Miranda Devine, Ladettes to Ladies, Drunken Trollops, Filthy Toxic Feminists, Modesty and Self-respect

It never rains but it pours. This weekend The Sydney Morning Herald doesn't just offer neo Duffy, it offers a dose of Miranda the neo Devine. 

Now I know what you're thinking punk. Can he handle one loon columnist or two? To tell you the truth I forgot myself, what with all the excitement, because you see the Devine tackles the subject of Ladette to Lady in her column Yearning to liberate the inner lady.

Okay, I knew you'd guess it. The show is a devastating indictment of neo feminism:

It's girlpower taken to extremes, the ultimate flowering of toxic aggro feminism, in which all civilised restraint is regarded as an unreasonable curtailment of freedom, and gender equality means being able to drink as much as a bloke and vomit in a bucket in the front bar, too.

Let's reword that. 

One of Devine's boorish columns is girlpower taken to extremes, the ultimate flowering of toxic aggro feminism, in which all civilized restraint, gentle discourse and tolerant engagement with greenies, lefties, feminists and minorities is regarded as an unreasonable curtailment of freedom, and gender equality means being able to spew as much nonsense as Akerman, Blair and Bolt, and vomit in a bucket in the front bar, too.

Yep, Devine knows where it's at:

Dignity, modesty and self-respect may be out of fashion, but the deep human need for them remains.

So shut your mouth Miranda the Devine, show a little dignity, a lot more modesty, and a lot more respect for others as a way of showing some respect for yourself. 

Start by explaining just how feminism turned women into strippers, bar brawlers and aimless drunkards, as if this kind of activity sprang full blown from Germaine Greer's head in the nineteen sixties.

Second thoughts, don't bother. Nobody expects a loon like you to provide a coherent sociological analysis of the predicament of young women, or a sensible accounting of feminism, especially when based on a viewing of a television show designed to gratuitously exploit all kinds of stereotypes to sell soap powder and beep beep cars.

Next week: a profound analysis of Australian feminism and where it's led young women astray, based on the mores on display in Neighbours and Home and Away, and Devine's neo discovery that young people still have a deep desire to get married just like Jason and Kylie.

The week after: Miranda the Devine announces that feminism is responsible for alcoholism in young women, based on an extensive survey of pub culture, where alcopopping teens insisted to her, it's my right as a woman to get as pissed as a parrot, and you can all get fucked.

Thoughts for further columns: 

(1) boorish women who don't know how to handle scones likely to be boorish drunken trollops, feminists from broken homes who keep photos of their naked bodies under the bed because they lack self-respect and participate in greenie tree hugging when they should be hugging handsome men. (NB note to self, misguided, likely to wear dungarees or some kind of overalls).

(2) increase in physical assaults on teenage girls in the past decade due to feminism. Expand this point - Germaine Greer's notorious tendency to drink in public the likely cause. Must suggest to Malcolm that they introduce gin drinking in moderation to finishing schools so that girls learn they can get tippling drunk in a refined, genteel, eastern suburbs way.

(3) spewing in gutters early indicator in girls of feminist tendencies. Perhaps a memo to Malcolm suggesting the opposition would do well to adopt a policy of funding finishing schools to improve young women in Australia. Is June Dally-Watkins still alive? Perhaps she can replace Julie Bishop as deputy leader of the Liberals, responsible for the eradication of up chucking in the young.

(4) Really important that women wear tweed suits, bend to the will of their tutors, take deportment lessons, learn how to cook (for men of course), arrange flowers, serve afternoon tea and speak politely to gentlemen at dinner parties, before sucking their cocks in the way the gentlemen learned to like in Eton (or was that Knox Grammar, must fact check). Perhaps Julie can be re-assigned to designing courses for young women on oral literacy and the importance of keeping men happy?

Must stress this: notion that women might become lawyers or doctors where society began to go wrong. Must only write about working class trollops as decent examples of women who want to become women before being derailed by feminism.

(5) Study Survivor as exemplar of capitalism? Dignified modest and self respecting women win and get to write newspaper columns lashing out at all and sundry? Darwinian element problematic for Christian readers? 

(6) Study Madmen as decent guide to smoking and sex for young women wanting to get back to nineteen fifties decency? Happy suburban couples behind picket fences. Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road better example? Such a happy couple.

(7) Proper female roles on view in Gilligan's Island? Return to the days of Jane Austen? No wait, feminists like her, ideologically suspect. Must keep watching television as impeccable source of moral truisms. Buffy the vampire slayer as goth feminist likely to increase tendency of young women to drink bloody marys?

You're right. I couldn't handle it. A double dose of Miranda the Devine and leadfoot speedster Michael Duffy on the one day is too much to handle. 

I'm now clinically insane, with no chance of actual treatment in the public health system. It's just another day in Sydney, capital of New South Wales, shark wonderland in the southern hemisphere.

Michael Duffy, health care, the mentally ill, war stories, neo discoveries and Michael Costa's neo week competition

Not that I ever go to a football match - life's too short to watch men sniffing each other's bums or chasing a pill over a paddock as if it's the meaning of life - but on a few occasions I've been dragged along and been politely astonished.

Suddenly the term 'one-eyed' became meaningful in a very real way. Now I know it's a trite observation that fan is a contraction of fanatic, and I know sporting fans can be harmless (except for you Carlton supporters, you bludging, John Elliott loving wankers) but I'm always amazed at the level of passion people can expend on issues of sublime irrelevance to the mainstream of life (if you happen to think food and shelter and sex and health are a little higher up the scale).

I know fans aren't necessarily the same as fanatics, or cranks or zealots but sometimes it's hard to pick the difference.

Anyhoo, it became clear to me in a vision that the right wing loons who write fanatical one eyed columns are generally as mad as march hares, and make as little sense as football fanatics, and so the only way to approach them is the way you'd approach a fan in a football ground - gingerly, stripping off any contrary colors, putting on a fixed smile, and talking in a soft, gentling way as if you're a horse whisperer.

Otherwise you might cop a kick in the crutch, seeing as loon columnists have the manners of horses. I sometimes wonder why.

Maybe it's a lack of travel. My partner, just back from India (Mumbai in particular), reported it a real mind fuck, a way of thinking, with castes and tribes, and over a billion complications, that makes the place unknowable, and conventional western thinking useless. I had the same response the first time I took off across China, and strangely enough when driving across America. You think because you speak the same language that you have some way of connecting to a country and its thinking, but really America is a different country, and they do things differently there. Even when you've made a superficial connection, you rarely appreciate how superficial it is.

A lot of the things the local loons rabbit on about simply don't compute in other parts of the world, or if they do, as a kind of low level buzz on the radar, as if someone's dropped a bunch of confusing aluminium foil into the atmosphere.

Now this is all a preamble to a celebration of the esteemed Michael Duffy, the neo columnist who gave his name to this neo site, and who each week in The Sydney Morning Herald demonstrates a neo fan's view of the neo world. 

Sorry, for those who came into the story late, we're having a neo week here, in honor of neo columnist for The Australian Michael Costa and the neo Matrix movies - remember guys only in black trench coats, and only in drag in honor of tg Larry Wachowski  (what a head fuck for neo transsexual hater Janet Albrechtsen). You win points in the game by seeing how many nouns or verbs you can insert a meaningless "neo" in front of. 

Costa has started hot out of the gates with neo interventionism, but what about neo surrealism and neo classicism and neo modernism and neo post modernism? And neo lyricism, not to mention neo romanticism and neo hedonism and neo dada and neo punk?

New rule: anyone talking about neo stones gets banned. Appalling pun. Neo lithic is the only word accepted when talking about Costa. And yes we know neo politan is a kind of ice cream, bugger off Naples, this is a cultural heritage we share with the good ol' USA.

Sorry about that detour. These acid flashes are getting hard to handle. My main point is, the Duffster is regularly perverse, as when this week he suddenly begins making  neo discoveries about neo health care. This week, in Health carers stars of an ailing show, the Duffster has, by consulting statistical data, found out that health care is possibly the largest industry in Australia and growing (Shock horror! This will come as news to Gerard Henderson, who firmly believes small business is the only game in town). And by talking to doctors and nurses he's also found out that it's something of a mess.

That's right - neo hot news from the Duffster. The health system is fucked, and the de-institutionalisation of the mental health system these past twenty years has been a disaster, in execution if not in concept, to quote the Duffster.

Well he'd have to say that, wouldn't he, because a hell of a lot of the pressure on the health system, and government participation in it, has come from right wing loons of the Duffy kind, who hate the idea of socialised medicine, hate the very notion of a national health care system, hate the idea of government being involved, cavil at every penny spent on government health care, and led the charge to downsize government spending.

By a curious coincidence, and since anecdotes seem to be the go, we have a nurse in the family, who's very handy if you want to know the doctors to avoid in an operating theatre in a rural hospital (and there are plenty), and we're friends with a young doctor who regularly tilts at the windmill of bureaucracy in a hospital that's new but run with a hundred year old mindset, and we also happen to be friends with a bigwig psychiatrist in the public system, whose chief job once upon a time seemed to be shuttling the mentally ill by taxi up and down the coast in search of a bed for the night.

They all have war stories, but thankfully they don't have an ideological bent which involves the destruction of government participation in health care. They just want it to be better, they try hard themselves, and they're regularly disappointed by the cheap, careless shots taken at the jobs they do in a system permanently under funding stress and political indifference.

The Duffster's potent conclusion: It's time the interests and concerns of doctors and nurses were given a more prominent place in the national conversation about health care.

Wow. A right wing loon wants to take a look at the health care system from the point of view of participants (never mind that happens to include all of us). So what are the solutions caring Duffster? More money, more government focus, perhaps structural reform? And no it's not just the bureaucrats growing in numbers while the pointy end suffers, because often the bureaucrats are being employed to keep expenditure under control to satisfy the cost control freaks out there in the community. You know the attack public waste at every opportunity brigade.

At this point the water gets too deep for the Duffster. Go whistle in the wind. End of column. Attention should be paid. End of story. Pious neo platitudes and war stories is about all you can expect from the Duffster.

Okay, how about this for a thought. It's time that right wing loons acknowledged that along with deinstitutionalising old fashioned Victorian style bedlams came a new responsibility to the mentally ill, so that community based caring didn't just become an excuse to kick the mentally ill out into the street, and thereby bump up the number of homeless wandering the streets of big cities like Sydney. 

And when it comes to this kind of responsibility, it's not going to come from the private sector, or half baked Christian charities intent on ramming Christ down the throat of the disturbed, but from government. And it involves spending money. Live with it, work with it, and above all fund it.

The fetishisation of bed space, and bed turnover, and kicking people out of beds to prove that hospitals are being run with the kind of efficiency demanded by day traders is one of the chief burdens of the current system. And some people are permanently broken and require care. How do you deal with that? I know, I know. More tax cuts, and kick them out on the street. Never mind all that fuss about community support. Why should my taxes support the crazy. Let them jump in front of a train. (In Victoria of course the cops do the job with a gun).

Thank the lord, I've mentioned what the Duffy was writing about this week. Loon watch done, ready and waiting for orders, suh!

By the way, if you think tolerance and community care is all fixed, all fine and dandy, here's Colorado state senator Scott Renfroe during a debate on health care benefits for same-sex partners:

I'm not saying (homosexuality) is the only sin that's out there. We have murder. We have all sorts of sin. We have adultery. And we don't make laws making those legal, and we would never think to make murder legal.

That's right. Having a fuck poofter style is a rough equivalent to murder. To which all I can think to say is fuck you all you fucking fanatics. (Thanks to Slate in its Say What? humor piece for this. And you thought you understood America. You neo logisms!)

Hey men, don't you find the senator's cheesy smile just so sexy? God I just luurve sexy men. Strictly as a heterosexual of course you filthy perverts. God save America from some Americans. 

And god save publicly funded health care from the loons.

Oh almost forgot the Duffster's score card this week:

Ability to reconcile philosophical contradictions: 0

Perverse interest in health horror stories: 0

Potency of actual horror stories told, up against the wealth available: 2

Willingness to embrace neo caring strategies: 1

Capacity for pious neo platitudes as a column closer: 11

Net benefit of column in terms of neo understanding of health care issues: 2

Tim Blair, Islamic Loons, Non-Islamic Loons, and the days of our loon lives

Over at that very special corner of loon pond where Tim Blair and the loonettes can be guaranteed to whip up a regular storm of loonacy on an hourly, daily, weekly, yearly basis, the head loon is still banging on endlessly about the Islamic TV executive who beheaded his wife.

Not a whisper about the two Queensland guys who knocked off another's head and used it as a bowling ball.

Tim has a crazy idea: how about Islamic men stop bashing women?

Great joke Tim. Does that mean non-Islamic men can carry on doing what comes naturally to the male of the species? By the way Tim when did you stop bashing your wife?

What a feral one eyed dork. Try this crazy idea Tim: how about men stop bashing women? No modifiers required.

And what about this one? How about men stop bashing men? And children. 

You know I'll even throw in a bonus: how about women stop bashing men? Though I have to say this could only a physical thing. Who could give up the notion of verbally bashing Tim Blair? Too hard. Some kind of happy SM thing going on there.

I've got another crazy idea Tim, I know the loons will love it. How about stopping the killing of people, men women and children, as a way of persuading them to your point of view?

I know, I know. Just another deluded secular liberal loon with no grasp of reality or the realpolitik of important alpha-males determined to show the metaphysical size of their cock with their fists or their bombs.

Like sands through the hourglass ... so are the days of our loon lives ... I'm betting the sand will run out before Tim gets round to mentioning vicious killings by non-Islamic killers. Hey ho, so it goes.

Michael Costa, Neo interventionism, theological environmentalism, coal, recession and battling greenies to save the world

(Above, Michael Costa, neo-saviour of the world)

A quiet day on loon pond, except for an extraordinary cawing and crying from the now seemingly permanent resident cuckoo Michael Costa, whose latest contribution to The Australian, Garrett holding economy to ransom, seems determined to prove he can out-loon any loon on loon pond.

Never mind that it was under Costa that the NSW government held every New South Welshperson to ransom. No, Costa's got a bee in his bonnet, and guess what? No, you'll never guess it. It's all the fault of the greenies, those arch villains, and vile Peter Garrett, head vile villain.

Say goodbye to the brotherhood of baldies. A noble band of brothers no more.

You see there's poor Kevin Rudd, not understanding that anything government does is a bad idea, just trying to do his best by urging that the government take steps. Our helpful Costa slaps a label on this sort of scurrilous activity with the curious coining "neo-interventionist". Now we all know that neo-interventionism sounds terribly bad, neo-conservatives everywhere are rolling in their graves, but it's better than nothing.

Well it would be except that neo-interventionism has been stymied from doing anything by Peter Garrett and his all powerful, all controlling environmental protection act.

This neo-protectionist act is in stark contrast to the wonderful work done by environmental minister Malcolm Turnbull, who streamlined everything. That was when the act was merely protectionist.

Now the bureaucrats run everything, and the world of developers is coming to an end. Wollongong under Labor will never be the same again. Sob.

It's all petty disputes over wordings in ads to serve "a common environmental ideology".

This neo-environmentalism is ruining everything because it's being manipulated by theological environmentalists (I understand when they pray it runs something like Our gaia who art in the soil, hallowed be your name, give us this day our dose of daily developers, so we can smash them into tiny little pieces and enrich your heavenly body, and save us from temptation by delivering us the evil one, a chappie called Costa, so we can smote him in your name, for gaia is the neo power and the neophyte glory. Something like that.)

So happy is Costa with having invented the notion of "theological environmentalists" he uses the terms a couple of times, and then sheds tears over specific examples of developers at work to make Australia a better place, only to be frustrated by fundamentalist greenies who make fundie Christians look like decent progressive capitalist types.

What's worse, these same ecological warriors now want global warming to be taken seriously. Their fiendish, diabolical Fu Manchu goal - to shut down the nation's coal industry. Or the nation!

This trigger is so broad it could be applied to all human activity undertaken on land. This would effectively give the department the right of veto over any future development of the Australian economy. Now that would be a recipe for recession.

Ah  bald headed one, I hate to break it to you, but the world is already pretty much in a recession, and somehow it managed this without the vital help of the greenies. Let's just say Wall street did a pretty good job all on its own, along with the bankers and the clever derivatives traders.

You know every so often I travel up through the Hunter Valley and I'm astonished just how many parts now visible from the road have been turned into a moonscape by the coal industry. Around Muswellbrook, the land has been ruined for generations for the one off benefit of digging it up and shipping it off. Michael Costa, as a proud Cessnock person, presumably has some passing knowledge of this.

I guess where I see destruction, he sees a neo-economy.

It's easy to understand why there's a bunch of farmers in the Gunnedah basin (or the Caroona basin, call it what you will) getting agitated about the proposals of the coal industry to tear the guts out of the land in their vicinity. Something about the water tables and wanting to grow things that people can eat rather than sit down to warm themselves by coal fire.

That's right, the protestors have been average common or garden farmers, worried about the land, and their right to farm it, worried about the soil, driven to act like greenies, protesting the NSW government decision to give the greenlight to mining licenses to explore for coal on their land.

My guess is that the NSW Labor government has wreaked more destruction on NSW in recent years - especially at the time when Costa was a key part of the team - than any loon greenie could manage, or imagine.

If only we had a Keith Olbermann type AV unit, so I could attach a little clip, inviting Michael Costa to come on down, as neo-loon of the week, and woooorst peerson in the wooooorllld. In a neo-columnist way. 

In the meantime, hopefully he'll accept our award for pro-developer anti-bureaucrat, anti-vile hideous greenie rant of the week. Yep, Michael, you're right out there, zooming past Andrew Bolt and tiger Tim Blair in your bid to become the chief sultana in the Christmas fruitcake.

And now quick children, hide, get under the bed. It's Peter Garrett, anti-Christ, neo-Satanist, and destroyer of Orrstralia for Ossies (and Darryls).

Miranda Devine, Catholics, green-leftist drop in centres, socialists and other weevils, and Hair, the cause of it all

Good old Miranda the Devine. When it comes to theological war, you can always predict what side she'll be on, and so it is in If you don't like the rules, start your own church.

Indeedy Miranda, and it seems people all over the world are doing just that. While the Catholic church loses priests and participants, the all singing, all dancing fundie evangelical revivalist crowd have been going great guns - even the woman who played Mary at the World Youth Day shindig recently announced she was off to Hillsong. No, not sweet Marina Dickson, not our holy blessed virgin Mary, mother of god, one of the chief cultish heresies of the Catholic church, say it ain't so.

While the total number of people in Australia identifying as Catholic is up, actual attendance in church is in decline, and the priesthood is moribund and aging. If it weren't for infusions like the Vietnamese, the Catholic church would be as feeble as mainstream Protestantism in Australia.

But nothing stops the Devine - taking a hearty swig of altar wine, she announces:

No one is forced to be a Catholic, and the church - as it has been for 2000 years - is thriving the world over, wherever it has remained true to its teachings.

Get it? The church is thriving in places where it bashes lefties and poofters and greenies and trendies. Like that repository of wisdom and human compassion, the church in Africa.

But wait, what of George Pell and his flock? Pell preaches the good word in Sydney in a very traditional style, how's he going? Oh no, even George sees a decline, and attributes it (or at least he did a while ago) to Christian teaching on pre-marital sex, divorce and contraception. Worse, it seems Catholic women under the age of 35 years in urban Australia are now as irreligious as their male peers, a condition the good Pell says has no equivalence in any other country and has been going on since 1983.

Worse, regular Sunday worship feel from about 50% in 1960 to 18% in 2002 and 16% in 2006.

Worse still, Pell quotes a survey saying by the time Gen Y reach the age of 29, 25% of those who used to belong to a church are already ex-members. The number for Catholics is 29%, higher than any other denomination. Only 10% of young Catholics believed "only one religion is true" against a national average of 11% (and 34% for other Christians), 75% of young Catholics believed it was okay to pick and choose beliefs, and 56% of young Catholics believed morals are relative. You can read all this and more in Pell's address in 2006 here.

Dearie me even the current Pope thinks the church is down the tubes in Australia. Numbers in the priesthood are down 20% since 1971, the average age is up from 44 to 60, and only 141 were in training in 2005, a quarter of the number in 1969. Guess being married to god isn't the number one choice for young Catholic boys in the lucky land.

We could go on and on about the dire condition of the one true church, but let's just rest with the notion that what Miranda says is nonsense. Surprised? No, but you know Miranda, when I told a fib or distorted the truth that way, the nuns always gave me a good thrashing, and it improved me in the best Dickensian way imaginable.

All this of course is just part of the Devine frothing at the mouth over Peter Kennedy, the 70 year old Brisbane Catholic priest who's being forced out of St Mary's church specifically, and out of the church in general, because as the Devine so quaintly puts it, he's turned his church into a "green-leftist New Age drop-in centre."

And all they're doing is kicking him out? In my day, they would have rammed a crown of thorns on his head, shoved a spear into his gut, and nailed him to a cross to leave him bleeding and suffering a long painful death. Nothing's bad enough for these christians worshipping a strange god, reviling Jews and Romans.

Oops, sorry, just had a little acid flash, induced by Fellini-like images of a nun beating me with a whip.

This Kennedy, he's such a worry. Poor Miranda was exposed to images of a mass - or whatever it was - featuring a pony-tailed man - not a priest!! - in a bright shirt waving around a giant Communion host in a haphazard way. It looked more like a yoga session to the shattered Devine, with meditation, and lay people taking to the pulpit to give 'sermons' which clearly had nothing to do with the bible.

Worse one of these twisted perverted chappies apparently said that he came to St Mary's services, not because it was a Catholic place of worship, but because it offered love, truth, authenticity, integrity, justice, unity, compassion, openness and friendship.

Get out of it. What's all that got to do with being Catholic?

But Father Kennedy commits an even bigger crime - the Socialist Alliance loves him. Atheists! Atheists who love to seize dupes and bring about the downfall of Rome and Christians everywhere. Leninists! Marxists! Fiends!

And then after all that, these loons at St. Mary's  have the cheek to talk about their critics as extremists doing the bidding of Rome. "So much for tolerance and inclusiveness", harrumphs the Devine, and fair enough she's only called them hippie ratbag fools, the dupes of atheists and socialists.

What's a little name calling between chums?

And then there's Kennedy's theological flaws. Using the wrong words in a baptism. And being an egotist full of hubris.

The Devine blames the mess on Archbishop Bathersby, who's tolerated the loon for too long, and turned his archdiocese into the most progressive and least disciplined in the country.

My own feeling is that the musical Hair is to blame. That's when the filthy long haired hippy rot set in. All that talk of peace and love and harmony. All nonsense.

Remember that set of jokes as the cast kick around some unhappy thoughts:

Solo voice: Ain't got no home

Others answer: So

Solo voice: Ain't got no shoes

Others answer: Poor

Solo voice: Ain't got no money

Others answer: Honey

Solo voice: Ain't got no class

Others answer: Common

Solo voice: Ain't got no scarf

Others answer: Hot

Solo voice: Ain't got no gloves

Others answer: Cold

Solo voice: Ain't got no bed

Others answer: Beat

Solo voice: Ain't got no pot

Others answer: Busted

Solo voice: Ain't got no faith

Others answer: Catholic

Always got a laugh. Still getting a laugh today. Anyway, Devine has a point. What the hell is Kennedy doing in a church that thinks bringing the anti semites and holocaust deniers of the SSPX clan back into the flock is a good thing, all in the name of plurality and diversity. With that mob welcomed with open arms, joining the likes of Pell and Christopher Pearson, Kennedy's better off heading down the road to the Trades and Labor Council.

Don't you just love sweet Christian charity and love in action, real time 24/7?

Piers Akerman, Sharks, Greenies, Global Warming, Jaws, Sydney Harbour and did we mention SHARK

How long o Lord before the fat owl, aka Piers Akerman, proud newspaperman, preferring black ink in his veins to blood, takes on the vexing issue of sharks?

How long? How about today? Never put off a shark story in a tabloid when you can always do it right here, right now in Biting the hands that cleaned up the Harbour.

As usual, it wouldn't be a fat owl column if he didn't start off by lustily, mightily, smoting greenies and environmentalists and anyone else standing in his way.

It seems sharks have got their own affirmative action program going, they've been given iconic status by environmentalist groups guided by a desire to claim ecologically superior status rather than by any scientific research. And any conniving politician you might hear downsizing the issue has clearly been inspired by the mayor in Jaws (how I hate you Murray Hamilton, with your greasy, slimy political ways).

The issue's simple. Stop commercial fishing and we're all doomed. More fish, more predators.

Never mind the last person actually killed by a shark in Sydney Harbour was in 1946, an actress by the name of Marcia Hathaway. Another killing's just around the corner. SHARK!

Yep, it looks like the fat owl is ready to join my campaign to kill all the sharks, just after we've burnt down all the trees.

But what's this? Some chappie at Surfwatch Australia by the name of Michael Brown, its director in fact, actually told the fat owl global warming might be involved - something about colder nutrient rich waters coming to the surface resulting in an increase in feed for the predators.

Surely not. Global warming, as we all know, is a myth. As the fat owl points out, nodding sagely, back in '46 all the talk of the catastrophists then was of global cooling. And anyway we've always had a stack of sharks, we can just see more of them because we cleaned up the water. Not sure of the point here - is it bring back the brown poo so we can't see the sharks anymore?

Anyhoo, it seems that this chappie Brown persisted, claiming that we'll see more great whites in the next few years. Something to do with global warming he reckons.

The fat owl is cautious: With such an increase in the number of potential killers, if it can be verified, there would seem little we can do but we could better mesh our Harbour beaches.

That's right. All this blather is window dressing for a suggestion we might fix up the nets. It's all the fault of the greenies you see. Manly council didn't fix the nets because the weed growth around it was seen as a potential sea horse habitat. Fuck the seahorses, what about the ratepayers. 

Okay, we're back to kill all the sharks.

But no, the fat owl goes to water, or to sea, or whatever. He doesn't even have the courage to suggest we should start shark fishing in the habour, especially if some sort of shark attractant or berley might be involved. But how so Piers - surely we just use greenie councillors, hippies, weirdos and lefties as bait? It's a win-win scenario. We catch the sharks, kill 'em, hold flake parties with the Daily Terror as a handsome wrapping for the goodies, and if the sharks take a nip out of a greenie along the way, so what? Sure, it'll lower the delicacy of the flavor of the flesh in that particular shark, but one less greenie means one less sea horse, and that must be all to the good.

As for treating sharks with a catch and release program in Sydney harbour? Pardon me while Piers and I faint.

But what about all this chatter about how sharks swim in the sea, and nipping on humans comes naturally to them (just being curious and experimental and wondering why somebody else wants to swim in Sydney harbour and pick up a good dose of mercury poisoning)?

The argument that humans are in the sharks' environment is also silly. We walk, we swim, we are humans.

Insights don't get any more profound than that. We burble, we scribble, we are loons.

Same deal for sharks. They swim, they turn into flake, and they get eaten.

After that Einstein-like flash of inspiration, the fat owl runs out of things to say. He suggests we take precautions - avoid swimming at dawn or dusk, watch out for lightning strikes on golf courses during storms, heck watch out for lightning generally, read 'man bites shark' stories, and watch out for overcast days.

Strangely Piers misses out on the real danger. Never ever swim in the nude, pert breasts bobbing in the moonlight, legs threshing about, while ominous music plays on the transistor radio, especially if it follows a night of petting, groping, drinking or drug abuse, you free thinking hedonistic hippie swine, you suitable subjects for shark bait.

For international readers, I'd like to add that you should watch out for red backs, funnel webs, all kinds of snakes, including brown, tiger, red bellied black, king and so forth and etcetera, and right wing newspaper columnists intent on a feed. Never stand in their way, or you could perish in the stampede.

Why do I feel like I drop 10 I.Q. points each time I read Piers? To make up for it, here's Robert Shaw's great speech in Jaws about the fate of the men on the Indianapolis, from the days when we understood that global warming had nothing to do with anything, and all sharks had to do was die so they could flavor up the chips.

Quint (Robert Shaw):  Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We'd just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes.

Didn't see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin' by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and sometimes that shark he go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away.

Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be livin'... 'til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin' and your hollerin' those sharks come in and... they rip you to pieces.

You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don't know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin', Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boson's mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist.

At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol' fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.

Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

Great writing. And a great performance from Shaw. Ah, I feel clean again, just like Sydney Harbour.

(Dorothy and Piers and the Daily Terror trading off on Jaws, even if the shark looks like a mechanical monster designed to scare tourists on a studio tour. SHARK! Please buy this newspaper. SHARK! Please read this blog. SHARK! Please watch exclusive on line video of shark caught in Sydney Harbour. Bull SHARK!)

Tim Blair, Rupert Murdoch, a personal apology, lead foots and zombies

Shock! Horror! Rupert 'the sun king' Murdoch personally apologizes for New York Post chimp shooting cartoon. "Today I want to personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted", said the head honcho in a statement released to those who care.

Read all about it in Tim Blair's up to the minute, scintillating, informative, even-handed, balanced and racially unbiased blog in The Daily Terror, a minor supplier of fish and chip wrapping paper in the byways of old Sydney town.

Oh wait. Don't bother. The latest from Tim is a re-hash of a dolphin joke, and a smirky aside that Barack Obama's approval rating is down to 59% under the tasteful header, "It's probably something to do with racism", and a  hilarious piece about the eating habits of the partner of a greenie politician at council meetings, along with a boast about how Tim talked himself out of a speeding ticket.

What is it with right wing loons? Both Blair and our own esteemed Michael Duffy are petrol head lead foots with a penchant for confessing to collecting speeding tickets (or not, as the case may be, depending how creative and gabby they are, or how they can titillate a cop by explaining they really are on the side of police rights in a police state). 

How come it's okay to be a law-breaker on the roads, and a righteous prick off them complaining about the lack of civility in secular society? Maybe Tim Blair was that bastard tail gating me on the M5 the other day? Who knows?

In further news, News Ltd shares are down a further 4% after the market heard that 2IC Peter Chernin is leaving the company. Rumors of mergers filter through the ether, the world might be shifting under Col Allan's feet, Faux Noise is losing money, the crunch is hitting the old fox, Australia was a turkey dragging down Australia and Fox ... 

Questions, questions: Does Rupe dare to ask Obama for a helping hand? How many loons would then immediately feel the need to jump off a nearby bridge? (Maps with diagrams and easy guides to nearest bridge available here right now, free. Just sayin', just plannin', just thinkin' ahead, just tryin' to help folks).

Oh it's a good news day.

Come on down righteous Hedgehoppers Anonymous, I feel a song coming on:

It's good news week

Someone's dropped a bomb somewhere

Contaminating atmosphere

And blackening the sky

It's good news week

Someone's found a way to give

The rotting dead a will to live

Go on and never die ...

Will zombie newspapers now join the zombie banks strutting the post industrial devastated landscape? And will zombie columnists still work for the zombie papers? And will lefties and greenies and despicable loons like that get a chance to play a sequel to that great Xbox 360 game Dead Rising? It was set in the middle of a giant America mall but I'm thinking we need to riff on a new setting. 

I can hear the voice over start the narrative in a new fresh downbeat kind of way: "Hi my name's Randy Stone, I cover the nightbeat for the Chicago Star. Stories start in many different ways. This one started with a zombie proprietor and ended with the four horsemen of the apocalypse."

We could call it Loons Rising ...

Janet Albrechtsen, Compassionate Conservatives, Wanker secular liberals and mincing poodles

Julia Gillard calling Christopher Pyne a mincing poodle sets a standard, I guess, for parliamentary debate, supported by no less than Tony Abbott when he subsequently hailed her as a vigorous contributor to the fine art of cheap shots.

It does however make it a little harder to care much about it when Bill Heffernan gives her a serve. Funny that at this moment SBS should serve up that fine, now venerable documentary about Harvey Milk, presumably as a warm up to the theatrical release in the antipodes of Sean Penn's Oscar winning ways. Not much seems to have changed over the years.

But as a poodle is to a pit bull, so Gillard's coarse wit sags up against Janet Albrechtsen, who in her latest column, Tough love a hard sell, sets new standards of snarly gnarly rhetoric, as she reaches across the aisle to discuss with David Williamson just how compassionate conservatives really are.

Dame Slap really cares!

To get things going, she makes sure the terrain is carefully defined - any criticism of conservatives lacking compassion is based on lazy and crude logic. The real problem is the way the Left promote a monopoly on the stuff, and conservatives fail to articulate their compassion.

I guess the 'fuck you, greed is good', never mind about the financial meltdown recently articulated by Albrechtsen lacked a little finesse.

Ritually doffing her hat and her arguments to the wonderful John Howard and his wonderful policies, Albrechtsen promises to stay true to the core value of conservatives - namely rationality.

I guess that means Peter Costello's recent flirtation with fundie loon Christians (and John Howard before that) is just a sign of how prayer is a deeply rational form of thinking.

Albrechtsen proposes four filters when considering leftie compassion, so called - the motive filter, the intestinal fortitude filter, the brains filter and the fashion filter - and then demonstrates how hard it is for conservatives to think logically when it comes to matters of emotion.

Firstly the motive filter. She notes that under Howard activists made a big deal about the Howard government keeping children in detention centres. So did the activists have a point? No, because the Rudd government also keeps children in detention centres. "The new-found silence suggests they do not care much about detained migrants ..."

Okay logic time. So comrade Stalin keeps people in gulags, while father of the nation Hitler favors concentration camps. Is silence an indicator that their policies are admirable? Is the silence of communists about Stalin, and their rage against Hitler a piece of fair minded, rational thinking? Or should we rail against the commies, in Nationalist Socialist style, and stay silent about the concentration camps?

Is keeping children in detention centres indefinitely a good policy? Is there any ethical or social consideration here, or is all morality refracted through the looking glass of self-serving politics?

I look forward to Albrechtsen getting out on the street and protesting the cruel, inhumane detention policies of the Rudd government. Now that'd be active conservative compassion. (That's if you think life amounts to more than disguised political ploys, partisanship dressed up as nobility).

Albrechtsen doesn't say much about the fortitude filter, but maybe that's because it takes guts to sink the boot into the poor on a regular basis as dole bludging no goods and neer do wells, as opposed to the average derivatives trader's wonderful dedication to humanity. Whatever, appeasement, sucking up to that sniveling bunch of drongos after a quick and easy buck, is clearly something only Neville Chamberlain would do.

This brings on talk about the brains filter, and how important it is to apply to whingeing lefties, especially given their Howard hating ways and their attitude to indigenous Australians. Unlike conservatives, who've derided the very concept of stolen generations, and derided the notion that blacks have a hard time in this lucky country, and sent the lazy walkabout bludgers out to do a bit of hard yakka as a way to get their minds off petrol sniffing (not that compassionate conservatives are in any way inclined to stereotypes - see Noel Pearson, who also thinks blacks are a mob of sit down bludgers). 

Compassion buffs, it seems, aren't very bright, which no doubt explains why the late breaking, hasty, cynical invasion of the Northern Territory has worked out so well.

Finally it's on to the fashion filter, and those silly rubber bracelets championing every cause under the sun, like that wretched David Hicks and his supporters. Albrechtsen amazingly allows 'legitimate criticisms' - who, what, where? - in relation to something somewhere at some time somehow remotely connected with Hicks, but then she quickly moves right along, because as we all know Abu Ghraib, rendition, torture and Guantanamo Bay turned out to be such jolly good policy wins for Bush and conservatives everywhere.

Yep, it's all good. Calls for compassion that fail the four policy filters - like blowing up Iraq to convert it to democracy - it seems will now be assigned to the scrap heap by the fair minded Albrechtsen. 

Which might explain why she's happy in her arguments to revert to catch phrases deriding Howard-haters and bleeding hearts (you know, the kind who rabbit on about human rights, and anti-terror laws, as opposed to the government's right to lock up anyone anytime if they think they're terrorists, given the fine and noble job that Mick Keelty did with Dr Haneef).

But Albrechtsen really is fair, she really is. Margaret Thatcher made a mistake when she declared there was no such thing as society. There is a society, it seems, and a deep sense of care within it. Disability carers and foster parents are just two groups who deserve more help than they get. Sure, but let's hope that sense of care never extends to single mothers - those fornicating sluts deserve all they get, and should be sent off to a matchbox factory forthwith.

Then Albrechtsen gets down to what she probably thinks is the fundamental problem - conservatives need to do a much better job in the spin and hype department. Like it's all about spin and hype. For compassion you just need to tweak a really good wrong 'un Shane Warne style and bowl those stupid lefties out. Compassion, it seems, is best understood as a form of trickery.

Sounds good. Name a minority group, and I'll expose them for the phony, grasping, self serving conservative hating, bleeding heart leeches and blood suckers and assorted vampiric ghouls they are,  pumping the healthy bodily fluids, the warm succulent juices of conservative compassion, out of the body politic ... What's that you say, I need to show I'm caring and sharing and not just abuse the shit out of wankers? Ah fuck it, it's just too hard.

Yeah, you bludging blacks and feminists and gays and weirdo hippies, and you deluded greenies who've burnt down Australia and should be hung from the nearest lamp-post, fact is religious conservatives in nuclear families are far more generous than you great pretenders, you bloody secular liberals and communists and pinkos and perverts. Nah nah.

You see it's okay for a Christian to give, but not a government. Not with my bloody taxes you don't. Piss off. I'm a caring compassionate conservative. You dumb fucker.

Dearie me, will somebody just send along a decent managerial class to run the country, and send these wretched hard core ideologues off to the ghettos where they might learn a thing or two about the real world.

The funny thing is, the sort of conservatism preached in the west - with its attitude to gays, blacks, women and those sort of losers - is actually not too far removed from the kind of intolerance of outsiders and 'others' preached by Islamic fundies on the other side. Ask an Islamic fundie and a Christian fundie about evolution, and they'll agree in spades.

Ask Janet Albrechtsen about compassion, and it sounds alright in theory. If it just didn't mean getting into bed with you bludging tossers and wankers and scumbugs. 

Jeez, Janet, stay the way you are. All this caring compassionate crap is too hard, it's a real mind fuck.  I might be mangling Henry Miller a bit, but didn't he say in the land of fuck, it's fuck or be fucked?

Just go on fucking over the fucked and don't bother rationalising it. Nobody expects conservatives to be compassionate. And nobody expects you to be rational. Now out with the cane. Dame Slap time!

Clive Hamilton, Stephen Conroy and smooth baby bottom smoking

Just thought I'd sneak this in before Clive Hamilton bans the intertubes. Found it while cleaning up some family heirlooms the other day. Must date to before 1938 when Dunhill's purchased the H. L. Savory brand.

Were pipe tobacco smokers kinky or what in the old days? A smoke as smooth as a baby's bottom! What would happen to Bill Henson if he did this sort of thing these days? Lock him up with Lewis Carroll I say. Or have we just become much more childish and knee-jerk reactive these days, whipped up into an hysterical lather by columnists determined to save the children? Should we all settle down and enjoy a good smoke? Sure it kills you. But death is preferable to perversion. Briar or corn cob?

Malcolm Maiden, Fairfax Media, and the decline and fall of an empire

We don't often visit the business pages in search of loons but there was something about Malcolm Maiden's column in The Age - Fairfax moves allow it a little headroom - Media group appears to be weathering the downturn - that was utterly compelling, especially with the news reported in sister paper SMH that Fairfax Media has just taken a half year hit of a $365m loss.

Maiden does a lot of fancy toe tapping with numbers to read in the entrails that Fairfax appears to be weathering the downturn. In much the same way that New Orleans weathered Hurricane Katrina?

I look forward to Maiden's next column, explaining how white is black, red ink is an excellent future profit indicator, and just why Chairman Mao and comrade Stalin were good for their countries, in a cyclical sort of way, with an upturn sure to follow, provided costs are contained, and journalists given their marching orders (since the best newspapers run without them, in the way Fawlty Towers was an excellent hotel apart from the pesky guests).

Guys, is this the final result of banning Mike Carlton and publishing loons like Gerard Henderson? Only time will tell. Meantime, we're so happy we sold our shares while they were north of $3.50, as they recently headed to below a dollar for the first time since listing. 

Management has stuffed a couple of papers with a proud history, and as we all know all the market does is say 'told you so'. You can blame short selling if you like, but free CD's and DVD's don't constitute either sensible marketing or good editorial policies. As for online, they still haven't got their refresh functionality working properly. 

If Citigroup and Bank of America go down, or get nationalised for their incompetence in a de facto ersatz American way, we haven't begun to see what it'll be like weathering a storm. Thanks be to Bush.

Gerard Henderson, Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Costello and the spirit of the hive

What I want to know is the secret meeting place where the commentariet get together to make sure there's a hegemony of ideas in all their columns. If anybody sees a gaggle of loons in a restaurant on a regular basis, please advise.

Or do the ideas float through the ether, like a collection of spectral ghosts? A kind of ectoplasm of the spirit world transmuted into bodily ideological shape? Or are all the columnists wired together by some kind of wifi communality, deep computer controlled elements waiting for a signal to collectively go barking mad? Or perhaps they're part of a master hive come from deepest space? Yes, maybe that's it, the invasion of the body snatchers has already taken place, but only right wing newspaper columnists were victims of the aliens.

The evidence for some kind of conspiracy is overwhelming. Take our favorite advisor to princes, popes and potentates, that worthy Polonius and desiccated coconut Gerard Henderson, in his column Disunity is death in Opposition.

All the talking points are there, as if learned by rote in some secret, furtive cabal.

First there's the ritual flailing and flensing away at John Hewson for daring to criticise Peter Costello. This isn't just a hatchet job, it's a beheading. For a start the form used by Hewson's missive - an 'open letter' - is a cliche. Wow. Killer point.

And then there's the notorious fact that Hewson appeared three times - three times I tells ya in a year - on the ABC's Lateline Friday forum. Talk about being infested by renegade white ants. Killer point. With splutter. He's just like - hisss - like Malcolm Fraser! Run children, hide under the bed.

But then the reason for all this is terribly clear. "Most journalists prefer Labor to the Coalition". Eer, is that a kind of "most journalists prefer vegemite to marmite" statement Gerard, backed by extensive research and statistical data Gerard, or just your own paranoid personal estimation? 

I have one of the same kind - "Most columnists employed by newspapers prefer loonacy of a coalition kind to sanity by a factor of four". I rest my case on the basis of my huge personal insights undeterred by the need for any substantiation beyond - I say it is so, and amazingly so it is.

Anyhoo, it seems this Labor loving media (you know, the kind owned by sun king Rupert Murdoch just for starters, or the eastern suburbs loving, Henderson employing Fairfax Media) just so loves the vile Hewson that no one in it has bothered to look at his role as chairman in a company that collapsed owing some $200 million. (So that explains why when you google up Hewson and Elderslie Finance Corporation you get dozens of references).

Never mind, what's a little dung throwing in the face - perhaps Hewson's like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour and really likes it, or perhaps Gerard gets so much pleasure out of doing the throwing, like the servant in the movie, that he doesn't notice the perversity of it all. Whatever. Rule number one, always play the man, never the ball. That's what makes Liberals such a great team.

Then it's back to the future time: Despite Hewson's complaints, Costello is the person best equipped to lead the Liberal party to the next election.

Ergo the Liberal party is being run by a second eleven loser called Malcolm while the king, I mean Prince Charles, is sitting in the wings waiting to ascend the throne. How's that for a thought to help party unity!

Meaning Henderson is doing his own level best to ensure continuing discord in the party as he supports the claims of the fundie loving Costello while that clown sits on the back bench in disruptive pique at not being hailed as the chief by universal acclaim. 

Is Henderson being as perverse and dumb as Costello, who seems to get profound pleasure and a sense of mischief out of fucking over his colleagues, or is he just being dumb?

Sorry folks, but it's hard not to jump to the latter option. Henderson writes off the Liberal party's chances at the next election - forget it boys, you're gone, despite hopeful signs in the polling on the economy and national security.

So what does our Polonius advise Malcolm in the middle to do?

Turnbull should publicly accept that Costello will remain on the back bench for the foreseeable future and praise his role as the member for the seat of Higgins.

Ah Gerard you're always good for a laugh, but I fell about cacking myself and almost had an accident in my panties. "Praise him". Dear lordy lordy, Malcolm should praise Costello? Now I get why you're a columnist and not a politician accustomed to the daily thrust and parry of politics.

But it gets better. According to our Polonius, Julie Bishop should remain as deputy because she displayed a remarkable degree of selflessness in stepping down as shadow treasurer, you know like the way the Terminator allowed himself to be crushed to a pulp and flung into a pot of molten hot metal. But wait Gerard that just means she was a loser who accepted the inevitable. What else have you got for keeping her in the glorious role of sidekick, waiting to be shot in the sixth reel?

Also, answers the sage Henderson, she was one of the few senior Liberals who declined to be interviewed for the ABC1 documentary The Howard Years. "This suggests that she has good judgment." But wait a minute, John Howard allowed himself to be extensively interviewed for The Howard Years. That's right god himself! Or does that mean John Howard showed bad judgment? No, say it ain't so Gerard, not god himself. He's infinite in his mercy and understanding and his judgments.

Gerard allows him one final strategic thought - the key players, the affable team of Abbott, Brandis, Coonan, Hockey, Minchin, Pyne and Robb should all get together in a leadership advisory group in order to co-ordinate the Opposition's message. Great idea. Abbott and Minchin get along so well with Christopher 'Robin' Pyne, what a team they'll make, like Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.

Hidden messages? Well clearly Malcolm is useless as a captain, so you're going to have to do it all yourself team. And also if you want to beat Labor you have to become Labor, and learn how to behave as collectivist Stalinists rather than proud individualists. You must all speak from the same page, like parrots or like members of the hive, vetting statements of party colleagues and introducing authority to constrain Bernardi style self-indulgence. You must all speak slowly like automatons voicing the one message over and over again. Perhaps we should hand around the hat and buy the lads and ladettes Homer Simpon's AT 2000 automatic dialler message machine.

At last it becomes clear. The spirit of the hive is strong Obi-Wan Kenobi. Yes it's clear that among right wing columnists there's a hive mind at work, just like in The X Files, and they want the Liberal party to adopt the same strange, alien mechanism.

The next time you meet a commentariet columnist at a Liberal party shindig, of the kind beloved by the elite Liberal owned media, check them out, and report any signs of alien behavior. The truth is out there people, we just have to find it, and warn the world ... before it's too late.

As for Malcolm Turnbull, who is clearly not the best person to be leading the Liberal party ... if you listen to Gerard Henderson, why not just save yourself and us the trouble, and step down now, singing and praising Peter Costello with a lusty voice ...

Peter, Peter our redeemer

has become our jubilee

sent to proclaim the release

of all held in captivity.

to the blind recovered sight

the release of all oppressed

to proclaim the year of the liberal party

hallelujah jubilee.

Clive Hamilton, Stephen Conroy, Thomas Bowdler, Tim Blair and Piers Akerman star in "A Gaggle of Loons"

The other day I was refreshing my memory of Thomas Bowdler, a noble physician who published an expurgated Billy Shakespeare suitable for women and children.

Bowdler, an expert on the country matters so coarsely outlined by Billy in Hamlet, made Ophelia's death an accidental drowning (none of that suicide nonsense), changed Lady Macbeth's cry to "Out, crimson spot" (forget damned), replaced god with heavens (but left off the 'to betsy' bit), dropped the hooker character entirely from Henry IV part 2, ripped out all the sexual innuendo (there's plenty of it if you know where to look, by cock there is) and dropped any hint of piss or shit in the texts (as well as putting a note up the front of Measure for Measure saying it was totally indecent and beyond his help. Now don't go running off to read the play, you'll only wonder what the fuss was about).

As a result, Bowdler now lives on in the language through the fine active verb, to bowdlerise. (You can put a 'zee' in place of the 's' if you come from the good ol' USA).

Now I'm torn. As we live through a new age of Bowdler and the planned censorship of the tubes in Orrstralia, what's the best term to describe the phenomenon? 

Hamiltonize has a nice ring to it, but there's a downside, because the preening prat and professor of Public Ethics at Charles Stuart University might enjoy the notoriety, as a sign he's done noble work (Bowdler never took a backward step or experienced a moment's doubt). 

So immortalized, Clive Hamilton might fancy himself as a kind of antipodean intellectual and upbeat version of Mary Whitehouse (see the Wikipedia on that fascinating old biddy, and The Goodies desperate but futile attempts to get her upset, here). 

Sadly the impulse is the same. Hamilton is really just Whitehouse in drag, and with about as much intellectual justification and weight behind him in his fetishistic fear of perversion and pornography. What Hamilton wants to do is reduce the internet to a standard where it's safe for children to cruise, thereby reducing and infantilizing all adults to the same level, and never you mind about responsible parenting or home filtering. It's one in, all in, for Clive and if you disagree, you have to be a paedophile. No opting out, no voluntary filtering. And the fact that it won't work is neither here nor there.

You do have to wonder what happens when someone becomes obsessed with researching pornography. Does it show a certain tendency, in the same way that in the end Whitehouse really needed vile deeds to get on to her noble steed and tilt at windmills?

To Conroyise is an unfortunate and ugly way to turn a name to verb, but on the upside it sounds a bit like the act Conroy is proposing to perform on the intertubes. Ugly.

And let's face it, Conroy is the main man - responsible, in a Janus-like way for all that's going down, dressing his experiments up as a noble concern for children when really it's a shabby concern for Steve Fielding's vote, mixed with a passing tip of the hat to the wonderful way China manages to shut down dissidents.

When I hear the word censorship, I reach for my libertarian gun, but what really startles me is how conservatives have folded on this issue. Barely a cheep from them as they beep beep around all kinds of other issues. Yet here's the Labor party acting in a way that would make North Korea and Islamic fundies around the world cheer and dance with glee.

I'm thinking maybe Conroystirpate or maybe Conroyminate might be better, but I'm not sure whether hair pullling from the roots Terminator style, as in extirpate, is as good as exterminate, which does conjure up Conroy as a battered, electronic-voiced Dalek shouting "exterminate".

I've searched for words of wisdom from Tim Blair and assorted other loons, and found out that Blair's blog was once blocked by the Howard government's voluntary filtering system. It'd be terrible if the loon and his followers somehow ended up on Conroy's new filter list because he tried to speak on adult subjects in a childish way. But does Blair rush to speak up about Conroy and his Dr Frankenstein routine? Not in what I read.

Why this side-track? Well today Tim Blair is back on his monomaniacal hobby horse of climate change. The only fun is that he's in a state of toxic shock in Malcolm in the merits. 

Malcolm Turnbull has said that the Coalition believes Labor's aim to cut greenhouse emissions  by between 5 per cent and 15 per cent is too little!!

TOO LITTLE? For an issue that's completely bogus? Well no that was yesterday. Today Tim's language is softer. It's a problem - even if it's real - that Australia can do nothing about. And how's this for graspng at straws? There's enough in the Coalition and their Labor opponents who don't believe in global warming at all, maybe enough to build a viable political force, maybe enough to take over the government, maybe to take over the world. And from there, Mars after the planet here becomes uninhabitable.

A loon in full cry is a fine sight.

Also in the Daily Terror is our regular dose of Piers Akerman, aka the fat owl, more welcome than a dose of cod liver oil, but not by much. Thank god it's not breakfast in your part of the world, because you might just choke on your Cheerios. 

The fat owl has praised ABC local radio! Sure it's just a brief mention in Making sense of loss by words and pictures before berating left wing social engineering educational theorist media teachers, and dishing out unctuous, servile, self-serving praise to The Daily Telegraph and The Herald Sun, at which point you might well have wished you'd choked on the Cheerios rather than throwing up into them.

A special treat: " ... the press has the capacity to expose the Left's penchant for profligate spending on unnecessary, even damaging, programs ..."

Like the ABC, you self-absorbed, contradictory fat owl!

A loon in full cry, chest puffed up with the finery of self importance and delusions, is a glorious sight.

Bring it on Conroy. Smote the intertubes, block obscenity, slam the lid on loonery. After all the democratic right of loons to speak their minds is driving us all mad, makes us rush off to look at nubile young men in Playgirl poses. Or is it only boys who do that?

Conroystirpate them all.

Tim Blair and bogus climate change versus risk management

Over at Tim Blair-sville, small pond to many loons, there's still no news about the New York Post's monkey apology. Guess it's old news, no need to bother now. Phew. That balance stuff is for dumb softie liberals. Never give an inch, to infinity and beyond.

And not a hint about that Queensland murder victim's head being used as a bowling ball. Funny, given the way Blair just loves to report in slobbering detail on an Islamic beheading.

No, it's back to the future again. In his latest scribble, Tim gets very bold under the header Green Wedge. He knows the real demonstrable truth about global warming: It sure isn't an issue that lives outside of politics, on account of it being utterly bogus.

Reminds me of a Christian saying with certainty there's absolutely only one god, his. Proof please. Or an atheist saying with absolute certainty there's no gods at all. Proof please.

Day after day Blair grinds on about global warming like a fundie preacher speaking of sin, in little snippets and gobbets that snipe and cavil and have all the logic and time-keeping skills of a clock with worn-down gears and a hand or two missing.

I guess either a mass of people are in the grip of a bogus hysteria, or Tim Blair is hysterically sure they're all hysterics. But he doesn't have to provide any proof. He's got a set of true believers and they know the truth.

Such certainty, such fervid passionate belief. I wish I had that kind of dumb intensity. With the world scheduled to hit nine billion by 2040, resources finite (I mean we haven't made it to Mars just yet, and the moon doesn't seem like an Aladdin's cave), you'd think risk management might involve taking some sensible precautions, rather than acting like cockroaches out for a mindless good time knowing that in the end they'll be the only ones to survive a nuclear blast. 

Reminds me of the old folk tale about the frog sitting in slowly warming water, but of course we all know that's just Al Gore recycling an old folk myth for his own evil purposes. I mean a frog in slowly boiling water will jump out as soon as it gets unpleasant, right, and sure as heck I intend to jump right off this planet the moment things start to go wrong with it. I'm thinking the Horsehead nebula is a pleasant, picturesque place in which to set up shop.

Meantime, here's a nineteenth century cartoon by the wondrous Grandville showing the trees and the fishies having a little gloat about silly humans.

Janet Albrechtsen, John Hewson, Peter Costello, Malcolm in the middle and a little big endian egg cutting and de-ballsing

(War) began upon the following Occasion. It is allowed on all Hands, that the primitive way of breaking Eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger End: But his present Majesty's Grand-father, while he was a Boy, going to eat an Egg, and breaking it according to the ancient Practice, happened to cut one of his Fingers. Whereupon the Emperor his Father published an Edict, commanding all his Subjects, upon great Penaltys, to break the smaller End of their Eggs. The People so highly resented this Law, that our Histories tell us there have been six Rebellions raised on that account; wherein one Emperor lost his Life, and another his Crown. These civil Commotions were constantly fomented by the Monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the Exiles always fled for Refuge to that Empire. It is computed, that eleven thousand Persons have, at several times, suffered Death, rather than submit to break their Eggs at the smaller End. Many hundred large Volumes have been published upon this Controversy: But the books of the Big-Endians have been long forbidden, and the whole Party
rendered incapable by Law of holding Employments. During the Course of these Troubles, the Emperors of Blefuscu did frequently expostulate by their Ambassadors, accusing us of making a Schism in Religion, by offending against a fundamental Doctrine of our great Prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth Chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran.) This, however, is thought to be a meer Strain upon the Text: For the Words are these: That all true Believers shall break their Eggs at the convenient End: and which is the convenient End, seems, in my humble Opinion, to be left to every Man's Conscience, or at least in the power of the Chief Magistrate to determine.  Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels.

Too much truth in that one short paragraph for a child to bear or understand when offered Gulliver's Travels and his voyage to Lilliput as a light-hearted fairy tale about a man-mountain dwelling amongst small people.

What's worse, Swift's work was published in 1726 and we still haven't worked it out today (and don't go talking to me with your computer jibber jabber about how big endians can improve hardware logic).

I mean there's that silly Queensland rebel priest Father Peter Kennedy, sacked by the Brisbane Archbishop for  inviting all kinds of trash into his church (gays no less!!) It seems the man wants to be a Christian in the proper sense of the word. Doesn't he understand he's actually a Catholic? Doesn't he realize that all would be well if only he invited anti-semites and Holocaust deniers into his flock, to help diversity and plurality? Silly man.

It's even better when the big endians fight amongst themselves (or are the Liberals little endians? Is it best for a Liberal to seek out the small end of the egg as a stand against big government intervention and as a symbol of the individual liberty of small men? Or should they stand for the big endian bit of town? So hard.)

Anyhoo, the Libs have got themselves into a standard 'in opposition' leadership knot, and the intervention of John Hewson into the Turnbull-Costello debate over the weekend was most amusing. In You missed your chance, Peter, Hewson essentially said Costello was lazy, self-indulgent, disloyal, didn't have the balls and he should bugger off.

It wasn't a subtle message, but from Malcolm Turnbull currently sits it probably sounded fair.

It also made a refreshing change to the pious free market platitudes we've been copping from former Labor party roosters. It's been vaguely nauseating to watch lately the way Labor party feather dusters like Michael Costa - done with ruining NSW - and Mark Latham - done with ruining the Labor party, have recently turned themselves into newspaper columnists quoted with adoration by the right wing commentariet for their refreshingly destructive take on the state of Australia under Kevin Rudd.

Naturally Hewson's outburst has immediately prompted a roast from Dame Slap aka Janet Albrechtsen, in The Australian, under the header Hewson's delusions of grandeur.

Albrechtsen inevitably contrasts the wonderful performance of John Howard at the Menzies Institute, with his measured and dignified talk of gratitude and reform, with the oafish behaviour of Hewson.

It seems Hewson's just an attention seeker, a look at moi type who was a wunderkind failure (now if only they'd told us that when he was elected leader of the Liberal party).

Anyhoo, as a failure, he should shut up. Proving once again that shooting the messenger is always more satisfying than listening to the message.

As for Albrechtsen's solution: "... in the interests of the party, the ongoing duel between the current Liberal leader and the former Treasurer needs to be dealt with behind closed doors."

Impenetrability I always say.

Like as if Janet. You know Hewson actually made a little more sense in his column than you. That must stick in the craw.

No wonder it seems Albrechtsen is still having gender issues: "But, John, just between us girls, we know that helping the Liberal Party was not your real intent was it?"

I don't recollect Hewson identifying as transsexual. Is this Albrechtsen's way of de-ballsing him, of turning him into a girl?

Johnny came from out on the island

In the backroom she was everybody's darling

But she never lost her head

Even when she was givin' head

She says, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side ...

Oh I get it, Janet's just being funny in a kinda funny way. Just a little bitch slapping. Settle down ho Hewson.

Ah well I guess it passes for political discourse in this country. How quickly Latham's been forgiven and elevated into the pantheon of poseurs, his labeling of Janet Albrechtsen a skanky ho, his attack on Tony Staley as a deformed character and his ridiculing our very own fat owl Piers Akerman as a cocaine user now long gone fish and chips wrapping (not to mention his description of John Howard as an arselicker and the front bench of the Liberal party as a conga line of suckholes).

Hewson will never achieve Latham's apotheosis. Sure, he might have been telling the truth as he sees it (well okay as I see it), but sssh, when arranging a funeral, it's best done behind closed doors.

But who's going to be burying who? Sssh, it'll be done behind closed doors. Just like the mob. Or domestic violence.

Janet always has the best role models to hand for the Liberal party. Fuck it, cut the egg whichever way you want to, just do it in private where no one can see the knife land.