Piers Akerman, Janet Albrechtsen, the rewriting of history,the Ruddster and a dash of zen

A confession. I'm addicted to zen koans. Have been for a long time. Started out with haiku - after long ago reading Harold Stewart's go at translating the form in Net of Fireflies, though these days purists get very agitated about his translations.

From there it was a short step to Paul Zeps translation of Nyogen Senzaki's 101 Zen Stories, released as Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Like going back to re-read Robert Louis Stevenson and Lewis Carroll, it's an abiding, enduring pleasure. These days of course you can find more koans on the intertubes than hot cups of tea.

One of my favourites involves a man walking across a field, only to stumble across a tiger. He flees, with the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, the man has two choices - stay and be eaten or jump. He jumps, but as he falls, he grabs hold of a bush, and dangles in the air. Above him is the tiger. Terrified, the man looks down below, to the bottom of the cliff. There another tiger appears, looking up and waiting for the feast to fall into his lap. At that moment, two mice, one white, one black, suddenly appear and begin to gnaw away at the roots to the bush. That's when the man sees a luscious strawberry dangling from a vine growing amongst the rocks. He reaches out and plucks the strawberry, and eats it. How sweet it tastes.

Now what, you might ask, has this got to do in any way shape and form with a blog crusading against gibbering right wing idiots, unleashed by feral lick spittle lackey editors on an unsuspecting world in a bid to harangue and berate it into submission? 

Well clearly you understand nothing grasshopper. Whenever I open my digital content in the morning I smell the virtual new mown grass and I contemplate the ethereal blue of the sky and then I read whichever curmudgeon has launched an assault on the middle ground of sanity, respect and human decency, and I smile. How sweet it tastes.

This morning poor old Kevin Rudd, that conniving intellectual socialist with leftist leanings designed to create more conniptions in a right wing columnist than catnip in a pussy, cops a battering from all sides. But the message isn't entirely clear - it seems the commentariet haven't been talking to each other.

Over at the Daily Terror the fat owl is distraught - Rudd is plunging us deep into the red.

A responsible leadership team would seek a bipartisan approach to the crisis. Rudd has destroyed any possibility of building that consensus.

(Perhaps the most amusing part of the a very short and lazy blog entry are the comments below it - it seems the fat owl is now being flamed regularly by his readership, and has taken alternately to abusing them and indiscriminately praising the Howard government. Poor unhappy fat owl, go avenging angels).

Okay, let's ay that Rudd read the fat owl and had a life changing revelation and decided to seek bipartisanship as a result of reading the fat owl's wise and moving words - it's a stretch, but let's say it, as the fat owl, always inflated with self-importance would think it entirely possible.

What then would the evil, conspiring Ruddster make of Janet Albrechtsen over at The Australian, that American owned institute for right wing thought: PM dumps facade for ideological dream.

Her punchline?

Even those in favor of stimulus spending and budget deficits (like Ronald Reagan?) should accept the need for vigilance to ensure Rudd's latest $42 billion package is rigorously justified on economic, not political or ideological grounds. The very last thing we need at this time is bipartisanship.

Indeed, and the very last thing we need is someone who paid any attention to the cawing and crying of the loons.

Along the way, as she gets to her final desperate act of verbal hostility, Albrechtsen manages to lead with all the talking points that justify the current stupidity of the Republicans, now a mean southern rump of dumb resentment.

So what caused the current great crash? You guessed it (and isn't it amazing that a human bean could write this kind of nonsense with a straight face):

One of the more wicked myths perpetuated by Rudd is his cheap attack on bloated corporate salaries and lack of regulation. Great politics but economically irresponsible: neither caused the crisis. Instead, it was loose money and wrong regulation in the US: utopian social planning by Democrat administrations stretching back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, continued by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton who sold a dream of government-mandated, taxpayer-funded home loans for all.

That's right, you stupid wretches, it was all the fault of the peanut farmer from Georgia, not to mention FDR way back into the thirties, and Bill Clinton, who was more interested in a blow job than public policy.

What's that you say? Didn't George Bush and the neo liberals run America for eight years? Didn't Ronnie Reagan come after Carter and FDR and sweep all that vile democrat dung under the carpet?

It's at this point of course you realize that Albrechtsen isn't after truth, she's a hysteric wanting to burn witches on faggots heaped in a bonfire. So her attack on Roosevelt's New Deal (and the Deal itself), along with her plug for an article in the flailing, failing Quadrant, and a rant based on Amity Shlae's wretched, one sided polemical broadside entitled The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression shows she's actually a simple minded revisionist who would have found a job in Stalinist Russia, if Stalin had wanted a hackette to do his bidding.

As always, the truth is more complex, the solutions more complicated and human than could ever be allowed to enter Albrechtsen's two legs good, four legs bad, black and white, 2D world.

Funnily enough, she can actually analyse and describe her own condition:

So why all this 21st century worship of false idols? Part of it is simply myth-making, a romanticisation of leftist ideals.

Substitute rightist for leftist ideals, and there you have it. As a worshipper of false idols, and as a promoter of deluded causes and as a writer determined to simplify and abuse, the right in Australia has no greater myth-maker or idol-worshipper than Albrechtsen. 

On the other hand, sometimes reading her, she's so predictable and dumb, it becomes a total pain. Actual real interesting and complex history doesn't need her stupid distortions to be interesting. Sometimes when you look through a glass darkly, you don't actually manage to see or say anything interesting.

Before we go, here's a few poems from Basho, active in the seventeenth century.

Summer grasses:

all that remains of great soldiers'

imperial dreams.

Eaten alive by

lice and fleas - now the horse 

beside my pillow pees.

O bush warblers!

Now you've shit all over

my rice cake on the porch.

Nothing in the cry 

of cicadas suggests they

are about to die.

To which I can only add, oh Akerman and Albrechtsen, now you've shat all over my pie with sauce. Thank god, I have some strawberries in the fridge and maybe at least one of them (thank you oh thank you Woollies fresh food people) hasn't gone mouldy just yet.

John Dickson, God botherers, do gooders, empty churches and onwards Atheist Soldiers

They never give up, the Christians. Tireless and indefatigable and boring. 

Take Dr John Dickson, director of the Centre for Public Christianity and the author of Jesus: A Short Life. No please take him. 

What's the point of writing a short life of Jesus - the new Testament is short enough, and pretty thread bare at that when it comes to biographical details, the historical record's even more barren, and when you get down to the nitty gritty, no one likes to actually mention or dwell on his brother James and how he might have been the result of a virgin birth as well (or did the mother of god actually act like a common person and have an ordinary birth?)

Guess it's a bit like Shakespeare, the less you know with any certainty, the greater the urge to write.

But enough of that. I never did understand theology, and anyway Dickson's main beef  is that Faith no more does little good for society.

It's the usual tiresome stuff, as Dickson notes that people having 'no religion' have jumped from 6.7 per cent in 1971 to 19 per cent in 2006, with the young 'uns being particularly keen to abandon god. Jolly good, I say, and let's have more of it.

But of course Dickson's not happy with that kind of raw data. He wonders how many putting 'no religion' might actually be reticent true believers, and manages to claw back the figure to just five per cent who call themselves atheists. But wait, he digs up another survey that suggests atheists don't necessarily deny the existence of god. Yep, we could have a hundred per cent true believers if you look at the stats and assorted surveys in the right, Christian, branch-stacking ways.

Dickson doesn't seem worried about what god we might be talking about. Last I checked amongst sundry loon fundamentalists (especially those supported and endorsed by Elvis Costello, or is that Peter), it seems the Christian god is not the Islamic god, and it goes without saying neither god is the Hindu god, and of course Jews don't recognize Christ as god.

So what's an atheist to do? How many gods do we have to renounce? What about wiccans and those of the original Roman faith, who still believe in Zeus? 

Zounds, it's tricky.

Anyhoo, after conclusively proving there are no atheists going the rounds in Australia, suddenly Dickson changes tack, and says we should all be terribly worried the churches are getting empty, because it's only the Christians who do charity work. (We might be hundred per cent believers in something metaphysical, but we have a Homer Simpson attitude to church. Well done The Simpsons).

It's only the Christians who volunteer! Funny and I thought that trawling through the charity bins at Vinnies (or the Sallies or wherever) and forking over a buck for a useless piece of junk was showing decent atheist respect for Christian charity.

Dickson can't get enough of the do gooders: 

a particular preoccupation of the faithful. Whether trying to earn their way to heaven or (more likely) trying to embody the love they think God has for the world, believers tend to give more money away, run more soup kitchens, collect more aid for those in poor countries and gravitate more toward 'people professions' than those without religion.

Ah there's just one problem here Dr Dickson. We on the right (well I'm on the right just for the moment for the sake of the argument) understand that charity is useless socialistic nonsense of the worst Marxist kind. Give the poor a job (preferably in a match factory) and they can go out and buy things and stimulate the economy. Give the money to the rich and it will trickle down to the poor, boost the economy and we'll all float upwards. Nothing to do with religion, and nothing to do with god. It's just the free market at work, and doesn't it work well.

Charity is for mugs and fraudsters. (Or so it seems if you read the right and their views on dole bludgers and down and out loafers who don't deserve any charity when a kick in the pants, or the crutch would do the job).

As for religious institutions, there's a good reason few people want to be cooped up like penguins in a nunnery these days. It's a silly waste of a life. And there are even more good reasons why people don't want to get involved with churches, synagogues and mosques: (a) they can't be certain they'll pick the winner. Fancy spending your life dedicated to Christ, only to discover you needed to be at the mosque to pick up the virgins in the after life (and vice versa); (b) church is incredibly dull; and (c) the notion you have to be religious and a believer to be a do gooder concerned for humanity is a typically offensive, exclusivist Christian notion that really sticks in the throat and not even the Heimlich manoeuvre will get it out.

By the way did I mention we have a homosexual Catholic priest in the family? Nice guy, tends the flock, does his duty, has a warm relationship with his partner, and keeps his head down. Now no name, no pack drill, because if the Church found out, there'd be no doubt he'd be exorcised, but I'm not certain where he stands on an eternity of hell versus a life of loving and giving and sharing. I'm thinking a bit of non-Christopher Pearson manly loving in the real world has turned out to be his true calling.

But then more and more people are coming to understand that it's hard to believe in a talking snake (I know I'm as boring as Dr Dickson when I keep urging you to check out Bill Maher's Religulous, but please do, it's funny enough, and it collects together as decent a bunch of loons as you can find in a single digital file).

Still more unbelievers are coming to understand that maybe the conflicting, squabbling, contradictory and confusing voices emanating from everywhere in the name of assorted gods is not the way forward in sorting out this chaotic world.

There are many solutions to this. My own is to nuke the lot of them, all the true believers, sent them off to the rapture, and let Vishnu, the destroyer of worlds, sort them out.

David Brooks, Ward Three Morality, The Poor Rich, and Sublimated Rage

Normally there's no room for special guest loons on the international landscape - there's too little time, and anyway any thoughts by loons outside our very own Australian loon pond are swiftly regurgitated by the local loons, who just love to have beaks shoved down their throats and a specially refined porridge of bugs and bran pumped into their stomachs (thereby conveniently bypassing the brain).

Now that little Billy Kristol has left The New York Times, poor David Brooks is one of the few resident right wing loons left in the house, and he doesn't quite know how to handle it, verging from moderate Obama praise to attempts at rational conversations to attempts at humor which, well, it has to be said, which are quite sad.

Take his latest flourish, a humorous column grandly entitled Ward Three Morality, which is all about the plight of the super rich - you know the ponces and gits that think they can still spend billions in bonuses and flash living, having fucked the American economy in general and fucked their very own companies in very specific ways.

Brooks seems in two comical minds about this, because he seems to be upset for the rich, who might be down to their last four hundred million or so. And they way they don't seem to realize that their general failure, and need to apply to government for help, has opened them up to a medieval morality play where they are ritually humiliated and deprived of their perks.

This allows Brooks to take a series of sideswipes at Ward Three, a section of Northwest Washington DC where senior Democratic staff live. These folk are the petty minded bureaucrats who are giving the the rich a hard time, mainly according to Brooks because of "Sublimated Liquidity Rage", "Status-Income Disequilibrium", and "Status rivalries endemic to the upper-middle class": 

As law school grads, they reset B-school grads. As Washingtonians, they resent New Yorkers. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure.

In short, people in Ward Three disdain three things: cleavage, hunting and dumb people who are richer than they are. Rich people have to learn to adapt to the new power structure if they hope to survive.

Golly gee, and there I was thinking it might have had something to do with businessmen who couldn't run a business, who drove America and the world into the ground. You don't need cleavage or hunting skills to do that, not even Dick Cheney, whatever you might think about his man breasts and the way he handles a shotgun.

Typically, Brooks omits a few key indicators. Ward Three types particularly detest smart arse Canadians who go American and pretend to be New Yorkers, especially those who specialise in NPR wonkery and public policy professorships, while trying to be political pundits with a hawkish right wing bent (except when they change their minds about Iraq). 

If there comes a time when The New York Times has to do more than mortgage its building - like you know reach out to government to save a national institution with a liberal bent - won't there be laughs and chuckles when it goes the way of all those Hearst rags that went before it.

But really who does Brooks think is the problem here? The rich who fucked up, or the bureaucrats who perforce now have to deal with them as they come caps in hand to Washington, chirping like Olivers for more gruel (with super rich enhanced potent bonus vitamin C)? 

If the rich had done their jobs, and not been so happy to take mind blowing risks, they could have gone on their fat cat ways and no one would have been the wiser. Or cared much, since the rich will always be with us, and so it goes.

Instead they spent too much time at the country club playing golf, and too little time actually checking the books. 

Brooks suggests a few mournful strategies: 

 ... there are times when Masters of the Universe must be the Masters of the Grovel. If you are a hedge fund manage and you find yourself in conversation with a person from Ward Three, apologize for ruining the Hamptons, and subsequently, the entire global economy.

What you must realize, above all, is the rich no longer control the economy and its mores. Ward Three people do, and their rule has just begun.

Darn tooting, and there's a long hard rain gunna fall. It's payback time, and now as people look around, they're going to look at newspapers of record like the NY Times, and check the record. And see how it utterly failed in its mission throughout the Bush years. Brooks, who purports an even handed attempt at credibility, is amongst the most notable and inept, perhaps flinching when Bush spoke but still going along with the lah lah fruitloops making the policy settings these first long eight years of the new century.

It might be fun for satirical opinion writers to pound away at the envious bureaucrats in the Third Ward, but it's even more fun pounding the rich when they're down (since the rich are never really out, they just stash their assets in all kinds of handy rainy day places).  And it's especial fun to pound The New York Times and their hapless vaguely conservative, hopelessly last year columnists, who think a bit of Washington bashing might provide a bit of harmless distraction, a jolly jape for the long suffering residents of the Hamptons.

Tell your readership to eat their government funded cake while they can Mr. Brooks, because something tells me we're all going to be eating gruel for a long time because of the incompetence of the pillars of American business, finance and industry. (Let's all have a laugh along with the captains of the US car industry for a start).

Meantime, what's the bet that at some point some Australian pundit will feel the need to do a satirical piece about the team of Ruddster bureaucrats lurking in some Canberra suburb, and the mindless way they cruelly deal with neo Liberals, small business, large business and Malcolm Turnbull (oops, sorry, I forgot Gerard, neo Liberals never existed, and certainly not in Australia, and calling Malcolm a flag changing Republican wannabe is a vicious slur when everyone knows he's really a merchant banker and a millionaire who knows where all the bodies are buried).

Oh yes, we're in for a fun year, and the queasy, uneasy humor of David Brooks is already making me feel seasick.

Gerard Henderson, the death of neo liberalism, the plague of social democrats, Jimmy Carter and Kevin Ruddster

Golly, there's chocolate and hot cross buns at Easter, and chocolate and sugar coated popcorn at Christmas. Life's sweet, don't you reckon? I just love pagan festivals, thanks unto the wiccan equinox and the Roman saturnalia. 

Well forget them, they're nothing, nothing, I tells ya.

Every Tuesday, there's Gerard Henderson in The Sydney Morning Herald, giving us free pearls of wisdom (well sort of free, because a click delivers digital content while sending the foolish SMH broke, providing you don't click on one of their intrusive offensive transition splash ads, though they might call them pop ups just to mollify you. They're getting as bad as a porn site).

Anyhoo, those pearls. Crunchy, deep fried, profound in flavor and wisdom. Oh yes, that Polonius of the printed word, that advisor to princes and potentates, that noble 2020 warrior (just doin' ma duty ma'am), that serial rooter for Sarah Palin, is always to hand to right the ship of state, ever so gently and in tones so dry that desiccated coconut loses whatever water it might have tucked away in a corner of the plastic packet.

Yep, it's like the Goodies - you just know the kitten and the tower are going to fall when Gerard steps into the ring. He's wittier than a Monty Python sketch, stronger than a Bill Maher religious bash, faster than a feeble Robin Williams on speed joke, more righteous than the Incredible Hulk, though prone to bouts of indignation that would make Ed Norton  flinch (whatever did happen to Eric Bana?)

Gee, it's like being a junkie, addicted to that pure unadulterated Henderson meth fix on a Tuesday.

Come on down Polonius, give us some of that ice blue flame, what have you got for us this week? Nothing predictable, I'm sure. 

But wait a minute, what's this: Rudd neo-liberal with the facts. Groan. Not another piece on PM Ruddster's piece for The Monthly, that peddler of socialistic clap trap for teachers with leather patches on their elbows? (You know, the one established by a wealthy property developer, one Morry Schwartz, not that Gerard or I are into slagging off the wealthy per se, even if they're dirty rotten class traitors).

Okay, let's do a quick run down. Seems Rudd is wrong (well who can argue with that), and that his piece is ahistorical. It fails to mention the wonderful banking and regulatory and currency and prudential system we have, as detailed by Gillard at Davos, and established by John Howard (who did everything for ever and ever amen). 

And here - you can almost hear Gerard splutter on the page, and it's bloody hard to splutter silently off stage - whatever that thing called neo liberalism by the Ruddster might happen to be, it certainly didn't prevail in Britain the US or Australia. Let's see, who can we mention in the article - well, there's Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Bob Hawke, and even Therese Rein who made her cash out of privatizing government services (always play the wife card when bashing up the man).

We can even go back to Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan or that peanut farmer Jimmy Carter. We can of course harumph in an even-handed way (where would Polonius be without a harumph or two):

The Prime Minister makes some valuable points in his very detailed essay. Certainly there is reason to attack greed, incompetence and inadequate regulation in the financial markets. The errors that occurred have been acknowledged by Alan Greenspan (the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve) and Sir John Gieve (the deputry governor of the Bank of England).

But of course it was Jimmy Carter that introduced the notion of housing for low income earners way back when. Yes damn you Jimmy Carter. Way back in 1981 it all went wrong. Neo-liberalism had nothing to do with it. Gerard Henderson himself was still in swaddling clothes.

And then a couple of strange admissions: Australia will suffer from the global financial crisis. But thankfully we will survive, and of course we will survive, and be able to go into deficit, and survive, thanks to the wonderful John Howard and the god fearing, god loving Peter Costello, and their strong surpluses, even if they derived them from that atheistic, communistic, mineral devouring China, and were pissed against the wall like a drunken sailor to buy votes and re-election.

This was not achieved by George Bush and the conservatives in the US, nor by the Blair/Brown social democrats in Britain.

Say what? George Who? Guess he was some feller who failed to balance the books, and his wretched body was thrown into a pit and covered with lime and forgotten about a long time ago, like Mozart. 

Say what? He was the leader of the free world and ran the United States of America for eight long years, and he and his administration fancied themselves as neo liberals, employing that ultra neo liberal Dick Cheney as Vice President. And around them clustered a set of poo bah neo liberals the likes of which haven't been seen since the time of  Nanki Poo in The Mikado (I've got a little list, oh yes I've got a little list).

You know, the reign that ended what, a month ago. Well that's so long ago, and it had bugger all to do with the current meltdown (I mean you might blame George for the dot com bubble, but that'd be ahistorical too, because Bill Gates and pizza caused that to peak in March 2000, way before George came to power).

Blair who? Must have been some kind of feller who acted as lap dog and panting poodle to George Bush, but damn it, don't forget he was never some kind of social conservative, no neo liberal out there fighting the Crusades one more time against the fierce Islamic hordes (and last we heard doing a wonderful job fixing up the Middle East as a devout Catholic would). No Blair was Labor through and through, the thrill he got from screwing workers was all about being pious and righteous in a free market way.

And now? Well everything's the fault of Obama. He's a social democrat. He's been in power a couple of weeks, and everything wrong in the world is his fault, even though faithful Republicans, while hoping he fails, have been doing everything they can to help him. (As for Kevin Rudd, how dare he, how double dare he call John Howard, the saintly John Howard a neo Liberal. No wonder his wife is looting the system, and he's writing gobbledegook).

Gee, reading Henderson is almost like attending a Stalinist show trial, followed by a Stalinist purge. Neo liberal? Not me folks, George Bush backer, nothing to do with me, rooter for Sarah Palin, you must have the wrong feller.

Oh and while you're at it Ruddster, advises our Polonius, go back to John Howard's wonderful labor laws, that Work Choices thingy that got him kicked out of office, and forget about global warming, and get rid of silly notions of taxing carbon. 

This would not be a concession to conservatives or neo-liberalism. Just common sense.

What wonderful, thoughtful advice Polonius. Told you it'd be a taste treat. As healthy and as sustaining as the chemicals in diet Coke. Never thought anyone could make the Ruddster sound like an intellectual but Henderson succeeds admirably.

And what have we learned? Well neo liberalism didn't exist, and even if it did, it had nothing to do with anything, and anything you might say to the contrary can't be heard by our Polonius, because he's blocking his ears. Everybody who's ever done anything in the recent past is either a vile social democrat, like Jimmy Carter, the ruination of us all, or a simple humane conservative, like that wonderful John Howard. 

Your lesson for the day, not so much ahistorical, as ahysterical. Now go forth in peace and spread the word.

By the way, did you know that the Puritans banned Christmas? Yep, because of its Roman saturnalian connections, they shut it down for twenty years in the seventeenth century. Or that Pope Paul the Second amused the Roman citizenry back in 1466 by forcing Jews to race naked through the streets of the city? And had a hearty laugh while doing it. 

Now there's a noble tradition for the Pope a Dope and his cohorts to revive, along with bringing a cheerful batch of anti-Semites back into the fold. Come on Christopher Pearson, sounds like a great idea.

My own thought? Is there some way we can ban Gerard Henderson for twenty years, or at least make him run naked through the streets when he gets things wrong. What fun we could have chortling and laughing at the goose with no feathers.

Whatever, we're heading to easter, must get out that statue of Aphrodite, give her some choccy, and thank her for the bounteous blessing of Gerard.

David Burchell, The Ruddster, Malcolm in the middle and the perils of Adelaide

An exceptionally quiet day on loon pond, with the only signs of restlessness a mild flap over at The Australian as David Burchell tries to grapple with ways to destroy the Ruddster in Too many authors get Rudd into a write mess.

You have to feel sorry for the loons as they work out that neo liberalism is dead and that, sadly too true, "the Howard government became the largest dispenser of purely passive welfare entitlements since Federation".

Indeedy. And how my heart reaches out for them when forced to write of "that suffocating burden of pious cant that so often deflects centre-leftists from the complicated (and often unwelcome) reality of the world around them".

Oh yes indeedy. Maybe that kind of cant is kissing cousin to the other kind - you know "that suffocating burden of pious cant that so often deflects centre-rightists from the complicated (and often unwelcome) reality of the world around them".

None of them seem to have noticed that the world is in an economic meltdown, spiralling out of control as a result of their worship of George Bush and the dumb greedy fucks that drove America and the rest of the world into the ground these eight past years. And that blaming the Clintons no longer cuts it. The worst result since the great depression.

That's how you end up with a Ruddster. That's how your team gets some time on the sidelines worrying that no one follows your plays anymore (go Steelers).

Oh the tragedy, to have to listen to the Ruddster, perhaps the dullest, most opaque, Christian, tedious, pious, bureaucratic and painful Rooster of them all. Well, do I care? There wasn't much name-calling as the Titanic went down (they even allowed the band to play on), and it's fun to see the cantists get excited about an article in The Monthly. Won't somebody spare a dime or a thought for Quadrant - has someone got a new Piltdown hoax, anything, to get the circulation back up to a thousand?

Over at The Sydney Morning Herald, things go from worse to bizarre. There's Paul Sheehan, intermittent loon, saying that the voters might well prefer Napoleon Rudd when the alternative is Malcolm Bonaparte. (Which chameleon do you prefer?)

Is this the first time that someone has noticed just how badly Malcolm Turnbull is doing, not just in the polls but in the general tedium surrounding a hot, muggy January? Turnbull once got by as a kind of dog whistling moderate with a past littered with fuck ups in republicanism and fixing up the flag, but ever since we heard that Chris Kenny, an Adelaide hack with right wing views on global warming and so on was appointed Malcolm's chief of staff, we've been thinking that there's been a conscious decision to steer the good ship Turnbull onto the reefs of right wing ratbaggery. 

Kenny was at one time an adviser to Alexander Downer, and if that doesn't give you a whiff of the way things work in Adelaide, you'll need to go live there for awhile. Second thoughts, life's way too short, as that humble rock star Ben Folds discovered when he married an Adelaide gal.

If you can stand the pain you can still find Kenny's scribbles in The Advertiser, once a proud broadsheet with North Terrace views but now turned into a tabloid of the most vulgar kind by its American owner (yep, taken over and wrecked, just as The News killed The News, the original Adelaide tabloid rag, when there was a buck to be made over sentiment).

And here's the funny thing. Not a word about Costello turning to god on Australia Day. Well that should give Malcolm some comfort. He can fuck up at his leisure, get shafted by Sheehan, ignored by the public, and generally disparaged without half the grief faced by that hang faced hound Brendan Nelson. And up against a tin rooster with feet of clay who fancies himself as a political theorist, and who sends the neo liberals into a frenzy, only to kill them, stupefy them, with boredom. Life can be cruel.

But it could be worse. You could be living in Adelaide. Take it away Ben:

Adelaide

On a plane

Far from the united states

of LA

Dropping in from outer space

Takes a day

Now I see the Bogans

At the motor race

Here you know the world could turn

Or crash and burn

And you would never know it

Going where the air is clear

There's better beer in Adelaide ...

(and so on down to)

And you know the earth could turn

Or crash and burn

And you would never now it.

Really got to make it to the finish line

Get the record done on time

Pack the bags

And catch a flight

And you can kiss my ass goodbye

On Adelaide.

(Once saw Ben play the Enmore. Gee he and his team were good, tight, rocking, energy plus, pounding away at the piano like it deserved to be nuked, and then brain snap - Ben went to Adelaide. Deary me, how even the righteous can take the wrong path).

So don't trust me, trust the newly reformed, turned wise by experience, Adelaide 'kiss my arse' departed, Paul Kelly and Ben Folds. 

They know how to rock in the suburbs, or is it just that they know that somebody, say Malcolm, is a brick sinking slowly. Trust the boys who know how to rock Malcolm, and keep Chris Kenny and his weird Adelaide ways at a safe distance. 

Piers Akerman, Kevin Rudd, the great depression and heart attacks

Over at the Daily Terror (or is it the Sunday Terror?) the fat owl has found time to have an apoplectic heart attack over the Ruddster and his demonising of capitalism.

After all, as the fat owl points out, the depression wasn't ended by Big Government, it was small business that did the job. And Michael Costa, one time NSW treasurer, now looks like a 'reforming giant'.

As well as side-swiping Rudd, the fat owl delivers some lusty blows in the direction of NSW Labor and the state government. 

The fat owl fumes: 

Rudd's whole agenda for the nation is based not on empirical data, on fact-based reality, it is based on ideological theories that should have been euthanased with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

That they are still in existence is a testament to the power of the relics of Marxism who still control the ethos in the nation's major universities.

Cough (sorry, hand over mouth), cough, er fat owl of the remove. Care to explain how Australia has profited, especially during the Howard Years, from the resources boom, driven by demand from China, controlled by the relics of Marxism? Care to comment on the role of China, which should have been euthanased perhaps, in the world economy, and its funding of the American imperium? 

Does it matter if fact-based reality actually resides in an alternate universe?

By the way, the fat owl should beware. Putting out apoplectic, apocalyptic columns can lead to heat stroke as a side result of global warming, or worse, it can lead to a heart attack and treatment in a socialistic, godless, atheistic, heathenish, way too large, anti-small business, non-paying of creditors public hospital.

Finally, a few readers have asked about the pet name 'fat owl of the remove' for the sublime Akerman. It derives from the long out of fashion scribblings (a penny a word) from the pen of Frank Richards way back when. You can google him and find out more about Billy Bunter's love of tuck. Actually he's more fun to read than Piers Akerman, but sadly he's not in a position to be employed by the Daily Terror (second thoughts from beyond the grave he might have something more witty and cogent to say than the screeching fat owl. Yarooh garooar).

Update for those few that might actually care or give a heck: today, being lucky, especially seeing as how I'd rather actually chop off my hand than pay for a Murdoch rag, I picked up a copy of the Daily Terror for free, and just for a lark read the fat owl's column in actual newsprint form. But damned if I could find his lines about the Berlin Wall and Marxists in universities. So perplexed I read the column three times. Hairdresser couldn't understand why my hair had suddenly gone stark white. Sure enough some kindly sub had removed the rant element that made sure the fat owl sounded like a raving, cawing loon. But it's still there on line. Go figure. 

Maybe someone in there figured that the fat owl's cry for freedom and to hell with censorship should be punished with a bit of choice pruning. Now I'm really concerned for all the Daily Terror readers who won't understand that it's the Marxists in the universities and their theories who've produced this global depression. (I also believe cuckoo clocks and chocolate explain the mental instability prevalent in people in Switzerland).

Christopher Pearson, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the SSPX and anti-semitism

Reading Christopher Pearson is one of the more peculiar pleasures available to the modern reader of newspapers.

Why The Australian publishes his commentariet on the Holy Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire (much diminished) is one of the deeper infallible mysteries, in much the same way as transubstantiation converts an ordinary drop of sherry into a healthy dose of type O blood direct from the body of Christ, and turns bread into a slice of flesh, perhaps a sweet tender cut carved from the thigh.

There's a peculiar self-loathing about Pearson and his proud parade of his gay-driven chastity for preference over sordid sex of a homosexual kind (or worse an actual gay marriage in a relationship involving giving and caring and loving). He is, at heart, a medievalist, a man driven to distraction by his own unhealthy perverted desires and the awful antics of those who lived life to the full in the nineteen sixties.

But as a result all his love is sent out in gushing waves towards the Roman church and its wonderful Holy See, with the current incumbent worthy of all kinds of loving understanding.

That's why lesser mortals have failed to understand why the Holy Father has decided to make peace with the bunch of raving ratbags and loons who parade under the guise of Catholic fundamentalist separatism, and have provided shelter for raving anti-semites in the guise of the SSPX (Society of Saint Pius X, a virulent form of extremist thinking available in Australia as elsewhere in the world).

As a result of carefully calculated manoeuvrings, according to Christopher, the Vatican produced a fait accompli, and as a result it seems is that most of  the SSPX's 500 or so priests and their congregations, not to mention 200 seminarians in training, will come back into the fold. "So his (Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re's) latest move will leave Catholicism a more pluralistic institution than it's been for a very long time."

Which is to say even more full, perhaps even completely replete, with as diverse a flock of galahs, fools, and barking mad conservatives as could be imagined in the twenty first century.

But that's the Pope's mission: "His primary responsibility is not to ingratiate himself with the Left-liberal press but to bring separated brethren - including the inconvenient and the barking mad as well as the mild-mannered conservatives - back into the church".

With a bald po-faced earnestness that should earn Pearson a 'pious hypocrite of the year' award, he seeks to explain away Marcel Lefebvre as a harmless French church man carrying a little cultural baggage, driven to mild extremes by hateful, hurtful vile modernists (who thought like y'know that the mass should be in a language the folk could understand, say English instead of Latin, so the flock could be more than a bunch of automatized sheep).

But no, it's those damned pesky republicans, socialists and the ecclesiastical left who created Lefebvre. Sure he supported Vichy (but his dad as in the resistance), sure he backed Le Pen (but only because of abortion) and sure he wrote a letter in 1985 to John Paul 11 saying Jews, communists and freemasons were the enemies of the Church.

But don't get it wrong - "to see anti-Semitism as Lefebvre's defining characteristic as misguided as dismissing the SSPX as a hate group". Sure, like the way Mel Gibson's dad doesn't have an anti-semitic bone in his body (just like good ol' drunken Mel himself), he just likes to see priests get dressed up in drag and sing in Latin (not like those bloody sixties hippies who liked to get undressed, smoke pot, fornicate in a lascivious manner and call themselves christians).

Yep, it seems that the main problem for the splinter group is just the modernists (who control everything, everything I tells ya) and the power of the bishops (when jeeze everybody knows the Pope is the only infallible one).

So what about this lunatic Richard Williamson? Well he's just a harmless deluded crank, who has happens to believe in a standard set of right wing conspiracy theories like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the twin towers being demolished by US agencies.

Harmless really, the result of taking refuge in a religious cult, one now warmly welcomed back into the fold. That's right, according to Pearson, the church has embraced a religious cult. Go figure. Anyhoo, not everyone in the SSPX shares all Williamson's beliefs - as long ago as 2007 they denounced anti-semitism. "But only in the past week has it managed to discipline and silence him". (Williamson was consecrated by Lefebvre way back in 1988. Still the wheels of truth grind slowly in the church - remember it was in 2000 that the Pope said sorry to Galileo for giving him a hard time in 1633).

The convoluted contortions of Pearson are fascinating to behold. They provide continuous amusement for anyone interested in logical expression and rational coherent argument. Now all sing along:

Is life just a game where we make up the rules

While we're searching for something to say

Or are we just simple spiralling coils

Of self-replicating DNA?

I'm for the idea that it's just a game where we make up the rules. And then you can spend a happy life in jesuitical hair splitting and working out just how many angels can fit on a pin and how many souls make it to purgatory (since it seems limbo might not exist anymore) and how many are going directly to hell, especially those hippie modernists who don't understand the beauty of Latin, a language established by heathen Romans long before they hit on the excellent notion of feeding Christians to lions.

Nuttiness, all is nuttiness, and Christopher Pearson a beautifully nutty and sultana-rich fruitcake, worthy of serving at Christmas, if only that wasn't a pagan festival celebrating materialism and a bearded jolly old man in red and white who closely resembles Satan.

Yep, let's face it, the Pope has succeeded magnificently. The Church is more barking mad than ever, and Christopher Pearson is there to celebrate it, and apologise for it, and resolutely excuse it in The Australian. What a funny world we live in, I say (and remind me never to buy The Australian).

Oh and if you must here is A broad church for all , (a click will make Rupert Murdoch, American owner of The Australian diddly squat), while if you want to get a good anti-abortion tirade from the Rockdale branch of the SSPX, you can always go here. A click here will encourage the lunatics in their new rapprochement with the Church, and its new radical extremism might herald the downfall of the beast of Rome and the start of the rapture. So it could be worth it. 

If however you want a bit of sanity, try Christopher Buckley with his Pope-a-Dope piece at The Daily Beast. Buckley was of course thrown out of Valhalla for drinking Obama kool-aid when he should have been drinking Palinade cordial fresh from Jonestown, but apart from sending up the whack-job called Lefebvre, and providing a link to the Holocaust denying rant by Williamson posted on You Tube, he also links to his own piece of writing on visiting Auschwitz. As well as deserving praise for being the author of the excellent Thank You For Smoking, it could be said that Buckley has more literary skill (and sanity) in his little finger than Pearson possesses within his substantial body. 

Meantime folks, it's time to make sure you have 666 somewhere around your house or in your possession as the end times draw near, and the heat buckles the rails of poor old Melbourne.

Luckily I have the numbers embedded in my driver's licence and still keep a registration plate off my old car, which included the numbers purely by chance. Does this mean something? Is it a sign? Something syntagmatic? Stop it you post structuralist, semiotically driven modernists, y'all go blind I tells ya.