It comes from Alice Through the Looking Glass:
"I don't know what you mean by 'glory', Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. " Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means jut what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs: they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs - however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say.
Of course both Alice books were written by a paedophile, using a pseudonym, as Lewis Carroll was in fact an Anglican deacon Charles Lutwdige Dodgson, who used to love to take nude photographs of children.
After the recent Bill Henson scare, I tried to organize a letter writing campaign to Senator Fielding suggesting that both Alice books (and all other works by that notorious child nude photographer) only be sold under the counter, plastic wrapped with an R certificate, and I also tried to get Senator Conroy to place on his black list any website mentioning Carroll nee Dodgson or any of his filthy works (oops, guess this site is on the black list now).
Before you unleash angry comments, remember I'm thinking of the children, and not buying any of this nonsense excusing Dodgson as part of a Victorian child cult which saw child nudity as an expression of innocence. Come on guys, they used to cover table legs and under-age prostitution was a fact of life. The time to take action is now, before Australia's healthy bodily fluids are leeched away.
Which brings us back to impenetrability, which of course means we've had enough of that subject, and now it's time to move on to the next.
And if we hadn't mistaken Piers Akerman for Billy Bunter, the fat owl of the remove, by golly we'd have found a lot of Humpty Dumpty in him. Piers is at his splenetic best in his demolition darby destruction of the Ruddster's stimulus package - The devil in the detail of Rudd's mad spree.
The fat owl is shocked, shocked I tells ya, by what he's uncovered, and the adjectives flow like Humpty Dumpty in full featherless flight. First of all, he invokes Burke and Wills, in an ill-planned expedition that has become a byword for arrogance and stupidity. Oh no, say it isn't so Piers, surely you don't mean that aboriginal folk had a better understanding of being in country than white folk.
Surely you're not embracing the blacks? Don't you mean to say the expedition wasn't a complete waste of time, since they discovered there was no inland sea. Surely since we've celebrated them as exploring heroes for generations, it can't all have been meaningless. Like worshipping a British flag and singing god save the queen.
Burke and Wills planned their expedition to the last camel and still died. Ah, that's better. They were careful planners, it had nothing to do with being caught out in the sun like mad dogs and Englishmen. But wait what's this, "As an innovator and initiator of enterprise, he is as clever as Burke and Wills." Well that's okay then, we're safe right down to the last camel, since global warming doesn't exist and this recent heatwave is just welcome relief from the cold.
But let's crank it up now. Rudd, acting as bombastically as Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator ... Now that's clever. We all know that dragging in the Nazis invokes Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies.
This long established law (since 1990!) scientifically proves that referencing Hitler or the Nazis is definitive evidence of a broken mind using a broken argument. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with referencing Charlie Chaplin playing Adenoid Hynkel, because that has absolutely nothing to do with Hitler.
As for Rachel Maddow's corollary, that as the time a liberal candidate is believed to be winning an election or argument increases, the probability that they will be labeled communist or socialist approaches 1, we can dismiss this as being a product of her publicly stated sexuality.
It's absurd to fit you up like that, dear Piers, just because you go on to say Rudd's speech attacking Turnbull might have been written by a junior member of the Socialist Alliance.
Of course it's the batts in the belfrey and sundry Australian homes that sends Piers in to a major rage: ... there is no evidence that the possible energy saved by the installation of tax-funded insulation would match the amount of energy expended on the construction of the insulation. It is, after all, only fibreglass, and fibreglass production requires the melting of sand to produce the glass that is made into fibre.
Here we go again, back down the hole with Alice, I mean Piers. First of all, as global warming is a myth, Kevin is just inventing a make work scheme, much the same as getting people to dig holes, then fill them in. And second since global warming is a reality, what you should be saying is that the production and installation of all insulation must cease at once, since it's creating a world carbon crisis all on its own (unlike coal power stations, which are just doing what comes naturally to them). Not even private home owners should be allowed this fiendish waste of resources as we all feel the heat clutching at our throats.
If ever there was a time for existential absurdity, it's the sight of the fat owl and Tim Blair berating the government for being energy inefficient over a non-existent global warming crisis.
The fat owl is also indignant at the Rudd proposal to fund public housing and mix it in with privately owned buildings. Of course the current policy of concentrating public housing into ghettoes has worked tremendously well - The Daily Terror has sold multitudes of papers under headlines berating the hapless wretches who live in purified bunches of economic despair on public estates.
No, no, no, whatever you do, let's stay NIMBY about all this social engineering. Let's keep the rioting, we have papers to sell. Let's not spend money on picayune projects that do little more than bolster local Labor contributors. And by the way fuck all you poor folk and dole bludgers, and if you have to go camping or live in the streets, so be it, Piers will understand, just don't make a fuss, okay? (Funny, we have a half way house across the road, and they're the quietest bunch of pussies).
Hey ho, let's keep those wagons moving: Rudd and his colleagues have only had two types of jobs, with the ALP or with the trade union movement; they would know less about job creation than a Kalahari bushman knows about walrus.
Or a Murdoch opinion writer, whose spent his life as a preening journalist, would know about global warming, apart from that plucky expedition when he went across the Andes by frog and noticed the glaciers were melting.
As usual, it's on with the abuse - the cockamamie global-warming plan - and a particular fat owl speciality, playing the wife instead of the man.
Our richest-ever prime minister may have benefitted from the capitalist system, but it must be remembered that he wasn't the brains behind the business. His wife, Therese Rein, cashed in on privatisation and built a company.
Go on Piers say it, she looted the public purse because of the stupid Howard privatization policies and the follies of people who think all government is evil.
You know, there's a sensible discussion to be had about Rudd's stimulus package, and hopefully the Senate will have it, but you can only expect heat and no light from the likes of our splendid fat owl (I suspect he doesn't pay his adjectives and metaphors enough when they come around demanding their wages for doing a lot of extra work).
But there's also a deeper reality. The fat owl and his mates in the White House had a go for eight years, and the result is an encroaching global depression, and please don't try to explain to me how it's all the fault of that Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter. Even Humpty Dumpty wouldn't try that on.
It's obvious that government is having a hard time dealing with the crisis, but then where's the argument that business should stand aside and let financial geniuses like Rupert Murdoch lose billions in a quarter (and see Faux Noise drop 17 per cent in revenue, despite higher political ad sales, with operating profits plunging 93 per cent. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy).
As Alice might have said about the fat owl, channeling Humpty Dumpty - before Conroy bans her from the internet - of all the unsatisfactory people I ever read ... (but she never finished the sentence, for at this moment another right wing columnist publishes his thoughts, and the heavy crash shook the forest from end to end).
By the way, you can get both Alices here.
Ain't the internet wonderful. Please read them to your children nightly and one day they will be able to grow up understanding Piers and the joy of absurdity (in a profoundly mathematical and philosophical way).
As for the fat owl: I say you beastly socialistic chappies, you commie bullies with rich wives and a resemblance to Charlie Chaplin and Burke and Wills and Kalahari bushmen, that hurts. Leave me alone, you fiends, or I'll yell. Yaroooh. Garooar. Picayune!
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