bill of Rights, which future generations of lawyers would want to interpret creatively. In the U.S.A. in the notorious Roe v Wade case in 1973 their Supreme Court moved from the right to privacy to a women's right to abortion. These decisions should be made by parliaments, whose members the people can accept or reject in the ballot box.

Translation. The Catholic church will never stop yammering about the right of the church to control women and what they do with their bodies, just as it will keep on insisting its priests maintain chastity and stay truly weird.

Why they still don't think you should put a condom on a walnut.

When you see a cleric like Pell discussing Roe v. Wade in such a simple-minded, fundie parrot-like way, you thank the long absent lord for a secular state ...

There's no way out of this sort of fundie madness, except to maintain the rage, in a modest and moderate way, against fundie madness ... and continue to agitate for education and laugher ...

Or maybe take the path of New Zealand.

But wait you say, in this ecumenical piece about raving ratbag fundamentalism the pond hasn't mentioned Jewish folk, even though the pond has lain with Jewish folk and done the devil's work and even broken bacon together in a surreptitious way. 

Oh well, here's a cartoon by one Eli Valley, found here, having a go at ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Click to enlarge:

There, the ecumenical meditation is done for the day, even as the fundie madness marches on ...

Of Oscar Wilde, Steinbeck, Harper Lee, Alan Jones and Christopher Pearson ...

(Above: not a green carnation in sight).

On the evidence already out there in relation to the Boston matter, one of the more trivial matters arising is that it seems Alan Jones mis-spoke.

But then Alan Jones always mis-speaks, so there's no learning experience here.

As usual, Mike Carlton seized the moment this morning to berate Jones for blaming blow-in "left-wing students":

Surely the FBI could have saved itself a lot of time and trouble if it had rung our very own Alan Jones, the visionary broadcaster, to find out who was behind the Boston bombing ...
Unkind people might think that Alan is a bit low on marbles these days, or even that he's lost them altogether, but I cannot agree. He and his wonderful radio station, 2GB, are all that stand between us and the abyss.  (here)

Yes, the pond got hooked on a live feed from Boston television - a bit like that O. J. Simpson cross-town parade - and watched the drama unfold long into the night - or should that be long into the dawn - but before the pond does an Alan Jones, shoots off the mouth and mis-speaks, let's move on to others, professionals, who making their living by mis-speaking.

Let's cut right to the heart of the matter, which usually involves prejudice, of a blind and ignorant kind, and a wanton posing, involving supercilious notions of superiority, generously mixed with bile, and where better to look than the pond's Saturday favourite, Christopher Pearson?

Cop this for starters, as he rabbits on in Bright sparks left to burn out about education, (behind the paywall because unless you can pay for your education, you should just stay dumb), about how the bright are made to suffer in the school system:

There are other endemic problems, many of them attributable to political correctness. For example, the boys who get most encouragement and approval in secondary schools these days tend to be the ones who behave like honorary girls. Clever girls who display a modicum of reserve in their dealings with classmates and teachers - a matter of elementary prudence - are far too readily censured as anti-social or "uncaring".

You could spend a month unpicking those bizarre notions - all the implications and resonances of "honorary girls" and "clever girls" like Prudence displaying a modicum of reserve.

Possibly the trauma started when Pearson first heard the Beatles:

Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play 
Dear Prudence, greet the brand new day 
The sun is up, the sky is blue 
It's beautiful and so are you 
Dear Prudence won't you come out to play 
Dear Prudence open up your eyes 
Dear Prudence see the sunny skies 
The wind is low the birds will sing 
That you are part of everything 
Dear Prudence won't you open up your eyes?

Oh go away wretched Beatles, I'm merely being Prue-dential, and cultivating my anti-social and uncaring manner and any other stereotypical cliched behaviour Mr. Pearson might inculcate into me.

But wait, it gets worse, because Pearson recognises he might be on dodgy ground, so he tries to feint and recover:

It probably understates the case to say I have no truck with PC and that there's not an equal-opportunity bone in my body. So it came as something of a surprise to me, but a pleasant one, to discover in my 40s that avuncular relations with adolescent girls were possible and that two of the four people in the past two decades I've had the pleasure of teaching were of the female persuasion. One of them has become a concert pianist, the other a teacher. Both of them won first-class honours and I'm immoderately proud of them.

Indeed, they survived Pearson and moved on, a man who amazingly can write about adolescent girls being of "the female persuasion".

Has Pearson finally adopted the notion of gender as something which can be stretched, with the boundaries between gender/identity roles and sexuality blurred in these modern times? Is gender just a matter of persuasion? Is Pearson merely a man of the male persuasion because he was persuaded that way in his youth?

But wait, there's more and here the aesthetic rubber really hits the road, and leaves some rim-marks on the road kill left behind:

When it comes to the Left-liberal pieties enshrined in texts such as The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird, uncritical endorsement is the only acceptable response in most schools. 

Such profound stupidity, so ostentatiously paraded.

It would, of course, behove a sensible commentator to provide evidence of said "uncritical endorsement" as the "only acceptable response" before publicly airing such a silly remark, but it's Pearson, remember, the literary equivalent of Alan Jones. But do go on:

I'm old enough to remember when they first appeared on the secondary syllabus in the early 1960s and thinking what awful slop they were at the time although, even then, saying so was one of those sins for which there could be no forgiveness. 

Which is strange, because the pond can remember any number of people who didn't use bucket words like "awful slop" but nonetheless could produce a balanced assessment of the works which didn't involve simpering uncritical endorsement.

But the judgement does bring Pearson into line with fellow American critics in the matter of The Grapes of Wrath, many of whom reside in trailers in Mississippi:

... The Grapes of Wrath has been banned by school boards: in August 1939, Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries. It was burned in Salinas on two different occasions. In 2003, a school board in Mississippi banned it on the grounds of profanity. According to the American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with Of Mice and Men ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States. (wiki here for the footnotes and more on Steinbeck).

And strange to say, much the same can be said about To Kill a Mockingbird:

To Kill a Mockingbird has been a source of significant controversy since its being the subject of classroom study as early as 1963. The book's racial slurs, profanity, and frank discussion of rape have led people to challenge its appropriateness in libraries and classrooms across the United States. The American Library Association reported that To Kill a Mockingbird was number 21 of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 2000–2009. (wiki the book and more details here).

Oh yes, you can just imagine school boards in the United States giving a fey sigh and talking of books with left-liberal pieties and demanding that they be burnt or banned for the awful, completely PC yet somehow threatening slop they are ... anything to shut down intelligent discussion ... But do go on ...

Put it down to a sense of belated fellow-feeling but about 20 years ago I came to the conclusion that it would be a terrible betrayal if I didn't give talented kids, when I came across them, the most attentive conversation and the best books I could manage.

The only best book Pearson mentions?

Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest ... (The Tempest is for next year).

Now the pond loves Oscar Wilde, ever since being introduced to him, alongside John Steinbeck, in what in the old days passed for a balanced informative education whereby all sorts of people and works could be contemplated for what they offer and have to say.

But with it came the irresistible vision of young Christopher sitting down and racing through the complete works of Gilbert and Sullivan, perhaps while wearing a smoking jacket with a dyed buttonhole and green carnation.

Pearson sends his young charge down to Google Dame Edith Evans playing Lady Bracknell, but he might just as easily have proposed that his young charge look up Henry Fonda in John Ford's version of The Grapes of Wrath (or even better, John Wayne in John Ford's masterpiece, The Searchers).

It was only quite recently that Ken Burns did an impressive documentary series on The Dust Bowl, which taken with Steinbeck and his Joad family could easily increase anyone's understanding of the United States, and a significant physical event that had immense consequences for the people who lived through it.

Is there something wrong with enhancing understanding in this way? Perhaps there is, if you prefer idle chatter about left-liberal pieties and vain boasts of being un-PC. Incomprehension and stereotypes are so much easier ...

Yet each man kills the thing he loves 
By each let this be heard, 
Some do it with a bitter look, 
Some with a flattering word, 
The coward does it with a kiss,  
The brave man with a sword! 

Some kill their love when they are young, 
And some when they are old; 
Some strangle with the hands of Lust, 
Some with the hands of Gold: 
The kindest use a knife, because 
The dead so soon grow cold. 

Some love too little, some too long, 
Some sell, and others buy; 
Some do the deed with many tears, 
And some without a sigh: 
For each man kills the thing he loves, 
Yet each man does not die. (the rest here)

In the end, the penny dropped:

And then there are the boys: two brothers from a family in the local Latin mass community ...

The local Latin mass community! Say no more. As Coleridge might say, that such a thing should be ...

Oh wait, say a little more:

It may seem like a small thing, but inducting young men into the niceties of knives, kitchenware and spices strikes me as one of the more important elements in transmitting the culture. 
It is very useful, for example, to know that prosciutto goes wonderfully well with figs or melon and that if you don't have the time or the inclination to make something more complicated you can fix something sustaining in a matter of minutes. 

Say bloody what?

You mean introduce them to nice bourgeois liberal pieties? You mean teach them to behave like honorary girlies?

Teach them kitchen political correctness?

Oh no, say it ain't so. But do go on:

Then there are the pleasures of showing them how to shop for food. Excursions to the central market to introduce them to the best grocers and butchers in the city make it likelier that, wherever they end up living, they'll know what to look out for. Studying and eating aren't mutually exclusive activities. 
Let one example suffice: interrupting a morning's work with Watkin Tench - reading about survival on starvation rations in the earliest days of colonial Sydney - to buy some veal and produce a decent osso bucco.

Yep, it's so, and what's the bet Pearson's students never get the first clue about what survival on starvation rations is like - it goes without saying that the pond got up at 4 am to leave cardboard box in middle of road to work in mill - and even less of a clue about Oscar Wilde serving out his time in Reading Gaol for a crime which should never have been a crime ...

Yes he was done down by the establishment with its vicious moral judgements and its talk of political and sexual correctness.

If only Pearson's students had a chance, they might find there's more in common between Wilde and the Joads and Mockingbird than they dared dream of in their Latin-saturated universe ...

Horatio: 
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange! 
Hamlet: 
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy
Or your talk of left liberal pieties and political correctness... 

Thank the long absent lord the young are resilient and in the end find their own way ...

As Pasolini once said, it's the business of students to eat their teachers, and having digested the meal ... perhaps with a tasty osso bucco on the side ... to move on, and perhaps even to catch up on all the interesting reading they missed out on because of the blind and wilful prejudices of their teachers ...

(Below: Beardsley does Wilde, and what the heck a few more Beardsley drawings for the fun of it).

What, give up the chocolate soldier commentariat? No, never ...

The pond listened with amusement last night to Swiss writer Rolf Dobelli arguing on the Media Report on RN that news is irrelevant, toxic and misleading, and we should give it up.

Who could argue the point, or even the toss of a cat, but sadly Dobelli didn't consider the even more toxic nature of the commentariat, and naturally silly old host Richard Aedy immediately segued into a sombre discussion of news and obituaries, and a new business model proposing to crowd fund news.

Poor Dobelli was done like a dinner before he'd even had a chance to be served cold ...

The pond likes to think of the commentariat as forms of chocolate. Now your hysterical top notch ranter and hate monger - surely Piers "Akker Dakker" Akerman and Andrew "the Bolter" are the top of the current pack - is probably 85% pure chocolate. So severe as to be quite repulsive.

Others down the food chain are a more palatable 75%, some have the tang of pure eccentricity embedded in them like orange flavouring (Greg Sheridan), and some are such a coarse, low-grade form of compound chocolate (think Tim Blair) you wouldn't eat them even if they were dressed up as an easter egg or a treat at the bottom of an Xmas stocking.

Unlike Dobelli, the pond can't and wouldn't want to give them up. It's a kind of therapy, a special treat, a reminder that while loons stalk the pond, after you've indulged in a vicious bit of hate-mongering, you can have a nice cup of tea and go about your business comforted that at least you're not as woefully embittered and as deeply unhappy as Akker Dakker or the Bolter, even if they only pretend to be so embittered in the manner of professional right wing harlots just doing a job on their johns for the master pimp ...

It would be absolutely wrong to talk of banning them, in much the same way as banning 85% chocolate would be perverse and wrong, or stopping the likes of David Irving from mouthing stupidities, though it might occasionally cause pain to the sensible David Irvings in the world.

Which is how the pond in recent days has found itself in strange company, supporting the Dalai Lama's right to speak at Sydney University.

However you cut the story, it seems clear that the administration, deep in the grip of Chinese cash, decided to evict the Dalai Lama. The latest claim, published a mere six hours ago in the lizard Oz, was that the change of location was requested by the Dalai Lama's office and not the University of Sydney.

Which makes most peculiar the emails previously aired on the ABC on the 7.30 show:

...emails aired on the ABC’s 7.30 program suggested the university had taken a more active role in the “difficult decisions” to move the event off-campus and to ensure staff were not formally involved. 
An email attributed to vice-chancellor Michael Spence said this “negotiated solution” would be “in the best interests of researchers across the university”. (here, behind the paywall so you can relax about the news, and here at 7.30 so you can watch the story for free)

So now someone's faking Michael Spence's email address? What a scandal, or has there been so much fudging and equivocation the pond could use it all to open a candy store?

Now in the pond's view the Dalai Lama is a harmless eccentric and clever showman, who having been evicted from his own country, now tours the world with an engaging routine but not much else to offer except ancient superstitions.

On the other hand, it's wantonly perverse for Sydney University to kow tow to the Chinese and keep him off campus, thereby providing another reminder that the pond should keep asking for someone to explain exactly why the Chinese government thinks it had the right to invade and then rule Tibet ...

The result is that now the university is yammering in high flown - but actually more fly blown way -about lofty constructive ways of lifting itself out of the bogswamp it dug for itself:

While it’s not clear when and where this event would be conducted, Professor Garton said the Dalai Lama’s office had “indicated considerable interest in this proposal”.
“The university is of the view that there is a clear need for informed and impartial expert engagement in the issues currently being experienced in Tibet, embracing environment, governance, sustainability and social cohesion,” he said. 
 “There is expertise in Sydney and in Australia that can constructively be brought to focus on these issues.”

Yes, and there'll be pie and choccy in the sky by and by.

Poor old Prof Garton is the bunny, the acting vice chancellor forced to find a way out of the mess, a mess entirely of the University's own creation.

And if being forced to stick up for the Dalai Lama isn't bad enough, there's Tim "Dickus" Dick gloating in Fairfax about his native New Zealand:

New Zealand understands the majority is judged on whether the minorities are equal before the law. History shows it takes a little longer for Australia to work it out. (Who's feeling sheepish now?)

And it's true! Oh the humiliation, oh the shame, oh the taste of compound "the lady's not for turning, I don't believe in conscience votes" chocolate on the lips ...

Why even big Bazza, torn from contemplating his VFT to Sudnuy's secund eerpurt in Canberra is on side with the New Zelunders and ready to do the gay marriage thing if he can only work out a way ...

Meanwhile, the pond couldn't resist a treat, a bon bon, and though you might think it peculiar, even perverse to think of the scribblings of Nick Cater as a treat, that's the way the pond rolls.

Cater recently issued a book, The Lucky Culture and the rise of an Australian Ruling Class, which was naturally given a plug by his good mate the Bolter, here, as he would because Cater has been at the head of the lizard Oz class ranting about class warfare as if to the Faux Noise manor born (the Bolter liked some of the ranting so much he ran it here, in the way the Bolter does, because to be so prolific you really do have to know how to cut and paste vast swathes of text).

And as a bonus - think of it as a packet of Smarties or Jaffas or M and M - if follow that link, you can also get a classic piece of resentful, anger-filled fear and loathing for students who might be a little smarter than the average Bolter reader.

The sight of the Bolter sending up students is pathetic. It's childish, spiteful stuff - the sort of nonsense that sees the Republican Party seek out the company of creationists - and it comes with a feeble and pathetic protest about a Tharunka front page carrying the rather old and tame news that Church Fucks Women. Is it possible to sound senile, or like a major-general sipping a port in the Melbourne Club at the Bolter's age? Of course it is ...

Here's how he presented it:

UPDATE 
 What kind of contemptuous and arrogant barbarians do our universities now produce to stock our “elite”? Judge by the cover of the latest magazine of the University of NSW students - and, caution, do not read on if bad language and graphic sexual imagery offend: 

What a preening tut tutting clucking fowl-yard scratching ponce. Of course he wanted to shock, and it's a measure of his feeble brain, and that of his feeble-minded readers that this cover might be construed as offensive rather than factual.

Truth to tell, the Bolter needs to stop listening to his operas and quaffing his charming beguiling reds and get out into a public bar occasionally but that might involve mingling with the barbarians ...

But enough of universities and the Bolter, and back to our bon bon Cater, because today it befalls to him to push along the Gina Rinehart barrow about the development of the deep north - they must be allotted turns in the lizard Oz - in Deep green campaign an enemy of progress (outside the paywall because Gina's puppets must be heard on a matter of national significance). You see, no gold bar:

It's Cater's duty to present a gleaming vision of Australia's north as Asia's food bowl, with agriculture taking over from the mining boom.

Now you might wonder what the deep green campaign is. Yep, Cater's banging on one more time about the live cattle trade to Indonesia and that video:

... the government's knee-jerk reaction in response to the footage brought home the widening gulf between city and country. The latte suburbs around the CBD seem particularly remote from the realities of farming, and it is there that opinion leaders congregate.

It's the pond's joyful duty to report that Nick Cater files all his copy from his fully wired shack at Oodnadatta, which is just as well, because it turns out according to Cater that the latte suburbs around the CBD are full of journalists:

Increasingly we recruit from the graduate class and journalists live by and large in the inner city and beach suburbs, in a bubble. They wear out the seats of their pants more quickly than they wear out their shoe leather. It's a tragedy. We have to wake up to ourselves before we lose touch with the rest of Australia altogether. (here, inside the paywall so you don't have to care)

Yep, it's another moaning refugee Pom, trained as a sociologist, a self-confessed former BBC man and reader of The Guardian, gone through some mystical transformation by working for chairman Rupert, a CBD man through and through, and how do we know? Why of all things he settled in newspapers because TV docs were too hard:

I was lugging a load of TV gear through Customs at Lisbon Airport with Leigh Hatcher when I worked at Channel Seven and he said: "TV is like working with a 10 tonne pencil.'' He was right.

Bugger the pond dead. A few bits of light-weight camera gear. Talk about living in a bubble. Try that attitude lifting a bale of hay on a farm. Oh I can't lift that, it's like feeding the cows 10 tonnes of grass ...

Anyhoo, it turns out that the 'leets run the superannuation industry:

Significantly, there was only one representative from the superannuation industry in attendance; the low returns simply do not excite domestic investors. Farmers can be their own worst enemies when it comes to enticing willing investors, Macquarie Agriculture Funds Management's co-head Tim Hornibrook told the forum.

Holy cow Batman, the latte sippers, the incompetent farmers and the super industry are joined together in one vast conspiracy.

Not to worry, everything is moving forward, and not just in one short step, but in one giant leap of the imagination:

One simple idea, however, seemed to catch imaginations. Vicki Meyer from Deniliquin Freighters suggested renaming the agriculture ministry the ministry of food. Andrew Robb, who in five months' time may well be a person of some influence, said the idea had merit.

Indeed. Just as the pond has always believed that the Ministry for Peace is so much better a name than the Ministry for War, and the Ministry of Information so much more fitting than the Ministry of Censorship (or the Ministry of dissembling disinformation outsourced to the private sector and the minions of Murdoch).

But yes the idea has merit. All the changes to the stationary and business cards and such like - government departments do still have them - and the changes to the website, and designing new logos and letter heads will keep the small business sector stimulated for months and months.

And Rolf Dobelli wants the pond to give up on this sort of thing?

No way Jose, keep that sweet Nick Cater milk chocolate flowing (warning no actual chocolate used in the making of this milk chocolate) ...

Which brings us to the last and sweetest bon bon of all: News Limited to move to a metered paywall from next month. How's that paywall working out for y'all ...? Remember the best bon bons and Nick Cater are free ...

(Below: the pond joins with Tom Tomorrow in making a modest development proposal for Nick Cater's consideration).