The Michael Duffy Files

Some final housekeeping for the moment

2009-07-24T09:47:00.004+10:00

Loon Pond has now shifted and gone HERE.

The Michael Duffy Files has now been running a tad over a year. It started as a jolly jape, though not amongst chums, by dedicating itself to the task of celebrating, disputing and excoriating the opinions of commentariat columnist Michael Duffy in the Sydney Morning Herald - such monomaniacal scribbling seemed a way of ensuring it would remain largely invisible to the world while acting as a kind of deep emotional therapy for the writer.

Alas Michael Duffy ceased writing for the Herald, though you can still catch him trilling away on Counterpoint at Radio National, available in transcript sometimes or for listening and downloading here.

So then the site shifted over to a look at other commentariat columnist loons on a more regular basis, and alarmingly it began to attract readers and of course loons. Many more than expected, and while of course sensible readers only admired the plumage and the loud squawking before moving on, the odd loon left a note to indicate that indeed the site struck chords. Even if they were discordant chords only suitable for inclusion in a Stockhausen concert.

Perhaps my fondest memory is of a loon from Nedlands in Western Australia who kept coming here in search of Hal G. P. Colebatch and leaving naughty anonymous messages, when he could just as easily have met Mr. Colebatch in his local coffee shop.

But as the readership began to grow and the loons began to squawk and prowl, it became painfully clear that calling the site after Mr. Duffy was both unfair and improper, at least after he became invisible and absent. After all, as vile progressives, who amongst us can believe in absentee landlords or absentee columnists?

While the title was changed to Loon Pond as an interim measure, the site now pops up all over the place bearing Mr. Duffy's name in its address and as a reference point. And some of the odium and opprobrium for its anti conservative bias no doubt lingers around him. This is hardly fair, because as columnists go, Mr. Duffy was largely inoffensive and on occasions sensible, and it's simply not right to have him somehow linked in to a commentary on deeply weird loons like Piers Akerman or Janet Albrechtsen.

Unlike others, Mr. Duffy has shown a steely indifference to this blog, which is both sporting and sensible, and so it's only fair to call a halt after a year of musings under his name.

Which is not to say it's gone forever, so much as taking a rest, in much the same way as Jeffrey Bernard was regularly unwell.

If Mr. Duffy ever decides to return to regular column, the Michael Duffy Files will be on hand to pay devoted attention to his scribbling.

But in the meantime, Loon Pond has shifted to its very own site and very own call sign.

If you want to visit Loon Pond, go HERE.

Apologies to all those who rely on bookmarks and similar intertubes folderol.

If you don't want to visit, fair enough, you may bugger off. It is after all only a form of therapy for the writer, and the fewer the loons that visit, the happier we all are (especially the loons from Nedlands, WA).

In any case, to borrow from Irish comedian Dave Allen, goodnight, thank you, and may your god go with you, whomever she might be.

Actually I don't think Dave said that last bit, but hey why not fling in a plug for Dave Allen's comedy stylings and the joys of being a practising atheist.

A Little Housekeeping

2009-07-20T20:22:00.005+10:00

A little housekeeping.

In the tradition of the true blue dinky di Australian, Dorothy is off to her heartland roots. No, not the Algonquin hotel in midtown Mahattan, home of the wonderful real Dorothy Parker, with her sashay and style, but rather the wonderful town of Tamworth, home of country music and the sad ersatz papier-mâché fake wannabe Dorothy Parker (and now you understand the root cause of schizophrenia).

In this dark and remote wilderness, there is little by way of internet cafes, or wifi, and less by way of arty crafty chardonnay and lefties. So Dorothy will probably do a little shooting and kill a few bunnies and down a few ales (make it dark, good fellow, like a Newcastle old), and a scone or three and a cup of tea or ten, and heck if a petrol head like Tim Blair can go to Townsville, some day he might become a real man and get into a fight in Maguires. In the meantime, we heartland Australians must consider him a poseur and a ponce and a flibbertygibbet, and likely to get nosebleed ten kilometres out of a major metropolis if there longer than a day.

And by the way if you saw tonight's Four Corners, maintain the rage about the coal miners wanting to fuck over the Liverpool plains. Love the country, you Liberal fuckers ... and so called Nationalists ... and to hell with the Labor party while we're at it ...

You've ruined the Hunter valley. Enough already.

Tim Andrews, Jeff Koons, bodacious babes, and a plan to save Australia and turn it into a free market pond

2009-07-20T18:14:00.012+10:00

(Above: bodacious babe Young Liberals as celebrated by Tim Andrews).

The intertubes is a fickle and cruel world. It's full of jealour malice and little green rats that gnaw away at your heart, which admittedly isn't so cruel as the pink elephants that tormented my grand pappy once he got into the moonshine (come on grand pappy tell us again about the Somme in the winter of 1917 and how it turned you into a raging drunk).

And sometimes I wonder how it is that Andy Warhol's allocation of fame has been reduced from fifteen minutes to fifteen seconds. That hardly seems fair, after all, it's hard work being Jeff Koons and marrying sex workers and making flower puppies (now residing in Bilbao) and finding you have to reduce the prices for your pieces from 20 to 10 million.

And can you now recall Tim Andrews, who briefly achieved notoriety by putting pictures of bodacious Liberal babes on his blog, some of them reading Ayn Rand? That's still the thing I can't get over. Ayn Rand!

It was like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling her body: she felt his arms around her, she felt her legs pulled forward against him and her chest bent back under the pressure of his, his mouth on hers (Atlas Shrugged).

Well it's good to know that minor skirmish with the shallow sordid world of Murdochian tabloidism hasn't put Tim off blogging or conspiring to change the shape of Australian politics.

How I Plan to Dedicate My Life to Reforming Australian Politics is his latest clarion call, in which he announces his plan to fix things up by making Australia a free market in everything (especially rough trade porn, I hope, for the sake of young Liberals everywhere).

Now I don't have a problem with that, in the sense that politics can always do with a shake up. But I just can't figure the angles. You see, like Rupert Murdoch, Tim says he's become an American citizen.

Most importantly though, I have the fortune of having won that roulette of lottery that is US citizenship, and have taken advantage of it. This, more than anything else, I cannot overstress the value of. Unless you have been here, no-one can actually understand the difference that living in the US makes. The fact that I am immersed in the core of the future of free market advocacy, means that I will have unparalleled skills necessary to be able to do this back in Australia. And these skills are impossible to pick up at home.

Um, but Tim, why not stay in America and fix it up? The Republican party is now barking mad right wing extreme, and if it's to come in from the cold, it needs the help of moderate, sane voices who can help it to the middle. In much the same way as the Liberal party doesn't need rhetoric about serfdom so much as a trip to the middle and power. So what's this about giving up on the Liberal party? Just because you want to set up an activist grassroots free market advocacy organization? (and please use zeee instead of s so your American spell checker doesn't create a fuss):

Obviously, this means that I can no longer be an active member of the Liberal Party. From a personal perspective, this pains me greatly; after all, I have dedicated almost half of my life to serving the Party. I know the personal losses that leaving will cause. Yet is necessary. There is, after all, no way I can objectively advocate sound policy, while I have a vested interest in one political party. Oh don’t get me wrong, doubtlessly I shall continue to be a member, to try to influence people as best as I can. But I cannot – and will not – continue to waste my time with the petty childish sandpit of internal party politics, nor place myself in a position where I can no-longer critique the party from outside.

Um, you're a member but you're not a member? Well if you can be an American and an Australian, I suppose it's the right stance.

But you know at the same time, perhaps you should re-think job advertising on the intertubes. There's no doubt that you have impressive credentials:

Firstly, I think it’s rather important to note that, to some degree at least, I do actually possess a brain and the ability to use it. I don’t know how I can objectively demonstrate this, other than to point out that my UAI of 99.85 (for all the flaws the UAI contains) does place me in the top 0.15% of the population intellectually (and, correct me if I’m wrong, is the highest in the NSW YL’s for the last 10 years or so).

Academically, I have a Bachelors of Economics (Social Sciences), with a double major in Government and International Relations, with a minor in economics. I have a Bachelor of Laws (Honours), with a primary focus in jurisprudence, and the relationship between politics and law. I also have a Masters in Public Policy, again, rather relevant to the intellectual underpinnings of what I wish to achieve.

But you know that's just a bunch of academic qualifications, and we know what we all think about academics. I'd have been more impressed if you'd said bugger the academic qualifications, I just want to make a shitload of money in an entrepreneurial way. The rest of the CV is equally fine, but I do wonder why you want to set up a freemarkets grassroots advocacy group in Australia:

So why exactly do I want to do this. The answer is unfortunately simple: there is no-one else. I mean this by no means out of arrogance, but simply as a statement of fact. There is no-one else who wants to do this. After all, I fully recognise I need more than simply desires, I need concrete skills. So let us look at my skillet as objectively as possible.

Um, okay, let's overlook the skillet business and your persistent refusal to use zeee instead of s, but have you thought of a reverse takeover of the Sydney Institute, run by that desiccated coconut and aging free market figure Gerard Henderson (here)?

Henderson hanging on by the fingernails? Never mind, let's look at your pitch:

I have no doubt whatsoever that we need to set up a free market grassroots advocacy group in Australia. I have no doubt that this is essential if we want to prosper as a society and not tumble headfirst down the road to serfdom. I believe, therefore, that I am the person with the enthusiasm, the experience, and the skills to make this happen.

So help me. Please help me. I cannot do this on my own. I cannot raise the money necessary, I cannot come up with the business plan, I cannot create the strategy by myself. I need your help. So please, contact me, and together, we can change Australia.

If you and I fail, if together we can not start up a genuine advocacy group, then freedom in Australia truly is doomed.

You can't do a business plan? You can't raise the money? You want it all handed to you on a plate? Then truly Australia and freedom are in trouble, and the road to serfdom likely. A degree in economics and you can't do a business plan? WTF. Truly, we are doomed, and likely so is America.

Having thus established the necessity for such an organisation, the obvious question is: why me? Am I really so arrogant as to believe I can personally reshape the Australian political landscape? Is my ego so big that I really think I can bring about that much change?

Well it'd have to be big to think about changing everything without being able to do a business plan. My advice? Either keep on with the bodacious babes, or toughen up, stop the bleeding over the intertubes, and for the love of the lord work out how to do a business plan. Or arrange for a bus to run over Gerard Henderson.

And can the condescension:

The core idea is simple: Create an activist grassroots free market advocacy organisation. Something to take abstract ideas, intellectual theories, and policy papers, and package them into something nice and simple that your average citizen can understand. To set up an organisation to fight in the trenches, to spread the message, to actually engage in the battle of ideas. Australia has some of the best think tanks in the world, in the CIS and IPA, but they are think tanks – they are not ground troop warriors. And that is what we need. And I want to set something up to actually be such warriors.

Dumb it down for the average citizen so they can understand it? The average citizen can do a business plan ... they do it every week in every year. You should get down in the trenches with them some time ...

(Below: bodacious Jeff Koons, and while in Bilboa can I recommend Licor de Hierbas, more potent than acid on an empty stomach. You will outshine Fellini in your dreaming).

David Gazard, Politics, the Church and feeling sorry for christians

2009-07-20T12:33:00.005+10:00

(Above: Life of Brian. Blessed are the cheesemakers, and if you think that's a typo for peace makers you haven't read David Gazard. Enough with your UN talk of peace making with black helicopters, what about the sterling work of cheese makers feeding the poor as small businessmen facing the crushing burden of socialism).

When you look at The Punch often enough, Australia's dumbest conversation, the befuddled editorial policies tend to come into balance.

Throw in a bit of populism (MasterChef), a Labor politician or two for balance, a Liberal to tip the scales the other way, then flavor it with a soupçon of loon.

David Gazard does nicely as a prime contender for loon pond gold status with his contribution Churches pray for terrorist and ignore a businessman, which yet again recycles comparisons between locked up in China businessman Stern Hu, against locked up in Guantanamo Bay David Hicks.

Gazard's target is Christians and their churches - and who can argue with that - but his argument is so full of holes and illiberal illogic that you just wish there was some other character roaming around the temples taking on the money lenders.

Let's cut to the chase here:

As a person of faith who holds a deep interest in politics, I think it is in our nation’s interest for the church to help fill the moral and spiritual vacuum. And there are a great many churches out there doing just that.

But if the traditional church is to succeed, it must get back to doing what it does best, delivering a spiritual message, not attempting to replicate a Left-of-centre political party or Greenpeace.

WTF? Oh yes, I can just imagine Gazard way back when writing an editorial for the Jerusalem Times reporting that a strange figure was seen roaming around the temples over turning tables and benches and getting upset about a few guys selling a few doves (and won't someone speak up for the doves).

If the traditional Mr. Christ is to succeed in his new ministry, Gazard might harumph, he needs to get back to doing what he does best - you know, miracles and stuff, and spiritual messages about Christmas and Easter, not attempting to replicate some kind of socialistic agenda about innocent money lenders and dove and rug dealers doing a bit of business in the temples.

It's that kind of Greenpeace Gaia nonsense, Gazard might continue in his op ed, which makes me wonder if he's the right kind of character to fill in the moral and spiritual vacuum around town. I've even heard he's used his skills to create wine, and I understand he keeps the company of peasants and prostitutes, rather than upstanding company directors and honest traders.

But wouldn't you know it. The brand new nineteen sixties moral and spiritual vacuum was created by Marxist baby boomers. Good news for vegan Adolf Hitler, and no need to worry about breaking Godwin's law:

The retiring Bishop of Rochester, Dr Nazir-Ali traces the decline of the church in Britain back to the 1960s when there was a steep decline in Christian worship.

Marxist students encouraged a “social and sexual revolution” to which liberal theologians and Church leaders “all but capitulated,” he says.

“It is this situation that has created the moral and spiritual vacuum in which we now find ourselves. While the Christian consensus was dissolved, nothing else, except perhaps endless self-indulgence, was put in its place.”

Oh yes, if you want wild sexual liberation, go to Russia and China and see how exciting it gets there. Luckily the United States has nothing to do with endless self-indulgence, given it never fell to Marxism.

What's that you say? How dare you equate my plasma screen and playstation box with mindless self-indulgence.

You see, there's endless self indulgence, and then there's mindless self-indulgence, and you must always be ready to separate the two.

And then of course there's the indulgences you can buy (any good church will sell you one), and the indulgence of being born gay or a woman, and really complicating matters.

The next thing you know Christians will be ordaining gays to take a place in the church. Or -s steady, don't faint - women. Why on earth can't the traditional church agree on a traditional social agenda. You know, Islamics terrible and gay people even worse. Women a necessary evil.

Lordy, some of these clerics can't even agree on whether god actually exists. Or if he or she is an actual sex, or whether (s)he is some kind of bizarre TG kind of creature, or whether (s)he might be a socialist marxist or even worse a one legged lesbian whale lover.

But back to the beginning. Gazard opens in best debating school manner:

I keep waiting for the traditional church to launch its campaign against the government’s treatment of boat people.

Perhaps Stern Hu needs a rocket launcher to get the churches' attention

After all, boats carrying asylum seekers keep entering Australian waters in greater numbers, there are allegations that boats are left to drift and, worst of all, some have perished along the way.

I glance skyward in Melbourne, looking for the immense banner hanging from the spire St Paul’s Cathedral, like there was a few years ago. Instead of “Justice for David Hicks”, it will read “Justice for SIEV 624”.

“Excising islands and placing boat people in New Guinea and Nauru and so removing them from access to the Australian legal system was too clever and inhuman. Have we no sense of shame as a nation?” asked the Most Reverend Peter R Watson, then the Archbishop of Melbourne in 2004.

Surely Rev Watson, or his successor Dr Philip Freier, who defended the “Justice for David Hicks” banner, will be out of the blocks soon to criticise the fact that boatpeople are dying and to demonstrate the traditional church’s deep adherence to social justice is non-partisan.

Err, actually it seems Gazard hasn't read Piers Akerman.

Once you've done that, you know that the current government is way too soft on illegal asylum seekers. Akkers is outraged at the way the government has helped out these wretched aliens. So what's for the clerics to protest at? All's peace and love under the christian Chairman Rudd.

Could it be that - gasp - Akkers is wrong. The government is still being tough? Gazard seems to think so, in which case me and Akkers must have missed the mail. I find it hard to believe, but that would certainly give the clerics some work to do.

Well, err actually that might explain why some of the clerics do think the government is still being too tough. Gazard doesn't seem to notice that the wretched do gooders and soft sook Christians are still out there raging at the government for being too hard on asylum seekers. But I guess they do it in publications that Gazard doesn't bother to read (on pink paper).

I guess if it's not in a huge banner on a cathedral these harmless do gooders going quietly about their work are invisible.

But then there's nothing like conflating a businessman held in prison in the one party state of communist China (still not up to a month) versus the treatment handed out to David Hicks (years and years) - and many others, innocent and guilty - by a country which is supposedly the leader of the free world, and which in this matter and the question of torture should have known better.

How about using hanging as a metaphor to make your point? Sure thing:

Or how about this for something really radical, seeing as the Melbourne Anglicans felt that a self professed terrorist needed support because he was held without charge: “Justice for Stern Hu.”

I’m not going to swing by the neck waiting.

Well I'm not going to state the obvious, which is that high church types seem to love supporting the pillars of state, and think the church should be one of those pillars, so that then the true believers can berate all the do gooders and lefty activists. Just like Gazard:

The point of this column is not to state the obvious. That the social justice wing of the traditional church is infected with Left-wing activists, many of whom would be agnostics at best or atheists at worst is well known and well documented.

And it’s not to have a crack at the social justice agenda or the people deeply committed to making their society or community a better place. And it’s not to make the argument that the church should never involve itself in politics. That would be ridiculous.

Yep, that's the christian church all right. Infested with agnostics or atheists. In fact atheists can't think of anything better to do with their time than go along on a Sunday and stand shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of Ned Flanders.

Which is terrible when you think about it. Because the church should of course support right wing politics, as natural and relevant today as part of Christ's message when he was way back riding donkeys and saying things about the ease with which rich people could get through eyes of needles straight into heaven (while the poor would be left waiting to collect two hundred dollars from go or Old Kent road).

After all, General Franco was a jolly good Catholic and he ran Spain in fine style. Back then the traditional church was really relevant. Right now?

... the traditional church is ushering itself to irrelevance.

I write this in the full knowledge that the church has made a big difference for the better on some big political issues, the abolition of slavery for one.

Not that in the old days the church had any understanding of the policy positions in relation to slavery, or the expertise to push any position at all when you remember that slavery successfully underpinned several economies.

And still does, and still can if we had only a modicum of policy sanity in the church. Unlike the festering lovey dovey position in relation to gays and women, two groups who seem to think that somehow they deserve equality in all things, when we know that doesn't serve the bible or the economy.

But on some issues, the church has no business pushing any position. It does not have policy expertise to do so. It’s trenchant opposition to the GST, for instance, proved that.

And there’s a big difference between slavery and garden variety political issues of the type that the church involves itself with more and more these days.

Yes, they should stick to tea and cheese and cucumber sandwiches.

Stop globalisation rally, the church will be there. Walk against the G8 Summit, the church will be represented—along with every other activist group and ratbag anarchist.

Leaked union documents before the last election showed the ACTU had a deliberate strategy to infiltrate churches in a bid to get them to push a pro-union message.

And, of course, the church did.

Pro unionist lick spittle lackeys. That's the christians. In fact it might not be so bad to have an honesty survey at the front door of the church, and if we find a unionist pretending to be a christian, he can be prevented from entering the service. Come unto me little children, but you have to draw the line somewhere and it may as well be big fat surly union thugs of the CFMEU kind.

Is the church the winner in any of this? Not if you count numbers, it isn’t.

While traditional church leaders might get a thrill out of seeing themselves in newspapers commenting on “cutting edge issues”, the sad reality is that people are staying away in droves.

Ah yes, cutting edge issues. Like those vexatious gay and noisy harridan women.

Not that this might have anything to do with people actually stopping believing in god or preferring material things or discovering different kinds of spirituality. No, it's because people would much prefer to join the Greens, with their weird religious faith and capable campaigning style:

This makes sense because other organizations are better equipped to run political campaigns.

If you want liberal policies and political campaigns, you go to the Greens website, not waste your Sunday morning on a Uniting Church pew listening to environmental policy.

The Greens don’t bother with rhetoric about saving souls on the way to figuring out how to save a tree.

And dammit christians shouldn't go on about saving a tree when they should be saving souls. After all, the tree can be chopped down and turned into something useful, like a crucifix.

So in persistent advocacy of secular issues, the church has willingly allowed itself to become no different to most of the other voices across the Left of the political spectrum.

And that means that, in the political cacophony, it carries a diminished voice, because it has no specific expertise, no particular skill set with which to argue its case.

Yes, and I've always found the word of god to be singularly useless in understanding the world or why we live in it, and isn't it particularly pleasing that Gazard notes that as policy advice the bible is hopeless, and that his church - even with the bible to hand - is absolutely lacking in specific expertise and skill sets. Christ is just another socialist dipstick, the Lenin to God's rampant Marxism.

And there you have it. What a great rant.

For a moment I almost felt sorry for the soft core christians being given a lashing by Gazard. After all, it takes a particularly peculiar kind of understanding of spirituality to think that somehow it's like the inside of a walnut, capable of being separate from the world, whether that be left of centre or right of centre, or outside or inside of politics, as if the word of god should have no impact on the ways and means of how you make your way through the world.

You know, like you loot and pillage the earth and humanity, and then you front up at the end, cheeky and bold as brass, and you get a cadillac class trip to heaven, with gold handles (no gilt please) running on good old fashioned 12 miles to the gallon leaded petrol. As if there's politics and religion and never the twain should meet, and never have done in the past and never will in the future, unless the politics are Gazard approved political stances. As individual as a cloning stamp.

After all, we all know that Christ said give to Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. But that was just a cunning answer to avoid being trapped by lawyers, priests and politicians. You will note he didn't say exactly what was Caesar's and what was God's. For that you have to look at his ambit claims and they were pretty wide. Like life and love and death and the whole damn thing.

For example, want Christ's views on the military and on theft and on being forced to go an extra mile?

If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. (Matthew 5:38-41)

Oh yes, it's a tough religion all right, and Gazard doesn't have a clue, so why am I unsurprised to discover he's worked for Peter Costello, who you will recall hung around with clap happy types until they decided the Victorian bushfires were due to abortion law reform.

And at that point I thought what the heck. Let Gazard tear the christians apart like a lion in the colosseum. Where's the harm in that? A few less christians, and more memberships for unions, socialist parties, lefty wanker go gooder revolutionary parties, greenies and Greenpeace.

Because if a high church is a place for high dudgeon, Gazard's welcome to dwell there with any like mind he can find ... while the rest of us can get on with the tricky business of living and not getting the neighbors too agitated ...

And now we turn to the text for the day:

Mrs. Big Nose: [trying to hear Jesus' sermon on the mount] Oh, it's blessed are the MEEK! Oh, I'm glad they're getting something, they have a hell of a time.
Reg: What Jesus fails to appreciate is that it's the meek who are the problem.

Brian: No, no. Please, please please listen. I've got one or two things to say.
The Crowd: Tell us! Tell us both of them!
Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong. You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...
Man in crowd: Shhh!
Brian: You've all got to work it out for yourselves.
The Crowd: Yes! We've got to work it out for ourselves!
Brian: Exactly!
The Crowd: Tell us more!
Brian: No! That's the point! Don't let anyone tell you what to do! Otherwise - Ow! Ow!

Mike Rann, twits twittering, and the joy of not having a filter

2009-07-20T09:31:00.005+10:00

You can always rely on a preening Mike Rann, premier of South Australia, for a bit of old fashioned hypocrisy.

This week the ostensible subject is Twitter, with the subtext how wired Rann is, along with the democratic joys that hot electrification brings. Get busy Tweeting or get busy dying, he triumphantly blogs, and perhaps best of all is the way politicians can avoid the filter of the mainstreeam media:

Twitter followers want straight talk, humour and occasionally a stoush.

They don’t want sanitised, bureaucratic blandishments.

Funnily enough, some reporters can’t deal with Twitter. It makes them defensive.

This puzzles me.

After all, Rupert Murdoch understands the new media. Some of his journalists don’t.

Is it because pollies are now able to communicate directly with the public, rather than through a filter?

That'd be the local media filter rather than Stephen Conroy's internet wide filter? Suddenly I prefer the local media filter.

You can hear the sneering resentment when we are quoted as “speaking on the social networking site, Twitter, …”

That’s like newspapers reporting quotes gleaned from a politician speaking “through the fax stream” or even “through the internet device known as email”.

Or perhaps like newspapers reporting quotes gleaned from a politician speaking from behind the Chinese bamboo internet curtain, or the theocratic Iranian intertubes censorship system, or Stephen Conroy's Steve Fielding approved network wide internet device known as network level filtering, as a bonus add on to the NBN.

I’ve also been attacked because a handful of my Twitter “followers” may be involved in “unsavoury activities”.

The Liberal’s raincoat brigade trawled through thousands of my followers and handed over the naughty tit-bits to a fellow traveller in the media.

It was the same team that brought down their own leader by peddling dodgy documents. Sleaze is their substitute for substance.

I’m sure the risqué also follow Malcolm Turnbull.

Well we won't have any sleazy stuff or the risqué to worry about when Stephen Conroy's grand plan kicks into gear, along with his three strikes and you're off the intertubes plan for dealing with pirates. Then the raincoat brigade will have to go back to trawling through garbage bins or their local purveyor of brown paper cover publications.

‘The Australian’, in particular, seems to have got its knickers in a knot.

It’s the newspaper that campaigns against censorship, and its sister publications carry advertisements for “escorts”.

Lordy, say it ain't so. Well Stephen Conroy will soon sort out that mob. Once the intertubes are banned from carrying anything hinting at escorts, maybe it'll be time to start on the filthy hard copy brethren.

I guess I could vet those who follow me on Twitter.

But that would be like employing a bouncer, or a censor, at my street corner meetings.

Yes, and why employ a bouncer or a censor when Stephen Conroy is to hand.

For me, Twitter represents a “virtual” town hall meeting.

It’s a talkback show involving thousands of people who are interested in policies, programs, and personalities.

After all, politics is a contest of ideas and personalities.

Soon, Twitter won’t seem so threatening to journalists, especially when they realise that their own jobs are likely to be on-line.

Or perhaps on the line, unless they adapt to new technologies.

Ultimately, it’s about giving people what they want, whether they are readers or voters.

I always thought that twitter was for twits, and know I know that giving voters what they want is giving them the tweets of Mike Rann, I'm sure of it.

Meantime, after all this talk of freedom from bouncers and censors - and presumably that includes right wing thuggess from the federal Labor party - I look forward to Mike Rann's active campaigning against Stephen Conroy and his desire to impose a network wide filter on the intertubes in Australia.

I'm dreaming?

When will we be rid of the prattling prats from the Labor party? Oh and here's a warning from Rann to Mark Day that newspapers are dead, along with a guide to what we can expect when twits are ascendant:

I started using Twitter earlier this year.

Why?

Essentially, because I rarely saw young people at my street corner and town hall meetings.

Newspapers are having to appeal to a new, younger, audience by going on-line.

People are no longer content to have their news thrown over the fence once a day.

So media is adapting to changing consumer demands. If they don’t, they’ll perish.

The same is true for politicians.

By Twittering, I am reaching a different audience.

But it’s not just a one-way street.

Through Twitter, people ask me questions. They argue. They disagree. Feedback is healthy in a democracy.

Twitter also takes up very little of my time.

Takes up very little of his time? Gee, I guess that means the healthy feedback is very short, the questions are simple minded, the arguments soon disposed of and the disagreements just a misunderstanding amongst chums. See it the Rann way, or see the highway.

Presumably that's because Rann can dispense with the twittering twits providing tweetish feedback.

You know: healthy feedback.

Oh Mr Rann, you're wonderful. Thnks u2.

And then even healthier feedback:

Oh Mr. Rann you do blather on. I b so 1337 Teh ful be pwned.

And then Conroy style feedback:

Oh Mr. Rann ain't freedom wonderful. Ful, pr0n b deadly, phreak off. Conry b teh d00d

Ah yes, the brand new state of the art uncensored world of high technology in the land of Labor twits twittering their tweets. And yes if you want to see Mike Rann in his full intertubes glory, so wired he's so over My Space, rush off to to see him in his old media My Space days here.

Props to Don Dunstan for this (no not the real Don you ghost whispering optimist), but one of Mike's loyal fans, and how long before this page goes down? Here's R. Diddy sending Mr Rann a greeting on 25 April 2008: happy birthyday motherfucker

Hey, that's short enough to go in a tweet.

Mark Day, Matthew Robson, troublesome teens and the way ahead for Murdoch rags

2009-07-20T07:46:00.004+10:00

(Above: the Daily Telegraph continuing its online campaign for adult content).

Poor Mark Day remains traumatized by the future of newspapers, when he really should just be facing the future with a 'meh', for what will be will be.

Casting through the runes, fossicking amongst the entrails, he gets agitated by the findings of Matthew Robson, intern at investment bank Morgan Stanley, aged 15 years and seventeen months when he wrote a report on teen media habits picked up by the London Financial Times.

(And if you're interested you can pick up a pdf here, a link Mr. Day should really have provided in this new media world, and if that link drops out, you know how to google).

In Teen as media news guru, Day recycles the alarming news that teens don't read newspapers.

Matthew is blunt when it comes to print.

“No teenager I know regularly reads a newspaper,” he says. “Most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text when they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV.”

Day recycles Robson's insights into other media - Twitter bad, Facebook good - and teen multi-tasking skills, and things that are hot - anything free, online game playing, free voice calls, phones with large memories and good battery life, and giant screens.

But it's the bit about newspapers that worries Day, and he finds ways to reassure his own fevered brow:

All this provides an interesting window into how a small section of society thinks.

But it is dangerous to assume too much from it—especially the assumption that because teenagers act this way now, they will continue to do so.

It is simply illogical to draw from the revelations of a teen mind anything masquerading as profound insights to future media. It would be wrong to assume that if it is nigh on impossible to reach such a fragmented, flipperty-gibbet teen audience today, it will be equally hard to reach them tomorrow.

Teenagers are going though a phase. We did it in our youth; our grandkids’ grandkids will do it too. Soon the grunts, grunge and spottiness will give way to confident young men and women in their 20s—Generation Z, or whatever name they adopt.

Phew. It's just a phase, like pimples and braces. Soon enough, when they get kids and a mortgage, they'll want to settle down and read a decent set of school league tables in a tabloid Murdoch rag:

And as they enter their 30s, they’ll come to embrace the same issues that consume most mature adults: how to buy a house, where to get the best mortgages, finding the best school for their kids’ education and getting the best advice on health and lifestyle matters. It has always been the way.

In my era, many people adopted the newspaper habit around the time they put their youthful years behind them and settled down to raise families.

But what about all these other digital distractions? What about the full to overflowing intertubes? Will dad want to settle in a comfy old lounge chair and get newsprint on his paws while missus whips up grub in kitchen and kids play cricket in back yard?

Newspapers may find it harder to develop this habit in a future dominated by digital dissemination of information, but people will still want to get their news from sources they can trust.

Like the Murdoch press? With due respect, the only news I'd trust from the Daily Terror is an update on Kyle's kinky sex kitten, knowing that anything said therein should be taken with a grain of salt.

And what happens if older folk confronted by the consistent dumbing down of the Murdoch press begin to take other paths? For example, we were astonished, while picking up tickets at the Sydney Opera House, to see the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald lying in racks - as they do at airports - waiting to be picked up for free by any passing punter, and no doubt counted in circulation figures.

Ostensibly it's a subscriber thing, but no one was guarding the gold and the rags were in essence being given away for free. The only thing going their way was that the punters tend to stay outside collecting another zillion images of the opera house to the quadzillions already available on the intertubes.

When we got the thing home, we were startled to have a paper in the house. We didn't quite know what to do with it. We poked and prodded it, and then my partner went online to get the news, and we both ended up reading The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, both of which have much better in depth articles (along with a smattering of fiction and cartoons).

In fact, we first began to drop off the newspaper habit when it became clear that most internationally orientated articles and columns were being picked up by Fairfax and Murdoch rags for their hard copy runs. But if Maureen Dowd is available online on The New York Times and the article from The New Yorker is a cut down version of the hard copy that now lands in my mailbox less than a week after publication, why should I pay double for this cheap assed double dipping? Or if I was less old school, I could find online with bonus footnotes?

Whatever you do, don't mention payment for content:

The teenage concept of knowing what’s going on by osmosis will morph into more regular and bankable media habits.

Bankable media habits? Well it's a nifty evasion for that deep question. How to make kids pay when they have more redbacks in their pockets than Uncle Scrooge. When even some older folk have broken through the pay fence and found the free grass greener on the other side?

If Matthew has a message for today’s editors and media managers it is that we should adopt a “horses for courses” approach to various products.

Today’s markets are broken into many sections and subsections, and the notion of one-size-fits-all is deader than the dodo.

Well I guess that means the odd page or two dedicated to comics will soon be lost to the world of tabloids, but the idea that you can save generalist publications by turning them into a one size fits one reader model is a radical, extreme kind of optimism.

For generations the mantra in publishing has been to “down age”: to adopt a youthful profile and attitude in order to attract young readers.

Today, in the face of evidence that young people are not reading, a compelling case can be made for newspapers—particularly our state-based dailies—to be edited to meet the demands and expectations of those that read them: adults.

But what if adults are jack of them as well? What if an adult reader thinks The Punch, allegedly the most intelligent conversation in the southern hemisphere is a bizarre mix of free kicks for passing politicians, airheads and eccentrics with bees in their bonnets.

You can sense each week in Day's writing an incipient nervousness that the old ways are dying or dead, and his beloved newspapers are going the way of dinosaurs and dodos.

I share his nostalgia - I can still remember my father turning up smelling of beer and newsprint, with the long gone Daily Mirror folded and tucked into his trousers' back pocket - but once a habit is lost, it's hard to get it back - unless of course it's something decently addictive, like cocaine.

Newspapers aren't cocaine, nor even a cup of tea. Once the issue of a universal reader is solved, the days of the old generalist rags will truly seem remote and astonishing, and the new forms might in fact find a kind of bankable alternative market. But they'll be so different it would be a stretch to call them newspapers in any meaningful sense of the word.

And there's another problem - while Day provides insights into the media habits of his grandson in Perth, he doesn't once mention piracy or other alternatives which happened to be 'free' in relation to other media.

For example, last year British teens averaged 842 illegal tracks per iPod, and while this year file sharing percentages have dropped, they're still the go, and where they aren't, they've been replaced by listening to streamed music, sharing burned CDs and bluetoothing tracks via mobile phones. And where once music trod alone, now movies and television tread with them.

Above all, anyone - no matter the age - familiar with technology has the capacity for flexibility and a diverse way of getting what they want for free.

In this new digital world - to which anyone with hardware has access to the golden key - to imagine that by targeting adults, and hoping that teens will grow up, settle down and start reading hard copy newspapers, is the way forward in saving hard copy newspapers is fanciful in the extreme.

If Day is right that the young are lost and that down aging isn't a viable strategy, then tabloids like The Daily Telegraph are dying, but just don't know it. But if what he's offering as adult content is The Australian, then it's time for that rag to take a look around at the competition offered by publications providing genuine adult content (and we're not just talking about thinking person's erotica).

Could it be that in fact relentless down marketing is the way forward, while toffy up market rags with 'adult' content get taken over by niche specialist suppliers who can do a better job than imagining Greg Sheridan, Glenn Milne and Janet Albrechtsen constitute a sufficient sampling of world views?

In the end I'm with Robson, and the ability to read or watch when and how you want, on portable devices or up on a big screen. And that's not just a phase. Reclaiming the right to watch a TV show without ads is to hand for anyone with a dvd player. And I like it free, unless the content is so irresistible (or the avi such a good small screen promotion) that I stump up the cash.

And hard copy newspapers bulging with a variety of sections and advertisements found for free in a rack in the city?

Meh.

(Below: the National Library of Australia's campaign to find lost newspapers. Look in the free racks at the Opera House mebbe?)

Hal G. P. Colebatch, G. K. Chesteron, the ballad of Alfred and eternal truths and verities

2009-07-19T10:46:00.007+10:00

Every so often, we love to drop in on favorite authors, and who could be more favorite on loon pond than Hal G. P. Colebatch.

It being a slow Sunday, what better way to fill in the empty hours by a visit to The American Spectator and his last column.

Sure you might be greeted by the unsettling visage of Ben Stein begging for money for the site - y'all will remember Ben Stein for his epic Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which managed to celebrate the science of intelligent design while conflating the theory of evolution with the rise of eugenics, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

But intrepid explorers of ideas are made of stern stuff, and so on we go to Epic Chesterton.

For those who've come in late Chesterton was a twentieth century writer who has largely disappeared from the popular imagination he once occupied centre stage, though there are still some who see him as part of a trinity of Christian writers, the others being C. S. Lewis and Evelyn Waugh (though truth to tell Waugh creams the other two in the art of writing). (As usual Wikipedia has an extensive entry, here).

Chesterton turned Catholic in later life, and there's no doubt that Hal G. P. Colebatch regards him as close to sainthood:

While some scholars have begun meeting at Oxford to discuss the cause of his eventual sainthood, G. K. Chesterton is remembered largely today by the reading public as the creator of the Father Brown detective stories, in which a humble Catholic priest solves crimes largely because his experiences in the confessional makes him exceptionally informed about the real nature of good and evil.

But Colebatch has other fish to fry than Father Brown, and for that he turns to Chesterton's epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse:

In its style, though not in its ultimate concerns, The Ballad of the White Horse is a rather different work from the adventures of Father Brown. It is not perfect as poetry but it is one of those works -- there are not very many -- that can actually change the reader's life and is a perennial source of inspiration and hope.

Now let's not linger too long on the poem itself, life changing and perennially inspiring as it is. Colebatch quotes from it extensively, and presumably he's paid for his important work, so it's important you click on his column to boost the American Spectator's numbers, but if you have a hankering for the whole event in free form, you might like to avail yourself of a free copy from Project Gutenberg here.

It might take you a time to wade through the whole thing - it's in eight books and runs to a flatulent length - but it's about the legend of Alfred, the sort of visionary stuff which chills an English spine as they smack and smote the colonials all over the field in the way they once taught the Vikings a lesson. It even has its own Wikipedia entry here so you know it's pretty significant, and might even have been ripped by Tolkien!

Colebatch's first quote gives you flavor enough, with things looking grim for the Christianized kingdom of Wessex and its symbol, the golden dragon:

There was not English armour left
Nor any English thing
When Alfred came to Athelney
To be an English king …

And the God of the Golden Dragon
Was dumb upon his throne,
And the lord of the golden Dragon
Ran in the woods alone …

Now some of the wretched Saxons just want to give the game away, but Alfred is made of sterner stuff, and is intent on setting the course of England to its ultimate situation, with conservationist Bonnie Prince Charlie ready to inherit the throne and save the world, with or without Al Gore.

Well things in the poem go on apace for many pages and then - spoiler alert - it looks like Alfred and his arm are hopelessly beaten. Luckily Alfred gets his act together and smotes the Vikings with his axe and Odin falls. Take that you filthy Scandinavians with your Ikea and your Nokia and your Volvo.

But there's a bit of a downside. You've always got to watch out for the heathens threatening to topple civilization. As Colebatch notes:

In the final part, describing the years of peace that follow, the king warns the fight will go on: barbarians will come in the future armed not only with warships and burning torches but also with books, with "the sign of the dying fire," and: "By this sign shall you know them: that they ruin and make dark."

Let's consult the holy text in detail so we can be forewarned and forearmed:

By this sign you shall know them,
The breaking of the sword,
And man no more a free knight,
That loves or hates his lord.

Yea, this shall be the sign of them,
The sign of the dying fire;
And Man made like a half-wit,
That knows not of his sire.

What though they come with scroll and pen,
And grave as a shaven clerk,
By this sign you shall know them,
That they ruin and make dark;

By all men bond to Nothing,
Being slaves without a lord,
By one blind idiot world obeyed,
Too blind to be abhorred;

By terror and the cruel tales
Of curse in bone and kin,
By weird and weakness winning,
Accursed from the beginning,
By detail of the sinning,
And denial of the sin;

By thought a crawling ruin,
By life a leaping mire,
By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
And the end of the world's desire;

By God and man dishonoured,
By death and life made vain,
Know ye the old barbarian,
The barbarian come again--

When is great talk of trend and tide,
And wisdom and destiny,
Hail that undying heathen
That is sadder than the sea.

Yep, the anti-sword pacifists are at it again, along with the greenies and their like, not to mention clever post modernists and post structuralists and post semioticians, with the leather patches on the elbows and clever dick words, doing old England down, bringing on the ruin and the dark. Is it a sign, a portent, that bonnie Prince Charlie is a charlie? Must noble warriors take to the streets yet again?

C. S. Lewis has said that The Ballad of the White Horse is "permanent and dateless…does not the central theme of the ballad…embody the feeling, and the only possible feeling, with which in any age almost defeated men take up such arms as are left them and win?"

Feel ye not the stirring within your loins proud Englanders? Thrash the Australian cricketers, throw away the color television sets, abandon your love of the Beatles and take up the bowler hat yet again. One day perhaps India and Pakistan and the middle East will recognize what they lost and welcome you back as conquerors, as opposed to weekend travellers blitzing Spain, Amsterdam and any European soccer match in which English footballers might be participants.

Join with Colebatch :

It is good to read The Ballad of the White Horse, and also to reflect that it is basically true. There really was a climatic battle at Ethandune (possibly modern Edington, where a white horse is carved on the chalk hillside, possibly originally in memory of the battle), and where, against all odds, the nascent Anglic civilization and its noble and undaunted king, after years of defeats and betrayals, really won the day, and where the barbarians really were not only defeated but Christianized: Guthrum, with Alfred as his Godfather, took the Baptismal name Athelstan and kept the peace for the rest of his life. In England learning, culture, and civilization were revived under Alfred's rule, and we really were saved from being savages forever. Thank you, G. K. Chesterton.

Onward Christian Anglic soldiers, saved from savagery and marching off to war. Better a heathen in hell than happy in this world ...

Thank you Hal G. P. Colebatch for reminding us of eternal verities and truths. Let's keep yearning for a past that never was and a future that will always be dark with fear and uncertainties, knowing that a good man with a rifle can sort out the heathens ... (or a cricket bat, unless a good nuking is required, and that too can be delivered, for along with the thwack of willow on leather there's nothing like the cleansing of split atoms on philistine skin) ...

And now as republicans threaten Australia and we suffer under the yoke of the evil tyrant Chairman Rudd, we turn to the north and mutter a silent prayer ... save us oh bonnie Prince Charlie ...

Piers Akerman, Chairman Rudd, and counting the many ways he's ruined everything this week

2009-07-19T09:35:00.003+10:00

In psychiatry, monomania (from Greek monos, one, and mania, mania) is a type of paranoia in which the patient has only one idea or type of ideas. Emotional monomania is that in which the patient is obsessed with only one emotion or several related to it; intellectual monomania is that which is related to only one kind of delirious idea or ideas.

You can read more about monomania here.

Or alternatively you can just go read Piers Akerman. He has a serious case of monomania, limited to the case of Chairman Rudd. The latest bout is to hand in Rudd is a bit player on the world stage.

It amazes me that the Daily and Sunday Terror continue to publish what might make for an interesting case study for a psychiatric journal, as yet again Akerman publishes a litany of charges against the Ruddster worthy of a Greek tragedy. If a man were so profoundly inhuman and incompetent, surely he'd already have been thrown into the flames of hell.

Here's Akker's opener:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had a short-lived and undistinguished career in the Australian diplomatic service and now we know why. He wasn’t very good at diplomacy and the prospect of working for a Queensland Labor premier, Wayne Goss, obviously seemed vastly more attractive.

A nice bouncer to the head. Then there's the now obligatory countdown of Chairman Rudd's many current failures, failings and delusions of grandeur:

1. In all the talk of climate change, everybody seems not to have noticed that the G8 isn't the G14 which isn't the G5 which taken together doesn't amount to the G20, but the G20 which includes Australia isn't the same as the G14 which includes the G5 and the G8 which might make you think it's the G13 but you forgot about Egypt.

2. In all the talk of China, everybody seems not to have noticed that the Mandarin speaking PM's glib tongue falls on deaf ears in Beijing as they told him to get lost in special language that required no special translation, as the case of Hu represents a gross breach of convention which has never occurred before except in the case of Australan Chinese businessman James Peng during the time of the Howard Government, with Peng spending six years in the slammer.

3. In all the talk of businessman Hu, some lefties have laughably claimed that this behavior in relation to Hu is somehow related to David Hicks, when in fact the only good thing about habeas corpus is that it produces corpses interred in jails as all jihadists should be.

4. In all the talk of the recent bombing in Jakarta, the media forgot to notice that the rise of Islamic fundamentalists might well be attributed to the poor relationship between Chairman Rudd and our northern neighbour. Unlike that Islamic president Obama, who has special ties with the country, while Chairman Rudd is really only a Mandarin speaking lackey for the dragon from the north.

Now it's time to quote a long time member of the Australian diplomatic corps, who for all we might know could well be a sinister anonymous blogger with no respect for actually standing up for what they believe in:

"Ever since Rudd personally blocked [Australian diplomat] Hugh Borrowman’s appointment to Berlin after he had been nominated by the Foreign Minister, no onewants to make a decision which the PM might overturn,’’ he said.
Rudd blocked Borrowman’s appointment on the basis of his `"language skills’’, even though the experienced diplomat had "qualifications’’ in German.

This is all apparently the result of Borrowman and Rudd knowing each other during their ANU days, which reminds me yet again how John Howard never carried a grudge and was always personally charming and charismatic and never did anything to repress the careers of anyone as they strove to serve Australia.

Former prime minister John Howard, who praised Borrowman, said the diplomat had been "very intelligent and highly professional. He had an excellent grasp of all foreign affairs issues’’.

Well yes, and let it not be said that in any sense Akerman is motivated by a personal and petty hostility to Chairman Rudd.

In the Borrowman case, as with the G8 grandstanding, Rudd appeared to be acting in a petty and personal manner, not as the professional he likes to portray himself as.

Whereas under the previous government, Australia let its actions speak for themselves when it successfully took decisive global initiatives, under the Rudd government it’s all talk and irresponsible and damaging action.

That's right, as case file number one thousand and forty two draws to a close, it becomes clear that Australia is just one step short of being a bum in the gutter with an empty sherry flagon on the international stage, while domestically it is already in the casket and awaiting cremation and a pauper's funeral.

As for monomania? Well let's leave that to the likes of Hal G. P. Colebatch of Nedlands WA, who sees the decline and fall of the English Empire in the Beatles and color television.

Our Piers is made of sterner stuff than that. He sees the decline and fall of Australia at the hands of a Mandarin speaking doofus, and he sees it over and over again, column after column, week after week.

It almost makes you wish that the basket case known as Australia would in fact disappear, that the failed Mandarin speaking Rudd was sent to Xi'an province as penance, and that John Howard could be brought back from the political grave, a Lazarus risen yet again, with mothballs applied to ease the smell, if that's the only way Akerman's monomania might be cured ...

Now check your own mental health against Wikipedia's handy list of monomaniac ailments. If you answer Chairman Rudd to any of these questions, consult your Doctor.

Capgras's Syndrome: Delusion that an impostor has been substituted for a significant person in the patient's life.

Easy. Chairman Rudd is an impostor.

de Clerambault's syndrome (erotomania): Delusion that a man or woman is in love with the patient. This can occur without reinforcement or even acquaintanceship with the love object.

Easy. Chairman Rudd is in love with my vote, but I spurn him.

Fregoli's illusion: Delusion that a tormenting individual is changing his appearance to resemble different persons in the patient's life.

Why yes, I've noticed that Chairman Rudd changes his body shape at will in order to persecute me in many different ways.

Genital retraction syndrome: Delusion that the penis is being retracted into the body.

Tricky for me, but I can see how it might work. Can women worry about how Chairman Rudd causes small breasts? Or breasts that are too big?

Wendigo (Wihtigo): Fear that one is being tormented by a demon who devours people. Alternatively the patient can take on the characteristics of the windigo. (Seen only in isolated members of the Algonquin Indian nations of Canada and the USA.)

Well that's a lay down misere. The demon Rudd doesn't just devour people, he devours Australia and shortly will devour the world.

Demonomania Delusion that one is possessed by demons.

Yes, I lie awake at night dreaming of being possessed by Chairman Rudd, knowing he only sleeps three hours and is always on the prowl. Not even Darren McGavin in Nightstalker can save me. I feel a 360 degree neck turn Linda Blair style coming on right now.

Eek, it's clear. Kevin Rudd truly is a demon, and we all suffer under him. We need a ghost whisperer or a medium, a Patricia Arquette or a Jennifer Love Hewitt to guide the demon into the next world, and we need them right now ...

Peter Garrett, Annabel Crabb, Shaun Carney, and a break from loon pond except for a passing reference to Tim Blair

2009-07-18T09:29:00.010+10:00

Way back in 1940 Howard Spring wrote a bestselling novel about the rise to power of a Labor politician. The title Fame is the Spur took its name from a poem by Milton, Lycidas:

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days.

In the way of things, it was then made into a film by the socialist inclined Boulting Brothers, with Michael Redgrave in the lead role.

The key visual metaphor in the film is the way a sword retrieved from the Peterloo massacre rusts into its scabbard, and when an aged Redgrave tries to get it down and pull it out, the effort is too much for him. He huffs and he puffs and he totters, but the sword of youthful ideals and hope stays stuck, betrayed by old age, compromise and the lust for power and fame.

Inevitably - it being an English saga - Redgrave moves from being an illegitimate child from the Manchester slum of Ancoats to Lord Radsahw, a bumbling old fool in the House of Lords dedicated to preserving what's left of his image.

The metaphor of the sword was so strong that it's stuck in my mind ever since the day I saw it long ago in a now demolished flea pit. It seemed to evoke the image of every failed politician who in the end looks out for themselves rather than their customers - and whenever Peter Garrett's name is mentioned, it sears back into the mind.

Peter Garrett is much in mind these days because of his licensing of a fourth uranium mine. Annabel Crabb does a very nice ambivalent piece which cleverly manages to have it both ways on Garrett.

The brutal, thriving industry that is the modern Garrett hunt manages to skewer Garrett, his hunters, and then find a kind of redemption for the beast in his Labor days, before going on to skewer him and Labor over their current policies in relation to nuclear energy. A couple of sentences reminded me yet again of Milton's insight:

How many of us would trade that for the grub and muck of actual change, the hard and often dispiriting slog of working within the system?

Politics is awful, a lot of the time.

It's full of debilitating compromise and settlements that are a pale shadow of what you'd really like to do.

Oh those laborious days.

And Crabb reminds Garrett and Chairman Rudd that they now have to thread their way through an issue still trembling in the background:

If climate change is indeed the greatest challenge of our time, is it really appropriate to be ignoring one feasible and low-carbon - albeit contentious - solution? Is the Government serious enough about all of this to risk its own political hide?

Not at the moment, it seems, although there are ministers who will readily concede in private that nuclear should be part of the debate.

Yet over in the corner there are old nuclear warriors like Helen Caldicott proposing that Uranium export is the first step to war, as if the days of Dr. Strangelove had never left her (while she also confesses bizarrely to forming a working relationship with that deviant dinosaur Robert McNamara):

Export of uranium ore is therefore the epitome of immorality both from a public health perspective and because it could be responsible down the line for triggering a nuclear holocaust.

Once Garrett would have been on the barricades, shouting or singing into a microphone, and now he's in a daily pickle.

Crabb captures the flavor of the pickle in an evocative way - she's way out in front as a political writer these days, and it's a relief to turn to her after wading through the tripe that constitutes The Punch and if you want to learn a little more about her - why am I unsurprised that she grew up in South Australia? - she was recently interviewed on ABC FM about her musical tastes (here, but be warned this link will expire fairly quickly).

Crabb summarises the situation of Garrett neatly:

On one construction, it's a personal hypocrisy.

On another, it's the most earnest surrender of ego to the democratic process that this Government has seen.

Has it been worth it?

Only Garrett can know the answer to that question.

Garrett's predicament also provokes a sympathetic analysis from Shaun Carney in his column On the borderline, with his conclusion being that Rudd should shift Garrett from the environment ministry to another portfolio:

The public and media reaction this week should provide food for thought for Kevin Rudd. Garrett's responsibility was to act on advice about the environmental impact of the Four Mile mine, not to make a decision on the merits of uranium mining. That had already been taken by the Rann Government, which wants more mines.

And yet, if you cared to ask just about anybody, they'd tell you that Garrett was singularly responsible for a new uranium mine and that he's now pro-uranium. That's the quick, if inaccurate, take on the Four Mile decision.

Crabb and Carney remind me that it's sometimes worth taking a break from loon pond, and especially from the ranting to be found in the Murdoch press.

But the heat isn't going to leave Garrett. It's not just the impending debate with nuclear warriors like Caldicott, up against the Ziggy Switkowskis of the world, and his report suggesting that 25 nuclear power stations could take care of one third of Australia's energy needs by 2050, provoking a howl of NIMBYism Labor was quick to exploit.

Next up for Garrett is the decision regarding the implementation of the Productivity Commission's recommendation to allow parallel imports of books. Will he reject the advice and help out local writers in maintaining a cozy price fixing arrangement (not so bad as adding a cent or two to each cardboard box in the land but in the same spirit) or will he jump into the realm of the free traders?

A realm in which incidentally I discover I live with the likes of Tim Blair, as he shows with Turn page on archaic book laws:

That's another curious thing about these writerly types. If you have a postcode tattoo and chant "we grew here, you flew here", you're an ignorant redneck. If you demand the protection of Australian publishers and seek to keep foreign books off Australian bookshelves, you're some kind of gifted intellectual.

Beats me. Meanwhile, here's my plan on how Australian writers can remain viable: Write something interesting that people will actually want to read.

Phew. At least I can distance myself from his rampaging bother boy book hating rednecked steel toe capped style - I guess that's what happens to a petrol head who resents writers who can write better than him, complete with cheap jokes about wearing novels as socks or using them as toasters. Why next he'll be joking about using newspapers in outhouses the way we used to in the old days.

But it does show the permanent dilemma that Garrett faces, and I wonder each day why he does it. He doesn't need the money, and while he might think he's making a difference, few of his old comrades think the difference is worth a pinch of anything.

What makes Peter Garrett run? Well who knows, even if it's a matter of intense personal curiosity on my part, but in his retirement, I'd hate to sit down and watch Fame is the Spur with him.

Like reading Annabel Crabb's sympathetic but incisive piece, it might be just too close to the bone to be a comfortable experience ...

(Below: Peter Garrett in his youth. Are we all doomed to become de facto Michael Redgraves in a sic transit gloria kind of way? Short memories and every show a sell out? Better to have ideals and lost them than never to have had any ideals at all. If you're not a liberal when you're 25 you have no heart. If you're not a liberal by the time you're 35 you're a fucked in the head Christian fundamentalist? (Sorry Winston think I got that one wrong).

Lenore Taylor, old media, politicians and twits atwittering

2009-07-18T07:32:00.005+10:00

Voters need something more than newspapers.

Why do I think this? Well I've just read Lenore Taylor's penetrating and insightful column Voters need something more than blogs.

Which on reading turns out not to be about blogs but all about Twitter, with a couple of totally minor references to blogging.

And if a header can't tell you the contents of a column, there's a pretty big roadblock to understanding anything.

Then there's the admission by Taylor that she's a nube twit:

Twitter is clearly a medium with a potential still being fully explored.

I am, I must confess, a notorious late adopter of new technology. Not in a closed-minded "I want nothing to do with that new-fangled stuff" kind of way. It's just that I'm busy and have precious little time to check out new things unless there's a need.

As with all late breaking novitiates, there follows an explanation of twittering, and a prompt recoil at the new form of communication. As if reading the Daily Terror was somehow a virtuous exercise in philosophy by comparison:

At first blush a micro-blogging site that asks you to report what you are doing in 140 characters or less, 24 hours a day, seems a perfect forum for narcissists with attention deficit disorder. Why would I be interested in reading about what someone is doing every moment of every day when I'm not even always all that interested in the edited highlights they offer once a month over a cup of coffee?

And the popularity of some twitts is truly beyond my capacity to explain. For example, Ashton Kutcher, a photogenic young American actor married to actress Demi Moore, appears to have more than 2.5 million followers for tweets about what party he is about to go to and pictures of his latest pair of "favourite shoes" (an ostentatious pair of black, brown and white brogues).

Which suggests to me that Taylor needs to get out more - if she wants arcane trivia beyond the capacity of any human to explain, I suggest a course in reading Sydney Confidential in the Daily Terror for a week. Then she'll understand twits twittering so much better. Especially the stuff about favorite shoes and party going. (Or she could be trapped in a train with Mx - the first form of newsprint to aggregate twits into hard copy form, guaranteed to reduce commuters to brain dead zombies within five minutes).

But as has become a recent theme in the Murdoch press lately, the real concern is that devious politicians might now be able to bypass newspapers and their filtering and communicate directly with their customers. Twits twittering to twits without any filtering from twits. Now this might sound alarmingly like democracy - after all 140 characters is more than enough to sum up the Australian psyche on any issue (the Murdoch press usually reduce their polls to yes no and maybe) - but to Taylor it feels like a fiendish exercise in avoiding tricky media gotcha questioning:

But the appeal of the site to politicians is obvious. John Howard was quite open about his strategy to go over the heads of the press gallery -- whose members ask altogether too many questions -- to communicate directly with voters via talkback radio and soft television shows.

Rudd has enthusiastically followed suit, taking the strategy even further with appearances on even softer TV shows such as Rove.

Um, old media talking about old media and ways to avoid hard questions, but how do we get rid of a twit like Rove? Thank the lord, new media:

But new media, such as Twitter and blogging, renders that strategy, like, so last decade. Twitter removes all the middle men and women. It offers the possibility of direct communication with potentially millions of voters. That communication can be key political messages -- in just 140 characters there's no need for any inconvenient background information or evidence -- or personal, humanising titbits of daily life information.

Twitter also potentially opens doors to younger voters who don't listen the radio or read newspapers.

Ah yes, the tricky younger votes who don't read newspapers. Or care about middle persons. Curse the twits.

Time then for Taylor to dissect tweets by Chairman Rudd and Malcolm in the middle, and find them lacking in insight. One was about the football, another about the cricket, the cat and the dog, while Turnbull also delivered dog advice and a note about an upcoming forum. Fair average twittering from whoever handles their tweets.

"Have yet to master koan form for profound insight into meaning of life" seems to be Taylor's conclusion, but by this time I'm thinking Taylor would have benefited from the brevity of tweeting in her own column. New form of hamstrung dumb communication, don't know what to say, young people, help.

So all poor bypassed Taylor can do is poke and prod at the twits twittering, like she's inspecting a furball that's suddenly turned up in the middle of old media to rain on its parade (gee, what a twit, with a mixed metaphor like that):

Twitter is clearly a medium with a potential still being fully explored, even by those who have been using it for years. And it is of course not without its dangers. Information sent has not been verified, and in fact much of the information sent from Iran turned out to be wrong. And it can be easily manipulated.

But from my admittedly inexpert standpoint, the biggest danger for politicians is likely to be that their followers will get bored by the barrage of inanities contained in their tweets. Surely after a while people will want a bit more than the blog of their dog or the mood of their cat?

Well from my admittedly inexpert standpoint, I'm wondering whether the biggest danger for newspapers is that it's a medium that has been fully explored and found wanting, even by those who've been using them for years. Information often turns out to be wrong, and is easily manipulated, and it's likely readers of The Punch or any Murdoch blog will get bored by the barrage of inaccurate inanities contained therein. Surely after awhile people will want more than another dose of David Penberthy? Who after all makes the mood of a dog or a cat somehow strangely compelling.

I also doubt if the new Murdochian desire to engage with the intertubes will actually reach the young.

... a recent report commissioned by Morgan Stanley from a 15-year-old work experience student also raised questions about Twitter's usefulness in connecting with youth.

"Teenagers do not use Twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it ... In addition, they realise no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless," he wrote.

Wow, old media right on target as usual. Why it was only a year ago in Time magazine that Bill Tancer from Hitwise was telling us that the key demographic was 18 to 24 year olds, and now it has skewed to males in the 35 to 44 year old age group (you can find data on a PEW study here and link to other data here).

But wait, it's not enough that mature age men are now twittering like twits, instead of displaying a steely laconic quality we expect of men while the women tweet like twitterers, but there are other enemies facing old media.

It seems young people prefer Facebook, but Taylor notes this won't faze politicians, as most of them have been amassing Facebook friends for ages. Taylor doesn't go on to tell us whether she too has been amassing Facebook friends for yonks - the experience of encountering the twits in twitterdom seems to have exhausted her - but by providing her own admittedly inexpert point of view, I've formed the alarming view that old media is now flailing around, desperate to find a new and coherent role and sense of self in the age of twits.

If only Taylor had bothered to seek out some of the data, she might have been reassured. There's nothing like old news to produce a reliable sense of tradition and inertia, and nothing like reading about a nube grappling with the fiendish new world of the technologically astute to produce a realization that even if I'm a twit, there are plenty of other twits out there too. Even if they turn out to be men heading towards middle age.

And the data might also have saved her sudden panic about journalism and the need to write a column bemoaning new mediums that demand some kind of understanding in this crazy mixed up world.

Because Pew data suggests that twits love reading newspapers ...

(Below: Pew data on news consumption, and Quantcast data on the American demographic breakdown of twits six months ago).

Leo Shanahan and celebrating a moon landing that never happened

2009-07-17T16:33:00.004+10:00

(Above: Capricorn One).

No neo Michael neo Costa today in The Australian, and so loon pond feels peculiarly empty and forlorn. Can't understand how I made it through the day without some ritual bashing of unions and the federal Labor party and Chairman Rudd.

What to do? Well there's always The Punch, which lately seems to have taken to afternoon updates. Reading it is somehow like watching a slow motion crashing and clashing of loons, worthy of the absent Costa.

Take Leo Shanahan's unexceptional Did you need that moment in history? I taped the cricket.

Springboarding off the NASA release of newly compiled footage of the Apollo 11 Mission - complete with YouTube video and links to NASA - he asks whether his dear readers had ever, in NASA fashion, taped over videos or otherwise erased precious things.

At the time of writing, he'd copped five comments, including these handsome offerings:

DJG says:

The most uncelebrated event in American history. Why? It never happened, thats why.
TimsonM says:
They haven’t been there, that is why they “lost” the originals.
Winsor Dobbin says:
The whole moon landing thing is a charade that simply became too big a lie for the Americans to turn back on their invention. Remember this was the time of the Cold War when the Americans would do anything to get one over on the Russians, If it was really that easy to have man walk on the moon 40 years ago, wouldn’t there have been thousands of subsequent expeditions, landings, even attempts to stay up there?

Now by my feeble maths that makes sixty per cent of his commenting readership barking mad loons. Count me in, and he's up to sixty six per cent.

But it did remind me of Capricorn One, an old Sir Lew Grade romp which thanks to the vicissitudes of his company seems to have fallen into the public domain and anyhow for this moment is available on Google video in its full bloatware two hour plus version (you can see it here).

Directed by Peter Hyams, the thinking person's Michael Bay, it features a classy cast, including Elliott Gould, that successful bed post impersonator James Brolin, hoarse voiced Brenda Vaccaro, Sam Waterston before he settled into a career doing vacuous noddies on television, O. J. Simpson before he got away with it, and Hal Halbrook doing yet another sinister turn as the ever so smooth baddie.

It even features special appearances by wild eyed Karen Black and the bald headed lolly pop sucking Telly Savalas long before neo con Michael Costa stole his thunder by doing imitations. Jerry Goldsmith contributes a thumping score, and it's a high concept version of a really dumb conspiracy theory before you could find a decepticon in the house.

It's all about how the Americans never made it to Mars, but instead faked it by building a set in the studio and beaming the signals out to an unsuspecting, duped world. It's only an anomaly - much like those anomalies in the moon TV footage - that gets the conspiracy theorists going and solves the fake landing, to the peril of the astronauts involved.

I guess it says something about the show that you can see it free on the intertubes - it's correct format but not up to an dvd rip avi - but equally what does it say about The Punch's readership?

I guess when you pitch your readership expectations at the lower end of the market, the mugwumps will come out of the swamp.

Which is why Tory Maguire, competitor for the title of bubble headed booby on the site, is distinctly unreadable, when she starts meandering on about how journalists and major media outlets are wonderful because they filter information and images (Citizen journalism: you might not like what you see).

Actually Tory, I'm still shocked at The Punch, or at least its readership, revealing to me that the moon landing was a hoax. Next your unfiltered site will be shocking me about the tooth fairy and Santa Claus.

But it takes a particular kind of gall in classic Murdoch style to deliver this kind of homily when talking about a distressing image currently doing the rounds in relation to the Jakarta bombing:

It’s the kind of thing picture editors in newsrooms see all day every day. They look carefully at these images, analysing the amount of blood and body parts visible. They use their own personal judgment about their news value compared to the level of distress they will cause readers.

They go home at night with them running on high rotation in their minds, and they do it so you won’t have too much trouble getting to sleep.

But now that filter has been effectively removed.

I guess Tory's too young to have seen footage of the holocaust and its victims. Or the unvarnished footage of people caught up in war. It's been available a long time. So when she writes this kind of nonsense I wonder whether it was the moon or Mars conspiracy she's trying to hide. But back to the Jakarta snap she righteously won't show but will blather about:

The person who took the photo doing the rounds on Twitter had gained nothing from the picture - other than perhaps the intangible feeling every human being gets when they know something someone else doesn’t, or have something no-one else has.

It’s that feeling that is driving the relatively new phenomenon known as citizen journalism. Unfiltered by newsrooms full of trained journalists, we’re getting coverage of big events that is more timely than ever, more diverse than ever, and evidently, more raw than anything we’ve ever seen before.

The day I need Tory Maguire's trained filtering expertise is the day I'll roll over and die.

And the sanctimonious notion that the intertubes is a festering mess only trained journalists should be able to handle? Come on down Iran, China, Stephen Conroy and Uncle Rupert. Especially by hinting that they're in the know about things which should be banned and which they won't show but which you can find easily enough if you look hard enough?

The relatively new phenomenon known as citizen journalism? Citizens and amateurs have been doing it since they invented the printing press. The medium might have changed, but the impulse has a long history.

More raw than anything we've ever seen before? Let's not get into a debate about what's rawest of the raw, but maybe Tory should get out and about a bit more. I'd expect a professional filter to understand a little more about the history things before she gets into the business of filtering ...

And I'd expect a bit more class than using the dire after effects of a terrorist attack to slag off social media while promoting a Punch special on social media this coming Monday. Suddenly I do believe in filtering ...

Luck McIlveen, Patrck Smith, and sporting loons at ten paces

2009-07-17T14:41:00.004+10:00

(Above: gladiators going at it with monster sheep).

We rarely do sport on this site. The turkeys take up way too much space already. But the chance to demand a smack down between two Murdoch hacks is irresistible.

Righteous smug up himself Patrick Smith in The Australian on the punch up at the end of the rugby league state of origin and how Origin biff leaves rest of us cold:

No action will be taken against White, no matter that his blow forced Price to be driven off the ground, senseless, with his neck in a brace. As Ray Warren explained to Melbourne radio audiences yesterday, that's quite the done thing in rugby league.

That may well be the case, too, because talkback callers with a rugby league background thought the description of the incident by Queensland coach Mal Meninga was insightful.

That Origin was a confrontation driven by fierce hate and one-on-one punch-ups were well and truly within the code of conduct as understood and adhered to by the players. And officials.

But to the rest of Australia this was more than a bit of Origin biffo. It was an act that spoke with great clarity about the future of rugby league outside Queensland, the ACT and NSW. It ain't happening.

Blood crazed gladiator loving Luke McIlveen - the man who loves to run bicyclists off the road -in The Punch, home to Australia's thickest conversations, on Savage dead rubber that breathed life back into league.

There are certain things you’re supposed to say when people ask what makes you proud of your home state. Nice things like the shimmering Harbour, the Opera House, the SCG or the Olympics.

I would trade them all for the bloodied grin that Brett White gave Justin Hodges in the moments after knocking out Steve Price on Wednesday night. As the flashy Hodges ranted about payback, positioning himself behind bigger teammates, White simply poked out his bloodied tongue and smiled, mocking Hodges for the pea-hearted, adolescent sook that he is.

At that moment, NSW hearts swelled with pride. Until then, we had almost forgotten the things that make the Premier state better than Queensland. Like having a first-world economy and houses made from bricks.

When Brett White landed that magnificent right cross, he struck a blow for every NSW fan who’s been bailed up in a pub by a pissed, red-headed Queenslander dribbling on about their superior passion and commitment to Origin.

Conclusion:

Smith and the deluded AFL are so far up themselves that they can even manage to get righteous about letting Barry Hall run around for years in best thuggee style, and then finally get even more righteous by saying that enough was enough. Not to mention that their particular brand of footy show features "Sam" Newman, possibly the most offensive turkey on television. This at the same time as Smith babbles on about the beating of a man in a fast food outlet in Melbourne? Which has what to do with anything, except the danger of ordering fast food n a state dedicated to AFL? Never mind, for Smith the match was "just another slash of the knife in what has become rugby league's year of unprecedented self-harm".

While McIlveen displays a taste for blood that is faintly disturbing even in a journalist who might want to worship the Emperor Caligula as a sports lover. "His work was done the moment the Medicab carrying his opposition front rower left the field." Wow, and a glassing means I trooly rooly loves ya.

Okay, here's the deal. Into the new super boxing HD program on One with the pair of them, with chairs and tables allowed as props, as you'd expect in a smack down, with the last still standing to be hailed as being in the right.

Result? At least one less crazed Murdoch sports journalist chewing up precious space on the already full to overflowing intertubes. And if it's Luke McIlveen, cyclists can feel safe that this road vermin hating journalist has been taken out by a good Barry Hall type thump to the jaw.

I won't be watching of course - I've taken to watching pimply kids with braces win five hundred thousand euros in poker games - but the thought that footballers might destroy themselves can only be enhanced by the notion that football journalists can follow in their footsteps.

And that's the last we'll mention of football, at least until the next glassing or motel incident precipitates some community concern about the blockheaded nature of footballers and brings out the feminist in me.

And why is football so problematic? Just read the sporting journalists and all will be clear ...

Sigh, now we have to renovate and extend loon pond once again. But if we allow sports writers in, we might actually have to designate the entire Pacific Ocean as a haven for loons ...

(Below: meantime, something for the more genteel gentleman who might consider taking his fair companion out on to the road this weekend on their vélocipède knowing that the roads are safe as Luke "Road Vermin" McIlveen prepares for his big bout with Patrick "the Saint" Smith).

Daniela Elser, hairdressers, and the Punch still striving to be the dumbest conversation in Australia

2009-07-17T10:03:00.006+10:00

(Above: Delacroix doing Hamlet, ah fuck it, this culture stuff is thirsty work, feel like a beer?)

It used to be that Tory Maguire was the aspirational bubble headed bimbo at The Punch, Australia's dumbest conversation, but recently a new contender has risen in the ranks.

Following her insightful Wanted: youngster to write about drugs and blow jobs, Daniela Elser now offers up Tune in, drop out, get drunk, become a hairdresser.

Dearie me, are the young so unhappy and despairing and cynical. Or worse still, thinking that they're still writing for Honi Soit, the student newspaper of Sydney University?

It seems poor Daniela spent five years at university studying arts and was scarified by the experience. But what attempts to be an insight into university turns out to be a strangely revealing and self-pitying exercise in fear and loathing of the y'artz. Which makes it all the stranger that Daniela seems to want to be a journalist, which is a kind of writing. Yeech.

Somehow she seems to think her university experience is a good argument against Julia Gillard's desire to create another 300,000 places for students. But does Daniela's sense of a wasted life mean others - perhaps without her opportunities - will proceed to waste any chance given to them?

If you’ve ever pondered the question, what does a 2.1 in History and a post-graduate qualification in Journalism get you, then you’re looking at it - a HECs debt, 18,000 poetically un-spell-checked words about something to do with social protest movements of the 21st century (a page-turner and a half) and several Ikea shelves full of half- read books.

Then there’s a lingering sense I could have somehow better spent four years of my life actually reading books or helping save the third world or just sleeping in. I’m starting to wish that I had thought more about what I really wanted out of the whole tertiary gambit before I plunged in head first and had to spend hours of my life reading Brecht.

To those 300,000, (most of whom are currently learning how to use scissors and the important lesson why we should never eat Clag), and to the HSC students of 2009, I ask you this - think very carefully about your university choices, because frankly, why don’t you choose not to?

Ah well, I suppose Brecht is a bit too lefty and arty for the average Punch reader, what with his blather abut epic theatre and dialectical materialism. So let's stay rigidly on the surface of ideas instead:

I propose this instead - have the awkward drunken sex, live in abject poverty, eat the bad food and pretend to understand Marshall McLuhan for a couple of years without the burden of having to knock out 5,000 words on Ford Maddox Ford’s ‘‘The Good Soldier”.

Or maybe just sit around doing nothing at all and indulging in rank self-pity? Whatever.

Make the choice not to rack up an IOU to the federal government to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and have only a vague understanding of Foucault to show for it. Choose to tread your own beer-stained path to nebulous maturity unfettered by Union fees or having to actually read Ulysses (or pretend you’ve even started the damn colossus).

Spend several years drinking with abandon and do away with the pretence of higher education and tertiary qualifications and then actually do something that will help the country- like take up hairdressing at Tafe.

Now a nation of hairdressers, surely, that’s something Julia would really like.

No actually I think Julia would love a nation of writers for The Punch proving conclusively that a hated for universities can be turned into a way of life.

But you know it's actually one of the oldest, cheapest, weakest tricks in the book, to conflate the honesty of hairdressing with university ponces who've never done an honest day's work in their life, or the uselessness of culture and the y'arts up against the honest yeoman learning at TAFE. As if somehow they're mutually exclusive. Tell that to a carpenter building a set, or a grip doing the perfect track.

Which is why it's a pity Daniela wasn't around to explain to our electrician as he re-wired our house why he pissed us off by boasting how he was going to the complete Beethoven cycle - using our money for his pleasure no doubt, while we sat at home listening to economical CDs. Oh yes these tradies know how to rub it in.

So it goes.

But surely Daniela learned something at uni, even during the depths of her despair:

If you go to university you will learn how to negotiate your way through the mire of Centrelink bureaucracy.

You will learn how to drink, nay, truly appreciate wine supped from a 4-litre box and you will become quite deft at fending off the feeble overtures of an engineering student.

You will learn to treat with abject distrust, tinged with antipathy, anyone with a Jesus fish on t-shirt, anyone from the Womyn’s Collective and a certain philosophy lecturer with a penchant for post-lecture private tutoring.

Great. Life values you can take with you anywhere for ever. A detestation of the Evangelical Union and rank lesbian feminism mixed with a hostility to men who just want a fuck. Along with a hostility to engineering students (what about the rural scientists as well?) and an appreciation of Chateau cardboard. Why perchance Daniela might even later in life turn into a female Bob Ellis.

I keed, I keed. You wouldn't wish that fate on any uni student. But it seems that as usual it's all the fault of baby boomers:

We seem to be surrounded by people (usually baby boomers with fond, stoned memories of watching free Fellini films and furtive fumblings in the bar after a shandy too many) who speak nostalgically, glowingly, of the so-called ‘university experience’.

But in my five or so years at various institutions studying a veritable swathe of subjects, I found nary a hint of this collegiate, intellectual ambience.

Well actually Daniela, though I guess it's a bit late for you, university is a place where you can be exposed to ideas and where you can expose yourself to ideas, even if that means all you can do later in life is be flip about D. H. Lawrence, Brecht and James Joyce.

But you hit your mark. Your first comment comes from a self described rationalist who says:

Solution: stop subsidising wastes of time (ie. arts and most of humanities).

That is where all the communists and other gits are.

Ah yes, The Punch. Home to fuck witted conversationalists where cretinous philistinism is a way of life. But wait, there's more. Cue Eric:

Rationalist has it right. Most of the “humanities” serve no other purpose than left-wing indoctrination. They’re a waste of money for both taxpayers and students.

Our universities could be greatly improved if the worthless half or so were simply dropped.

And there's more all about the uselessness of the arts in the comments.

Well somehow between reading rationalist or Eric or Daniela, I'd rather be reading Shakespeare than their dumb fuck ideas on life and the joys of doing a course in engineering so that they can build another motorway to clip the petrol heads like sheep as they go from job to pub and footy.

But you know that's just a personal choice, personal taste thing, and to each their own, but it does remind me of Malcolm Bradbury's genuinely funny satire on provincial redbrick universities in Eating People is Wrong, which amongst other things has a great time with one student doing a thesis on fish imagery in Shakespeare.

There's just one irony. I doubt whether I would have come across the book unless an English lecturer had thrust it into my rural paw one night, along with exposing me to Indian food after a lifetime of lamb cutlets and three vegies.

So it goes. I guess that's just a hazy stoned memory of people being people.

I'm also reminded that Malcolm Bradbury was much given to one liners:

If God had been a liberal we wouldn’t have had the Ten Commandments; we’d have the Ten Suggestions.

So can I make a suggestion to Daniela in her bid to become a writer for The Punch. Enough with the self-pity and the cheap anti-intellectual clap trap. If you love a career in hair-dressing, go do a course in hair-dressing. That doesn't mean you can only read New Idea. Unless of course New Idea is your idea of an intellectual rag full of riches and insight - and given you write for The Punch I'm not trying to second guess here.

And can I make another suggestion to the arts hating cretinous philistines who infest the commentary section. Go to this random Shakespeare abuse generator here.

Apply any combination to yourself as you disappear up your fundaments.

And if you can't be bothered with that exercise in culture, why not just go fuck yourself, though I believe Hamlet put it with a shade more subtlety and nuance when confronted by his first skull:

There's another: why may not that be the skull of a lawyer?
Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures,
and his tricks?

Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock
him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him
of his action of battery?

Hum! This fellow might be in's time a
great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his
fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries: is this the fine of
his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine
pate full of fine dirt?

Will his vouchers vouch him no more of
his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth
of a pair of indentures?

The very conveyances of his lands will
scarcely lie in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no
more, ha?

Memo to Daniela. If you're going to pitch to the punters, the commoners, the groundlings and the stinkards in the pits and the stalls, try doing it with a bit of style. It's the least a hairdresser would do, and it's the least a writer should try to do ...

Tim Black, swine flu, feverish deconstructions of decontextualized hysteria and the filthy elites

2009-07-17T08:08:00.004+10:00

You know you're in the company of a fuzzy thinker when the word 'elite' pops out in a column.

The elites are responsible for so much it's a wonder they ever have time to rest in their busy work - but I guess the elites need to keep doing their thing, so people can expose, reveal and malign the elites for the filthy ideas which they constantly devise to inflict on long suffering humanity.

Take Tim Black on the subject of swine flu in his column Feverish obsessions with fantasy flu instead of real ills.

It's Black's important mission to establish that too much has been said and written about swine flu - by writing another column about swine flu.

Black knows the real source of the problem. Swine flu is the fault of flu geekery and the elites:

The elites' obsessive flusteria does not just detract from other, more serious, ailments. It also makes it difficult to put swine flu into any perspective, to contextualise it in terms of similar conditions. Take the following statistic from Britain's National Institute for Clinical Excellence: the average mortality rate of influenza in Britain is 600 deaths a year in a non-epidemic year and 12,000 to 13,800 deaths a year in an epidemic year. So while swine flu is, in rare cases, fatal, so are the other strains of flu that we cope with year in, year out.

Yep, I too am staggered that the 'leets haven't generated a global warming related hysteria about malaria and about Ross River fever shifting south and about the spread of tropical illnesses to Tasmania. Oh wait, they have you tell me? Filthy elites.

Right, and there's no doubt there's been an unhealthy hysteria about swine flu, in much the same way that the elites are unhealthily obsessed with sex and violence. And the best joy with this kind of column? Why if the elites don't pay any attention to swine flu, then they're guilty of dereliction of duty, and a dangerous taking the eye of the ball, and before you know it the Poms have scored five hundred runs.

But back to those damn pesky elites:

But now it is here, swine flu is likelier to be the object of jokes than panic among the public.

So while the occasionally tragic reality of swine flu is clearly not a creation of the authorities' feverish imaginations, the political and media obsession with it is.

A top-down politicisation of an illness has served only to obscure and problematise a clinical problem.

That most people seem largely unflustered by the hype simply reveals its unhealthy elite origins.

Pigs are the new unhealthy elite? Oh sorry, it's the hype that has an unhealthy elite origin. The pigs can pick up a 'get out of elite jail for free' card after passing go, while the unhealthy elite can get a good old clobbering, a roistering and a spiking.

So who are these 'leets? Well it seems that its politicians and officials and of course the World Health Organization, which has no doubt used black helicopters to spread pandemic panic.

But I'm not sure who's the hysteric here. Last time I heard Nicola Roxon speaking on the subject, she was trying to hose down an estimate of deaths which seemed extravagant. But Black is an object lesson in establishing that all the 'leets are in the conspiracy together. A global one - a full-scale siren-headed pandemic - and a parochial one. The 'leets are coming and we might not get out alive:

The public announcements continue. A worst-case scenario could see about 6000 people die from swine fluthis winter in Australia, federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon said yesterday in a pangloomian attempt to imagine the worst in the worst of all possible worlds.

But this is where a columnist has to get cunning. Here's the technique. First establish that the number of swine flu cases and related deaths in Australia are currently low, then attack likely carriers of 'leet catastrophist panic - the ABC and the Sydney Morning Herald - then throw in the WHO with their steady drip-drip of anxiety-inducing statements, with their be alert but not alarmed caveats, pragmatically cultivating fear, then bemoan how swine flu has been lifted from a level five to a level six global pandemic (never mind if this is deployed in its strict technical definition):

Never has fear been cultivated so pragmatically. Indeed, since swine flu provides the seemingly all too imaginable threat against which people must be protected, thus providing some semblance of a point to policy-making, one suspects that if the disease did not exist the authorities would have to invent it. Which, in a sense, they have.

Aha, they did invent swine flu. The filthy 'leets. The pigs are innocent! Save the pigs! Free the pigs!

While WHO preoccupied itself with second-guessing the apocalypse, the Prime Minister was advising people on basic hygiene. For the frighteningly unsocialised, or just the extravagantly rude, advice such as cover your mouth when coughing phlegm everywhere may have been useful, but for everyone else it just seemed to highlight the strange, exceptional nature of swine flu.

Yeah, well tell that to the guy who hacked and coughed then spat on the railway platform right next to me yesterday, but I guess I looked at him and just saw him as another 'leet fear merchant peddling the strange, exceptional nature of swine flu. After all, he was wearing a suit, so he couldn't have been frighteningly unsocialized. Maybe he was just extravagantly rude because he saw me as a 'leet promoter - even an inventor - of the swine flu hysteria.

Have we come to this level of uncertainty in our subjectivist relativist post modernist 'leet times?

Curse you elites. But what to do? Well how about you give yourself a 'get out of jail card' in the form of a bold caveat, just in case the pigs might have been involved:

Not that swine flu is to be taken lightly. By all accounts swine flu is more serious than normal seasonal flu.

Yaaay. Right at this moment you too can become a 'leet person by showing your 'leet understanding of swine flu by discussing swine flu and then by reassuring everyone it's all fine (unless of course you die from swine flu related problems, but let's just call that unfortunate rather than a justification for 'leet hysteria):

Biological sciences professor Ian Jones, summarising recent US research published in Nature, concluded that the new virus is about five times more pathogenic than seasonal H1N1 but that, nonetheless, the likely outcome to infection is recovery. For the few cases of severe infection the data will help in clinical management of hospitalised patients. Also having looked at the Nature research, Mark Henderson of London newspaper The Times noted: "It's not a mild illness, but neither does it seem especially severe. Perhaps moderate is the best term." Yet moderate hardly seems apposite for a strain of flu that has dominated the news headlines at various points during the past two months. And it is precisely that predominance that is the problem.

Well that's alright then. It's joke time right? Even the 'leet papers (yes a Murdoch rag can be 'leet) are telling us not to panic. Where's the problem?

Well it seems you don't understand that swine flu in fact reflects the dangers of having people worrying about pandemics. They've turned it into a politicized justification for socialistic public policy, perhaps even a perverted justification for socialized medicine, a potent symbol of fear more debilitating and threatening than the swastika.

Each policy announcement, each subsequent media report, ripping swine flu from any clinical context, adds to the impression that it is not just flu; it is something more significant. In other words, it is not just a moderate strain of influenza, it is an exceptional strain of influenza. So while politicians and officialdom are simultaneously forced to admit that, for most people, swine flu will not even require treatment, their incessant swine-flu chatter, their constant need to make announcements, to speculate and faithlessly reassure, ends up creating swine flu as something extraordinary.

Swine flu has become more than a clinical problem; it has become politicised, a symbol of the fear that legitimises and underpins security-conscious policy-making today.

Funny, I remember that the 'leets tried to change the name from swine flu to the banal N1H1 virus - as a way of trying to undercut the swinish hysteria - but to Mr. Black, that's just a terminological inexactitude beloved by the "increasingly popular flu geekery". Can't get them coming, make sure you get 'em going.

Oh dear lord, I feel a panic attack about the 'leets coming on. The fear ... the fear ...

And then I began to notice certain words deployed by the good Mr. Black. Here's a sampling: "the narrative of swine flu", fear cultivated "pragmatically", "fear that legitimises", "cannot help but decontextualise", "what is problematic", "to contextualise it" and so on.

And I began to get the uneasy feeling I was reading something written by a tainted 'leet person, someone who had caught a whiff of semiotics and structuralism in an earlier life - perhaps from a coughing, spluttering academic who in turn might have caught it from a French academic - and become diseased for life. With an illness way worse than swine flu ...

And at that point the fear really gripped me. Because you see not once during his column - despite telling us that swine flu is being treated as a joke by the population at large - does Mr. Black give us a good swine flu joke.

Instead we get a lot of bluster and hot air about 'leets. Which is why I'm suggesting Mr. Black go kiss a pig so that we can all contextualize our lack of panic ...

(Below: a swine flu joke, credit to Panric).

Steve Fielding, Kevin Rudd, CityLife Church, and shacking up to save the planet

2009-07-16T14:25:00.004+10:00

(Above: Senator Steve Fielding provides the best argument for gay people to get married and live together yet devised by a creationist fundamentalist loving Christian church goer).

You might have forgotten this story, which really is only as old as February 25, 2009, but it's worth re-visiting to remember the quality of Senator Steve Fielding's thinking on global warming (Divorce adds to the impact of global warming - Steve Fielding):

Divorce adds to the impact of global warming as couples switch to wasteful single lifestyles, according to an Australian politician. Family First senator Steve Fielding told a Senate hearing yesterday that divorce led to a "resource-inefficient lifestyle" and it would be better for the planet if couples stayed married.

When couples separate, they need more rooms, more electricity and more water, which increases their carbon footprint.

Is this the best argument for gay marriage you've yet come across?

"We understand that there is a social problem (with divorce), but now we're seeing there is also environmental impact as well on the footprint," Senator Fielding said.

The senator, who came from a family of 16 children, has been married for more than 20 years and focuses on family issues in his political life.

Until he became an adept in the art and science of global warming. And discovered he was completely clueless, so now he's become completely clueless in a new way. But back then he was a believer:

Senator Fielding read out quotes from a US report to the country's top environment bureaucrats.

"Mitigating the impacts of resource-inefficient lifestyles such as divorce helps to achieve global environmental sustainability and saves money for households," Senator Fielding quoted.

Ross Carter, from the Department of Environment, said he had not read the report but would look into the issue.

"Certainly, now that we're aware of it, we will discuss that with other agencies."

He said divorce was one factor that could diminish the efficiency of housing.

How did this sudden discovery of the efficiency of housing go down with the good senator's peers?

The Opposition and the Greens declined to comment on Senator Fielding's concerns.

However, one source said Senator Fielding's campaign could encourage couples to live together in sin to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Yes folks, shack up in sin to save the planet. Gays and straights. Home cooked sex and the planet saved.

Now suddenly this loon, who thought divorce was a contribution to global warming, is a hero to the sceptics for suddenly discovering climate change is a furphy. Only Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair could take him seriously. But then they took Sarah Palin seriously.

Once a loon, always a loon I say.

Meantime, some scientific thoughts from the good folks at Steve Fielding's preferred house of worship, CityLife Church:

If we simply evolved from chemical gases, grown up germs or recent improvements of the apes, how do we account that in almost every culture in the world there is a preference for love over hate, truthfulness over lying, kindness over violence, and justice over injustice. What accounts for this? Are gases, germs or genes capable of creating a moral code of values in people worldwide, one that is remarkably consistent even though billions of people have existed on different continents? Do morality and ethics have a Darwinian explanation (altruistic genes selected through the process of evolution giving people natural empathy) or are they evidence for God?

No, look to the garden of eden and the talking snake, I say. Who is this caddish god-denying Darwin, and what would he know about global warming.

You can find a lot more of what Fielding presumably listens to week in week out by visiting the church's sermon and discussion notes here. Or you can live a useful life. Your choice.

Meantime, I found this happy set of notes by John Stear, detailing his correspondence with CityLife, Family First and Senator Fielding. Wonderful to see such ducking and weaving, or in the case of Fielding simply no reply at all when it comes to the matter of answers in Genesis and the teaching of science in schools. He did get one honest reply from CityLife Church-Knox:

Our Christian school, Waverley Christian College, is an important part of the Church and its ministries. It has a strong record of academic achievement, whilst also providing a caring and supportive Christian environment for the students. Creationism is taught at the College, whilst Evolution is also noted as a theory. Given that it is a Christian school with our belief system based on the Bible, it is natural that we would teach origins based on Creation.

I'm amazed Stear had the energy for the hunt. Well done.

But not a word from Fielding. What's he afraid of, what's he running from? Is he doing an Al Gore on the subject of creationism? After all, Al Gore's a preacher for global warming. What or who is Fielding a preacher for? Has he read all the advice in CityLife's sermons on "Conversations & Evangelism"? Is he doing his best in "Reaching the Unchurched Next Door" (in four parts). After all, it's the fundamentalists who got him the gig. (You can catch John Stear's correspondence at "Family First'? - not in science education).

Remind me yet again how the Labor Party helped Fielding into power with just under 2% of the votes of Victorians, and how Fielding will now will demand of Conroy that the intertubes must be subject to draconian censorship. (I'm told that Fielding's vote amounted to 2,519 first preference votes).

Now if Fielding is inclined to creationism as a philosophy, I want him to meet up with Ian Plimer. It should be a fifteen round battle royale, alternately smack down and love fest, as the anti creationist Plimer bonds with the fundie Christian over global warming.

But instead of a decent all in bring a bollard with you state of origin match, The Punch offers us Kevin Rudd with his first blog on Here's why Fielding should support us on climate.

Talk about a love tap on the chin. Only a Queenslander would go down. And it's so unscientific. He doesn't even include one graph, the one clear graph that indicates climate change is a furphy. And golly the loons come out in force in the comments.

Why do I think loon pond is these days undergoing a population crisis of the hugest kind. So many loons flocking and squawking.

If only Malthus had been right ...

Ah well, if Fielding can provide solid arguments in favor of saving the planet through shacking up, perhaps he can provide a coherent critique of the government's current legislative plans in relation to global warming, and devise a better model.

Oops, I looked out the window and thought I saw a number of porcine like creatures flying ... mebbe on their way to or from the garden of eden.

Steve Fielding, climate change, and Australia's dumbest conversation

2009-07-16T09:24:00.005+10:00

(Above: Senator Steve Fielding demonstrating that a goose by any other name remains a goose).

The Punch seems to have aspirations about turning itself into Australia's dumbest conversation.

But then it's the Murdoch press's attempt to get down and get hip with the intertubes, so why am I surprised.

I guess they wouldn't lead with a story from Pauline Hanson these days - though who knows what might have happened with Hanson in her prime.

So they settle for Senator Steve Fielding as the top of the page lead, with The real reason I'll fight in the Senate on climate change - thereby proving that bears with very little brain can get an indecent amount of exposure. And The Punch is doing what it knows will work - pandering to climate change deniers, the so-called sceptics - in the way that Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt have established as the sine qua non of Murdochian blogging.

Which makes you wonder why they bother, since there's a already a Murdochian super abundance of this kind of nonsense feeding the chooks.

Fielding's piece is offensively simple minded, in much the same way as his political posturing is insufferably self-righteous. You can tell he's taken a liberal dose of the kool aid with his self serving grandstanding on the matter of meeting Al Gore, which clearly wasn't about Fielding getting an education in science from Gore.

After all, this lone intrepid science driven warrior has made up his mind on the basis of one graph that the science is clearly inconclusive. Which in Fielding's world is code for incorrect and irrelevant.

A rough equivalent of his scientific pilgrimage would be me going off to a true believing priest and ask him to prove his faith, while I maintained my own lack of faith. When science is reduced to a debate about beliefs, it's a wretched kind of debate, of the kind always on view in the gadfly snipings of Tim Blair.

And who turns up to play the priest to the pontificating know all Fielding?

But then enter Al Gore. Here was a man who had a lot of power and went around the world preaching about climate change. I thought he might have the answer for me, the ones I couldn’t extract from the Rudd government.

Why? Surely since Fielding is in the sceptics' camp, he now knows Al Gore is just a grand-standing self seeking rich man, the anti-christ of the global warming brigade, without a shred of scientific understanding, and worse than Michael Moore.

But then that's all there in the tone Fielding's words. Gore's a preacher man, with a lot of power, traveling the world, preaching. He surely must have the answer, since a trip up the Himalayas to meet a guru with the answer to the meaning of life is a tad too difficult. Tell me Al Gore what do you know?

I briefly met Mr Gore at a breakfast in Melbourne attended by more than a thousand people. He was aware of the important role Family First plays in the senate and was keen to catch up.

Yep Al Gore knows all about the wonderful Family First. Choke on my rising gorge. Al Gore gives a flying fuck about Family First and was keen to catch up to discuss Christian fundamentalism?

But apart from knowing about the wonderful Family First, it seems Al Gore knows fuck all about anything else:

After a series of phone calls I was met with a stonewall of resistance. I offered to meet Mr Gore at any place at any time but had no luck. Here we had the former Vice President of the United States, a self proclaimed climate change preacher running away from me over a few simple questions. I could hardly believe it.

Jesu, who does this man's copy writing? A stonewall of resistance. Any place at any time. No luck. Self proclaimed climate change preacher running away from me. Over a few simple questions. I could hardly believe it.

Running away from Steve Fielding and the visionary, demolitionary power of his scientific insights?

No, I can hardly believe it myself, you hopeless gherkin, so full of delusionary self serving twaddle are you that it's possible your emissions alone are solely responsible for the rise of the sea waters, thereby letting Al Gore off the hook.

But wait, there's more:

I would have thought if Al Gore was really committed to the cause he would want to meet with all senators who had concerns about the science if it would help ensure that the CPRS legislation would pass. Obviously I was wrong.

Or maybe he could spot a loon recently escaped from loon pond and wondering how he could avoid being caught up in a no win situation arguing with a loon about his already made up mind:

I have written to every senator urging them to look at the graph and ask themselves the key question - what is driving climate change? If they can’t answer that simple question they shouldn’t be voting for a CPRS. This decision is the biggest economic decision in this country’s history, one which is too important to vote along party lines.

One graph is the answer to it all? The complexity of the earth's current situation and the truth of denialism can be reduced to one graph? Well I guess that's better than saying 42 over and over again.

I call on the government to answer my question with a straight answer. If they’re not prepared to do so, I’m happy to fight the lone battle in the senate until those senators who are honest with themselves break party lines.

Oh now we're jerking our collective chain about lone battlers and calling on senators to join the heroic delusionary by breaking party lines. A straight simple answer based on one straight, not so simple deceptive and misleading graph ...

The sad thing is that there's better ways of doing things than what the government is currently proposing, but if Fielding had been around in the senate in the days when we had to do something about fluorocarbons, the hole in the ozone layer would now cover the earth.

Now you might think that The Punch is being dreadfully clever by allowing Steve Fielding to promote his delusional stupidity to the world. But the comments section gives away the game, with all the usual loons chipping in to support Fielding's brave stand.

The Punch is just printing the controversy, and shortly I expect to see lead stories on intelligent design, creationism and the dangers of Darwinism to the health of Australia. I mean I know it was always intended for people who avoided university degrees for fear of learning something, but should it reduce everything to kindergarten incoherence?

It reminds me that the Labor Party thought it was incredibly clever by preferencing Fielding, and then to their astonishment watching as he actually got up, and now they have to contemplate his infinite loonacy at work in the senate on a daily basis. As my new heroine Bronnie might say, whom the gods would destroy they first make read Steve Fielding's guide to the inner workings of his mind.

Because you see there's an infinite more of Fielding's self seeking grandstanding tireless self promotion on view in The Punch column:

I went back to the government with this question but was met with a wall of silence. They had clearly decided it was safer not to engage with me because I had legitimate questions which they probably were unable to answer.

I was left feeling that the only responsible thing to do was to vote against this legislation. At the end of the day, it would be a betrayal of my duty to the Australian people to put at risk the national economy and many thousands of jobs on what is clearly inconclusive science.

But you see wherever Fielding looks, he can't get an answer he can understand:

Armed with this information I sat down with Minister Wong, the Chief Scientist and Professor Will Steffen of the ANU to hear their explanation. After an hour and a half I left none the wiser ...

I received a written response to my questions from the Minister a few days later which had me even more uncertain ...

Some of the data led me to question whether the Rudd government had got the science right. I then took some of the information and questions I had to the White House where I met with one of President Obama’s senior climate change advisors. While these discussions were fruitful, I was left at the end with even more questions than when I had started ...

Well perhaps that's because bears with little brain are better off just munching on honeycomb and not trying to absorb too much information all at once.

But The Punch will no doubt be pleased. They've stirred the pot and got everyone agitated.

But has the understanding of the world's current situation been advanced one whit or jot?

Well in the sense that we understand just how comprehensively the ALP has comprehensively helped fuck Australia by getting Fielding elected to the senate, yes, in spades ... But as for actually understanding things, no, in spades ...

Time to sing a song of Pooh, tra la:

When the sun came out,
the sky cleared up
and the bear of little thinkage
began to dry,
and by and by
showed a high
amount of shrinkage.

Hooray for you!
Hooray for me!
Hooray, hooray,
The Pooh will soon be free!
Now the time has come for proving
What the diet did for Pooh.

And since we pledged
He'd be unwedged,
That's what we're going to do.
He'll be pulled and he'll be tugged,
and eventually unplugged.
We'll have a tug of war
To open Rabbit's door.

Think heavage, think towage
And out the Pooh will goage.
For mind over matter
Has made the Pooh unfatter.

(Below: saving the shrinking Pooh, in a case of mind over matter, but who will save Senator Fielding?)

Piers Akerman, Chinese thugs, Indonesian thugs, the false speaking Chairman Rudd and so many bones to chew

2009-07-16T08:02:00.004+10:00

It seemed like another hard day on the intertubes. Being Thursday it was Akerman day and being Akerman it wasn't surprising to see the splash on the front page Akerman: China thugs bullying Aussies.

When Akkers gets hold of a bone, he worries it to death in bull terrier style, and only when the last bit of flesh has been stripped from it and the marrow sucked from the bone will he bury it in the back yard. Which doesn't stop him digging it out every so often to sniff and lick and munch on. And the more dirt, as you know, the tastier the bone.

So it seemed like the old China bone would be getting another going over.

Then came an alarming thought - what if the few remaining subs at the Daily Terror never bothered to read Akerman - after all, it must be one of the most draining and exhausting jobs on earth. Repetition after repetition, fear and loathing, whining and stomping around, re-hashing old grudges over and over until the track in the shellac is worn down by the grinding effect of the needle.

So what has Akkers got to say about China in his latest piece, which turns out on the actual page to be titled PM turns blind eye on thugs bullying Aussies?

Just this as a taster:

Kevin Rudd has now let down Australian citizens in two foreign countries. The Chinese Government has so far snubbed his attempts to get any substantial news about the arrest of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu.

It would of course be a much simpler sentence and a much shorter column if Akkers had written: Kevin Rudd has now let down all Australian citizens in Australia now and forever and ever, amen, and in any foreign country I can find a story to write about. Fill in the details at your own leisure ...

But instead Akkers drags out the Indonesian bone, using the murder of Australian Drew Grant in Papua province as an excuse to berate Indonesia and the Rudd government.

Never mind that Akkers and his ilk went missing on what Indonesia got up to in Papua in the old days, and displayed extreme hostility to the notion that Australia might shelter Papuan refugees. Never mind that Indonesia has at last managed a decent presidential election. Never mind that the murder is subject to a police investigation, still in relatively early days.

Akkers knows all about it.

The Australian Government is too timid to point out that security forces around Freeport have in the past resorted to standover tactics to blackmail the mine into paying higher premiums for peace.

It’s a practice that some say provided an incentive for security forces to attack the mine to justify their lucrative presence.

While Indonesian security forces continue to have to find the means to meet their budgets while on the job, it seems unlikely the central government will be able to contain regional corruption.

The Australian Government has sent two police officers to assist Indonesian authorities but they are likely to run into political interference from both the Indonesian and Australian Governments.

Political interference from the Australian government? Presumably he's basing that on the craven attitude of the Howard government to Indonesia during its time in office. Or perhaps he's basing it on nothing at all, except the mad bone munching of a terrier with the subtlety and wit of a bull in a china ship.

Freeport is Indonesia’s largest taxpayer and its military, despite the setback forced on it by its withdrawal from East Timor, remains an entity largely beyond control.

The Australian-Indonesian relationship, no matter what Rudd’s spin doctors will claim, has gone backwards since the Rudd Government came to office.

Say what? So the Rudd government has no relationship with Indonesia and Indonesia has no control over the military in Freeport? Well good luck to their campaign of political interference then.

Meanwhile, Akkers has solved the case. The Indonesian military did it. How's that for investigative prowess up against due process (Golly I bet he's a dab hand at Cluedo).

But wait, it wouldn't be an Akkers column if we didn't drag another bone out of the back yard for a salivating if irrelevant munch:

A prime example is shown in the Australian Government’s failure to lay charges against accused East Timorese murderer Guy Campos, who entered Australia on a pilgrim visa during the Pope’s Youth Day visit.

Well actually every day we live and breathe under the Rudd government, Australia lives in a hell hole of dire inhumanity, of epic failure and abject incompetence, of profound disaster and inhuman suffering.

Faced with the challenges of Hu’s arrest and the murder of Grant, the Rudd Government appears impotent.

Making speeches in Mandarin may make Rudd feel better but it won’t bring transparency to any case the Chinese authorities may make against Hu.

Addressing the Australia-Indonesia Society may promote a warm inner glow but the words are worthless if Grant’s murder remains unsolved.

Diplomacy demands more than words alone . . . it requires trust and a determination to back words with actions.

Which is why I think Akkers will back this site's demand that chairman Rudd immediately drop all other duties and proceed to Papua to solve the murder mystery, and having done that - I think the two days we've allocated is more than sufficient - then proceed on to China to obtain the release of Stern Hu.

Now the latter matter is more tricky - busting a business executive out of prison isn't the easiest job - but that's why we're proposing that the government hire Tom Cruise and treat the whole thing as a Mission Impossible caper. Sequel and spin off rights will be sold separately.

Failure to do so will establish the credentials of chairman Rudd in craven cowardliness.

The failure of the Rudd Government to act on behalf of Australian citizens abroad is in keeping with its dismal record in almost all other areas of policy.

Yes indeed. A totally dismal record of complete and utter disaster. Why if they hadn't found that stout British lad lost in the Blue Mountains without his mobile phone it would have been yet another black mark against the Rudd government.

And their refusal to deal thoughtfully with the Michael Jackson murder case indicates extreme contempt for Jackson's Australian fans. While the tsunami alert indicates extreme incompetence - wave, what wave - and the bones of a woman found in a cave on the central coast indicate the abject failure of the law and order policies of the Rudd government (I know, I know, she's been missing for seven years. Details, you pedant, details).

Oh yes Rudd might be able to speak Mandarin, but how's that a match for hysterical English Akkers style.

But the funniest thing of all? After beating the drum loudly, the Murdoch press has now decided it can catch Rudd coming and going. While Akkers is over in one corner, there's Jennifer Hewett over in The Australian with PM's harsh tone may misfire.

Here's a sample:

Kevin Rudd's decision to publicly up the ante in his reaction to the Chinese detentions of Rio Tinto executives is curious as well as extremely risky.

The Prime Minister's words were his most critical so far, and will reverberate loudly in Beijing. To what purpose is far less clear. The rhetoric is more likely to further irritate the Chinese than it is to persuade them to change course over the imprisonment of Stern Hu.

Rudd would presumably appreciate that. It suggests that his comments are designed more for domestic consumption and for blunting the opposition's hysterical demands for the government to pick up the phone.

Speak up in Mandarin, no don't speak up, too extremely risky.

Certainly Rudd's firm warnings will sound tougher and more decisive at home. In China, it will make it even harder for any possible resolution to be quietly negotiated through diplomatic channels. What now?

Quiet diplomacy, no stern action. No, no - stern action needed, right now.

Well if you relied on the Murdoch press for insight, the world would likely be at war within the week.

So it goes. That's the bones thoroughly chewed this week, time to put them back into the ground until they come in handy again. And isn't it comforting to realize that it isn't just dogs that can see the world in black and white.

Oh I know that might be an area of scientific dispute, I know there might be claims that dogs can see red, blue and other colors, but trust me if you're Akkers and you're looking at the world, it's strictly black and white.

(Below: Gustave Dore's Andromeda on the rocks, 1869. One of the earliest examples of an artist capturing the way the Rudd government puts women in peril. Note the crocodile bottom left hand corner, the artist's nuanced way of including Chairman Rudd in the painting).

Terry Barnes, Tony Abbott, the punitive mind set of the conservative, and all the king's horses

2009-07-15T10:41:00.008+10:00

(Above: great cake topper ideas for conservatives about to get hitched until death do them part, unless divorce lawyers and private eyes and courts can sort out the unholy mess in which they landed themselves).

At first I thought Tony Abbott's new proposal to bring fault back into marriage and divorce - as if marriage wasn't already fault finding and punitive enough according to conservatives - was the product of his own fevered conservative Catholic brain.

After all, Catholicism is adept at guilt and confession and punishment and forgiveness as a way of keeping the tithes ticking over.

Then I stumbled on Terry Barnes in Let's help more of us to have and to hold on and I realized that Abbott must have workshopped the concept and decided it was a goer.

Barnes in his tag is noted as having advised Howard government ministers Michael Wooldridge and Tony Abbott, and concludes his column in a bizarre way worthy of an Abbott advisor:

Provided people aren't forced to remain in abusive relationships, if reintroducing a reasonable and defensible concept of fault into relationship break-ups will help more partners to stick together for the long haul, it is something well worth considering.

WTF? What on earth is a reasonable and defensible concept of fault? Like you were swinging your dick around and now I'm going to take you to the cleaners, or you were having an affair with the postman, so now you can get out on the street and deliver the letters with him?

Barnes arrives at this conclusion by regaling us with an anecdote about his aunt:

In the early 1970s my aunt spent several years nursing in a remote community mission in the New Guinea highlands. Reminiscing recently, she said that it was a constant struggle to coax every last bit of use from surgical instruments, syringes and other essential equipment.

When she returned to Australia in 1973, however, she was astonished to find how things had changed at home. Disposable equipment had become the order of the day, and reusable items suddenly were obsolete. Her nursing experience was an analogy for those times. On July 1, 1975, marriage itself became a disposable item with the introduction of the Family Law Act and no-fault divorce.

Marriage as a disposable syringe? What is it about conservatives that they fail to understand the essence of marriage? People come together and they stay together. Or they don't. Putting lawyers and courts and private eyes into the bedrooms of couples isn't going to swing it one way or the other.

In his forthcoming book Battlelines, former Howard government minister Tony Abbott will argue that the relationship pendulum has swung too far, and that the concept of fault as grounds for divorce should be back on the agenda.

Abbott's argument is simple: if the way out is too easy, attempts to save or even shore up a troubled relationship will be set aside.

Well the argument actually might better be described as simple minded, since on the one hand Abbott has recently blathered on about the joys of passive smoking in cars as opposed to the nanny state, then he starts blathering about how he wants to bring the nanny state back into marriage and divorce.

And when you look at the logic, it's like marriage is some kind of trap or prison in which the unwilling victims must be kept locked up for fear they'll take the easy way out. Yeah, let's make divorce so tough suicide will seem like a sensible solution.

Bizarrely, in support of this bizarre proposition, Barnes quotes data that suggests that the median length of marriage to separation was 8.9 years in 2007, as opposed to 7.8 years in 1998. And that the median length of marriage to divorce was 12.5 years for divorces granted in 2007, while in 1998 it was 8.9 years. And that after peaking at 2.7 per thousand of population in 2003, the divorce rate in Australia has declined in 2007 to 2.3 per thousand.

So what's the problem here? Well when you're in opposition, I guess all that remains is blather and a pious willingness to ignore the figures:

Such numbers, however, don't tell the stories behind them. What kept these couples together for as long as they did, and what finally tore them apart? Was it marrying in haste and repenting at leisure, "for the sake of the children", partner or child abuse, financial difficulties, infidelity, or simply familiarity breeding contempt? How hard did they try to work on repairing their relationships? This is where Abbott's point goes - was the leaving of the relationship proportionate to the problem?

More to the point surely is the question of whether staying in the relationship would fix the problem, and how on earth would returning to the days when couples turned the end days of a relationship into an ugly court room drama of recriminations and blame and guilt, while the children stood on the sidelines wondering what emotional truck had just driven over them.

Do Barnes and Abbott really think they will be able to stop the trend to divorce or serial monogamy by a return to the old days and by introducing punitive approaches to divorce? Well only if you think saying thirty Hail Marys will somehow prevent fornication and adultery:

That divorce is still common, despite community support for marriage and publicly funded services such as the Federal Government's Family Relationship Centres, suggests that too many of us either take the words lightly, or simply don't realise how hard the marital road can be after that initial brilliant glow of romantic love - and lust - fades.

But after the ritual tugging of the forelock at how wonderful the Howard government was when it comes to the family unit, and the need for hard work in relationships and sacrifice ... Hang on, why do men always describe marriage as thick and thin stuff, and suffering and hard work and sacrifice? Is marriage like some kind of living hell, working away down mine digging out coal or tending furnace in steel works? Hard work, but no joy?

Well no matter all the wonderful work the Howard government did, and the way the stats seem to be heading the opposite way to the problem perceived by Abbott, there's still a need for more tinkering, and this is where it gets really weird, because somehow it seems to involve same sex marriage:

Nevertheless, we still need to revamp relationships law, especially the federal Marriage and Family Law Acts, to ensure that all those who want to make such a commitment are encouraged, championed and supported in their often difficult task. In this day and age this should apply not only to marriage between a man and a woman, but also to marriage or similar binding commitments between same-sex partners.

Ah yes, it seems that the conservatives recognize that there might actually be marriage between same sex partners somewhere down the track in Australia. So let's make sure it's the kind of hell heterosexuals had to endure in the old days. That'll teach them. It's difficult and hard, this getting hitched, and let's see how they handle it.

Then we can have standard off the shelf lite marriage for gay folk and others in search of the easy disposable syringe, while conservatives will have Leet Marriages, which are hardened and toughened and durable, because they know if they don't work and suffer their way to success the divorce courts are going to have fun fixing the blame on all and sundry. Meanwhile, while we devise this new form of marriage as cilice wearing, let's see how the gays cope with this game:

If two people want to pledge themselves freely and publicly to each other, to respecting each other and to making their relationship work, they shouldn't be legally barred from doing so simply because of an accident of gender or sexuality. Society is tolerant and open enough to welcome and encourage such declarations of commitment, rather than to dismiss them as outside the pale. Gay couples are just as entitled as their heterosexual equivalents to make public and legally binding vows to love and honour each other, but equally must account for the consequences if they break their vows.

Yeah, and once you get hitched, let's see what happens if you go back to the old ways of touring the beats or heading off for some clubbing. There'll be consequences. Oh yes, we'll make you regret getting hitched. You bloody disposable syringe lovers.

It's vital for our society that all couples, regardless of their sexuality, accept that their legally recognised relationships are not disposable items in our throwaway society. Just as marriage shouldn't be entered into lightly, ending a marriage or civil partnership shouldn't be too easy either.

No, it should be bloody hard to break up, onerous and burdensome and tough, like marriage is, and like it used to be in the old days when marriage was hell, and divorce even more hellish.

Oh the suffering and the humanity.

Is there any more poignant, tragic and sad example of how conservative thinking contends that life must involve pain and suffering and work and obligation.

Try this for a thought. Marriage can be fun. You stay in it because you like it. But if it breaks, all the kings horses, plus Tony Abbott and Terry Barnes, won't be able to put it back together again. And then the bonus punitive measures they propose will just scramble the egg even further.

Been there, done that, bugger off Abbott and Barnes, and take it away Dolly:

Momma moved out
Daddy sold the house
They split up the money
And went on their way
And all the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put mommy and daddy back together again

Starting over again
Where should they begin
'Cause they've never been out on their own
Starting over again
Where do you begin
When your dreams are all shattered
And the kids are all grown
And the whole world cries

Got an apartment
She moved in with her sisters
He's scheming big deals with one of his friends
While she sits at home
Just sorting out pieces
Of left over memories
From thirty odd years

Starting over again
Where do you begin
You've never been out on your own
Starting over again
Never any end

What will the neighbors say?
They're talking talk, its small town news
Facing fifty years old
Making up a happy home
And this far down the road
You find yourself alone
Two fools

Starting over again
Now where do you begin
When you've never been out on your own
Starting over again
Never any end
When your dreams are all shattered
And the kids are all grown
And all the king's horses
And all the king's men
Could never put mommy and daddy back together
Back together, again

(Below: marriage as a disposable syringe).

Janet Albrechtsen, Kevin Rudd, and god botherers bothering god botherers about bothering god, the media and Bonhoeffer

2009-07-15T07:40:00.005+10:00

(Above: on the right Pope Rudd issues a blessing to the commentariat columnists of the world, with a particular benediction to Janet Albrechtsen. On the left is some kind of parish priest god botherer, name unknown at time of writing).

You might recollect where Janet Albrechtsen was during John Howard's sordid dance with the Exclusive Brethren, a pernicious cult destructive of the family values he purported to hold, and now with its paws in the funding of private religious schools.

I don't. You might recollect where Janet Albrechtsen stood when John Howard and Peter Costello went off to sing along with the clap happy crowd at Hillsong. I don't.

You might even wonder what she had to say when only this year Peter Costello issued his fatuous Australia Day message to a bunch of fundie Victorian loons who subsequently claimed that the Victorian bushfires were the result of God's response to abortion law reforms. I share your sense of wonder.

You might even wonder where she is when Senator Steve Fielding trails his Family First religious convictions behind him like a blaze of glory - especially when he seeks an audience with Al Gore to soothe his doubts as to the reality of climate change. Isn't that a little like asking the anti-Christ for an explanation of the reality of heaven? Seeing as how Tim regularly tells me Al Gore knows nothing about science. Which makes Fielding's grandstanding a prattling befuddled kind of religiosity and knavery.

But in PM proves a convert to the politics of faith, we're left with no doubt about what she thinks of Rudd's regular display of Christian piety - it gets up her nose.

Which is about the first time I've thought there was a useful purpose in Rudd's Christian posturing.

Apart from her complaint that Rudd has turned into a public Christian - a complaint I can't ever remember reading her make about Peter Costello - she has an even more heinous charge:

Midway through his term as Prime Minister, whatever else one thinks of Rudd, he has proven to be a political operator of the highest order. He is a master of political manipulation.

Learned well he did from the master. You know, John Howard. But now it's a crime to be good at the game?

Well if you're on the wrong side. It's a bit like watching the toads demolish the cockroaches. Sure we all love the skills involved in the game, but not if it means the toads winning. Fuck that notion that what's good for the game is greater than the particular result. You can already feel Albrechtsen bunkering down, settling into the bomb shelter, thinking my god, another four years of Kevin.

Which is why she does her best to tag him on the subject of religion.

Under John Howard, any conservative MP who touted their religious beliefs was consistently treated by the political cognoscenti with derision and not a little suspicion. Books such as Marion Maddox’s God Under Howard claimed religion had been co-opted for sinister political purposes by conservative politicians. This was a hot topic for discussion. However, the sort of cynicism that informed much of the commentary about Howard’s apparent embrace of the religious Right is missing in action these days. Yet no Australian prime minister has used religion for such overtly political purposes as Rudd.

Except John Howard. Learned well he did at the feet of the master.

Because Howard and Costello and Tony Abbott consistently displayed their faith (or in Howard's case his faith that faith would deliver him votes) as a dog whistling trawling to the electorate. And when it worked the pack of commentariat columnists thought it a jolly fine thing, shoring up western civilization as we know it against deviant perverts, secular liberals and rampant Islamics.

But the funny thing is that to make her charge stick about Rudd displaying his religion, Albrechtsen has to do the time warp, and go back to the days before he became PM - discussing the God factor in a May 2005 interview on Compass, and publishing an essay on Faith in Politics in October 2006:

During that Compass interview in 2005, Gillard castigated Tony Abbott and then deputy prime minister John Anderson “for putting matters of faith more on their sleeve” for political purposes. Much of the media agreed with Gillard. What would she—and they—make of Rudd’s 5000-word Faith in Politics essay in October 2006 when Rudd openly touted his religious fervour, writing at length about German theologian and pastor Bonhoeffer, the social gospel and his Christian faith? Not much. A more intellectually honest and genuinely sceptical press gallery might have explored Rudd’s expedient embrace of religion back then. It may have asked why Rudd’s various “convictions” seem to appear on his sleeve at only the most politically opportune moment. They didn’t.

And they still haven’t.

Now here's the tortured logic. Way back in her column, Albrechtsen has to admit that Rudd can legitimately claim religion has always been a part of his life - born a Catholic, shifting to the Uniting Church, ending up an Anglican, and just loving it when he can hand over some dinkum Aussie wine to the Pope.

So how is it an expedient embrace? No, the thing that gets up her nose is that Rudd seems to be getting away with what John Howard did all the time:

Had Howard written such an essay, the intelligentsia would have whined about a breakdown in the separation of church and state. By contrast, the silence on Rudd and religion grows more baffling as his politicisation of God grows.

Memo to Janet. Shock, revelation. God is political. Or at least his (or her if you will, you feminists) representatives are, not having seen god cast a vote at the last election.

During the Compass interview, the narrator noted that “Kevin is wary of outward displays of religious piety, so pictures of him worshipping and praying were off limits”. Now, Rudd frequently does doorstops with the press the moment he steps outside a church on Sundays, perfect footage for the Sunday news bulletins. Now, there are photographs of him and his wife praying.

The PM is fortunate the media has extended to him the sort of long honeymoon that even the most amorous newlyweds never manage.

Well yes, and you can just imagine the fun the media would have if they turned up on the Sunday outside church and Rudd told them all to fuck off. No, it suits them, and it suits him, and so the pieties in Australian life continue as one kind of conservative takes over from another.

When Rudd struck out at media treatment of him in recent weeks—particularly at News Limited newspapers—it was clear he had grown too accustomed to media lapdogs. That is especially apparent in the media’s feeble refusal to explore Rudd’s religious opportunism.

If the media chooses to look, it may find our man in the Lodge is so full of hubris he uses his religious views for some particularly base political purposes. Bonhoeffer would hardly approve of that.

Of course John Howard has already proven that you can't attack a politician when he espouses Christianity, or even when he does a dance with a cult like the Exclusive Brethren. It just doesn't fly. The religious lobby still cuts a rug in the modern world. Which leaves poor old Albrechtsen hyper ventilating in the corner.

But there's a deal to be done here. If Albrechtsen spends a few columns deploring the use of religious convictions on the conservative side of politics - damning Tony Abbott and his coat tailing of Catholicism, and tearing into his new book, ripping into that dummy Steve Fielding and his family first values, deploring the decay of secularism in politics by both sides - she'd certainly get an audience amongst secularists.

Heck, why stop there? Why not a regular spray of articles showing how useless and divisive religion is in the post-modern world. Not just Islam, but all forms - Christian and Judaic for starters, but let's not forget the Hindus and every other kind of pie in the sky show.

But when it's just a whine about how Rudd is doing what Howard did for years, and he's doing it well enough to get re-elected, there's a smug satisfaction that at last she's getting to choke on the wafer like secularists did during the Howard years.

But wait, there's even more bad news for Albrechtsen. Not only does the pope meet with the likes of Rudd, it seems Benedict XVI might be going socialist in his latest encyclical Caritas in Veritate (and it's 30,000 words long, so it must be right):

... a great surprise in Benedict's encyclical is the way he highlights Pope Paul VI's 1967 encyclical, Development of Peoples, as the most significant Catholic document about the ethics needed to confront current global perils and poverty. Pope Paul's urgent call to action stirred Catholic social reform movements mightily, especially in developing countries, where most Catholics now live.

Benedict wants to inject renewed commitment into the global struggle for social justice and human wellbeing as "the heart of the Christian social message". Neo-conservatives in the US and elsewhere will be very upset that Benedict has, like preceding popes, recommitted the Church to engage more vigorously in the struggle for social justice as part of its essential mission. Leading Catholic neo-cons Michael Novak and George Weigel have been prodigious in extolling US free-market capitalism as the embodiment of Catholic social principles. Weigel has now protested that the Pope has been conned by justice and peace circles in the Vatican.

(there's more here at Pope's worthy plea up against market forces).

Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd, and the pope, and only Janet Albrechtsen to man the pumps and clean out the bilge. But don't worry Janet, I'm right behind you, and thank the lord you offered to go first ...

Just remember one thing. God is political. Some even suspect he's the ultimate politician. He knows how to spin and he knows how to offer pie in the sky ...

(Below: poor Tony Abbott, clutching a photo while Kevin Rudd gets to drop off Aussie plonk in Rome. Where's the justice in that? Oh my lord why have you forsaken me? Heli Heli lema sabacthani hoc est Deus meus, Deus meus, quid dereliquisti me?)

Tony Abbott, family values, private dicks and Chinatown

2009-07-14T21:46:00.007+10:00

(Above: Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, back in the good old days when you could enhance family relationships and values by having a daughter and a sister all in one).

We were shattered to learn of the reaction of the private dick industry to Tony Abbott's grand strategy to re-introduce a "fault" clause into divorce proceedings.

Rick Feneley has penned an hysterical, outrageous portrait, an extremist view of the consequences of the Mr. Abbott's proposal, in Private eyes dread a return to infidelity on camera.

I mean, what do you make of an anecdote like this?

Picture this: a husband so desperate to escape an unhappy marriage that he commits fraud to "expose" himself in an act of infidelity. He hires a prostitute to act as his lover and a private investigator to burst into a motel room and photograph them in flagrante delicto.

Australia's private investigators can recall the boom days of a seedy, sordid business, when a spouse would go to such extremes to get a divorce.

I mean really, no mad monk comments please. We're above that kind of language, and besides this was most uncommon. In the old days it was much more sensible and simple just to embark on an affair, and have a private dick catch you in the act because your spouse had sooled the hound on to you, and you didn't know the bugger was on to you and had the latest state of the art "flash bulb" technology hooked up to his camera (no implication should be read into the wording of 'hooked up').

"Heaven help us," says Warren Mallard, managing director of Sydney's Lyonswood Investigations and Forensic Group. He does not want want a return to the "ugliest days of all" for marriage in Australia.

"People had to be caught in a compromising position. That required evidence, so there were a lot of photos of ankles wrapped around ears, for want of a better expression. It was not work that investigators relished."

The humiliating pictures could be tendered to the Divorce Court. "But it got to the point where people wanting a divorce would commit fraud and deception and 're-enact' the offence of infidelity - hire a prostitute, hire an investigator, to catch them in the act." Even in cases of amicable divorce, couples agreed to such fabrications.

What spoilsports. What cynics and ne'er do wells. What a pack of mean minded heartless scoundrels. What's wrong with an ankle wrapped around an ear, for want of a better expression. (Though if you want a better expression why not a man thing in a woman thing, or ringing the bell or hiding the salami or playing doctor or santa or dropping anchor or clubbing the kitten?)

Not only would it be great business for the private dick industry, it'd be great fun for tabloids, already running short of material as Republican governors evade the cameras and head off to South America for their fun.

The wretched Mallard - a name that qualifies him for a corner of loon pond - babbles on about privacy laws, and the difficulties of barging into motel rooms and people's houses.

Dearie me, is this in the spirit of the great J.J. "Jake" Gittes, always ready to tear a page out of a public document with the help of a ruler and a cough.

Thank the lord that John Bracey, president of the Australian Institute of Private Detectives, can see a way forward, with private dicks on standby, at the ready, to take instructions, gather evidence, and establish in a court of law the evidence of spousal adultery, contriving with lawyers - at a reasonable expense - to establish guilt, mortification, lashings, and sordid revelations. But there is one minor catch:

"And if there is a law that infidelity is grounds for divorce, we can't have another privacy law that prevents us from gathering evidence of the infidelity. It would be lunacy."

Not a problem. Let's just change the useless privacy laws!

Now some might think the mad monk's proposal (sorry monks of the world) is the actual lunacy, so bereft is he of understanding the way the world works these days, so much in love with the conservative wing of the Catholic church that he simply can't remember what it was like in the old days (though you'd think that the return of a possible love child would have given him at least a gentle prod in that direction).

Sadly Mr. Bracey suspects Mr. Abbott's proposal will be buried, which is ever so unsatisfying given that it would be so much better if Mr. Abbott had been interred in the same place as his social engineering - somewhere dank, dark and festering, and possibly infested with vampires or zombies.

But I'm pleased to learn that the work for the private dick game now lies in family law and custody disputes and adequacy of care for children and abuse and refusals to pay maintenance.

They've moved on from people who fuck up their marriage to people who fuck over their children.

I guess it's a kind of progress.

Oh and maybe you missed the piece about Abbott's family values, wherein he played down rumours he was seeking the leadership of the opposition:

Australian couples have the option of being married under a new law that would make it more difficult to get a divorce as part of a push to strengthen traditional family values by conservative federal politician Tony Abbott.

The outspoken Liberal frontbencher wants a return to a fault-based system of divorce similar to the old Matrimonial Causes Act that provided grounds for divorce, including adultery, cruelty, habitual drunkenness or separation for more than five years. Mr Abbott's proposed new law would run alongside current legislation that allows people to divorce after a 12-month separation.

The strengthening of the institution of marriage is part of Mr Abbott's bid to ramp up a campaign to bring conservatism back to mainstream Liberal Party politics.

Bring it on I say. Bring on the new world of conservative values. Let conservatives "come out" instead of hiding behind the bushes as they did in the Bush and Howard years. Let their wacky values meander in the sunlight. Let them be as visible as gay folk at the Mardi Gras, since they seem to have hid their light under the haystack this last decade or so.

And make Tony Abbott leader of the Liberals now!

Not going to happen? What kind of deviant devious plot would prevent that from happening? But I guess that'd allow Bronwyn Bishop to lean over and whisper in Tony Abbott's ear my favorite line from one of my favorite movies:

Forget it Tony, it's Chinatown.

And if you've read Piers Akerman, you'll know all about what living in Chinatown means.

Bronwyn Bishop, the freaks at Bundanoon, and a burqa led economic recovery

2009-07-14T20:01:00.004+10:00

(Above: Bronwyn Bishop glaring and dressing in style).

Lordy, lordy, lordy.

By their sins shall they be known.

Here's this from Bronwyn Bishop in her eloquently titled piece Fair suck of the water bottle:

I am pleased to see the President of France take a hard line on the burqa – that black prison of fabric from head to toe which totally obliterates the human persona of a woman. He has said it is not welcome in France.

Perhaps the time has come to declare the burqa an instrument of harsh and unusual punishment and change the Declaration of Human Rights to have as its first statement – women are human beings not chattels.

Could it be that I am at one with Bishop and Sarkozy? Who was it that said god was a sick surrealist with a Salvador Dali sense of humor? How did this happen? Where did I go wrong?

The rest of her piece for The Punch was happily as mad as a cut snake, and there was no need for me to go there, with her outrage at the banning of bottled water in Bundanoon - she managed to conflate the binge drinking of alcopops with the decision of the locals to use their local water supply, saying it was a sin, illogical and crazy. I guess drinking water for free as opposed to forking out a hefty premium for the pleasure of looking cool, trendy and now is a sin, crazy and illogical, but WTF has that got to do with binge drinking.

That piece of decepticon logic was followed by handy hints for NSW crims (kicking the crime can in the usual Liberal way), along with her desperate attempt to keep utegate alive when not one of her sentient comrades mentions it when they can instead demand immediate action against the Chinese dragon.

It's lovely to see Bronnie still somewhere back in the last century while the debt truck chugs around the nation, and everybody is appalled at the lack of gumption by the government, when all the Ruddster has to do is speak Mandarin and even the gates of hell would open for him.

But one thing she wrote resonated with me:

Euripidies was right – Those whom the Gods destroy they make first mad.

And they make them mad by making them share a prejudice with Bronnie.

Okay, I'm up for it. Bring on the foot binding, bring on the burqa. As D said in his eloquent note:

But what about all those people whose jobs depend on the manufacture of the burqas, supplying the burqas and delivering the product and finally selling the product? Who will think of them?

Yep, it's time for a burqa led economic revival in this country. And I vote that Bronnie show the way.

(Below: Bronnie on the beach. Note the extensive use of clothing while the men display their lustful inciting love handled naked bodies. Can we learn something from this image?)

Piers Akerman, the Chinese, barbarians at the gate, the opium wars, history and a hammer for a head

2009-07-14T10:39:00.006+10:00

And so we come to the strange and disturbing case of Piers Akerman's fear and loathing of the Chinese.

His latest rant - Rudd stymied as the barbarians shut the gate - would be worthy of a digger on the Australian goldfields in the nineteenth century. Indeedy, he even manages to revive the term celestial, a word you don't find being used outside the muckraking that inspired the Lambing Flat riots in 1861.

As Peng discovered and Hu is now learning, after 177 years the Chinese are still adhering to the established laws of the Celestial Empire and ignoring international covenants which apply in the more civilised modern nations.

Peng is of course James Peng, who spent six years in a Chinese prison, and Hu is the latest Chinese-born Australian businessman to find himself in trouble in the Middle Kingdom (see, I can do the Sons of Heaven gibberish as well as Piers).

But enough of that, let's get back to the history lesson that Piers provides us so we can better understand the fiendish nature of the Chinese:

Not withstanding the muscular actions of the seafaring door openers of the British East India Company, it is the Chinese who could now best be described as barbarians in the matter of both Peng and Hu.

It is Chinese enterprises which enjoy the support of the weight of the state, despite the best efforts of publicists to claim the state ensures businesses in which it holds an interest (all mainland Chinese businesses) operate at arm’s length from the political wing.

Muscular actions? Perhaps they learned too well the lesson of the British East India company, which happened to be fuck them any which way you can in whatever direction you can manage.

But what you ask about the Opium Wars. Why were they fought? Did it happen perchance to involve the British government sorting out the Chinese so that their businessmen could get on with the business of screwing the Chinese?

For all the nastiness of the opium trade, the merchants from Britain and the other European nations which opened China to the world did mightily assist in the modernisation of a feudal state.

Nastiness? Ah that'd be the couple of wars that were fought so that the British smuggling of opium into China from India would be tolerated by the Chinese government, and the noble private sector British East India company could flog its crap to a hooked nation. Well I guess trying to turn a nation into a bunch of dependent junkies is some kind of modernization.

The first war prompted the newly elected MP William Gladstone to wonder if there had ever been a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know.

We could go on through the despicable litany of misbegotten western imperial behavior in China, while not forgetting the contribution of Japan in the second world war, or mentioning the determined desire of the British government to hold on to Hong Kong right up to 1997, after having first got hold of the territory after China's defeat in the second Opium war and the signing of the Convention of Peking.

Yes, tough lessons and the Chinese learned them well. But now we have our very own colonial Colonel Fawcett telling us how it was done in the old days, and how presumably diplomacy should be conducted these days. Quoting Jim Spigelman, Akerman recites an anecdote about how Hugh Hamilton Lindsay had the Daotai's measure in his quest for the opening of Chinese markets:

He sent two tough sailors ashore to deliver a petition to the Daotai requesting he rethink his order. After knocking on the locked entrance gates of the principal public building in Shanghai and receiving no joy, the worthies applied their shoulders to the barriers and shook them open.

Lindsay then stood up to the Daotai, refusing to take back his petition once it had been read and copied, refusing to accept a reply which used terminology of rejection not just refusal, and rejecting the use of the word translated as “barbarian”.

This is of course so Akerman can brood about the word barbarian and its shocking deployment in relation to westerners. Actually the anecdote deserves its proper re-telling:

On June 20, 1832, with symbolism bordering on the vulgar, two English sailors from the Lord Amherst shouldered open the locked entrance gates of the major public building in Shanghai so that their commander could present a petition demanding that the city be opened to British trade. As the commander, Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, reported to his superiors in the British East India Company: "They shook them off their hinges and brought them down with a great clatter." However, conscious of British standards of proper behaviour, he took pains to report that, of course, he had knocked first.

And Akerman misses the point of the anecdote, deliberately of course, perhaps because he could never see the point of knocking first:

Reacting to the use of the word barbarian, Lindsay protested: "The affront is intolerable, for by such conduct the respectability of my own country would suffer. The great English nation has never been a barbarian nation, but a foreign nation."

A document was produced which referred to him as an "English trader". Even though the Shanghai public never saw it, Lindsay was placated. However, his conduct was not calculated to convince any Chinese that the term was inappropriate.

Why? What did Lindsay get up to¿ Well I guess in much the same way as you might take a dim view of somebody deploying a false name and fake occupation:

Lindsay and his interpreter Charles Gutzlaff also made their reports, which were published in England and became very influential. Lindsay was particularly critical of the deceptive conduct of the local officials, referring to their "petty and degrading duplicity". He said this without a trace of embarrassment about the fact that, in order to hide his association with the East India Company, Lindsay had given a false name and claimed to be a private trader blown off course on a voyage from Bengal to Japan. Gutzlaff, who had also given a false name and translated everything that Lindsay said, had spent some of his time distributing Chinese-language excerpts from the Bible and certain religious tracts with such titles as "A Tract against Lying"; "A Tract against Gambling" and "A Tract in Praise of Honesty".

A tract against lying and dissembling hey. What a pity Akerman doesn't read this kind of tract on a regular basis:

Lindsay was adamant as to the model of effective European conduct. "Compliance," he reported, "begets insolence; opposition and defiance produces servility and friendly professions." It apparently never crossed his mind that he was simply being humoured in order to speed his departure.

And so we have in Akerman the Lindsay of his day. Well even his master Rupert found things tricky in Beijing and when you cite the lessons of history, you should be careful:

In his report, Lindsay's strongest contempt was reserved for his assessment of Chinese military prowess. He dismissed the war junks he saw as "wretched and inefficient". He thought the army, with its antiquated and decrepit armaments, would be despatched by one-tenth the number of European troops.

Gutzlaff, the missionary, plainly shared the low value placed on military virtues by the Chinese scholar gentry and its difficulty in accepting the proposition that great skill in the art of killing others was a mark of a superior civilisation. He seemed to understand the Chinese position when he said:

From the long peace which China has enjoyed, all their military works have fallen into decay. They even seem anxious that all should crumble into dust and that wars should be blotted from remembering ... they detest bloodshed and have generally made the greatest sacrifices to prevent it. We attach no blame to their cowardice [a word he clearly used bearing his European audience in mind] but hope that while they continue to be pacific they will cease to be overbearing towards other nations who have power to humble their arrogance.

Ah yes, how things have changed. After being done over, time and again, the Chinese worked out that they needed to get up a bunch of weaponry and a huge army, and then see what happens when the barbarians turn up at the gates and politely knock.

Well done Britain and Japan and every other nation that congregated in Hong Kong in search of the elusive Chinese market - sell every one a bottle opener and you'll be a billionaire my lad - and while we're at it Akkers, why not revive the opium trade? Oh sorry, we already have, by arranging for it to flourish in Afghanistan.

So what's the history lesson for today folks? There are barbarians at the gate, and they carry greetings from Akerman. But beware an ignorance of the implications, subtleties and nuances of history, lest you stumble around in the circus like a clown who can't find his way to the ring ...

Oh as for the rest of Akkers' column, it's a standard dumbed down gloss of the situation of Hu from the perspective of the outraged Liberal party and columnist commentariat, which if read by Chinese officials would do more harm than good, but there you go, when you've spent a lifetime kicking the Chinese and communist can, what else can you do.

When all you've got for a head is a hammer, everything will always look like a nail ...

Gerard Henderson, John Howard, John Howard, John Howard, the basic wage and a pox on the workers

2009-07-14T07:46:00.007+10:00

(Above: we have no evidence that Gerard Henderson or his father or his grandfather wrote the caption for this Bulletin cartoon 16th October 1919: The minimum wage: "All damn fine, but are we going to be guaranteed a minimum of bad conditions, so's we can pay without going further into debt?")

Today is Tuesday and yippie yi yo, it was bet collecting time.

Admittedly it was from a poseur dilettante who had no idea what they were talking about but you take your fun where you find it.

The poor lad couldn't believe me when I explained that reading that prattling Polonius, that desiccated coconut, commentariat columnist Gerard Henderson, would invariably within any column on any subject involve a reference to the Howard Years. Usually with a golden hue, or a rainbow like quality, or a halo affixed firmly to the memory.

It was like watching Old Faithful. Sure in the moments leading up to the gushing of the geyser you might have your anxieties and doubts. You'd turn up wondering whether the name was a trick, and given the frequency of the eruption (between 45 and 125 minutes) you might begin to think the epic trip might have turned into a curate's egg, with the geyser suddenly falling silent.

And then there's a whooshing and a wheezing and a spurting, and up comes the heated water, as reliable as ever.

It's the only way to get through some of Henderson's dry as dust columns.

In another life he writes a media column that flails about at others with a ponderous inaccuracy and a pretense at liveliness, but I guess when you're a short odds geyser in your own columns, you need a funeral director like solemnity to carry the day. And of course to show respect to the departed leader.

In Fair Work makes no sense in GFC, we have several Howard citations. The first references unemployment, noting that when Bob Hawke became PM, the unemployment rate was around 10 per cent:

When the Howard Government was defeated in 2007, it was around 4 per cent and there was a shortage of labour in significant parts of the country.

Thanks to labour market deregulation of course, nothing to do with digging up the country and shipping it overseas, especially to those filthy, fiendish Chinese, with their tendency to lock up Australian executives at a drop of a hat. Resources boom? Western Australia? Shortage of labor? Que?

But Henderson is so reliable, his next reference to Howard delivers a triple dunk whammy:

It is clear, however, that the commissioners and bureaucrats at Fair Work Australia will play an increasing role in regulating labour markets. What's more, Fair Work legislation restores many trade union privileges abolished under Howard's Work Choices legislation. And the overwhelming majority of academics covering the field - many have never run a business or worked in the private sector - can be expected to appear in the media supporting Fair Work Australia.

Yep, there's John Howard, and academics who've never run a business or worked in the private sector and evil trade unions peddling privilege for indolent workers, bludgers who want to destroy Australia.

Which leads me to wonder exactly how private sector Henderson is. According to his brief Wikipedia entry here, he's worked as an academic, in the Commonwealth Department of Industrial Relations, and was on the staff of both Malcolm Fraser and John Howard. But his main gig has been executive director of the Sydney Institute, a privately funded current affairs forum and think tank which relies on corporate sponsorship for a crust in this difficult and troubled world.

Which I guess is why his column is a tedious mix of personal recollections and pro corporate propaganda.

I was employed in the award enforcement section of the Commonwealth Department of Industrial Relations in the early 1980s. It became evident to me that the rigidity of the centralised industrial relations system was actually creating unemployment since there was not sufficient flexibility to make it possible for employers to retain workers at a time of recession. My experience as a public servant led me to condemn the prevailing system in an essay The IR Club, published in Quadrant in September 1983.

Dearie me Polonius, you've been prattling since 1983 about the importance of stripping away workers' rights and indulgences and bonuses and perks. Some things never change for the Old Faithful's of the world, first the bubbling and then the eruption, over and over and over.

In the latter half of the 1980s, the increasing call for industrial relations reform was led by Costello, then a barrister, and by Howard within the Liberal Party. After the recession of the early 1990s, Keating introduced significant reforms which saw the decline of the IR Club and the move to enterprise agreements.

A hit, a palpable hit. Another reference to Howard. And to Peter Costello. Both lawyers. Funny that academics with no experience of the private sector are uninformed while a bunch of lawyers kneecapping the workers are wunderkind for the commentariat.

But Henderson isn't just content to hark back to the recent past, his purvey takes in the old days:

Gillard is a long-time admirer of Henry Bournes Higgins, who established the Australian basic wage just over a century ago. Like Gillard, Higgins was full of the best intentions towards workers. But his Harvester Judgment of 1907 priced workers out of jobs and was substantially altered over the next two decades.

Well yes, and I've always regretted those labor laws that removed children from the business of climbing up chimneys and sweeping out the soot, since they were ideally sized for the job and were given a fair rate of pay for the work (and as they often died of lung related diseases required no form of socialistic medicine for their care).

And you might argue that it was Hugh Victor McKay's stupidity at Sunshine Harvester and his implacable opposition to doing any kind of deal with trade unions that led to the court case, and the Harvester judgment, but why actually spend any time on the specifics and merits of the case in question when you can just pluck a view out of the air, and perhaps even blame it for the great depression (which coincidentally occurred only a a decade after the judgment, say no more).

Anyway, it strikes me that there's been way too much mollycoddling of workers, what with the bizarre notion of the eight hour day and the five day week and a couple of days as a weekend, when in fact the best way to deploy the cattle (and get them away from the trough and off the teat) is to cut their working hours, junk their shifts and scrap overtime. Call them in at a moment's notice and then send them away when they've run out of blood and fresh blood is required.

A return to the vigorous opportunism and adventurism of the Victorian days would far better suit business in the perilous times of the GFC than the rampant socialism of that redheaded Gillard (when she could have had any color out of the bottle, she chose red! Say no more).

What we're facing is the return of an Industrial Relations Club which will set wages, enjoy support from journalists covering this area, and bankrupt business. Well when we say journalists, let's exclude Gerard Henderson and other commentariat columnists.

There's more of course - including praise for the Fair Pay Commission refusing to raise the minimum hourly rate of pay, without wondering why we have a Fair Pay Commission whose business it is to set a fair rate of pay, much as Henry Bournes Higgins determined an Australian basic wage way back when.

Bring back the days of frugal comfort I say. Why seven shillings a day should be enough for any working man with wife and child, and be damned to those who say otherwise.

But enough. Listening to Henderson gush like clockwork is a bit like listening to the ACTU's Sharan Burrow babble on about how hard the workers are done by. Sure, it's a fair show of steam gushing into the air, as predictable as the steps in the mating dance of the bower bird, but sadly in contrast to those natural phenomena, as dull and as tepid and rank and malodorous as ditch water.

Meantime, we'll keep a close look watch on Henderson's special pleading column, and try to fleece a few more unwary punters of a buck or two. Still never doubt the usefulness of Old Faithful. Comes the day he fails to mention Howard is likely to be a sign that the rapture is imminent ...

(Below: old faithful and buffalo roaming and give me a home, but no overtime or other fringe benefits. Yet another irrelevant image in the proud long standing tradition established a month ago by The Punch).

Paul Sheehan, Tim Winton, autoerotic asphyxiation, and the Mormon missionary

2009-07-13T08:41:00.010+10:00

(Above: an example of this site's feeble attempts to emulate News Corp with a gratuitous shot of Madonna while trying to make a point about fetishism. Surely by now we've established our credentials for a career as a News Corp columnist?)

What on earth are we to make of this remark by Paul Sheehan?

As for the physiological explanation of the link between asphyxiation and sexual pleasure, and the psychological explanation of the urge to exploit that link, I don't know, because my curiosity has been overtaken by my recoil mechanism.

That's after a column supposedly devoted to the ins and outs of autoerotic asphyxiation (Breathless sex simmers at the edge of compulsion). Well oxygen depletion is a simple enough mechanism and as usual Wikipedia has an informative article on it and the matter in question here.

Breath play isn't a form of kink to be recommended, because of the obvious dangers involved, but what's sublime about Sheehan's fatuous ignorance is the way he manages to blame the internet for the technique seemingly becoming commonplace, and apparently the new best way for lonely males to end their lonely days in lonely hotel rooms (but come to think of it that's on a par with his decision pleading recoil, to end his column right at the point when he could have ended his and his readers' fatuous ignorance).

Yep, it's Tim Winton's fault for deploying the technique in his novel Miles Franklin winning Breath, and that reflects the baleful influence of the intertubes:

The mainstreaming of erotic asphyxiation in this novel is another element in the process of mainstreaming the values that have exploded out of the largely hidden margins of society thanks to the advent of the internet. The porn industry, more than any other, has been able to export some of its sensibilities into schools and homes, to the point of social conformity among the young.

Tim Winton and the intertubes, conspiring to bring down western civilization as we know it. And shipping it into the minds of the socially conforming young.

Which establishes Sheehan's ignorance - because it's been a fairly well known form of extreme sex play since composer Frantisek Kotzwara died in 1791 from erotic asphyxiation, which according to Wikipedia, is probably the first recorded case. No doubt it's due to the baleful effect of the intertubes in the eighteenth century.

Perhaps the most famous twentieth century death involved Sada Abe, who killed her lover in 1936 and then cut off his testicles and carried them around in a handbag for a number of days. It became a cause celebre in Japan, featuring in any number of novels as well as films, but achieved international recognition with Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, produced in 1976.

That film was widely banned, though given the associated scandal you'd have to have been a monk in a monastery to suggest the notorious show was part of the largely hidden margins of sexual life.

I do remember watching it in a flea pit in Adelaide, and being amused by the number of men in raincoats who hastily exited the cinema as the tale of the mad, obsessed lovers ground to an inevitable and profoundly unerotic conclusion. Those were the days when I'd willingly surround myself with panting men in a darkened room in the interests of auteurism.

Whew, thank the lord those days are gone. I mean there's sex and passion, and then there's death, which rather limits the options for experimental sex play. And then there's the swishing sound of frustrated men stomping out of a cinema stinking of sweaty unfulfilled sex, a smell worse than buttered popcorn.

But I guess it was the infamous role of the internet in the nineteen seventies that should shoulder much of the blame, rather than Oshima.

Still, at least it's a change from blaming comics, which always liked to show aliens threatening evil towards scantily clad, bound or chained women, or The Joy of Sex, which in the seventies devoted a whole page to the pleasures of bondage.

All the same, it seems that Sheehan is titillated by the subject, and he manages not only to conflate it with the prevelance of pornography on the intertubes, but with the safe practice of BDSM:

The more you learn about the subject, the worse it gets. I've been looking sideways at this for years, not wanting to know, but like other highly dubious practices, erotic asphyxiation, or asphyxiophilia, has a following within the subculture known as BDSM (bondage, discipline, sado-masochism).

In BDSM roleplay, erotic asphyxiation is known by a variety of terms such as "edgeplay" or "breathplay" and an erotic asphyxiator is sometimes called a gasper, and can use various paraphernalia including gas masks, plastic bags and bondage straps. Usually a partner is present to avert catastrophe.

Well what are these other highly dubious practices which infest the world of BDSM? Sheehan doesn't go there, which is fine, because then we won't go into the highly dubious practices of safe heterosexual sex, such as glassing as foreplay and rape as a demonstration of male passion.

But then Sheehan is fond of completely unfounded comments:

The real list of such fatalities is long, and much longer than the official record. Most are men.

A long list of fatalities? Much longer than the official record? So what's he got? A couple of celebrity deaths including the recent death of David Carradine, and by implication the death of Michael Hutchence:

Nor is Carradine the first prominent casualty. Ever since the singer Michael Hutchence was found hanged in a hotel room in Double Bay in 1997, there has been doubt about the official cause of death, which was ruled a suicide.

And now it seems there's the intertube influenced Winton and his book, which brings the subject out of the closet, so to speak, so now it can be revealed that many many men have died lonely deaths in strange parts of the house or in hotels:

One of the characters in Breath ends up like Carradine, hanging lifeless in a closet, like a suit. Winton wrote the novel long before Carradine's death, because for years police have been finding the result of erotic asphyxiation gone wrong, bodies hanging in hotel rooms, closets, bathrooms. Many have been ruled suicides after a family member or friend sanitised the scene by removing sexual apparatus.

By golly, for a column that manages to list no more than three celebrity deaths, that's a pretty evocative image of a world gone mad, with men driven to insanity by what's available on the intertubes. Could this be the worst killer of all time, way ahead of passive smoking in cars, which can now only be used to understand less significant matters, like the way Tony Abbott experienced intellectual development difficulties in his youth.

Sheehan really isn't interested in making any sense on the subject. He starts his column by explaining that he doesn't get vampires:

I don't get vampires, avoid them at all cost, but Australia is having a love affair with them. The bestseller list is dominated by a 35-year-old American Mormon, Stephenie Meyer, whose vampire-driven Twilight romance novels hold positions one, two, three and four on the Herald's best-seller list. They've dominated the list for a year, spending a combined 192 weeks there. Australia alone would make Myer a prosperous woman but her four Twilight books have sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.

I don't get sexual asphyxiation, either, and have avoided the subject for years but it, too, is sitting there, surreptitiously, on the bestseller list, just below the Twilight dominance. It can be found in Tim Winton's latest novel, Breath, a best-seller which won the Miles Franklin Award last month, the fourth time Winton has won Australia's most prestigious literary award.

Well from reading this column, I dare say that Sheehan also doesn't get the cult of the goth, bright red lips, pale cheeks, Wuthering Heights (and its implications for women), corsets, fetish clothing, Betty Page, Betty Boop, Buffy, bondage, the beneficial power of garlic, silk stockings, six inch heels, conical steel bras, the importance of carrying a wooden stake, a cross and a set of silver bullets, the sense of style wearing only black provides, the joys of cross dressing and taking a walk on the wild side.

But can he stop blaming the internet for them and suggesting that somehow the full to overflowing tubes have produced a new pornographic social conformity among the young?

Can we just agree that the sudden outbreak of rampant sexuality in fundamentalist Christians and Republican governors has been around for a long time, well before the intertubes got going.

As the priests used to say to the young boys in my school, stop it or you'll go blind, or even worse, get hair on the palms of your hands.

Yep, there's very little that's new under the sun, and the sun has been rising (and setting, in a strictly metaphorical way) for a long time. Legends about sex and sex play and kink have been going around for an equally long time - why it feels like only yesterday I was reading Apuleius's The Golden Ass (which involves an ass doing things) and Seutonius on what the emperor Tiberius liked to lick, but as with Sheehan's speculations, idle regurgitating of nonsense about how the intertubes made them do it, don't make it right ...

Which reminds of the story of the woman who kidnapped a male Mormon missionary and chaining him to a Devon cottage bed with mink handcuffs, and forcing him to have sex. It seems she might be the same woman as a year or so ago paid a substantial sum to a South Korean laboratory to have her pitbull terrier cloned.

Never mind whether it's true or not, the Daily Mail rehashes the original story of McKinney and the Mormon here.

And it's good clean salacious tabloid fun, as opposed to the sanctimonious pieties of Sheehan. And it's available on the intertubes. Even if it's a story that happened in 1978. You can surely see the sinister relevance.

Stand by for more cases of women kidnapping young Mormon missionaries and having their evil way with them. Using mink handcuffs. Oh intertubes you have so much to answer for, and you give so little.

Moral to the tale? There are more things in heaven and earth, especially when it comes to sex, than are dreamed of in Sheehan's limited philosophies ...

(Below: Joyce McKinney, the woman in the 'Mormon missionary with mink handcuffs' affair, proving the baleful influence of the intertubes on bondage in 1978, as well as elevating this site once again to the responsible level of News Corp reporting, in a fair and balanced way, while refusing to sensationalize. We maintain such high standards we'd ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up our nose rather than lower the quality of insight provided herein).

Janet Albrechtsen, David Hicks, Stern Hu, GetUp and the intertubes

2009-07-13T07:45:00.004+10:00

How do you say Janet Albrechtsen in Mandarin, as spoken by someone with a Stephen Conroy accent?

A thought prompted by Janet Albrechtsen's column How do you say Get Up in Mandarin?

You see, the good Dame Slap berates GetUp for overlooking the situation of the situation the Australian born Chinese Rio Tinto businessman accused of espionage and stealing state secrets.

I checked Get Up’s website. Nothing there. It was a case of Mr Who? Same absence of interest over at Liberty Victoria. But let’s be fair and give them time. Maybe we will soon hear from Amnesty International, the various trade unions and civil libertarians who so eagerly became involved in the Fair Go For David campaign and the International Day of Action for David Hicks? Will we see a Fair Go For Stern operation? Or could it be that the brigade of do-gooders who paraded their commitment to human rights for David Hicks were largely driven by the fact that Hicks was imprisoned by Americans under the watch of President George W Bush?

Inspired by her example, I did a check of her recent blogs. To see what she had to say about Senator Stephen Conroy's plan to impose no opt out censorship at network levels on Australia, in a style only managed by the Chinese and Iranian and North Korean governments in recent years.

Couldn't spot a word, not a peek a boo, from this supposedly fierce libertarian. But let's be fair and give her time. Maybe she's just biding her time, waiting for the right, most destructive moment to strike. Or could it be that she thoroughly approves of the Federal government's plans, and thinks a blow against pornography will be a blow for truth for all right thinking conservative Christians?

Sure we've had Albrechtsen spank Conroy for the cost of the new NBN:

Will consumers be prepared to pay $150 or $200 a month for 100megabits per second of broadband? Because it will probably need to cost this much to attract private investment. Or would consumers rather pay Telstra or another operator half that for a 50Mbps service? Is this likely to be a monumental white elephant overtaken by technology or outwitted by the offerings of others?

In other words, where is Australia’s P.J. O’Rourke? The renowned American political writer, who will be in Australia next week, would have a field day poking holes into the hazy $43billion broadband proposal being flogged to mum and dad investors by Rudd. He would remind us, no doubt, of his basic law about politicians: namely that giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

But where's Australia's P. J. O'Rourke when it comes to Conroy's filtering plan, remembering that this wasn't devised a few days ago, as with the arrest of Hu, but has been long festering in the government's mind.

So what about the network level filtering tied in to the new NBN? Is that like loaning your credit card to teenage boys so they can have a good time in the brothel?

Or is it just that arguing about what your ostensible opponents haven't commented on is just a fairly crude ploy, in much the same way as it would be more than obvious to note that during David Hicks' time in Guantanamo, our vast array of commentariat columnists were running a very vocal campaign explaining how the wonderful Americans were wonderful for incarcerating him and keeping him locked up, and demanding that his rights be ignored? So that Australia could stay safe.

And they never forget or forgive any deviancy from their self devised and imposed norm.

Well who knows what the rights and the wrongs of the Hu case are. Who knows if he'll turn into a cause celebre like Schapelle Corby. Who knows if the Chinese government are guilty of grave misconduct. Time will tell, and it's likely Hu will have a lot more attention paid and be given a timelier resolution than that afforded Hicks.

But what's this? Suddenly Albrechtsen discovers that Bob Brown has the same capacity to waffle on about human rights as she has.

To his credit, Greens leader Bob Brown has demanded more action from the Australian Government, telling ABC Radio that. He had no brief for Hu but “I’ve got a total brief for his rights and his rights are non-existent when you compare them with the, what’s required under Australian law. And we should be standing up for Australian norms to be applied to this Australian citizen who’s under arrest and at great threat for his future wellbeing under the Chinese communist system.”

Surely any time now that regular troupe of church leaders, human rights lawyers and other motley activists will line up to echo the same sentiments and demand that the Rudd Government “do something” to protect Mr Hu’s human rights.

Yes and surely any time now that regular troupe of commentariat columnists and motley newspaper journalists will line up to echo the same sentiments as GetUp when it comes to Stephen Conroy's internet level filtering system, and demand that the Rudd government do something to protect Australian adults from the loss of their right to read and see as adults, instead of being reduced to the level of infantilism on view in China.

Or maybe not.

Since she went to the web site, looked around it in detail, and ignored that which stared her in the face. So she could conduct a beat up on our vast array of human right activists, with their extensive - nay vast - access to the pages of The Australian. So that they could jump up and down without knowing the facts of the matter, on the assured basis that the Chinese government is bad and Hu is an innocent victim. If that's the case, let's hope an activist judge lends a helping hand.

Selective indignation is the cheapest and easiest form of righteousness, especially when you blame others for the selective indignation you yourself practice.

Humbuggery rides again, and who else can you expect in the side saddle than Albrechtsen.

(Memo to Albrechtsen and/or her subs. It's GetUp!, or if you find the exclamation mark too offensively in your face, GetUp).

And if you want a look at GetUp's current campaign about Conroy's plan to censor the web, involving the beneficial powers of Censordyne (one scrub and your cabling will be free of everything) you can find it all here.

Tony Abbott, Family Values, and Enhancing the Matrimonial Act for Conservatives

2009-07-12T12:57:00.003+10:00

Tony Abbott is already out and about spruiking for his forthcoming book, which sounds a strange and wonderful beast.

It seems he's only just discovered conservatism, and it must now come out, like young homosexuals announcing to their family that the straight life might not be for them.

"Conservatism was the doctrine that dare not speak its name," Mr Abbott said. "Now I think it is important that conservatism be acknowledged as a critically important component of the strands of thinking within the Liberal Party.

"Conservatism has a potential appeal which may well be much broader than the appeal of political philosophies which have historically been more acceptable in Australia, such as liberalism and socialism."

(Abbott foresees 'coming out' for conservatism).

The doctrine that dare not speak its name? Like the love that dare not speak its name? Um, what did I learn last week in class about trading off, conflation, hi jacking, taking over, usurping and arrogating a term from a minority in the interests of boosting the heterosexual majority? Is conservatism a new kind of sodomy? Or even pedophilia?

Lordy, and what kind of conservative speaking in tongues was going on then during the Howard years and the Bush years. I should have stayed longer in that Baptist church to work it out.

So what's the lad got? Pardon me while I yawn. It's family values. And a return to the Britain of the nineteen thirties, at least in the matter of marital unions:

The point I make in the book is that a society that is moving towards some kind of recognition of gay unions, for instance, is surely capable of providing additional recognition to what might be thought of as traditional marriage.

So what's Abbott's idea of providing greater recognition for man woman marriage? Couples will be given the option of marriage under a matrimonial causes act, which will bring back the fault-based system of divorce dismantled in Australia back in 1975.

Uh huh. Revolutionary thinking. As Josh Gordon notes in his piece for The Age, this provided some fourteen grounds for divorce: including adultery, desertion, cruelty, habitual drunkenness, imprisonment and insanity, or separation for more than five years.

By golly, the private investigator lobby must be slobbering into their beers, and they must have a powerful lobby group at work in the bowels of the Conservative nee Liberal party. Who could ever forget the fun days they had, and the money they earned, and the newspapers they helped sell discovering proof of adultery, or other evidence which would allow one partner to take the other to the cleaners.

I couldn't think of a better plan to diminish trust in marriage, or bring back a punitive approach to relationships. But it seems that Abbott sees marriage as basically an economic contract requiring strict enforceability in a court of law, instead of the slack kind of easy contract we've grown used to:

Something akin to matrimonial causes act marriage ought to be an option for people who would like it," Mr Abbott said. "Even though (marriage) is probably the most important commitment that any human being can make, in fact there are many, many contracts which are harder to enter and harder to get out of than this one."

Well I can see a big future for this new form of matrimonial binding. I can just see all the men with their cocks flapping in the wind like a barn door in a gale signing up for rigorously enforceable punitive terms for a bit of fluff on the side. Why women might even put in a liquidated damages clause so that if the men fail to hit the right kind of milestone, then the penalty for failure to perform is payable without the need to litigate.

Sad to say, in these distrusting days, we already are seeing signs that the contractual basis for marriage is undergoing some changes, with Katrin Radmacher, a German heiress and one of Germany's richest women, winning a Court of Appeal claim in the UK, to overturn a previous award her ex-husband of £5.8m of her £100m fortune.

The decision turned on a pre-nuptial agreement (Pre-nuptial victory for heiress).

Good luck to her - if you sign a pre-nup it should mean something. But I find it peculiarly funny that Tony Abbott should think that bringing back private detectives and lawyers and courts to arbitrate between husband and wife will somehow either advance the cause of matrimony or stand as a beacon of advanced conservative thinking.

If this is the best his book Battlelines has got to offer, pardon me if I spare myself the chore of wading through the 368 pages, at least until it turns up on the two dollar remainder table.

But wait, that page count means it's bulky. Maybe it's even got footnotes, in which case his thoughts on climate change should be a treat ...

(Below: contact Tony Abbott to see if he can develop a private member's bill for this kind of cake to be made available to all contracting couples wanting to settle things the conservative way).

Piers Akerman, boat people, kicking the can and a shameless lack of shame

2009-07-12T09:30:00.003+10:00

When a scandalous and fraudulent header greets you on a Sunday morning, you sigh. You know it has to be Piers Akerman. Here it is:

Rudd's open door to illegals.

Now when I consulted sundry online dictionaries, here was the definition of open door that popped up:

1. Unhindered opportunity; free access.
2. Admission to all on equal terms.
3. A policy whereby a nation trades with all other nations on equal terms.

So the header could only be described as mendacious, misleading, deceptive and fraudulent. So could the rest of the story, which is a typical bit of dog whistling scare mongering by Akerman about the arrival of boat people. Akerman does his best to establish that the Rudd government has launched an open door policy - which is a wondrous trick given that they haven't abolished the Christmas Island facility, where they lock up children out of eyesight - but of course Akerman isn't interested in a rational debate.

Instead his target audience is the extreme right anti-immigration component of his readership. Which is why his concluding remark is both profoundly pious and profoundly hypocritical. After moaning yet again about the golden glories of the Howard years - when will the right get over the fact that Howard is gone, gone, gone - the fat owl of the remove wraps it up with this:

Such flouting of the community will is doubtless going to result in increased numbers embracing unwholesome anti-immigration groups.

Unwholesome anti-immigration groups? What about the number of unwholesome anti-immigration commentariat columnists?

Maybe his readers failed to note the adjective unwholesome. First up comment:

I blame both sides of Politics for all the different nationailities coming into our country.......... our doors have been open since Vietnam ........ and they came out hear to live after the war.......... and all Governments Politicians looked after them....... more so than our guys who came home from Vietnam....and now we have more Muslim religion who try to change us as they dont want to leave their past behind them…
Enough is enough these boat people should come hear the right way or not at all/
as a matter of fact stop migrants for a few years as we are all going through tough times,and also why should Australian tax payers spend tax payers money supporting them.

Oh he knows how to hit a target audience does our Piers. Stop all migrants now! How about a little bonus prejudice? Sure thing:

Most opf the illegals today are from the middle east, and there are believed to be aprox 50,000 more waiting in Indonesia top come here.
Middle East migrants dont do all the crime but they do nearly all the most violent ones.

... Today we are paying for this absurd idea that all cultures are equal. No migrants don’t do all the crime but third world migrants do almost all of the most violent ones. They also run the majority of the drug trade, prostitution, kidnappings, car theft and re-berthing, home invasions, ram raids, standover crimes, muggings, stabbings, murder,welfare fraud and the list goes on. In return what have we got ...Ethnic food
Middle East gangs involved in drug trafficking were responsible for a surge in crime, particularly violent crime, in Australia, retiring Federal Police Commissioner Mick Palmer warned (March 12)."The greater use of hand guns and knives, Mr Palmer said, “is a reflection of behaviour in the countries from where they came”.

In remarkable news today, it was announced that in Britain and the United States, the use of hand guns and knives had been unknown in these countries until recent times, while in Australia a spokesperson deplored the tendency to replace the cut throat razor with knives. If it was good enough for the razor gangs, he noted, a cut throat should be good enough for today's criminals. A spokesperson refused to comment on why baseball bats would only be sold to those who could demonstrate they weren't members of the Balmain branch of the ALP.

On and on Piers ragtag pack of ratbags ranted in an anti-immigrant fervor worthy of the English trying to stop the Irish turning up in Liverpool.

The funniest thing about all this? It was the Vietnam war that saw an influx of Vietnamese into this country. Now in Sydney the Vietnamese community seem to control every second dry cleaning store, and every third faux French bread shop (with lamingtons of course) while the number of Vietnamese restaurants is equalled only by the number of Thai and Indian. Personally I don't mind - I eat better, my clothes are clean, and I don't bother with the bread, which bears only a passing resemblance to the French model (too much sugar and salt, designed for the crude Australian palate).

Now of course under the Howard government, Australia embarked on a couple of great adventures - in Iraq and Afghanistan - with a fairly remote connection to these shores, and brave Australian lads and lasses (so we're told) have been roaming the world, fighting for truth, justice and democracy, and advertising what a great and free and wonderful place Australia is in which to live.

Given the choice of living in an Iraq torn by war for six years (not to mention the many years before), or Afghanistan (when has it not been at war) or Pakistan (disrupted by the war in Afghanistan but with its own very long set of ruling class follies), or for that matter Sri Lanka or the theocratic Iran or Lebanon, bombed by Israel and betrayed by Syria, where might you decide to live if you had even the remotest of chances ...

Do Akerman or his readers have any empathetic understanding of the sheer desperation of people driven to hop into a leaky boat and cross dangerous seas while trusting in corrupt criminals? Do these same readers imagine things will get better as things fall further apart in the world?

Well actually there was one reader that made a plaintive plea:

Anything to whip up a bit of hysteria eh Piers?
Marginalise/demonise to try and produce what is an altered reality.
I feel sorry for people like yourself who seem to thrive on division and a basic lack of decency in order to function.
The world in Socio-economic turmoil and all you can do is pander to xenophobes! Is it any wonder that a compassionate and caring society seems so far from achieving when we have your outdated propaganda to perpetuate hatred and fear?
You call these PEOPLE illegals? A faceless mob to be fearful of? You should be ashamed of yourself.

To which Akerman replied:

Jamie, why should I be ashamed of reminding readers of the duplicity of the Rudd government?

What a pity Akerman couldn't have ended his story with a heartfelt plea for tolerance and understanding:

Such articles by commentariat columnists will doubtless result in increased numbers embracing unwholesome anti-immigration groups. And I'm terribly pleased about that because I hate Kevin Rudd so much I'd stoop to anything, throw any kind of mud, dig up any kind of shit, no matter the stench, to conquer. Call me a grub, call me vile, but please send me your poor and homeless, and watch me make hay with them.

But at least he made the honest reply. Shame? I have no sense of shame, and that's why I can go on being shameless until the cows come home, and the immigrant boat people can is so soundly kicked, it'll be flatter than a pancake.

Which raises only one further question in my mind. Why do people still keep buying the Sunday Telegraph? Cash in the paw only eggs them on, while an online click only sends them into a huddle, trying to work out how to charge freeloaders for the pleasure of reading Piers Akerman.

Your choice, but I'd rather spend six months in a leaky boat than pay for Akerman's musings. Bring on the paywall, bring it on now.

When I was a young boy
I wanted to sail around the world
That's the life for me, living on the sea
Spirit of a sailor, circumnavigates the globe
The lust of a pioneer, will acknowledge
No frontier
I remember you by, thunderclap in the sky
Lightning flash, tempers flare,
'round the horn if you dare
I just spent six months in a leaky boat
Lucky just to keep afloat

Aotearoa, rugged individual
Glisten like a pearl
At the bottom of the world
The tyranny of distance
Didn't stop the cavalier
So why should it stop me
I'll conquer and stay free
Ah c'mon all you lads
Let's forget and forgive
There's a world to explore
Tales to tell back on shore
I just spent six months in a leaky boat
Six months in a leaky boat

Ship-wrecked love can be cruel
Don't be fooled by her kind
There's a wind in my sails
Will protect and prevail
I just spent six months in a leaky boat
Nothing to it leaky boat.

(Songwriters: Finn, Neil Mullane; Griggs, Nigel; Crombie, Noel; Finn, Tim; Rayner, Edward)

Luke McIlveen, lycra, cyclists and Lance Armstrong

2009-07-11T15:26:00.006+10:00

(Above: Jodie Marsh in a lycra jumpsuit, the sort of sight Luke McIlveen can't cop before breakfast. I know, I know, it's descending to the standard of News Corp, but if you're doing the limbo, the aim is to see how low you can go).

Seeing as how I upset a bunch of cyclists awhile back, it's a pleasure to watch them get hold of Luke McIlveen, indulge in a hate fest and shake him all about.

Another bump for a superman in tights is his contribution to Sydney lore on how to respond to cyclists on the road. (It's recycled in The Punch as well, which is where all the cyclists get agitated, but as Tim Blair keeps telling us, why bother to recycle garbage).

I don't like cyclists as a general rule. I don't like the way they clog up my local cafe on Saturday mornings and clip-clop around the joint in their pixie shoes.

Fair enough. I dare say they don't like the fat bearded blob squatting in the corner scoffing down a bacon and egg sandwich dressed in his board short and flip flops (thongs only if you have the limited vocab favored by Lukes).

What's that you say, you've seen photos of Luke and he doesn't have a beard and seems quite fit. Never mind, I much prefer a stereotypical image. Why let facts get in the road of an evocative image.

As I was saying about the fat blobs who parade under the name of Luke, they seem a tad vengeful on the subject of cyclists.

And I sure as hell can't cop the sight before breakfast of a middle-aged lawyer on his third wife wearing a lycra jumpsuit more in line with Cirque du Soleil.

In much the same way as I dare say that middle aged lawyers can't cop a News Corp journalist perving over his third wife as if he's never seen a woman wearing a lycra jumpsuit before. Oh wait, is the lycra jumpsuit meant to be descriptive of the gear worn by the middle aged lawyer. Hmm, maybe it should be more firmly attached to the subject, not floating off towards the end of the sentence like a clown performing verbal gymnastics in the Cirque du Soleil.

Or maybe the sentence is meant to be evocative of a woman wearing a lycra jumpsuit? (As opposed to Superman or Spiderman or a soccer player in lycra). Which raises the question of exactly what Luke finds wrong with a woman wearing a decent lycra jumpsuit? Is it just because it's before breakfast? Once he's shoveled bacon and eggs down his throat, he'd be ready for a perve? Or even some action on the road, where a man's a man and you don't have to be distracted by lycra as you carry out your job of pest control?

But even I've stopped swerving at these road vermin this week long enough to ask: How good is Lance Armstrong?

Oh dear, it's the 'how many points do you get for running over a nun' joke. Only this time it's cyclists as road vermin. And the noble lad's restrained himself because suddenly he's choked with admiration for Lance Armstrong? And after the Tour de France he'll be able to go back to swerving at road vermin in the shape of cyclists?

Well send your cards and letters to Luke McIlveen, News Corp humorist, and expert eradicator of vermin on the roads. Reminds me of that terribly funny time last year when some fifty cyclists were involved in a hit and run crash in Sydney. (Furious driver takes out 50-strong cycle pack).

What a hoot that was. Did those filthy vermin cop it or what. Straight out of the old McIlveen play book.

Next week, Luke explains how road rage is much funnier if you do a Lenny McPherson and stab a tow truck driver in the eye with a handy screw driver ...

Prince Charles, Tim Blair, the monarchy and super cars forever, and a little bit of car porn

2009-07-11T11:50:00.005+10:00

(Above: Henry the VIII, who knew about environmentalism, and architecture, and certainly knows the best way to deal with climate change sceptics).

It's a quiet day on loon pond - genuine eccentricity is a rare and valuable commodity - so it seemed only fair and just to see what our favorite future King of Australia, bonnie Prince Charlie, the aspirational tampon, has been up to in recent times.

And he never disappoints, though the extraordinary gyrations and mind games of the likes of David Flint in suggesting that we somehow live in a 'crowned republic', makes the bonnie Prince seem quite rational.

Other loons have a quite pedestrian imagination. Take Tim Blair - please take Tim Blair - and his paen in praise of super cars, Happiness a brute roaring on the grid.

Dropping these 290km/h beasts into an urban setting gives a place a jolt, if "jolt" sufficiently describes the effect delivered by an 18,000kW defibrillator.

That's around the combined power generated by a whole grid of V8 Supercars. It is a sight to behold. Or to feel. These cars shake the Earth. They also cause happiness. Just ask everyone in Townsville.

I never thought much of the campaign with all the women waving their little fingers at speed freak boys who find their masculinity inside a car. But suddenly I had an almost irresistible urge to wave my little finger in Blair's direction.

The rest of his piece is the usual squawk about the carbon police, as dull as it is predictable. He really should start reading some Dean Swift as a way of sharpening up his wit, but can you read Gulliver's Travels while coming at the sight of leather and chrome and sniffing the fumes and listening to the roar of the pulsating, throbbing, vibrating, slapping, pounding, penetrating, plunging rods of the engines?

So back to Prince Charles, who happily is due to become the next king of Australia thanks to the monarchists (damn you, damn you all to hell, you republican fiends, if you try to stop it).

The happy prince has discovered that Henry VIII was an environmentalist with a keen interest in architecture.

Golly, the reign of Charlie looks like it might turn into something terribly interesting and jolly. Can we look forward to a few more wives, and a beheading or two, or perhaps even a schism in the Church of England (well we're already well rid of the papists and their feeble attitude to adultery and divorce). Perhaps as well as executing modern day irritating feminists like Anne Boleyn, we could throw in the bonus torture of a monk or three.

Now you might think Charlie's attempt to rehabilitate Henry a tad unfortunate, given that he was an irascible tyrant who made Kerry Packer look like a benign social benefactor of cricket and casinos. How wrong you'd be as the Prince regales us with tales of how Henry passed laws in 1543 to protect against the felling of too many oak trees:

What was instinctively understood by many in King Henry's time was the importance of working with the grain of nature to maintain balance between keeping the earth's natural capital intact and sustaining humanity on its renewable income.

Oh the harmony of the Gaia goddess. Bow down you men to the feminine form divine.

Never mind that Henry was seeking to protect the supply of wood for the Royal Navy, he was, argues our Charlie, perhaps the first environmentalist, passing the very first piece of green legislation in Britain. And as for architecture? It's possible that the interest Henry exhibited may even be hereditary.

Well if you can inherit an interest in architecture, how about a gene for fitting up women for a beheading or two? By golly, that'll give the tabloids something to write about.

And I wonder what particular peculiar gene determines that any building built after the second world war is by definition a dastardly modernist or post modernist disaster, unless of course it pays homage to Christopher Wren or the ancient Greeks and Romans?

The rest of the Prince's speech for BBC One - the Richard Dimbeldy Lecture given at St James Palace in front of a live audience - contains a standard set of homilies about the environment. There's only 96 months left to save the planet, and we must switch immediately from an Age of Convenience to an Age of Sustainability. Not to mention the development of a sustainable urbanism. And thinking about the children:

If only because, surely, we all want to bequeath to our children and our grandchildren something other than the living hell of the nightmare that for so many of us now looms on the horizon.

As well as thinking about banking in a different way:

Just as our banking sector is struggling with its debts... so Nature's life-support systems are failing to cope with the debts we have built up there too ... If we don't face up to this, then Nature, the biggest bank of all, could go bust. And no amount of quantitative easing will revive it.

Golly, not much room for super cars in the new world of our latterday Henry. (You can read more in the UK Daily Telegraph here).

Here's Tim Blair, back on the 6th November 2002 boasting about how the monarchists in Australia cynically exploited the fear factor in the campaign for a republic by using 'power grab' rhetoric:

I was one of those cynical monarchists. For some reason the deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, where I worked at the time, appointed me to run a kind of daily update on the upcoming referendum; a strange decision, because I was about the only anti-republican at a paper that was furiously pro-republic.

Perhaps she didn't know about my prejudices. Anyway, while most newspapers in Australia ran tons of "Hooray for the Great New Australian Republic!" items, the Telegraph suddenly became loaded with angry folk denouncing the proposed change. At one point I wrote a Republican Crossword, with clues like: "Bitter New York arts critic, back in Australia to boss us around."

I'd like to think, given the closeness of the result, that my little campaign may have been significant. On "mystic chords" … (link no longer working) Joanne Jacobs’s daughter, in the UK to study at Oxford, explains them well in this email home after the Jubilee celebrations:

"I couldn't believe how little security [Prince Charles] had, or that the queen had. When I asked a Brit about it, she said, 'Well, who would want to hurt the royal family? We love the royal family' … after the queen came out to light the final ceremonial flare, and we all gave her three cheers, fireworks lit up the sky. I'm telling you, I finally get the reason for the monarchy. Nothing in America inspires this much devotion."

Hear, hear!

I'd like to think that Tim Blair's campaign may have been significant too. I'd love to hear more about his devotion to bonnie Prince Charlie. Bend your knee you varlet (in the 'page, attendant or servant' rather than the 'rascally knave' sense of the word), kneel before your environmental superior.

The sooner we get the aspirational tampon hectoring and lecturing climate change sceptics like Tim Blair, the better. Let him arrange a tour of the colonies by private jet, I say, Al Gore style. Let him stand in kingly fashion in his stockings and berate them and remind them of the children and the environmental banking system.

And best of all, if his loyal subjects get fractious and start talking about crowned republics and the stupidity of warministas, how about a few beheadings and the odd bit of torture, Henry style.

Hear, hear!

(Below: as it seems the age of gasoline might be drawing to a close in the future - or as bonnie Prince Charlie starts to behead petrol heads and other fume sniffers - here's a little car porn for Tim Blair. Enjoy it while you can, because soon our new 'enry will join the long line of barking mad King Charlies. All thanks to you and your significant campaign).

Christopher Pearson, the Tridentine Mass, Philistinism and how to behave on a board

2009-07-11T08:09:00.009+10:00

Christopher Pearson is building up quite a following on loon pond - one reader recently referred lovingly to him as a twat, though in Pearsonian fashion perhaps we should discuss in a paragraph or three as to whether twot or twit might be terminologically more appropriate.

But just as Shakespeare had his King John along with his Macbeth, so Pearson can have his slow days - some doubt that he can ever surpass his recent proof that he's the repository of more sage social advice than Emily Post. Perhaps it was his Hamlet moment, at least in the matter of the color pink.

Pearson's homage to the recently departed Frank Devine in Frank conviviality of a Devine soul is not one of his best outings, but devotees will nonetheless scan the entrails for signs of the master's wit.

Let's not speak ill of the dead, but pray let's speak ill of the living, because in Pearson's rambling musings about the past Pearson (and his interactions with Devine) sheds light on thinking which really is beyond the arcane. The how and the why of it being published in The Australian must remain an arcane mystery, rather like transubstantiation.

First let's see what kind of thinking Pearson indulges in when it comes to the Church of Rome:

When I was received into the Catholic Church in 1999, Paddy (McGuiness) joked about being "not outgunned, just outnumbered". Frank (Devine) was delighted and he and his wife, Jacqueline, volunteered to come with (Tony) Abbott and me to a Tridentine high mass in Latin at the Maternal Heart Chapel at Lewisham when I was in Sydney a few days later.

None of them had expected that I'd become a "happy, clappy" low-church type. But neither had they quite anticipated that I'd be an adherent of the old rite - which, until Pope Benedict XVI's election, was the most oppressed and marginalised group in the church - and each of them reacted to the news quite differently.

The news that a board member of SBS and the National Museum - both Howard government appointments - is an arcane devotee of the Latin mass is interesting. That he stridently believes it is one of the most oppressed and marginalised groups in the church perhaps hints at the festering paranoia in groups like the SSPX.

But it does also explain why he was so happy and supportive when Pope Benedict XVI came along to offer ratbags like the SSPX a way to return to the church, bringing along a healthy dose of anti-semitism, as well as a positive reaction to Benedict's motu proprio Summorum Pontificum.

I'm still wondering why the National Museum is a national disgrace and a rampant failure, within its own terms and as an evocation of nation, but every so often I get a glimmer of insight. Anyway, back to the story:

Tony (Abbott) tried his hardest to be broad-minded, although inclined to think that anyone more tradition-oriented than himself was going a bit overboard, and he was obviously relieved to find that the rest of the congregation wasn't noticeably limp-wristed.

What a world can be evoked with a couple of words. Relieved to find the congregation wasn't noticeably limp-wristed? As opposed to finding it subtly so? Thank the lord we're not talking about poofters here.

And Tony tries his hardest to be broad-minded? As opposed to being such a tradition-orientated conservative he always actually turns out to be exceptionally narrow minded?

Jacqueline was quite attracted to the old mass, which reminded her of her youth, and came to some of the Easter ceremonies. Frank (Devine) managed to convey, without quite saying so, that he had submitted obediently when the Vatican all but suppressed the Latin rite 40 years ago and that, however painful it had been at the time, there was no going back. Liturgy was the only dimension of his life in which it seemed to me that his preferences bordered on the philistine.

Why is it I'm suddenly warming to Frank Devine? Philistine for accepting the mass in English?

Now at some time perhaps we can go into the mind set of a group of people who think that the mass in Latin is somehow truer to the Christian message, and work out just how the language devised and deployed by the Roman empire in its conquering days is so much better for the task than Christ's actual language of Aramaic. ( In fact the Tridentine Mass mentioned by Pearson has only been around since 1570 - as usual Wikipedia has an entry here - and in theological terms an affectation for it is a bit like a conservative desire for the below stairs staff to starch and iron the white sheets so they sit nicely in the bed).

But let's keep moving along:

About that time the Howard government named me as a member of the Australia Council, the federal government's main arts funding body. It was a nest of political correctness, full of bureaucrats who pined for the Keating era and Labor's Creative Nation agenda. I managed to persuade Frank and Patrick Morgan, a prominent contributor to Quadrant and literary academic, to accept appointments as members of the council's Literature Board, which they rightly regarded as a thankless public duty.

Yep, there you have it. The naked display of a Latin mass lover berating people in the Australia Council for yearning for the days when a government set a creative nation agenda, and proud to have rooted out the devilish mice infesting the nest of political correctness. If ever the Howard government deserved a bad rap, it was for the naked and obvious nature of its political appointments to cultural and arts bodies, and Christopher Pearson is the incarnation of this derelict, wayward behaviour.

But let's settle now for a final anecdote:

They used to talk to me about the board's operations and on one occasion these conversations came to the attention of the council's chief executive Michael Lynch. He was an arts administrator who detested the Howard ascendancy, went to work in London and only recently has returned to take a position, selected by the Rudd government's new apolitical selection process, as a member of the ABC board.

Do you follow the nuances in all this? Do you have the jesuitical nose for casuistry required for reading Pearson? The way Lynch, an alleged Howard hater, allegedly fled to London during the reign of the man he feared and hated, and has only now returned to sit on the ABC board as a display of the Rudd's new alleged apolitical selection process? Snark, snark.

What a narrow and festering world view some people have.

Lynch interrupted a meeting of the Literature Board to tell them they had no right to communicate with members of the Australia Council on board matters and that if it happened again they could be prosecuted under the provisions of the Commonwealth Crimes Act. Frank, who had edited newspapers on the mean streets of Chicago and New York, was underwhelmed. Morgan remembers his reply to Lynch: "Well, you can see my attorney." Frank just used to say that he made it clear to Lynch that if he thought anyone was in the least bit intimidated by that sort of shenanigans he was mistaken and it was inconceivable that the commonwealth would prosecute members of a junior board for discussing Australia Council business with colleagues.

The CEO interrupted the board in its deliberations. The upstart, the cheek of the fellow.

Well we all know boards - especially in the arts and culture area - leak like a sieve. They're not supposed to - all the boards which I had a working knowledge of were studious in certain aspects of their behavior, and understood that confidentiality was expected at all times.

You know, if you were one of those folks who'd scored an insider's seat on a board and had an application before it, you discreetly left the room and after the matter had been considered, came back in to the approving smirks and congratulatory smiles of your board colleagues.

And the staff always picked up the board papers from board members and took them away for either filing or destruction (and the few times someone tried to smuggle them out, they were snaffled before they could reach the door). And the CEO's spent most of their time trying to hose down members from chatting with lobbyists and interest groups, it being the business of the board to decide rather than supplant the staff, or indulge in common gossip and idle speculation about the business before them. Or worse still, wander around lobbying all and sundry.

So now you have an idea of how Pearson might behave should you decide to put him on a board. They play it tough in the mean streets of Canberra ...

The rest of the piece dwells on Devine and Evelyn Waugh (why are you not surprised) and the joys of sashimi, but it's the bits of fish that smell in a pungent way that will reward the read ...

Even in King John, Shakespeare delivered a few interesting revelations about the ways of the world, and so Pearson does, about the way the world worked in the Howard years ...

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa ...

Tim Blair's mice, John Hartigan and putting away childish things

2009-07-10T16:04:00.006+10:00

While the cat's away, the mice will play.

With Tim Blair in Townsville drooling over super cars, it's been left to the troops to carry on the dialectical discourse.

One silly stirrer has tossed a bone to the dogs, and they've gone into foaming, frothing mode. A contributor dubbed Draco - in homage to a constellation, a dwarf galaxy or a gliding lizard? - said:

The long-running campaign by the embarrassed right to paint Hitler/Nazis as left wing, has had a fatal blow delivered by the extreme right.

He linked to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald, featuring a claim that the Ku Klux Klan had infiltrated an anti-immigration party preparing to contest seats at the next federal election. (We have infiltrated party: KKK).

The party itself is one of those fringe rabble rousing groups clutching at the patriotic flag and name of convenience - Australia First (there's also another mob, the Australian Protectionist Party). It's a colonial version of the BNP, and you can assess the level of threat from these loons by the way the self-titled Kolonial Klan, which grandly announced its infiltration plans, claims to muster 20 members a meeting. Ooooh, scary.

But it led to a righteous bout of barking from the hounds:

Draco, did you read their platform? Utterly opposed to free markets and most other basic freedoms - critters of the left every bit as much as the Greens and the SWP. In fact they have a number of common platforms with Bob Brownshirt.

Surely there’s a soccer game somewhere you could be throwing flares at and punching on with some ethnically identical mortal enemies?

It's impossible to begin to assess the breathtaking ahistorical conflationary stupidity of this remark, so I won't bother. Except to note that Bob Brownshirt would likely have been rounded up during the days of the Nazi regime for his homosexuality and probably wouldn't do much better if the KKK were running the show.

Let's instead turn to the best remark, which came from Le Grognard, a pen name that hints at Napoleonic delusions of grandeur.

I’m sorry ... you do not make any sense. There is no reference to Nazis in your cited article.
Nazi: “Nazism, officially National Socialism(German: Nationalsozialismus), refers to the ideology and practices of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party under Adolf Hitler.” (Started in the 1930s)

The article talks about a completely different organisation. The KKK: “Ku Klux Klan, informally known as The Klan, is the name of several past and present secret militant organizations in the United States whose avowed purpose was to protect the rights of and further the interests of white Americans by violence and intimidation.” (Started in the 1860s).
To be honest, techincally there is no KKK outside of the USA, so I am not sure if this Palmer chap is even allowed to call his group that, or if he is some how violating a ‘copyright’...not that I really care.

However, as far as ‘Nazis’ go, the long running campaign to establish their bonafide left-wing, totalitarian tendencies and inclinations continues, and Draco, you should be embarrassed because you didn’t read the article.

The funniest line is the notion that the long running campaign to establish the bonafide left wing nature of the Nazis has any credibility, as if running a long running campaign is enough in itself. It's a bit like having a long running campaign to establish the scientific credentials of creationism, or a long running campaign to establish that dinosaurs were the favorite food of humans.

And it takes a particularly dumb level of conflationary tendencies to muddle totalitarian with left wing. As if the right can't also have totalitarian tendencies (come on down Dick Cheney). Or theocratic states for that matter. In fact the term was popularized in the twentieth century by the Italian fascists who took up the words of philosopher Giovanni Gentile (as always there's a wikipedia entry on the word). It then got applied to the Soviet Union.

The fact that Hitler deployed the term Socialism in his party's title doesn't in fact make him a socialist, at least if you have any understanding of the implications of Marxism. In fact big business flourished under Nazism and enjoyed considerable benefits from a docile labor force (and American big business loved to do business there). There was a lot of mutually pleasurable back scratching at work - even the so called volks car, the Volkswagon, ended up not in the hands of the volk, but in the hands of the Nazi bureaucracy during the war.

Hitler loathed communism - believing that it came from the mind of a Jew - and spent a considerable amount of energy attacking the domestic communists in Germany and their allies in Moscow. Which is why the pact with Stalin caused such consternation amongst the comrades - no doubt particularly bitter if you'd been herded off to a concentration camp as a reward for being a true believer.

You can really only suggest Hitler was left leaning by saying that the terms left and right - as applied by Hitler's contemporaries - had no actual meaning, so they may now be reversed, or applied as anyone might like and deem fitting. Especially by right wing nutters wanting to troll lefties by doing a little historical re-adjustment to the position of Adolf Hitler. This is the kind of nonsense peddled by Jonah Golberg in the United States, and it's interesting to see that Blair's blog seems to be a natural home for it here. By your followers shall ye be known.

But wait, there's more. Another troll, demeaning the name of the great French comic Jacques Tati, posted this:

Why was early Progressivism (early 20th century) so entwined with racism and eugenics? Anyone have ideas to share?

Here is what I’ve come up with by my little old self:

Racism and eugenics both flowed from the scientific fashion - which at that time supported the idea that certain races were higher on the evolutionary scale than others, and that eugenics could be applied to improve certain groups of human beings. Progressivism accepted these ideas easily because of its worship of science and its innate belief in the superiority of some over others. Furthermore, some of this was simply an expression of certain parts of the new American middle class, too - i.e., “All those lower class people - black or otherwise - are backwards, and we need to improve them.”

And he came up with it all by his little old self, which perhaps is just as well, because one barking mad person on the planet is enough. (if you want a better idea what deluded clowns mean by progressivism, again there's a wikipedia piece here). But you see how it works? Now we have progressivism responsible for racism, the Nazis, Communism, the KKK and the whole damn thing. And it's all the fault of science!

While the cat's away, the pinheads do play. But wait there's more, we haven't got on to climate change. Oh heck, why bother. The bible got it right a long time ago:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

A dip into Blair's comments section is like a dip in a mugwump swamp, where no one seems to have managed to put away childish things, and anything that is seen is seen through a dark incoherent glass of muddled thoughts and ignorance.

What a fertile feeding ground for ratbags lies here ...

Vale John Hartigan, the man who announced that blogs were of such limited value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance. Read the shit that goes out under your banner Mr. Hartigan ... read the shit. By your readers shall you be known ...

Chris Deal, crappest 100 songs and contenders for crappest blogs of all time

2009-07-10T10:48:00.007+10:00

(Above: in the finest traditions of News Corp journalism, an example of nifty book ends which incidentally establish that this site is down and dirty with trend setting trends amongst comic book loving ten year olds. What's that you say, only forty year old nerds get off on superheroes in comic books? Oh go talk dirty to a waitress. And please note the word bookend is actually used in this piece! How's that for relevance).

The loons on loon pond have a game they love to play, and that's naming the crappiest blog on the intertubes.

It's exhausting - at last count they got to a million contenders before they stopped counting, and when the dust had settled, and the squawking stopped, they couldn't decide whether Loon Pond or The Punch deserved to take out the number one prize.

It was decided in the end by a raising of hands and a shout of voices that - as The Punch was financed by Rupert Murdoch's squillions - therefore it should win - at which point some of the loons got terribly upset, since even winning 'worst blog on the intertubes' is a prize better than no prize at all.

But there's a moral to the story, and that involves the danger of reading Crappest 100: the worst songs of all time, as penned by Chris Deal.

It seems that having skewed to sport, The Punch is now trying to skew to the cool, the now, the real and the cutting edge. Like wow dudes and dudettes. Like even mentioning Triple J and its hottest one hundred of all time music poll.

Typical socialistic ABC positivity. How about a bout of negativity? Yep, when all else fails, turn to the worst movie of all time comp, or the worst song of all time, or the crappest one hundred. Sure standbys on a flailing news day (well after all the news that the News of the World is into sleazy, grubby activities worthy of a third world dictator hardly counts as news).

Sadly wit intelligence taste and a knowing referentialism is required when indulging in this kind of schtick. Instead what we get is a bulk offering of recycled music from the intertubes - most likely with shameless disregard for IP rights - and insights like this:

4. Every F**ken City - Paul Kelly
Every city sounds the same. Just like all your songs. Shit.

Oh indeedy, and every childish rant in a childish blog sounds like all those childishly ranting bloggers. Shit.

I could go on but why bother - that's when I decided that most likely all the songs on the list were probably amongst the best songs of all time.

You can, if you like, waste your time on this drivel, but it occurred to me that Rupert Murdoch should be the one that's worried about wasting his money. Meantime Mr. Deal scribbles and scrawls on in his desire for a record burning to match Mr. Hitler's record on book burning:

These are the songs that are, but should never have been. Musical conceptions where the writers should have been forced to wear condoms. Songs that if they were erased from the annals of history, the world would not only not even notice their removal, but would possibly even be changed for the better.

How to fit condoms on writers for The Punch so that the world would not even notice their arrival, or their remove, but would possibly even be changed for the better? And how is this going to appeal to the demographic? As one commentator, Amerigo, pondered that dilemma, he felt compelled to muse:

all along the watchtower ? the end ? pretty neat aye ? whats this? a highschool project?

The Murdoch stable, let loose from the leash, is not a pretty sight. Not so much a pack of fox hunting hounds as a loose rabble of daschunds.

But okay, one high school project does not a high school make. What else have they got?

Well there's Daniela Elser's poignant appeal to the youthful demographic, keeping the pitch for the day chugging along, with her column headed Wanted: youngster to write about drugs and blow jobs.

Ooh, blow jobs. This is going to be a cutting edge demolition of people who want to be cutting edge - including our prattling Polonius Gerard Henderson. She even uses a snap of our Gerard to illustrate the piece. Lordy, Gerard and gen y and blow jobs. It's as desperate as that. But what starts as a rambling analysis of how the youth voice is missing from the current line up turns in to a job application. First the job specification:

What they need is a Hip Young Thing, someone who can knock out a few wry paragraphs about blow jobs and recreational drug use, making a name for themselves with their frequent use of the word ‘fuck’ and poor grammar and syntax.

I’m thinking of a mouthy piece with a soupcon of nous and with the attitude of an MDMA-imbibing drummer about to play their first Homebake sideshow and who wields a vocabulary to Year 10 standard.

(BTW it was spelled f**k, but here we like to use the actual word when the actual word is supposed to be used. After all, between a fuck and a nuclear weapon, allow me to choose the fuck).

Then the job application, complete with a CV full of exemplary qualifications:

I’ve had my fair share of fumblings with B-grade indy rockers, I have stumbled into a mediocre media career, and I’ve never had a relationship last longer than a season of Big Brother. I’ve had the requisite moments of sexual and chemical deviancy, and possess the mandatory quota of gay friends (the last two most definitely not being mutually exclusive).

I have a HECS debt, a credit card debt and a sleep debt.

I can be as cynical, judgemental and self-opinionated as the next Arts graduate with but a passing memory of some French guy named Foucault.

So, call me, call me now - or I’ll just have to go out and follow my other great life ambition of snagging myself a still employed Macquarie banker, a renovated terrace in Paddo and a couple of kids named Bruno and Allegra.

Ah thanks for that Daniela, but here at loon pond, we're still to the brim with the pontifications of our prattling Polonius, and surprisingly we're suddenly full of strange tenderness towards Gerard Henderson. Even if it's unlikely he'll be writing about blow jobs in the near future.

Two strikes in a row. What else you got?

Well sad to say, fatigue set in. I couldn't raise the strength to open up Sarah Ayoub's Why we should give our police a proper payrise - I had this strange desire to give her a burst of taser power - and then Luke McIlveen offered up The one cyclist I actually like with some recycled complete with recycled YouTube footage of an interview with Lance Armstrong (never mind the IP), and I began to get it. This is a site for people too lazy to do a little digging around, to find interest amongst the billions of items on the intertubes, people who prefer a brand to intelligent discourse.

Readers of Rupert Murdoch's rags. Gob smacked by this revelation - it felt better than joining the Rosicrucians - I rambled on down the page.

There was Clive Mathieson on Stokes vs. Packer: A media mogul death match, and Ed Charles offering up Eaaaarggh ... what really made you sick last night ... and Charles Miranda doing I don't mean to be a Queen but I haven't a thing to wear ...

And I got paranoid. I realized this was a reverse takeover of loon pond. The inhabitants had gone and got their own web site. Loons to the right of me, loons to the left, everywhere the din and squawk of loons.

But surely there had to be a capper for this tenth day of July. And there was. It just so happened to be published on the ninth day of July, by David Penberthy with the header How Australia forgot about Schapelle Corby.

Now if that isn't the perfect bookend to five minutes of reading The Punch. David Penberthy reminding us that we've forgotten about Schapelle Corby when on exactly the same day the world wide resources of News Limited brought us a story about how Schapelle Corby gave herself a birthday present by unveiling a shorter hair style as she prepares to celebrate her 32nd birthday. Complete with locks lopped photo!

Banal, trivial, breathtakingly obvious and bereft of insight, with endless bonus recycled footage from YouTube. That's a conversation at The Punch.

Contender for crappest 100 blog spots of all time?

You betcha, hotter than a blow job in a sauna ...

(Below: you can take the boys and girls out of Murdoch and put them in a blog, but can you take the Murdoch out of the boys and girls? Another fine example of a hard hitting story from the News team, this time from the death by chocolate team at the Daily Terror. But remember to keep your cell phone to yourself when on the premises. You just never know).

Mark Seymour, Bob Carr, Louise Adler, Phillip Adams and the new world of downloads

2009-07-09T21:35:00.007+10:00

(Above: isn't death a laugh? Another sooooh funny splash by News Corp, showing all the wit and humor of a funeral director in a morgue. Laugh, I've never laughed so hard - until I realized someone might be bugging my cell phone. Time for a pay wall yet? Another in my News Corp inspired illustrations with nothing to do with the text below).

By golly, they play it tough in the book trade. All your mental images of genteel persons munching on cucumber sandwiches should be parked at the door and replaced by violent brawling souls inclined to thump on the table to make a point (some day soon I'm expecting the Balmain boys to get out the baseball bats):

It seems only yesterday that Bob Carr, the man who can claim to have singlehandedly presided over the demolition of the once grand state of NSW and Louise Adler, CEO of Melbourne University Publishing, engaged in a slanging match on Phillip Adams' radio program Late Night Live (in fact it was only June 29th and it can be found here for listening and downloading under the header An open market for books?)

Carr, in his best pugnacious bully boy manner was whipping himself up into a frothing and a foaming when suddenly there was dead silence at the other end of the debate. Poor Adams - confused much of the time, but here doubly confused - seemed to think that she'd upped and walked out of the studio under the assault of the heavy hitter Carr. He then wrapped it up quick time in a welter of confusion.

Normally listening to the radio with Adams is a soporific affair, ideally suited to nodding off a minute after he starts speaking over his guests to insist on his understanding of the world, but this was jolly good stuff. It makes me think that a ritual kneecapping somewhere in each of the hours would bring better ratings.

Anyway, the next night Adams felt compelled to issue a clarification for the confusion at the end of the boxing match:

... last night Bob seemed to confuse the program, which he knows very well, with a faction fight at a local branch meeting. So he got very grumpy and very loud and poor Louise sort of almost vanished, well she literally vanished at the end and I want to make it clear that she did not flounce out of the studio in a hissy fit. She didn't, she stuck it out, the kid's got guts but the um microphone went down and it's not my fault, it was a problem in the Tardis in Melbourne. I wrote to Bob today and I said Bob, sent him a couple of emails, said Bob um you really do know this program well, you've been on it often enough, but whatever the merits of your argument, you lost the argument because you lost the audience. Thanks for all the emails, fascinating response ...

(You can get that program by downloading the program for Tuesday 30th June, but be warned if you play it in your iTunes, the ABC thinks it's a spiffing idea to provide an image of Adams with the mp4, so that he glowers at you from the screen).

Phew, that's a relief, Louise Adler going dead quiet and apparently storming out just sounded like a hissy fit.

As for Carr, he was - in his usual overbearing way - totally irritating, and at the same time hopelessly compromised by being a board member of Dymocks, which is heading the charge to change to local publishing. That said, he's right, if not quite for all the reasons he enunciated while acting like a twelve bore shotgun.

And while this squabble was strictly in Adams' teacup, it's a nice intro to the folly of the proponents for a restricted Australian book market - most lately provided by Mark Seymour, one time of the Hunters and Collectors, in The book price row rings too sadly familiar.

Now I love Hunters and Collectors, and over the years have probably paid off at least a couple of bricks in the home inhabited by Mark Seymour, assuming he owns a home and didn't splurge my offerings on a wild Melbourne lifestyle (and can it get racy in Melbourne ...)

But he doesn't open well with his argument with this flourish:

This championing of the rights of the consumer is grasping self-interest.

Eer, actually, generally and specifically, the championing of the rights of the consumer is championing the rights of the consumer, unless of course it's the consumer championing the rights of the consumer, in which case it might well be called grasping self-interest. Which is hardly a stirring insight, since consumers generally act on the basis of grasping self-interest.

You see consumers are generally canny, and they know when they're being ripped, and right now it's cheaper for us to buy books from Amazon, in modest bulk so that the freight cost is amortized, and a few weeks later they land in the post box, and we've made small but real savings which - like junkies - keeps us coming back for more. (I can remember doing the same way back when Blackwell offered a mail order service to the colony for books you couldn't get, or if you could, only for a stern colonial price).

Mark Seymour proceeds in his column to relive the famous CD wars of the nineties, offering up a few more classic lines:

Our case was doomed from the start for no other reason than because we presented a commercial argument.

Indeed and no doubt in much the same way as Woollies presented a wonderful commercial argument in its 'we will bury you' stoush with Choice magazine in the debate over providing consumers with pricing information. Well not quite the same:

Most journalists at the media conference appeared to believe that to be artistically true there has to be fundamental antipathy between the artist and the record company. Otherwise, all the artist is doing is playing into the hands of base commercialism. This view demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding as to how the music industry worked. In the end the controversy boiled down to one simple question. How dare we defend the status quo in the face of a black-and-white and entirely theoretical proposition?

That's right, in this particular case, it seems the artists and the record companies were the love in, and the consumers, while much loved, could just stump up the cash. Seymour broods over the parallels and the lost opportunities and how the fat cow turned into the plucked chicken:

Today there are remarkable parallels to be drawn between the 1991 CD controversy and the current draft proposals of the Productivity Commission regarding the price of books.

There is the same level of hysteria driven in large part by "the coalition for cheaper books", a cartel of the retail mega-chains — Woolworths, Coles, Kmart, Big W and Target. The "coalition" has been lobbying the commission hard, with a similar argument. Books cost too much and it's the publishers' fault. Its major spokesman, former NSW premier Bob Carr, has famously demanded we "bring Aussie publishers to book", as though there is something darkly underhand going on.

But as was the case for the music industry, these big retail chains are the only sector who stand to gain anything from reform. What appears to be an altruistic championing of the rights of the consumer is in fact nothing more than a repeat of the grasping self-interest on display in 1991.

Okay, let's concede a few points. It's unlikely that the changes in book importation will bring prices down substantially - the effect in relation to CDs was marginal when it mattered. And book dumping has always been a feature of local retailing - there once was, for example, a retailer that specialized in setting up companies in the Philippines to buy books in bulk and then dump them in Australia (with the Philippines company then liquidated for a measly cost).

Seymour then goes on to hit at least one nail on the head:

The reality is that the Australian music industry is in deep trouble. It has halved in size in the past five to seven years and the fall in the price of CDs is directly attributable to a spectacular decline in demand as a result of digital downloading and copying — it has nothing to do with the removal of import regulations.

Quite simply there is no money in selling CDs, which is why successful vendors, such as JB Hi-Fi, have diversified so heavily. In fact, there's very little money in the business overall. Those of us who've survived the past 10 years have done so by adapting. Margins are down. Audiences likewise. Australian radio has retreated even further from Australian content. The rot was already well set in around the time of the reforms, which is why you'll often hear the '80s referred to as the golden era in Australian popular music.

And precisely the same is about the happen to the book trade. I know there's a special mystique about a book - the smell, the heaviness in the hand, the portability, the entrancing history, the sharing of minds, the tradition going back to Gutenberg - which strangely enough never affected the CD (or VHS), though it did somehow invest in LPs. I've shared in the mystic nonsense, and can still get excited by the tang of opening a freshly minted book (but then I can get the same effect from sniffing a wine not decorked but poured from a screwcap bottle).

But after his insight about digital downloading, does Seymour make the imaginative leap, as the book publishing business will shortly have to do? Unfortunately he's still stuck somewhere back in the nineties, fighting the beastly giant retailers:

The truth is the Productivity Commission's drive for market reform in bookselling has been hijacked by the coalition of giant retailers. If the giant retailers are allowed to import books as soon as they become available from overseas then they will simply demand discounts for the same titles from local publishers or buy overseas. And there will be no legal compulsion to pass the savings on to the consumer.

Of course, they can only do this because size matters. The independents would not have the same clout simply because they could never buy in sufficient quantities to have any effect, as the margins would be infinitesimal. As to the price of books? That's not what this controversy is about. In the end, it's all about selling a free-market line to the tabloids.

The truth is, when the next generation or two of book readers hits the market, the revolution the book trade will face will be of the same kind as the CD faced when the mp3 came into the world, and spread digitally across the intertubes like a free virus.

Right now there's a huge business in the free distribution of education texts in pdf and other formats, and Project Gutenberg has a vast range of out of copyright books available in digitized form. The only thing that has stopped a proliferation of digitized texts has been the reader, which still awaits its iPod.

But that'll come and more quickly than local publishers expect, and then if they think young early adopters will be interested in maintaining a love affair with the world of books, they should check out how many actually still play the better sounding LP as opposed to the hopelessly lossy mp3.

Currently Australian publishers are defending a wall, and even if they win their current storm in a teacup feud, they will find that soon enough the wall will become irrelevant. They will have fought for the Maginot line, and the digitized young will already be in Paris.

That Seymour gets it - technology change did over the music business - and doesn't get it - books will be somehow immune from the impact of technology - is one of the more poignant aspects of the current debate.

Amazon is the first brick in the argument to fall, and that's what the traders know. And as we all know once you step out of the Garden of Eden it's gone for good. Here's Seymour mourning the lost world of music:

Like the publishing industry, the music industry is a complex chain of commercial interests all inextricably linked by small margins. It is a labyrinth of agents, promoters, record companies, publishers, radio stations and, at the pointy end of the food chain, the retailer. We've all been affected by downloading. Carr's glib observations about how the Australian music industry has flourished despite reform are — to use his language — "absolute rubbish".

If the publishing industry thinks it's going to be immune from change, then a harder rain than necessary is going to fall on local publishers and local writers. They need to get real. Perhaps they should try this line for a start:

This championing of the rights of the consumer is in the best interests of publishers and writers ... for without consumers there will be nothing consumed, and nothing to be consumed ... unless of course it comes in the form of a free download for my lovely new eye catching reader.

Senator Stephen Conroy, Censordyne, Asher Moses, the good folk of GetUp and a warm glow for Oral-B

2009-07-09T20:25:00.006+10:00

(Above: working for a cleaner intertubes).

What I want to know is, was it deliberate?

The juxtaposition on the page of the Herald of a nice ad for Oral-B with online activist group GetUp's parody ad campaign for Censordyne, cheek by jowel, top to bottom?

The story's here, and it's by Asher Moses, under the header Censordyne: net censoring gets a toothpasting.

It's a never no mind, I guess. I've always felt a warm glow towards Oral-B. I like their peppermint toothpaste so much I go into cut price pharmacies to buy it, thereby avoiding Woollies and their 'we will bury you' attitude to consumers and Choice. I've had one of their electric toothbrushes for over a decade and never looked back (I notice back in 2004 Choice rated their cheap unit as top of ten electric brushes in terms of cleaning teeth and massaging gums).

But even if it's just a happenstance, I still feel a warm glow towards the Oral-B brand - they know how to do peppermint like the Dutch know how to do hot chocolate.

There's a parody website here.

There's a parody search engine here.

The target? The federal Australian government's fabulous folly, a harebrained scheme by the harebrained Conroy to do an Iran on the country by way of intertubes censorship.

GetUp plans to run the ad on every domestic Qantas flight into Canberra in August, around the first sitting week of Parliament. They also intend to run the ad on television, starting on Sunday during Meet the Press, but the number of plays will depend on donations from the public. Why not send them a few schekels to help send Senator Conroy up shitless?

Creator of the ad is Dan Ilic, GetUp CEO Simon Sheikh is pushing it out into the world, and the indefatigable Asher Moses chalks up another story about the sublime stupidity of Conroy. Props to them all.

If he isn't feeling the heat in his feet by now, Conroy surely must have taken a course in fire walking from a Filipino faith healer.

Here's a snap of the website:

Oh and here's the video:

Rupert Murdoch, the Guardian, the News of the World and the art and science of knowing nothing

2009-07-09T18:29:00.003+10:00

(Above: oberfeldwebel Hans Georg Schultz serial number 23781 - John Banner. "I hear nothing. I see nothing. I now nothing!" or "I know nothing - NOTHING!")

RUPERT MURDOCH OWNS SLEAZY GRUBBY NEST OF SPIES

Oh goody goody gumdrops, that felt good.

Not like the old days of course. Blogger has a limited palette. No, nothing like the days when a two inch header wasn't big enough. Back then I loved a header that was big and bold and brave. Give me some men, stout hearted men. Six, nine, twelve inches. Whatever you've got. Shout it from the rooftops stuff.

Sorry mild delirium there.

I know you know all about it already - and if you don't, chuff off to The Guardian's story Murdoch papers paid £1m to gag phone-hacking victims.

Of course Mr. Murdoch says he knows nothing.

I know nothing, he allegedly told Bloombergs news, which of course will immediately remind you of the Know Nothing movement (which has its own Wikipedia page here). When a member of the Native American Party was asked about its activities, he was supposed to reply "I know nothing."

Oh alright, you pop culture nerds. Go on, strut about, do your Hogan's Heroes fake German imitation. I know nothink, mein herr.

I guess you can apply that to readers of News Corp papers now. When asked about the activities of the tabloid rag News of the World, they'll be able to say "I know nothing."

We've already had the 'it's only one rotten apple in a barrel of fresh food' defence, as deployed during the Iraq war endless times by the Bush administration, but here's hoping it keeps on keeping on in other news media.

Meantime, practise that look into camera. The only thing I know is that I know nothing ... and get out your know nothing soap so that you can wash out your know nothing mouth ...

Seth Stevenson, advertising, love, hate, pain and the strange door that leads to a green void

2009-07-09T16:59:00.008+10:00

(Above: Love pain the whole damn thing
if you want my heart you get everything
Love pain the whole damn thing
It's a crown of thorns to wear a golden ring
Love pain the whole damn thing

Oh sorry Amy Sky, got it wrong, it's an ad for scientology).

One of the things about living in Sydney is that there are cockroaches everywhere.

You can put down baits, you can mount fierce attacks, but they just keep coming. One time a blocked sewer out the back resulted in a man lifting the lid from the sewer and giving me a glimpse into the netherworld. Zillions of cockroaches, festering away just a few metres away from the back gate.

No way you can stop that kind of infestation, or the occasional cockie warrior making it into the kitchen. They'll win in the end. Game over.

Advertising on the intertubes is a bit like the cockies. It's everywhere, works on crude formulations of interest, and frequently features the underbelly kind of client. Lately there's an advertisement that's been doing the rounds for Scientology:

"You are not your name," says a voice-over announcer, as we see a series of different nametags. "You're not your job." We see people in the uniforms of different occupations. "You're not the clothes you wear or the neighborhood you live in." Images continue to illustrate the litany of things that you are not. "You are a spirit that will never die," the announcer concludes. "And no matter how beaten down, you will rise again." The tag line: "Scientology. Know yourself. Know life."

Know thetans? Know clear?

You can catch up with Seth Stevenson's assessment of the ad here at Slate, in Are You There God? It's Me, Madison Avenue How to make an ad for a church.

He gives it a B-, and along with a link to the recent series in the St. Petersburg Times on the self denominated church (here), notes that it seems that the cult has been recently redoubling efforts to raise funds.

Perhaps this new campaign is part of Miscavige's revenue drive. Or perhaps it's an effort to counteract the negative press, the increasingly open ridicule, and the growing bands of protesters that have lately dogged the religion.

Stevenson's impressed by the slickness, the high budget gloss, and the cinematography and editing of the ad. But he also raises a few questions about the tone - dark, dramatic and epic.

... Scientology's marketing challenges are different from those faced by religions with more established bona fides. By now—especially in the wake of the Tom Cruise couch-jumping incident, and the subsequent snarky national conversation—I think there are a fair number of people out there who have a nascent, inchoate sense that Scientology is weird. They're looking for reassurances that this is a faith for everyday people, not just eccentric celebrities. They're wondering whether Scientology's worship services will be something they're comfortable with. These grandiose yet stubbornly vague ads, with their intimations that Scientology holds the answers to all life's riddles, don't bother to address any of those less lofty concerns.

That's why I'd rate them an F. The latest to flash pop up to come my way has the same portentous vaguely sci fi feel to it. Love and pain and the whole damn thing and the mystery of it all, lurking behind a door that might have been painted by Magritte on a depressively bad day for surrealism, and with flashes of sci fi lightning that makes it look like Cecil B. de Mille was an inspiration.

But whenever you ask an open question in a campaign - like "what is the answer?" - you have to accept that the customer is likely to answer "not your alphabet soup buddy". As an ad, it's about as convincing as John Travolta's Battlefield Earth.

But I do hope they keep sending them my way. It gives me a delicious thrill at the thought of the money they're wasting, when they'd be so much better off getting the worker bees to harass people in the streets, and arm wrestle them inside for a free test.

If you can get a sucker to fall for that kind of pea under the shell routine, you could well have a chook ripe for the plucking and the eating and the spitting out of the bones (but save the chicken feet, very tasty).

Guys, guys, that's not a door. This is a door:

Piers Akerman, John Hartigan, Arundhati Roy, Mudgin-Gal and News Corp lifts up the world

2009-07-09T11:55:00.006+10:00

(Above: Black Narcissus, or how Piers Akerman made me think of joining a nunnery).

What ho? What's this?

Why I had taken thee for a knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; a one-trunk-inheriting slave; and one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service. Indeed, I'd fancied thou art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir to a mongrel bitch, one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deni'st the least syllable of thy addition.

But it seems as well as being a shameless filcher of Shakespeare, I got it wrong.

Akker Dakkers has turned caring socialist.

Day after day recently he's sent me into turmoil, first with his love of Bruno (even if he hadn't seen the film), proving his love of gay folk, and then, with his enthusiastic support for the importation of Wall Street orientated elephants from Thailand to save Taronga zoo, proving how he got the notion of breeding in captivity as cosmic entrepreneurial elephant salvation, in contrast to the useless greenies and RSPA, who didn't have a clue about anything.

Yep, and now he's a flush pink, as in Aboriginal milestones and hateful millstones, he's doing what his fearless leader John Hartigan demanded. A story that surprises and delights readers. A clap happy story. And what's more he wants to fling more government money at indigenous women and in particular Mudgin-Gal Aboriginal Women's Corporation:

Its work is however under constant threat because Mudgin-Gal is run by volunteers who are funded through a variety of private and corporate bodies through the Redfern Foundation. Its skeleton staff is paid through a trickle of grants from state and federal agencies on a project-by-project basis.

Given the millions of dollars the Federal and State Governments are wasting currently, it seems sheer lunacy that a group such as Mudgin-Gal, which provides the tools that will enable some Aboriginal families to find much-needed stability, is starved of resources.

By golly, it's time to get Piers into position as a bureaucrat handing out the lolly to aboriginal groups. He's turned sensitive and aware. Now what would you think was a reasonable measure for the work Mudgin-Gal does?

Through Mudgin-Gal’s Seeding Hope, project, which will be launched today, the Redfern women hope to continue to develop their hybrid programs developed in concert with bodies like Relationships Australia.

This may mean teaching such simple things as attendance and compliance to enable them to hold regular jobs - basic stuff, but crucial.

Mudgin-Gal, which occupies several terrace houses and operates a women’s shelter, has earned the respect of the community. Not once have men broken into the women’s shelter.

Not once broken into by the men! I can see that going on any sensible funding application form. Have you either in the recent past, or the distant past been broken into by a man or men? If yes, give details - break-ins will be held against you - and if no, proceed to the column indicating the amount you are requesting. Any figure will do, for break in free folk.

I keed, I keed. If you want to find out more about Mudgin-Gal, you can find a pdf on their programs, philosophies and activities here.

Reading it, you wonder if the women involved would be entirely happy having Piers as a bouncing puppy lolloping along enthusiastically behind them. After all, when Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy won the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize, she donated a third of the money to the Mudgin-Gal Women's Corporation (the other two organizations being the ACT's The Connection and Weena Mooga Gu Gudba from Ceduna).

Now don't start Piers on the Sydney Peace Prize and that bunch of do gooder wankers, or their decision to give the prize to Roy - paying for a perfect stranger to treat us like pariahs. A man can only stay community and socialist minded for so long.

When you have a head kicker like Piers as your friend, here's hoping he can fling $16.5k the women's way when he wins a prize for "best inspiring story" of the year.

But bummer dude, there's always a downside to an Akker Dakker story. First the yin, then the yang. First the light, then the dark.

First he upsets a few abused people by proposing the following:

Every study shows the family is the most important social unit in our society and that abused children, almost inevitably, will go on to abuse their own children.

Remind me not to give any help to anyone abused as a child, since almost inevitably they'll go on to abuse their own children. You're doomed I tells ya, because Piers' tells me so.

And then it wouldn't be an Akkers column if he didn't provide a bit of balance, and a display of how much he loves aboriginal culture, provided it conforms to his notions of aboriginal culture (which should include a capacity to manufacture neolithic tools in the manner of 40,000 years ago tribal ancestors).

By contrast, the ABC will tonight screen a so-called documentary called Spirit Stones that mumbles its way from mysterious claims of gravel falling from the sky to a generalised statement against white civilisation.

Well of course I'd expect the socialists at the ABC to do this sort of thing. Come to think of it, I'm surprised that's the least of it, but I guess dwelling and brooding too much on the show would go against the grain of writing a happy, uplifting story. Oh wait, there's more:

Again, by way of contrast, the curious program to be aired on the ABC appears to be a meandering rant of those who do not want to see Aboriginal people given the skills to endure in the modern world. That the ABC and its funding body Film Australia feel it was worth making and broadcasting reflects on the disastrous social-engineering mindsets that dominate within these bodies.

Fortunately, such backwardness doesn’t prevail among the gals from Mudgin-Gal, who have more important things to concentrate their minds and focus their energy on. Mudgin-Gal, with your help, can make a positive difference. The ABC program demonstrates that culturally, it remains a negative force.

Gals. From Mudgin-Gal. Lordy, let me roll over and quietly die in a feminist funk.

Okay, recovered, feeling better now.

Um, just one thought. "Appears to be". Strange kind of wording. "Appears to be"?

Piers did get a screener didn't he? He has seen the show, which airs tonight on the ABC? And not just read the screed on the back of the case?

It's not another case of writing a column in a vacuum, as he did about Bruno, which included a little sideways flip of the curls on the head, along with an admission he hadn't actually seen the show?

Hmm, you'll find no greater critic than me of the culturally stultified world of Film Australia, now incorporated within the stultified world of Screen Australia, but a close analysis of the text provides no internal evidence Piers has actually watched the show. Like there's plenty of generalities, but no specifics, in the sense that his meandering rant is interchangeable with any number of other meandering rants of his on the subject of indigenous Australia.

"Appears to be"?

What a prattling knave.

Oh well, enough with the carping. Let's stick with the positives, another victory for fearless leader John Hartigan and his quest for positive, uplifting stories. Who'd have thought that he could lift up that ponderous Piers pachyderm (meaning thick skinned) and transform him into a shining light, dispensing government welfare with a flourish and exuding positive joy in the company of Sydney peace prize winner Arundhati Roy.

By golly, I passed up the chance to become a nun when a child, but suddenly I'm thinking of joining - maybe more The Nun's Story than Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus (though come to think of it, that David Farrar has fun amongst the penguins).

In this crazy, mixed up world, kiddo, miracles can happen ...

Update: I see in a response to a comment that Akerman claims to have seen a preview of the film. Phew, that's a relief. He's just an incompetent writer and a hopeless film critic. Another up beat ending to a happy story full of surprises and joy for the reader.