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India. One-way.

This plane ticket, and everything it represents, is more important to me right now than anything; everything in my life at the moment is viewed in the context of my plans to travel through India and the middle east next year. As a true Leftist I’ve even been learning Arabic since February.

For this reason I’ve decided to close GrodsCorp.

In late 2003 I started GrodsCorp for much the same reasons as any other blogger: I wanted a place to dump my thoughts and opinions in the vain hope that someone, anyone might read them. The very first iteration of GrodsCorp was built with hand-coded HTML — a skill I learned (badly) by trial-and-error during long, boring overnight shifts in television back in 1998. After transitioning through various content management systems and designs, GrodsCorp ended up as the Wordpress blog with the orange and blue theme (thanks, silpheed!) that you all know today.

The dude with the sunnies in the header has been GrodsCorp’s mascot for most of the site’s history, and there is no truth in the claim that GrodsCorp’s mascot is similar and/or identical to that of Austrian pretzel company Soletti. Here’s me on the ski fields of New Zealand daring Soletti’s lawyers to bring it on by strapping Joe to my backpack while snowboarding.

You go faster with a stuffed toy on your back.

And here’s me defending the Soletti vs. GrodsCorp case in the Supreme Court of Teh Blogosphere.

The restitution prosts, your Majestness.

In the five-and-a-half years since I first uploaded this site to the intertubes via my dialup connection, GrodsCorp grew into a community of hundreds of people who contributed, read and commented. Over 2,600 posts, 30-odd podcasts, 40 episodes of Lachlan Connor, Independent, and four episodes of Let’s Cook! With Craig later, it is the community that made GrodsCorp so much more than the sum of its parts. Of that content, some was shithouse, some was okay, some was pretty good, and some was fucking awesome, but no matter what was published we always had a good laugh and even managed to debate some important stuff along the way.

Through GrodsCorp I’ve made real-life friends, bloggosphere (sic) enemies, attracted a creepy stalker who likes to send emails to my boss, and discovered Iain Hall. The Internet: there’s nothing else quite like it.

The literally thousands of hours that I’ve spent building, maintaining, moderating and writing for GrodsCorp were worth it because of the community of people who hung out on the site or lurked in the background — youse are such a bunch of funny, pernicious bastards and I can’t thank you enough. Writing is fun, but writing for an audience is funner.

But most of all I’d like to thank the dozen or so people who wrote for GrodsCorp at some stage during its life, and especially the five contributors who rounded out the GrodsTeam until the end: John Surname, Bridgit Gread, Ant Rogenous, Bron and Jason. A finer bunch of Leftists I’ll never meet, and superb writers to boot. Except John Surname.

I’m going to keep writing at a new, personal blog: scottbridges.id.au. The new blog is not Grods2.0, rather a place for me to intermittently publish longer-form stuff, my writing at Crikey, newmatilda.com etc., and telegrams from my travels next year. I’d love it if you all dropped in to say hello sometime.

A few members of the GrodsTeam have asked to publish personal farewells.

John Surname:

Tell my loyal fans that I will be releasing a compilation of my best posts entitled Journey To The Centre of John Surname.

Bridgit Gread:

So, at last it’s come to this – such is blogging. This is like the last Chooklotto on the last episode of “Hey Hey It’s Saturday!” except that Scott is Daryl Somers, Ant is John Blackman, I’m Jacqui McDonald and John Surname is Plucka Duck.

It’s been a rollercoaster few years. I’ve laughed and gasped and cringed; I’ve ridiculed all manner of fools and freaks; and above all I’ve had fun. Together we’ve all done made a blog that people like reading – and even when you’ve spent most of your time writing for a living, that’s a feeling you still enjoy. My thanks to Scott for hosting Grods, for making it shine and for allowing me to be a part of it – and for enduring the river of shite that being a blog owner invites. You can teach my kids Marxist theory or “The Internationale” anytime, comprade. Thanks also to my fellow team members: the loveable Ant ‘George’ Rogenous; the irrepressible John Surname, the concupiscient Bron and the gorgeous Jason. And to the host of regular Grods commenters: Chuck, Wah, confessions, silpheed, JT, phyllis stein, Tobias Ziegler, dribble, michelle, even bloody Fang and Ray bloody Dixon from bloody Bright.

I feel like I’m losing a friend – quite a few friends actually – but like the ‘existential Buddhist’ I am, I know they won’t be gone forever. Good people and good humour never die, they just take a holiday and come back wearing cheap Hawaiian shirts and with a thousand digital pictures.

Now it’s time to down my last McMuffin, hotwire the Noddy car and hit the wide open road. To borrow some parting words, “I’m just going out and may be gone some time.”

Bridgit

Bron:

Well, this is sad and unexpected, but I take great comfort in knowing that Grods is going out on top. No matter the reason for its departure, it is still the best fucking blog in the blogosphere [sic]. Of course, I could just be biased.

The authors of Grods have made it what it was — but most of all, it was the community we created, beginning with Scott. The community is one of the biggest things I’m going to miss.

I have met a lot of wonderful people via Grods — and have had the opportunity to meet some of them in real life who I know will always be friends. And then there are those who I care about deeply, although they may not fully realise it right now. You know who you are.

I will be around reading and occasionally commenting on blogs that some of you have and I hope to see the rest of you around very soon. In fact, I have a new blog that I will start writing in again someday – A Fresh Start In August.

Don’t think of this as an ending — but rather as an opportunity for a fresh start.

Ting tong, tingtong,
Bron.

PS Hey, that rhymes! Oh, the shame! Damn you Michelle for saying that to me! I never wanted to be linked to that shithouse poem! Even though it’s the best fucking poem I’ve ever read!!!

PPS Cosmicjester, tha bastard son. I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you but it’s actually spelled T-H-E.

PPPS Oh, nothing. Just checkin’ to see if you’re still reading. Fuck off, now. No, really.

PPPPS First warning, Scott.

So I guess that’s it. My sincere best wishes to each of you.

Cheers,

Scott
sdebridges@gmail.com

You would have to positively left-wing not to click that. So I did, and it took me to the website of Captain Chris Close Combat Training.

But what is it? Captain Chris explains all:

He is a fomer military interrogator (trained to extract information from enemy combatants) and has black belts in 5 different martial arts—including karate, judo and Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

[...]

However, despite all his martial arts training and awards, several years ago Captain Chris and his wife were attacked in a vicious road-rage incident that left him beaten within an inch of his life.

Broken, humiliated and mad as hell, he realized true self defense has nothing to do with “martial arts”… and martial arts was actually getting people hurt, crippled and even killed on the streets.

Scraping together what little money he had, and calling in every military favor he could find, Captain Chris travelled the world in search of the “perfect” fighting style that would work for anyone—regardless of size, speed or experience.

After several years abroad, and training under everyone from the violent Arabian assassins in Egypt to the last remaining Samurai in Japan, Captain Chris ran into an old, grizzled WW2 vet in Britain and discovered what he was searching for:

“Close Combat Training”

You mean all those hours watching Karate Kid actually let him down? It’s not even possible!

How is this possible?

To answer that question, I have no choice but to tell you a story the military and most every “martial arts” teacher on the planet do NOT want you to know.

Frankly, even the U.S. government will deny what I’m about to say.

Typical. I blame The Left. Luckily, so does The Capt’n:

Almost 80 years ago, on the eve of World War 2, there was a meeting within the House of Lords in London. In attendance were some of the world’s richest and most powerful men: Including billionaires (there were only a few at the time), diplomats, kings, world leaders, presidents, and other powerful “elites” who controlled vast sums of money and power.

These people were literally desperate to discover the answer to one question, and one question only:

“What REALLY Works In Combat?”

Why did they need to know the answer to this question?

Because these guys were scared shitless (and rightfully so) that they were about to lose their entire fortunes to the single greatest threat mankind had ever seen:

The Nazis.

Great, so it’s combat training as designed by John Ray. But who are we to protect ourselves from?

And I KNOW the kind of crazy shit that’s about to hit the fan in our country.

I’ve seen statistics, reports and projections that would quite frankly cause a nation-wide panic if everyone knew the truth.

Believe me…

Whatever you think you might know about crime and violence (from reading the newspaper and listening to talk radio) is just a “watered-down” version of the REAL story meant to keep the public calm and our politicians’ butts covered.

The fact is… with the explosion of criminal illegal alien gangs allowed to freely roam big cities like LA, Chicago and New York…

… international terrorists basically invited in by the Washington liberals…

…and the rising number of left wing nuts in Congress passing laws that empower criminals and castrate guys like you…

…knowing how to kick someone’s ass at the drop of a dime is no longer a luxury.

The Capt’n also caters for those stupid women who are all about helping people:

Women are natural “care takers” and want to help people all the time. And the sociopaths, rapists and serial killers use this fact to lure women into empty, isolated places where nobody can hear their screams.

But you won’t have to worry about that anymore.

Because once your wife or daughter watches this DVD, she will NEVER be “easy pickings” for these sick bastards. I get testimonials about this DVD ALL THE TIME from women who were once afraid of walking to their cars at night or who were being stalked by psychotic ex-boyfriends.

I can’t believe this man is giving people all the information they need to destroy the Left. Needless to say, when the New Soviets come he will not be spared.

Irascible and lazy, Rupert ‘Ratz’ Kramer is a 35-year-old slacker who plays out his patricidal fantasies through the development of a violent computer game. A chance call from an old flame sends him to New York, where he hopes to sell his creation to a games company, but instead becomes embroiled in events that begin to pose increasingly uncomfortable moral questions.

Part thriller, part psychological family drama, part exploration of German–Austrian war guilt, this film from Michael Glawogger defies categorisation.

Adapted from the novel Das Vaterspiel by Josef Haslinger.

Interesting and believable characters, along with a mysterious script with lots of room for guessing, ensure that you can’t take your eyes of this film. But it turns out to be a slow-burner, with everything building up to a stunning under-egged scene featuring a Nazi war criminal talking about his guilt, fear and lack of remorse. Kill Daddy Goodnight certainly defies categorisation and leaves you thinking for hours afterwards.

Actor–director Baltasar Kormákur calls his modernised version of Anton Chekhov’s play Ivanov a ‘dramedy’, inspired by the likes of Pedro Almodóvar and Woody Allen.

A middle-aged professor braces himself for his second marriage, to an ex-student half his age, but as his guests flock to the wedding’s remote island locale, he starts to get cold feet. After a long ‘white night’ of drinking and thinking, will he make it to the church on time?

Kormákur’s expertly juggled tone – slapstick tinged with darker and more perverse elements of Chekhov – has seen White Night Wedding become one of Iceland’s highest-grossing domestic hits.

“Dramedy” indeed. A heart-wrenching tale of relationships and life told with a just-right application of humour and understated slapstick. As the protagonist lurches towards his wedding day, with flashbacks to the disintegration of his first marriage, viewers are invited to ponder the fragility of human interaction and the way that middle age brings with it the realisation that life is a series of wasted opportunities. White Night Wedding keeps you guessing right up to the penultimate scene, which seems to provide a Hollywood ending, only to have that illusion shattered as the credits roll.

The best part, but? I was riding home from the cinema and came to a stop at a red light. A couple of seconds later another bike pulled up next to me so I looked over and it was … Bicycle Pump Man! However, I wimped out and didn’t get a photo.

Imagine! Two whole hours of that crap.

This is what happens with TV – people only remember the good bits and banish the thousands of hours of shit to the Land of Wind and Ghosts before returning ten years later to demand the return of a show they can’t really remember anyway.

NOW LOOK WHAT THEY’VE DONE

The directorial debut of Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie), this claustrophobic sci-fi feature stars Sam Rockwell and the voice of Kevin Spacey.

Heralding a fresh renaissance in indie sci-fi flicks, Moon eschews big budget CGI effects for slow-burn combustible tension, telling the story of a man on a solo mission on the moon who begins to suffer hallucinations, as he succumbs to the isolation and monotony of his assignment.

An intimate character portrayal in a starkly impersonal outer space setting, Moon is a claustrophobic drama that harkens back to classic sci-fi of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Scott says: Moon is an atmospheric study of life, death, isolation and human desire. Set to a cracking soundtrack that perfectly creates a mood to match the action, and featuring an excellent performance by solo actor Sam Rockwell, Moon lets us imagine the nature of space exploration in the near-ish future and prompts us to question what the implications are for humans’ needs.

The director mostly lets viewers discover plot twists on their own, although a few are rammed home a little too obviously. Once the major twist is revealed the film plays out a touch too predictably at times, but enough mystery is retained to command your attention until the conclusion which is mercifully free of an overblown and trite Hollywood ending.

Moon is a film that will make you look inside and question your own emotions, needs and desires.

** SPOILER ALERT — READ NO FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW PLOT **

John Surname says: Moon is an 80’s style low-budget sci-fi film set, mysteriously, on the Moon. Sam Bell is employed by Lunar Enterprises to harvest helium to produce fusion power for earth with only a robot named H.A.L GERTY for company. With two weeks to go until his three year contract is up Sam has an accident which puts into motion a series of events that will change his life forever.

Want to know more?

…..

HE’S A CLONE.

A MOTHERFUCKING CLONE.

This film should have been called CLONES IN SPACE, or even better, CLONES IN SPACE IV: CLONES IN LOVE.

As it stands Moon is a very impressive debut from Zowie Bowie Duncan Jones who manages to conjure up the isolation a helium miner would probably feel being so far from home. As the film progresses, Sam pines for his wife on Earth, and for memories which aren’t even really his. The appearance of the clone, however, screws everything up royally as he slowly realises that he is a creation of the corporation which employs him in the first place.

In story terms the plot isn’t particularly complex – once you have the clone information figured out it’s quite obvious which way the film is heading. The unexplained benevolence of GERTY is a surprise – perhaps the screenwriter thought an evil computer would be too close to H.A.L for comfort, but H.A.L had story reasons for the way he acted. GERTY does not which causes some confusion as to why a robot would act this way – saying he’s programmed to “help” isn’t enough. Surely LUNAR INC would have programmed him to watch the valuable clone at all costs?

Well, I hope they learned their lesson!

The film takes numerous visual clues from 2001 and Silent Runnings but doesn’t quite stand with either of them. What I did enjoy was the excellent atmosphere built around the moon base, and the personal tension between the clones (despite lame comedic moments).

I give this film 3.5/5

Final question: if Sam’s clones have the same strength as each other, how can one win a fight?

THINK ABOUT THAT.

From within the straightjacket of a highly controlled film industry, Iranian visionary Asghar Farhadi (The Beautiful City, Fireworks Wednesday) miraculously emerges with an uncompromising chronicle of middle-class Iranian malaise.

A group of friends holidaying on the Caspian Sea play matchmaker between a divorcé and schoolteacher Elly. When she disappears, a sticky mess of seemingly innocuous deceits – some being the product of tarouf, a type of Persian cultural politeness – prove dire in their consequences.

One of the best Iranian films in years – and accordingly well-awarded at this year’s Tribeca film festival – it’s also the final one to feature Golshifteh Farahani, who inflamed controversy by appearing in Ridley Scott’s Body of Evidence, in turn causing About Elly to be banned in Iran.

A well-constructed character study that revolves around the social norms at play in middle-class Iran. At first the characters’ action were difficult to understand as a Westerner, but as the film progressed it became easier to accept why seemingly stupid decisions (from an audience perspective) were the only option available to the protagonists. However, the film lost a bit of momentum towards the end and offered no new insight or surprise; the ending was predictable once the invisible rules binding the characters were revealed. A solid, but not sensational film.

And now, thanks to the literary editors at Coles, there’s Amelia:

The best part was when she rhymed “nice” with “nice”.

Anyway, time for a GrodsChallenge. Whoever writes the best poem about the most unspectacular grocery item gets to lick the cake-mix off my beater.*

Have at it!

* Not a euphemism, you depraved Leftists.

This year’s big questions:

• Will Craig faint in the middle of a packed cinema again?
• Will I finally snap that photograph of Bicycle Pump Man that I’ve been trying to get for four years?

Stuart MacGill: can’t bat, can’t bowl, can’t host

Jeebus H. Cat, the man is atrocious! Whenever SBS crosses back to the studio during lunch I am overwhelmed with feelings of embarrassment for him; that’s if I can stop cringing at the telly long enough. It’s like watching a nervous schoolkid, spooked eyes staring straight down the barrel of the camera, wee their pants from fear live on air. Every night for ten nights.

I know that it’s wise to head your sports broadcasts with someone who knows the game and who can talk from experience, but surely they could’ve found someone better than MacGill. Even Damien Martyn, with his complete lack of charisma or presence would’ve made a better host — at least he’s watchable. But between MacGill and that goose Greg Matthews I’ve been tempted a number of times to throw the flat screen off the balcony.

Stuart MacGill, you’re on the list.

UPDATE: From MacGill’s Wikipedia page:

MacGill is noted as an intellectual type, having once read 17 books on a tour of Pakistan

I suppose reading one book on a cricket tour is enough to get yourself smeared as an intellectual.

UPDATE II: Further down the Wikipedia page the plot thickens:

He has a fondness for wine and books, once reading 24 novels during a tour of Pakistan.

Both “facts” are sourced from a Cricinfo bio, which states:

The son and grandson of Western Australian state players, he socialised with friends who weren’t cricketers in his playing days, and was often portrayed as a thinker, a misfit, the odd man out. It was something he played down, although he once read 24 novels on a tour of Pakistan.

Socialised with non-cricketers! The shame.

And just how is it doing that if its been cooler in the last decade ? more fairtails from the best scammers of all ,THE GREENGATE LIARS.I THINK THEIR LITTLE BRAIN MIGHT BE SHRINKING .I bet those Dinosoars were wondering how they got so big when it was so much hotter than now .c02 is the lowest its been in 600 million yrs according to the latest research .

My soul hurts.

Oh, and bugger me with a fish-fork if the woman who won isn’t a dead ringer for a certain Pamela Allen children’s book character:

Nature also prefers bus timetables that bear even a passing resemblance to the actual running times of buses, but apparently the Melbourne bus companies think that nature can go fuck itself.

Fundamentalist Christian news website OneNewsNow cites a “family” campaigner who accuses “homosexual activists” of using such examples of apparent animal homosexuality to “normalize their lifestyle”. Says the campaigner:

It’s pretty pathetic to turn to turn to animals to guide how humans should behave. It’s just ridiculous.

Pathetic indeed. Here’s the OneNewsNow reporter in the first par of the story.

A pro-family advocate says the latest developments at the San Francisco Zoo show that nature prefers heterosexual relationships.

Shit don’t prove shit, unless it’s the shit we want it to prove.

• Gun
• Bullets
• Pants
• Helmet
• Dog tags
• Photo of partner (unless you and your partner are teh gay)
• Energy bars
• Water bottle
• Chap Stick
• Sunglasses
• Spare bullets
• Hand grenades
• BibleStick

For those of you too lazy to watch even 30 seconds of a YouTube video because you’re doing something really important like drinking a chai latte, the lyrics go like this:

I love pop music, this is how we do it
It’s politics you can romance to
I love pop music, sprinkle sugar through it,
Philosophy that you can dance to

Inane, yes, but pretty typical for Ben Lee as anyone who caught his disease would know (not herpes, the song).

No, what sends this song into new unseen realms of awfulness are the spoken word verses:

The price of oil is at an all time high and rising,
Global warming threatens life as we know it on this planet,
And leaders have not committed to a plan of action on renewable energy,
The food crisis is currently affecting a hundred million people world wide.

No, really. Go and watch it. Instead of bringing public attention to these issues (global warming? what’s that?), as well as high-lighting the power of music to achieve things, he’s instead ended up making a mockery of these issues, pop music in general, and himself.

Something I’ve always noticed about Ben Lee is his videos always feature good looking young people who fete him like a god, presumably because no one likes him in real life. This video is no exception. What is the exception are the mindless call-and-response background lyrics. Pay attention to the words in brackets in the next verse:

There are over 6 billion people on this planet and not enough fresh drinking water (we’re in trouble),
Religious intolerance creating geopolitical instability (shine a light),
Politicians battling each other like professional wrestlers (ooh),
Further division is not the answer, division is not the answer

We’re in trouble? Shine a light?

A brief search reveals the album on which this song appears, The Rebirth of Venus, has been panned mercilessly worldwide with a slew of one-star reviews, from Uncut  to Slant magazines. And not just because it contains another song called I’m a Woman, Too.

GrodsReaders, what’s your favourite political song? My vote goes to This World Over by XTC. What’s yours?

It’s not just that his website is at the lamely rhyming www.pyneonline.com, or that the first thing that assaults you on the site is a pop-up box demanding that you keep in touch, and totally friend him on Facebook. It’s clear he needs help. He wants to be leader, but he’ll never do it on his own.

Malcolm Turnbull hasn’t helped things by handing him a dud portfolio like Shadow Minister for Education, Training and Apprenticeships. Turnbull is obviously threatened by Pyne’s oration skills and animal magnetism, and why shouldn’t he be? Pyne is the only sitting member of Parliament with the ability to grab the Liberal party by the balls and return it to its former glory – you know, lying about asylum seekers throwing children overboard, sending us off to war based on phoney evidence, putting value back in the pound, that sort of thing.

So right now I would to announce my campaign to make Christopher Pyne leader of the Liberal party. He deserves it, and Australia needs it.

What you can do:

Write letters: write letters to all the major newspapers talking up Christopher Pyne’s record of whatever it that he does. Be sure to mention his steely glances and come-hither stare.

Send emails: Set up fake Christopher Pyne email address and badger Turnbull by email. Chances are he won’t tell the difference and will crumble instantly.

Join the Young Libs: For no other reason than the active social life (their Get Smart series 3 fundraiser was a huge success).

Phone talkback radio and repeat what you wrote in your newspaper letters. Chances are Alan Jones will hang up on you, but don’t let that stop you phoning in again under a Mexican pseudonym. If he tries to hang up again cry “racism!”.

Together, GrodsReaders, we can return the Liberal party to its glory days.

It’s quite appropriate that Costello is displayed next to books about fear and chickens

Wait…what? Thankfully @AndrewBolt stepped in to inform the masses of this troubling news, which was no doubt the fault of Al Gore.

With serious Twitter muscle behind him, the story exploded. All people could talk about was #tunnelcow. An unremarkable story about a cow in a metropolitan tunnel became one of the highest trending topics on Twitter.

But where was the MSM? On the most important story of the day they’d gone AWOL. @AndrewBolt demanded answers:

#tunnelcow was trending through the roof, but the MSM was strangely silent. Even @774melbourne stopped mentioning #tunnelcow.

Other worrying signs of Leftist supression began to pop up, beginning with a tweet from true comprade @thewetmale:

What could the reason for the stony wall of Leftist silence? Sure enough, @AndrewBolt received an alarming tip-off.

Meanwhile, the first pictures of #tunnelcow were appearing:

Indisputable evidence of a bovine shennanigans in the tunnel if there ever were any.

And for no reason here’s a tweet from @andyblume:

Finally, @AndrewBolt used all his charisma on the cause of freedom of information.

As I type, #tunnelcow chatter continues on Twitter, and the ABC finally tried to file #tunnelcow away as a frivilous story on a frivilous blog. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

#tunnelcow’s whereabouts remain unknown. Final words to @carousella:

And that should be the end of that, right? He goes back home to England and recuperates fully and resumes normal life, right?

Oh no. Not at all. Don’t be so fuckin’ naive, Bron, for this is the day and age of instant “celebrity” and round-the-clock, in-your-face media exposure. Timespan of everyone wanting a piece of your arse: usually a week.

Thus I was shitty when I saw the headline on the SMH website, “Jamie Neale stands to make a fortune”.

Shitty because I really need to make an instant fortune and it was him who gets the money and I don’t.

Seriously, though, it’s shitty because everyone is getting fiscally rewarded and instant “celebrity” for mishaps, accidents, and just generally getting caught up in the vicissitudes of life.

Shit happens.

And who the hell are these celebrity agents? The dude’s just come out of the bush after 12 days and is recovering in hospital and he’s already signed up to a celebrity agent? Do celebrity agents hang around hospital corridors waiting for the next “big” story to be wheeled past in a gurney? There is just something sordid about the speed at which Jamie and his dad were snapped up by a “celebrity” agent.

I, for one, won’t be reading or watching any interviews. I know the story, I know what happened, and I know how it ended. I don’t need a complete rehash and deconstruction of The Boy Who Was Lost in the Bush for 12 Days. I’m just glad he’s been found safe and sound. And that’s that.

It’s almost Scotch O’Clock, comrades.

This weekend, obviously, I am going (I am going) where streams of whiskey are flowing.

What are you all up to?

In the article, Steve (via Susan) trots out all of the lines he’s being spewing into the media recently about looking at both sides of the story, the science not being settled, and pretty graphs presenting arbitrarily-selected data proving something or other (Tobias covers this in more detail over at Pure Poison.) But the most brilliant moment of deluded madness is this:

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.

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.

Don’t you know who I am? I am the leader of a Party of one that on the basis of 50,000 votes is holding the Upper House of Australia’s Parliament to ransom in a futile effort to get myself re-elected in 2010.

Steve’s just pissed off that he paid for dry cleaning for nothing.

The cad. Oh well, I hope he took it out for dinner, used lots of foreplay and was gentle.

THISafternoon axed by Nine. First Hey Hey goes and now this. Sure, you have ratings, BUT AT WHAT PRICE??!

But is it any wonder the plug was pulled when the two hosts have smiles as appallingly and frighteningly fake as these?

The longer you look, the more evil they appear

One minute you’ve got Steve Fielding urging the prevention of divorce on the grounds that it worsens climate change …

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.

… but the next you’ve got Steve Fielding denying that climate change is even occurring.

And one minute you’ve got Tony Abbott flatly opposing gay marriage on the grounds that teh homos are unnatural, but the next you’ve got Tony Abbott resigning himself to gay marriage as long as traditional marriage is strengthened.

… 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 … 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.

A cynic might suggest that these guys trot out any old argument they can find, regardless of whether they believe it, to force their religious beliefs onto others.

Mr Turnbull’s personal position is now the same, or worse, than Brendan Nelson’s when he was replaced as Liberal leader late last year …
– (source)

Satisfaction with the Leader of the Opposition lifted in the past two weeks after he spent a week overseas visiting Australian troops and a week in Perth attacking the Rudd government’s debt and budget deficit.

[...]

Last weekend, satisfaction with Mr Turnbull rose from 25per cent to 31 per cent, and dissatisfaction fell from 58 per cent to 55 per cent.

I apologise unreservedly to Malcolm Turnbull for ridiculing his campaigning methods.

In unrelated news, Andrew Bolt says that drawing conclusions from “changes that fall even within the margin of error” is “a waste of time and credibility”. What did The Australian ever do to Andrew to deserve such a scathing attack?

An engineering degree might have more relevance – or at least it would if you’d actually done any engineering work since graduating in the early-80s, like our unrepresentative in the Senate, Steve Fielding. Lately Steve has risen from his near-sickbed after receiving Tamiflu for a case of almost-swine flu, to take up the cudgels of global warming scepticism. He’s probably just after a dinner date with Bolta, we’ll never know, but whatever the reason the Herald Sun is playing along. Today it bellows “This is why Al Gore’s wrong“ on Steve’s behalf and links to the pseudo-Senator’s own website. The reason? Steve has done found himself a graph – and it’s a purdy one – showing the correlation, or lack thereof, between rising CO2 levels and ’steadying’ global surface temperatures:

Ain’t that sweet? But is it true? According to the Herald Sun “the graph was used by the UN in its reports on the effects of climate change” but I had a quick search and couldn’t find it. OK, no sweat, it cites temperature data from two sources: the Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia. Was Fielding’s graph – or at least the temperature component of it – on their websites? Nope. Hmm.

So what do these places have to say about global surface temperatures? Here is the Hadley Centre’s summation of global average, land surface and sea surface temperatures. And here is the University of East Anglia’s. Each spans a longer timeframe than Steve’s 15-year snapshot, but nevertheless looks different to his Al-you’re-wrong graph.

In any event, doesn’t “air temperature anomaly” describe variations from the norm? All of the anomalies on Fielding’s graph are in the positive range, so if we accept this data as valid then all Steve has ‘proven’ is that global temperatures have risen less in some of the last 15 years. In 2008 it almost dipped down to average, but otherwise there’s been a steady increase of +0.3 or higher since 2001. The increase in global temperatures may have flattened out but global temperatures themselves have not returned to normal, in fact they more than a half-degree higher than when Steve Fielding was going through puberty.

I’m hoping Steve can pop around for a cup of rooibos tea and a Marie biscuit to explain to me where in his God’s name he got this graph, whether he thinks its title is deceiptful and if he genuinely believes it disproves a link between CO2 emissions and global warming. Just don’t bother dressing up as an inanimate object, and leave your Bible at home.

“Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being paid to State Government appointed contractors. Quotes are being inflated beyond all reasonable levels. School communities are being regularly sidelined as faceless bureaucrats dictate what will happen in their schools

[...]

“It is clear that this Minister has a set against programs designed at empowering parents and local communities, and prefers giving money to state education department bureaucrats. We have now seen the waste and mismanagement that naturally follows.

“Australia deserves better than this part-time Education Minister.”

Pyne took some time out of his busy leader-of-opposition-business-and-lobbying-for-leadership schedule to write this press release; a press release that readily admits that the Howard Government’s school infrastructure program ($1.18 billion) was “more modest” than the Rudd Government’s school infrastructure program ($14.7 billion). But, you know, what’s a lazy thirteen billion clams between empowered communities?

I love you, internet.

In third place is Mikey.

“The sunnies I left at home are diamond crusted, and woven around the hinges is a lock of hair from none other than Ghandi – and he was bald so you can imagine just how hard that was to obtain … for an ordinary person.”

Mikey wins Malcolms empty yoghurt container, autographed.

In second place is Megan.

“Oh, I see. I had always assumed that ’soggy-SAO’ thing was apocryphal. Ah, yes. Very amusing. Well done…”

Megan wins a cardboard cutout of Julie Bishop. Or Julie Bishop herself if the cardboard cutout is busy in Parliament.

And the winner is Speckled Jim.

There was no joke; just some uncomfortable chuckling to cover up Turnbull’s faux pas in ordering an unwooded chardonnay with his instant mash and bully beef.

Speckled Jim wins a year’s supply of New Vegemite, applied to his toast each morning by John Surname wearing nothing but Malcolm’s bulletproof vest and his nevernude shorts. Congratulations!

Anyway, the wisdom some hold to in the North is that everyone “down south” is soft, spoiled and pretty much kidding themselves. That includes Brisbane, and particularly the semi-rural hinterlands surrounding the capital, where would-be bushmen who wouldn’t know a day’s work if it bit them on the arse sometimes live.

Special contempt is reserved for the owners of inferior motor vehicles. And is it any wonder? Why would you waste your time tinkering away in a shed, making a car out of bits of corrugated iron, araldite and pencil shavings, when you could go out there, earn an honest crust and get yourself a REAL man’s car?

1. There is nothing particularly unusual about young men discussing their philistinic dreams of sexual conquests, both likely and improbable. There’s no real scandal in writing these things down, unless they involve degrading personal commentary that subsequently harms someone. If we’re going to start sacking or indicting males aged 17-28 for playing silly games and thinking with the wrong head, a quarter of society will be out of work or in the slammer.

2. It’s the military, fer Chrissakes. It has a blokey, boozy, misogynistic culture, fuelled by large amounts of testosterone, perpetuated by playing with big guns and propagated by living in a hothouse environment, at close quarters with each other for eleven months of the year. When not fighting, which is 99 percent of the time, they spend their hours either training, being yelled at, oiling their guns, swabbing poop decks, whatever. It’s hardly surprising that they’d engage in dubious horseplay to relieve the boredom.

3. Why the hell do we expect our military to be a paragon of gender equality and political correctness anyway? Their job is to kill people and blow things up – do we really believe this attracts libertarians, feminists and Greens voters?  Or that it doesn’t attract risk-takers, loose cannons or people of dubious psychological integrity? The problem lies not with the people concerned but the glorification of military service that’s been ongoing in this country since Howard came to power.  The ADF has always done and continues to do a fine job – but it is not a patrician class, upholding civilised mores or furthering higher social values. The military’s job is to protect the values of liberal democracy, not to practise them.

4. Horniness in the military is now entirely understandable, given that the ADF is now headed by John Faulkner – the world’s sexiest politician (if you’re a practising female actuary). $250 for John and $300 if he keeps his glasses on. Yum yum.

Just kidding. He recycled a thirteen-year-old stunt and launched a debt truck.

Well, a debt trailer. Can’t Malcolm get anything right?

_________________

It must be pretty humbling to feel your power slipping away. And not just slipping away to an equally powerful competitor, but slipping away to — gasp! — ordinary people.

Let’s just say you’re the Australian head of a massive, global media company and that you’re accustomed to people doing what you say. You grew up in a social and business environment where money meant power, where media barons were the only people who could afford to communicate directly with large numbers of people; it has been this way for as long as you can remember, and as long as your father’s generation can remember for that matter. But one day along comes this thing called The Internet, promising to democratise the flow of information, and something terrible begins to happen: the plebs grow bold and start to rise up, empowered by having their voice heard, unworried about profit or business models. If you were that media baron what would you do? Would you adapt or would you atrophy?

When this news and journalism environment started to change dramatically about a decade ago, newspaper media companies initially refused to change with it. They whacked their stories online, slapped a couple of ads up with them, and sat back waiting for the rivers of internet gold to flow. But people don’t use the internet like they do traditional media forms, and most attempts by traditional players to adapt to this new form have been contrived and poorly executed. The failure to adapt a product to a market is bad business, but the petulant bitching and moaning from dinosaur media chiefs who want the world to stop moving so they don’t have to get off their arse and move with it is just bad form.

When News Ltd CEO John Hartigan addressed the National Press Club yesterday he angrily took aim at absolutely everyone in a lumbering speech of contradictions and non-sequiturs. Like a cornered soldier in a ferocious firefight, he stood with his back pressed against the wall, haunted eyes open wide, firing his rifle wildly and indiscriminately in erratic arcs at anything that moved. He made many points during his speech, but the main theme seemed to be: how dare you people who haven’t suffered through a newspaper cadetship and operating outside the employ of a large newspaper organisation communicate with a wider audience?

Some of Hartigan’s best venom was reserved for bloggers, who he said produced content of “limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance”. Along with news aggregation services (Google and others) and non-traditional media outlets like Crikey, bloggers are despised by Hartigan for shamelessly reproducing his outlets’ content instead of producing their own. I know this because I read his speech on a webpage at The Australian’s site, at the bottom of which was this giant invitation to share the paper’s content with bloggers, news aggregators and Google.

Leading us to the central paradox: Hartigan says that for every one hardcopy reader his papers lose, ten online readers must be attracted to break even. In an attempt to attract those ten readers, newspaper websites desperately require blogs and other online fora to reference and link to their stories, hoping that the expanded readership will click back to the original story to eyeball the attached advertising. If such a co-dependence (and it is co-dependence because newspaper journalists often refer to blogs’ content in their reporting) is necessary for the financial stability of traditional media outlets then Hartigan getting huffy and bitchy about bloggers re-publishing his content is laughable.

And let’s be totally honest about what Hartigan’s outlets are up against here: there are blogs and then there are blogs. Any bozo or halfwit with a Wordpress or Blogger account can cut-and-paste massive swathes of newspaper copy into a blog post, add a line or two of comment, and wait patiently for six or seven readers to accidentally stumble across the result while Googling “Britney vids”. But how are these pisspoor “citizen journalism” efforts cannibalising Hartigan’s business model? The combined financial effect of these blogs’ thieving of News Ltd content wouldn’t even total the cost of his Cabcharge to the Press Club yesterday.

Hartigan says he could summarise his speech in two dot points: “If you want to attract readers, break stories people want to read,” and “give them something they can’t get anywhere else, make it relevant and useful and let them get involved.” While the vast majority of blogs of the type described above offer nothing new to their reader(s), the larger, more popular blogs are right across Hartigan’s dot points — they’re offering people something they want to read, often by looking at an issue from a new angle; they’re giving readers something they can’t get anywhere else, in the form of the blogger’s unique perspective, personality and writing style; and they’re letting the reader get involved by facilitating a proper conversation, unhindered by clunky moderation policies and properly involving the article’s author. Often these blogs refer to articles published by mainstream media organisations, quoting sections of text under the fair use provisions of the copyright act, but they’re also adding significant content of their own. In effect, bloggers and their readers are merely discussing those news stories in the same way that people discuss the content of a physical newspaper around the water cooler. Ultimately, this quoting and discussion lead to readers’ awareness of Hartigan’s publications and directs their eyeballs towards Hartigan’s ads.

Traditional journalism and blogging do not compete with each other; it’s not an either/or proposition. A modern news consumer does not consume news and comment from a single source, and it is this fact of 21st century life that so upsets Hartigan and his ilk. The modern news consumer looks to a large and dynamic range of sources for reporting, comment, analysis and debate to inform their world view, and increasingly look to sources that let them get involved. There is room in this multidirectional environment for traditional journalism, blogs, news aggregators, independent media and social networking to all play important roles. The days of a newspaper holding exclusive power over their readers’ eyeballs are over, as are the days of unilateral communication from powerful journalist to subservient reader. Hartigan can feel his power slipping away and he’s not humbled, just frightened and pissed off.

In the end, Hartigan seems to have faith in the idea that quality content has the power to attract paying readers. If that’s the case, and if he’s so sure that what he’s got to offer is so much better than bloggers, then he’s got nothing to worry about. Associate editor of Hartigan’s highest circulation newspaper and, um, blogger, Andrew Bolt, says that “relevance and credibility will be the keys to [News Ltd’s] survival.” And if that’s the case, while News Ltd publications are pumping out credible and relevant content such as the fake Pauline Hanson teenage pictures and Piers Akerman, Hartigan’s got lots to worry about.

Who is who?

“I believe I am alive today because God saved me for this – to make people happy. I have a message to give, the same as Michael,” he said yesterday.

Yeah, um. Okay.

Of course not. You visit the troops in Afghanistan for some nice pictures that aren’t at all a cynical attempt to boost your standing in the electorate by co-opting everything the soldiers stand for.

Here’s Malcolm arriving in Afghanistan wearing the sort of gear he needed last week in the House of Reps.

“Welcome to Afghanistan, Mr Turnbull. Mr Rudd’s office emailed to say you’re a dickhead.”

Of course, what’s a trip to the battlefield without a stirring speech to the troops, including a stunned Julie Bishop posing stupidly in the background and a random soldier staring at your arse?

“He must work out.”

And this photo was captioned by Malcolm’s press people as: “The Opposition Leader, The Hon Malcom Turnbull MP, shares a joke with Australian Defence Force personnel during his visit to bases in the Middle East and Afghanistan.” Your job is to caption the photograph with the joke being shared.

Have at it!

Coalition frontbencher Tony Abbott says New South Wales is playing nanny state politics with its ban on smoking in cars when children are present.

[...]

Mr Abbott says the ban is over the top.

“I was a child that was regularly imprisoned in a car with heavy smokers,” he said.

“My parents both smoked heavily when I was a kid. Now has it done me any harm?

“You be the judge …”

Forget research, expert opinion and statistics, Tony’s fine so let’s legislate based on his personal experience.

It is.

And as it has been promising to do for the past few years (with fingers crossed behind its back), the ATO says it will still “continue investigating [making] e-tax available to different computer platforms.” What complete bullshit, I say. And as Craig would say, “It is the yeah two thousands!”

Word.

Imagine you are a husky fellow of simple tastes and modest abilities. Imagine that, until now, you’ve been a long way back in the queue to the throne, but that suddenly the whole line of succession has been catastrophically blown up, leaving you as the heir apparent.

Where would you turn to find a precedent for your frightening situation? Could there perhaps be a work of cinematic art that might provide a way for you to understand your predicament?

Joe Hockey: The King Ralph of Australian politics.

It all made sense when I read this:

The Coalition and Malcolm Turnbull have received a devastating blow from the OzCar affair, with 53 per cent of voters saying they have a less favourable impression of the Opposition Leader as a result of it.

Mr Turnbull’s approval rating has plunged a massive 11 points while disapproval soared by 13 points in the Age/Nielsen poll taken on Thursday to Saturday. The Coalition’s two-party vote has slumped five points since May in the wake of Mr Turnbull’s call for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s resignation, which backfired spectacularly.

Even The Oz is anticipating Malcy’s political death.

Malcolm Turnbull’s political career has been smashed in just one week, and senior Liberals believe there could be moves within the party to remove him as Opposition Leader within days or weeks.

[...]

According to a Newspoll survey, conducted exclusively for The Australian last weekend, satisfaction with Mr Turnbull’s job as Opposition Leader has suffered the single biggest fall in the survey’s 25-year history. His position is now worse than Labor’s Mark Latham ever was and is at, or lower than, the levels of Brendan Nelson when he was dumped as Liberal leader to make way for Mr Turnbull.

Accordingly, the GrodsBook is now open. Leave in comments your prediction for the date on which Malcy will resign or be forced out of the Liberal leadership. The winner, being the person with the closest prediction, will win the Liberal leadership.

Press Gallery opinion is that this has not been Malcolm Turnbull’s week but I suspect they should revise their judgment. This week, the government threw everything it could at Turnbull and he never flinched.

Of course, Tony! The almost unanimous opinion of the nation’s journalists is certainly less likely to be correct than a hopelessly biased member of the disgraced political party in question. A hopelessly biased member of the disgraced political party in question who can presumably say something like this without feeling a hint of shame:

This week, the government threw everything it could at Turnbull and he never flinched.

I watched the House of Representatives broadcast for four hours on Monday (the things you do while you’re crippled with flu) and not only did Malcolm Turnbull flinch, the entire opposition side of the chamber collectively flinched. You could see it in Malcy’s body language and hear it in his voice on that day and in the days following, during which he contradicted and embarrassed himself across the news media. The man was in shock.

Abbott then accuses Rudd of acting un-Prime Ministerly by calling for Turnbull’s resignation. His benchmark? John Howard, of course.

John Howard never lost his dignity …

If you say it often enough it must be true.

Then again, maybe it was just taking care of Piers Akerman’s expense account receipts from 2007/08.

Now the Brumby Government, itself largely responsible for the dog’s breakfast that is the train system, has gone and ruined the entire city’s ability to efficiently and succinctly sum up its frustration with the trains by awarding the contract to a new operator.

The Government, reeling from a public backlash over the rail network’s failings, yesterday dumped the French-owned operator Connex and replaced it with a consortium backed by Hong Kong’s metro operator … But Premier John Brumby insisted commuters would get a better deal from new rail operator Metro Trains Melbourne …

What will it be now? Metro’d? Metro Trainsoed? How will we possible cope? Brumby says we will be compensated appropriately.

More staff on stations, fewer cancelled trains and improved punctuality have been promised by the Brumby Government and the new consortium appointed to operate Melbourne’s train network for the next eight years.

Just after they finish spending millions and millions on new station and train signage, new uniforms, new stationary, new audio recordings, and an advertising blitz to promote the brand to the pissed off and cynical Melbourne population who have see it all before each of the several other times the operator has changed.

Family First Senator Steve Fielding has made up his mind on global warming – there’s not enough evidence that it’s real.

If only the AGW model was proposed in a collection of 2000-year-old texts of dubious authorship. That way there would be enough evidence.

In other news, Steve recently started taking the anti-swine flu medication Tamiflu because his sister-in-law contracted the virus. Poor old Steve copped a hard time from cynics who declared it was a stunt, detractors who thought it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, and even his own son who loves a good practical joke.

Steve was forced to write a post on his blog, defending the precautionary use of Tamiflu.

There have been plenty of reports on swine flu coming to Parliament House as though I am some form of carrier pigeon from Victoria. First of all I have no symptoms.

Like everyone else I have been told I am no more likely of contracting swine flu than the average Joe from Melbourne.

The truth of the matter is my sister in law was in quarantine at my family home over the weekend as she was quite ill and had no where else to go.

I have been told by doctors and the parliamentary nurse that I am of little risk of contracting or carrying swine flu.

This whole issue has been blown out of proportion and wasn’t a stunt like was reported in The Australian online.

Reporters at a press conference earlier today suggested I was being selfish by being in Canberra this week.

But given the advice I have received by doctors, telling me I am at no more risk than the average Victorian, I thought it best I go to work given the important climate change legalisation before the Parliament.

I’m currently taking a precautionary course of Tamiflu.

But this is only a precaution.

Commenter Gaz was relieved.

Well, Senator, I hope you manage to avoid swine flu and that if you are infected that the Tamiflu works properly.

Fingers crossed on that one, of course. After all, it was designed by scientists using computer models.

But I do hope you don’t succumb to the virus, otherwise you won’t be able to apologise to the Australian people when the temperature sets new records and you realise how gullible you have been.
Comment by Gaz on 24 June 2009 at 02:59:02 PM

Fielding: pwned.

Which is the true test of political success, the office or the outcome?

Well, Peter, I would say the outcome is important, but so is one’s willingness to grab hold of an opportunity when it is presented to them. You know you lacked the balls, and you’re also aware that history will record that fact for posterity. Deal.

Utegate raises no end of questions for the media too
Here’s Crikey’s own Bernard Keane thinking out loud via Twitter on Saturday:

Not sure how both Rudd and Turnbull can still be leaders after this. One or other is in deep trouble.

And it’s starting to look quite that serious. Both men are calling aggressively for the other to stand down, and both are standing firmly by their stories. It’s a Mexican stand-off that will end with egg on face if nobody pulls the trigger. One (or possibly both) of the two men will certainly be seriously compromised when the truth does finally out.

Fairly amazing when you think about it. That political leaders withstand the political pressure exerted by wars, global financial crises, and overboard children, but the question of the existence of a single email, and the genuineness of that email, can threaten to end political careers

While there are many aspects to this saga, clearly the most central is the question of that email from the Prime Minister’s office to a public servant by the name of Gordan Godwin Grech. The Daily Telegraph printed the email in last Saturday’s newspaper, later conceding that it was never actually sighted. The reporter in question, Steve Lewis, claims that it was read to him over the phone by a “primary source”. Kevin Rudd flatly denies the existence of the email and searches of the relevant IT infrastructure seem to suggest that no such email was ever sent.

Malcolm Turnbull has been hinting none-too-subtly since 4 June that he’s known about some sort of correspondence believed to be “smoking gun” evidence of Kevin Rudd’s dodgy dealings. Reading his statements in the context of the last few days (great summary by Possum) makes this clearer than it was at the time. Turnbull says that he had not seen the email prior to its publication in the Tele; unfortunately for Malcolm he blew that charade apart this morning when he said Senator Eric Abetz was reading the email from the newspaper a day before it went to print.

All in all it’s a tangled web of minutiae that promises to be explosive in its untangling. But the politics aside for a moment, whichever way you look at this whole thing the media is up to its armpits in it, and some serious questions have been raised.

Firstly, is Steve Lewis telling the truth about the manner in which he received this email? A cynic might suggest that the “read over the phone” story is a bit far fetched given that there’s an awful lot of information to be read out, what with email addresses, CC’s, timestamps and the rest. Is Steve Lewis trying to keep his informant at arm’s length to protect his or her anonymity?

Secondly, is it ethical for the Daily Telegraph to mock-up for display an email using the text read to one of its reporters over the phone, implying rather boldly that it is in possession of the electronic or printed version of the email? Shouldn’t the fact that the email has not been sighted be disclosed to readers who will otherwise interpret the mock-up as proof of possession?

Thirdly, and most seriously, should Steve Lewis and the Tele protect a source that has fed them an allegedly fraudulent email, now the subject of an AFP criminal investigation, that may possibly be the catalyst for the Prime Minister or Opposition leader of the nation quitting their job? While most people would agree that it’s important for journalists to be able to afford their sources a certain level of protection, surely there comes a point at which the interests of the nation override that protection. While the Tele deserves a certain amount of credit for breaking a story of significance, perhaps there are now greater priorities than an extra day at the centre of attention.

Steve Lewis has today written an article calling for “full transparency” from the Rudd government over Utegate. The thing is, if Lewis was a little more transparent himself the whole controversy would instantly become a lot clearer. And let’s put this in perspective one more time: the bona-fides of a single email, the source of which is likely known to a newspaper journalist, will either end the career of the nation’s Prime Minister or Opposition leader, or cause them significant damage. A heavy burden of responsibility for a reporter and newspaper who hold the key to the truth.

“Utegate”

A summary of this earth-shattering scandal: an ill-conceived prop-up scheme for car financiers, a shonky Ipswich trader, a nerdy Treasury official, an e-mail that may or may not have existed… and a ute. How quintessentially Australian. And how utterly bloody boring. It sounds like the type of scandal you’d expect to envelop the Bourke Shire Council, not the Parliament of Australia.

The people of Australia demand better quality political scandals. Not Iguanagate, travel rorts, Keating’s pig farm or Howard’s big brother Stan. I don’t want to hear any more about ”Utegate” unless someone discovers that it involves Kevin Rudd rogering Kate Ellis in the back of a Holden Sandman after a pint of JD and six lines of coke. Now go away and try harder.

Anthony Scrinis, an electorate officer working for … Mirabella, who is the opposition spokeswoman for women, handed in his resignation late today.

Six women claim Mr Scrinis sexually harassed them – two say he grabbed their breasts on the dance floor while at the Midwinter Ball at Parliament House on Wednesday night.

A spokeswoman in Ms Mirabella’s office told AAP on Thursday evening that Mr Scrinis had been on a three-month probation period as an electorate officer and adviser to Ms Mirabella.

Other sources suggest he had been working for Sophie Mirabella, Ray Dixon (Bright)’s favourite pollie, for just a few days. And just who is this Anthony Scrinis anyway? He’s a failed candidate for the City of Port Phillip, where he recorded a total 231 votes out of a possible 9810. He’s a good sport who took his defeat in Port Phillip with remarkable grace. He’s a climate change denialist who reckons sea levels and global temperatures are falling and everything’s hunky-dory. He’s got his own meedja company and did a bit of filming for the Greek version of So You Think You Can Dance? But when on the dancefloor himself, it appears Tone has gone those wandering hands.

Good choice, Soph. “Next!”

• I have committed genocide using weapons of mass destruction
• I have bombed entire populations resident on my land with chemical weapons, out of pure racism
• I have launched military action against a colony on the false premise that they posed a danger to me
• I have employed torture devices that have maimed and killed countless innocent creatures, just ’cause

I submit myself to PETA and humbly ask for leniency.

Andrew’s complete lack of comedy nous makes me long for the days of jokes about terminally ill kids. I never thought I’d say this, but I hope he stays in “social commentary” because he has no talent here. To think everyone has been beating up on the Chaser when they could have been beating up on this shit.

[The Punch is] a place for spirited, sleeves-up, energetic, engaging commentary, written by people who enjoy writing, for people who enjoy reading … The Punch is just as happy covering politics as it is covering TV, crime, music, social trends, sport, business, economics, food and fashion.

Every day it will present diverse opinions from its own small team, and a rolling roster of almost 100 outside contributors, to give you real-time commentary and analysis of news and current affairs.

So what’s with this atrocious collection of disconnected short-form anti-Labor bile snippets, masquerading as considered opinion, from Bronwyn Bishop?

Julia Gillard feigns a fight with Trade Unions at their annual conference but gives her blessing to the indoctrination of school students 14 years and up.

[...]

The Government had a lot to say about working families in opposition- How about a policy change and create a few.

[...]

It always pays to read the fine print before you get too carried away with Rudd largess.

[...]

The Government censors as it should, against child pornography and advertising tobacco … Me thinks the ABC should have had a closer look at self-censoring and told the Chasers War On Everything that there are ethical standards to be met and they just failed miserably.

[...]

Latham’s outburst against Australian defence personnel was bitter and nasty. And to think this man was putting his hand up to be PM. Would Latham pass the necessary tests, both psychological and physical to be accepted into the Australian Defence Force? A good question!

Hoping to contribute to the conversation I left the following comment:

Wow! Five vacuous brain-farts from Bronwyn Bishop. Australia’s best conversation indeed.

Not published. Conversation stilted.

About now another mate of Peter’s — let’s call him Brendan — enters the brothel and (after telling everyone repeatedly that he is a doctor and playing them gnarly riffs on one of his five guitars and showing them photos of his Harley Davidsons) pushes in front of Peter to get his end away. Brendan doesn’t hang around for long though, giving Peter another chance to do what he’s been waiting ages to do.

By this time the brothel staff and other customers are getting sick and tired of this Peter guy telling them with false bravado about how he’s, like, the best root on the planet, and how he makes the laydeez crazy, and how he’s so totally going to have sex with this chick … soon. Some of the staff and other clients get a bit impatient, telling Peter to do it or just fuck off.

And then another guy — let’s call him Malcolm — walks in. Malcolm struts about like he’s been waiting his whole life for this moment. He cruises past the waiting Peter and enters the bedroom with a smug look of self-assuredness on his face. While Malcolm’s making sex (tweeted live from his BlackBerry) Peter is sitting in the waiting room, shit-eating grin plastered on his face, hinting none-too-subtly that he’s going to walk on in there and throw Malcolm off the bed. There’s tension in the brothel. Tension so thick you can cut it. All eyes are on Peter. And then …

Peter walks out.

“He will be seen forever as a wrecker who distracted and damaged the party by feeding hopes he never had the courage to fulfil. He [is] finished. A permanent joke. The big tease.”

Most reasonable people would think this a fair compromise: the customer still pays for their borrowing, the bank still makes their money and everyone is happy. Not the Tele, which reports it under a headline that screams of preferential treatment and reverse-racism. Its reporter also sees fit to avoiding mentioning a pivotal fact until the tail of the article:

The loans would also be available to non-Muslims.

Cue the hysteria in comments,where the great unwashed, ordinarily riled by the thought of mortgage interest, seemed to claim it as some kind of patriotic badge of honour:

You’ve got be bloody kidding me, right? Can’t people just adopt the Aussie way. After all you do live in our country. If you don’t want to work by our rules, then piss off.
Posted by: christine of sydney 8:17am today

You tell ‘em, babe. 

If it hasn’t started already, this is the beginning of the end for this once great country.
Posted by: Ralph Malph of Avalon 10:55am today

It’s all downhill from here, Ralph. Much like after your mate Fonzie ‘jumped the shark’.

Can the bank provide Christian and Buddist loans too? Shows the illusion.
Posted by: piggybank 4:41pm today

A Buddhist loan, gee that’d be good – I could buy a house now and defer payments until my second reincarnation.

The truth about fishing

Anyone else doing anything awesome?

Less well documented so far has been the industry’s influence on the media. Take the powerful News Corporation, which publishes two-thirds of our remaining newspapers. Despite a spectacular about-face on climate change in 2007 by News Corp’s chairman Rupert Murdoch, no media group can match the Murdoch press for consistently fomenting global warming scepticism and arguing against climate change mitigation measures.

News Corp’s tabloid provocateurs Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt rail against greenies every other day but don’t have the attention to detail to influence national debate on climate change science, emissions trading and reduction targets, and international negotiations on global warming.

The Australian – Rupert’s baby and local flagship – does. But nothing you read on climate change in The Australian can be taken at face value. Its coverage of the issue is effectively sponsored by the resources industry.

Read it.

And all power to them. There is a growing number of people out there who are sceptical about climate change or about the role that humans play in it, and a growing number of outright deniers. If the Climate Sceptics Party wants to have a crack at representing those people, then who are we point, laugh and ridicule?

So let’s say you are sceptical about climate change and you are looking to support a political party that will oppose legislation you see as unnecessary and destructive. You stumble across the Climate Sceptics and you like what you see.

The boxing kangaroo means they’re dinky-di Aussie, mate.

But, being a thinking person, you see some contradictions and dodgy assertions. Firstly, you’re a little taken aback to see this graphic.

You know, being a thinking person, that a slick diagram proving that the sun is rooly, rooly big doesn’t conclusively prove shit when it comes to climate change.

And you know, being a thinking person, that our society works best when people take personal responsibility for personal actions, considering how they affect themselves, other people, and shared surroundings, so you’re disappointed to see this hand-washing, guilt-absolving statement.

You wonder to yourself, being a thinking person, if this political party exists to drive better national policy or just clear people’s consciences. You begin to doubt, as a thinking person, the Climate Sceptics, and your doubt only strengthens after reading the About Us page, where you find these statements about the organisation’s philosophy.

• We support family values
• We support a return to basic values, good manners and respect for human values within our society.

And your worst fears are confirmed. The Climate Sceptics are not just a single-issue party that exists to drive better legislation on your behalf, they’re also a conservative movement committed to reinforcing those tired concepts of “family” and “basic” values, like discrimination against homosexuals and restriction of personal freedoms in the name of personal freedom. The Climate Sceptics, far from existing to battle it out on environmental issues, exist only to fight the culture wars.

If I twist a jar 90 degrees in the morning the label will be facing front by evening.

It’s my contention that this whole thing is an American wrestling-style beat-up, dreamed up on-the-wire by Ramsay’s agents, PR suits and Channel Nine. It is all geared at whipping up publicity for Ramsay and his programmes, once hot property for Nine but since flagging in the ratings. Others with a working knowledge of the media concur. Ramsay’s public persona is that of a crass, boorish and foul-mouth yobbo, but he is nobody’s fool. Grimshaw, once a real journalist, is now little more than a network puppet. If she was truly aggrieved by Ramsay’s ‘attack’ then she should raise the question of why her employer ran two hours of his TV shows last night – after, of course, yet another ACA re-hash of Tracy vs. Gordon – when Nine might instead support her by suspending them Chaser-style.

Today the Herald Sun went even further with a gutter-delving implication that Ramsay might well be gay. The ‘evidence’ of this, says the Spun, is a 15-year-old caution stemming from drunken nakedness and tomfoolery in a Tube station toilet – because as we all know, every canned-up young bloke who gets his kit off or flops out his shrivelled manhood must “bat for the other team”.  For additional confirmation of Ramsay’s dubious sexuality they went to his embittered, press-savvy former lover – who is, wait for it, female. Further comment was also sought from two of Ramsay’s arch-rivals, who had nothing of note to add other than that noting that Ramsay “looks like a cross between Patrick Swayze and a ventriloquist’s dummy”. A very shaky house-of-cards indeed and one that would, on any other day, never get past Murdoch’s in-house lawyers.

None of this concerns me too much: commercial TV and its stars will always play contrived games of cross-promotion and draw in the celebrity-obsessed masses when they do. What bothers me is the completely inappropriate involvement of our political leaders. Kevin Rudd, now so populist that he comments on just about every non-political matter raised at pressers, referred to Ramsay as “low life”. Julia Gillard more pithily advised him to ”stay in the kitchen” and make “nice things for people to eat” - good advice that Jules and Kev might want to follow themselves by confining themselves to matters of government. Their attempt to extract votes by tapping into a public ‘issue’ that is, at best, wildly exaggerated and, at worst, fabricated cheapens politics and insults those whose concerns run deeper than a foul-mouthed chef and a nondescript TV host.

“Fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate.”

Only 500 years ago, people believed Earth was the centre of the universe and the sun and planets revolved around it. Anyone who dared challenge this idea was denounced as a heretic and punished by imprisonment, torture or in some cases even death. Public debate on this issue was strictly prohibited. It is only on account of people such as Copernicus and Galileo, who dared question the “indisputable science”, that we now know these assertions to be false. For me, these events are in many ways reminiscent of the present debate on climate change. Though thankfully we do not persecute those arguing against the idea of human-induced global warming, a blind acceptance of only one perspective has meant that proper debate on this issue has essentially been stifled. Opponents of the popular opinion that global warming is a direct result of carbon emissions, a group that includes many notable and distinguished scientists, are often derided and quickly dismissed.

It is for this reason that I headed to Washington this week on a self-funded trip to look at the science and facts behind global warming. I am neither a climate sceptic nor a climate extremist. What I am, however, is open-minded.

As an engineer, I have been trained to listen to both sides of the debate in order to make an informed decision about any issue. Any scientist worth their salt will tell you that in order to form a conclusive view about any topic, you need to properly explore all available possibilities.

I look forward to Steve turning his eagle eye and open mind to the evidence-free faith that informs his decisions to oppose abortion, voluntary euthanasia, gay marriage and the rest of his religious policy platforms.

NO! I am a fucking CUNT, you fucking CUNT! Don’t FUCKEN interrupt me! I AM A FUCKING MORON, A FUCKING DIPSHIT, A FUCKING CUNT AND YOU KNOW IT!!! … WHAT THE FUCK!! I MEANT YOU ARE A FUCKING MORON, A FUCKING CUNT, A FUCKKKKKKING SHITHEAD, not me. I meant you all along, YOU FUCKING STUPID DOG!

When taking the weighty decision to get into shape by investing in a “home gym”, one must stay focused on the primary purpose of the enterprise, which is to get healthy and prolong life, not to kill yourself while attempting to operate the aforementioned home gym. Thus, I heartily recommend to anyone contemplating the purchase of a bargain-priced treadmill to get their head examined, promptly.

Even if anyone gave a flying fuck about the process of buying a treadmill, or if the subject of buying a treadmill was worthy of the opinion page, Schembri doesn’t provide any insight into the subject, instead rolling out the most pathetic cliches and tired jokes imaginable.

You should have heard this chick [salesperson] go. She went on about how much time it would save, about energy-burning co-efficients, about reduced joint stress, the in-built calorie counter, the free pedometer. She even worked in a reference to NASA, which I didn’t quite catch, but it had something to do with anti-gravity technology or exercising in orbit. She made it sound too great, and her enthusiasm was so infectious I felt that leaving the store without this treadmill would be the biggest mistake of my life. So we rang it up and home it came.

Still awake? If so, I bet you’ll never guess what happened next.

Assembling it was a trial, and for a while it looked like I was going to burn more calories putting the thing together than I ever would using it. But once it was in one piece I felt the world open up before me. “This is it,” I thought. “I shall be Adonis, just like the guys in the gym.”

He had trouble assembling it! How original! I bet you’ll never guess what happened next.

Then I got on and gave it a go. Or tried to. I need to stress here that there was nothing wrong with the machine. All the parts moved the way they were supposed to. It merely required ventricle-bursting strain to get the thing going. Sweat showered off me. You know those old movies about ancient Egypt where you see the slaves pushing those big stone blocks up the ramps to build the pyramids? Those guys are my brothers.

He didn’t like using it! How original! I bet you’ll never guess what happened next.

So what was I to do? What else? Leave it right there, in the middle of the living room. Eight months later the treadmill wound up the way 95 per cent of all home-gym equipment winds up: covered in towels, jackets, socks and shirts. I was going to sell the dreaded thing but then thought, no, this is actually garbage, so the next hard-rubbish day it was gone. I even watched through the window as they carted it away.

He didn’t use it and it sat in the corner collecting dust! How original!

Jim Shembri, you are the hackest of hacks. You are a disgrace to the profession of journalism. If anyone needed any further proof that The Age was a paper no longer worth even a tenth of the cover price they need look no further than the presence of this abomination on today’s opinion page.

But came to a quick conclusion about the term’s meaning.

And now it’s entered Fielding’s everyday vocabulary.

Senate Estimates are really milf!

The chicken korma at the APH cafe is totally milf.

Coco Pops for breakfast. They’re totally milf.

Susan just snapped at me, told me to stop referring to myself in conversation as “Family First”, that my name is “Steve” … Told her to chill out, that’s everything’s milf.

Milf is the new black.

The latest self-aggrandising project to spew forth from Prodos’ ego is the objective and constructive Are You A Moron? project, which requires you to answer “yes” if you believe in any of the following:

• Global warming
• Scientific consensus
• That the debate is over
• Renewable energy
• Taxing carbon
• Green jobs
• the idea CO2 is a pollutant

As is the way with all of Prodos’ projects (Privatize The ABC, Celebrate Capitalism, Thinker To Thinker, I Love Prodos etc.) he seems to be more interested in the pithy slogans, domain names and merchandise than he does in the issue. This particular project boasts at least four domain names (areyouamoron.com, greenpoppycock.com, carbondioxideisnotapollutant.com and greensliepeopledie.com) — conservative estimates put the total number of domain names owned by Prodos at over 9000 — a blog with links to stuff other people wrote, and a massive range of stupid merchandise like this:

Someone needs to proof read Prodos’ slogans for grammar before he prints them

Now all he needs is a matching song, perhaps along the lines of this one he wrote about Teh Moooooooslems.

me: Now fucking sign up for fucking Twitter. Fucken.

Bron: fuck twitter!

me: You know you want it

Bron: Pleh.

… but I finally won.

Go check out Bron’s Twitter feed.

(In case you’re confused, that’s him on the right. I think the other guy is MK.)

Briggs is the MP for Mayo – yes, he’s heir incumbent to the nasal throne of Alex ‘Things-that-batter’ Downer. He was born and raised in country Victoria, then (according to his maiden speech) ”moved to Adelaide following year 12 to pursue dreams of playing cricket for Australia… [however] my ability was no match for my enthusiasm”. The same might well be said for Briggsy’s fledging parliamentary career. This was his effort yesterday during the motion of condolence for just-deceased World War I veteran, John “Jack” Ross:

MR Rudd: “During World War Two, Jack served his country again, as a member of the Volunteer Defence Corps. In civilian life, Jack Ross worked at the Victorian Railways for more than 45 years, retiring in 1964. Jack was a life member of the Australian Labor Party.”

MR Briggs: (interjecting) Only the good die young.

Jamie Briggs, thou art a tool. And while on the subject of tools from South Australia, note the effort of Christopher ‘He’s-such-a-good-boy’ Pyne earlier in the week:

(MR Pyne interjecting)

The SPEAKER: The Manager of Opposition Business, on behalf of several people, will withdraw that remark.

MR Pyne: Which one? There were many.

The SPEAKER: If there were many, you will withdraw all of them.

MR Pyne: On behalf of my team, I withdraw “nasty’, ‘nerd’ and ”bitch”.

The SPEAKER: The Manager of Opposition Business will withdraw without qualification, as he is required.

MR Pyne: I withdraw without qualification, Mr Speaker.

Pyne pwned.

Despite what some people say, this sketch isn’t making fun of children with terminal illness, but rather our attitudes towards them. Are the kids in this the target of ridicule, or the faux terrible charity?

In the end though, the sketch is a failure for comedic reasons, not for moral ones. Like most ad parodies, it’s very by-the-numbers. The moral outrage this morning is the result of the sketch failing to make anyone laugh. As a result, everyone missed the point and it appeared as though the humour in the sketch came from lambasting dying children, which it wasn’t supposed to.

It was clumsy comedy that they simply should have handled better.

Incidentally, it’s almost a virtual re-write of a McDonald’s House charity parody they did on CNNNN for Fungry’s, and I don’t remember anyone complaining then. Why? Because the sketch hit its satirical mark and there was no question as to where the comedy was aimed.

But to all the people complaining – how many of you even saw the sketch go to air? Mia Freedman didn’t. Like the obituary song, most of the outrage will be generated by the current affairs and morning shows who will gleefully replay it in a cheap grab for ratings.

Seriously, wowsers, go back to The Wedge.

No, it’s not Pauline Hanson, although the media have dubbed her as the “next Pauline Hanson”.

Who? This dopey cow.

Small wonder Kate McCullock has joined the One Nation Party and will be their candidate for the seat of Macarthur in the next Federal Election, according to a press release from the Ku Klux Klan One Nation Party today.

Mad Kate is standing for the seat because:

…she felt strongly about freedom of speech.

“So many people felt so strongly about the issue in Camden but they were too terrified to speak out, and that’s sad,” she said.

She hoped standing as a candidate and “saying the truth and what I think” would give Australians the courage to speak up.

Or allow bigots and racists to spew their bile. Making it acceptable to be racist and ignorant and xenophobic and all that jazz.

Of course, racism and bigotry is never acceptable. Except Kate’s not racist, is she? Oh no. It’s the media’s fault for portraying her like that:

But Mrs McCulloch said she was prepared for an onslaught from the media.

“I have a feeling how the media are going to portray me as xenophobic and racist,” she said.

“They will sensationalise. You have to cop it sweet.

“It doesn’t worry me what they call me. I’ve got six kids. I know I stand for good values.”

That’s right. She’s not xenophobic and racist, she stands for good values (and what the hell does having six kids got anything to do with anything?). But she still thinks

…too much time and money is being spent on helping poorer countries overseas and helping asylum seekers, while Australian citizens such as farmers needed help.

Yeah, real good values, Mad Kate. Farmers need help from time to time but I would hardly put them in the same basket as asylum seekers.

Mad Kate’s good values also means being nice about other cultures:

We don’t want [Muslims] not only here, we don’t want them in Australia. They’re an oppressive society, they’re a dictatorship… The ones that come here oppress our society, they take our welfare and they don’t want to accept our way of life.

Oh, sorry. Hang on, I’m sure I can find something she’s said that demonstrates Mad Kate’s good values…

Go and do something while I search. Go on, then. It will take me a while.

For the first time, the judging panel presented the award to an editor rather than a reporter or columnist. ACRBA chief executive Ernest Pickleheim said that over the past 12 months GrodsCorp’s “in-depth and balanced coverage of a range of social and political issues affecting Australians all has been of a consistently high standard”.

Writers at GrodsCorp including John Surname, Bridgit Gread, Ant Rogenous, Bron and Jason, were judged to have “significantly contributed to this very high standard of journalism”.

(More information here and here.)

A parallel could be drawn with wider society, where people in private and public discourse tend to be extremely quick to slap the label “racist” on anyone who says something that is remotely connected to race, in the process watering down the concept of racism until it is almost meaningless.

In the past fortnight there have been two big news stories that got everyone talking about racism. Last week the ex-CEO of Telstra, Sol Trujillo, took a parting shot at the whole of Australia, calling it a racist and backward country based on his perceived treatment at the hands of the media during his time working here. A few days before that the nation stopped to debate the YouTube antics of chk-chk BOOM girl, Clare Werbeloff, with some wondering if her “woggy” rant was racist.

But just like kids at school throwing around premature accusations of bullying, are we calling racism where there is none? Are we confusing racism with racial stereotyping, and even if we are, is stereotyping okay while the other one is off-limits?

Racism is the belief that a given race of people possesses inherent qualities, usually negative, while racial stereotyping is the assertion that one member of a race automatically possesses the stereotypical traits commonly attributed to it. Problem is, racism and stereotyping often look very similar — there are definite cross-overs between the two — but it’s generally held that racism is bad and stereotyping is okay, as long as the latter is done for a laugh. It’s funny to say that all New Zealanders shag sheep, that all Germans are ruthlessly efficient, that all Aborigines sniff petrol.

Oh, dear! As has just been demonstrated, when the laughter stops, the racism tends to start. But is it possible to say something like that last phrase in that last paragraph and be guilty not of racism but of simply making a terrible, terrible joke in the worst possible taste? It’s conceivable that a person might say something like that and honestly hold no racist beliefs about Aboriginal people, but it’s also conceivable (and more likely) that a person who says something like that does hold racist beliefs about Aboriginal people.

Often it comes down to the tone of the comment. If the “joke” is made without malice then it’s unlikely to have been spawned by racism, but if the “joke” is delivered with derogatory intent then a charge of racism is more likely to be accurate.

But even then it’s not so simple.

Clare “chk-chk BOOM” Werbeloff may have been implying that all “wogs” speak like Pauly from Fat Pizza, sleep with each others’ cousins, and settle disputes with violence, but is she racist? Probably not. Does cartoonist Mark Knight (one of the key Trujillo antagonists) think that all Mexicans are lazy, slightly stupid, and bumbling like the Three Amigos? Probably not. But both Clare and Mark thought that their stereotypes were funny, and a majority of people thought so too.

And it was the humour defence that was trotted out by so many commentators in response to Sol Trujillo’s claim of Australian racism. Get a sense of humour, he was told by opinion columnists, cartoonists and ex-Treasurers who are definitely not interested in leading the parliamentary Liberal Party. He was told to lighten up and chill out, which should be easy for a man who’s just pocketed a cool $30 million for screwing a telco. Leading us to the second defence against his racism call: Sol deserved it.

But as Eddie McGuire said in his excellent Herald Sun column, “Maybe everyone was a little sensitive this week in banging on about Sol’s sensitivities … the protest has been bordering on nervous justification by some … A bit like what we all feel when we realise we might have held on to a joke a bit too long and that serious people have stopped laughing.”

Indeed.

Who are we to tell Sol, or anyone, that they shouldn’t be offended by a joke? What if Trujillo genuinely was offended by the Mexican jibes? Who are we to tell all “wogs” that they shouldn’t be offended by the word because it’s lost the derogatory undertones and is now all affectionate and cuddly? What if some “wogs” are still genuinely offended by the term?

Appealing to a critical mass of people who think a racial stereotype is funny, and ignoring the people who are offended, certainly does open one up to accusations of racism. While it’s still probably not racism the insensitivity required to mindlessly defend one’s stereotype simply reinforces it, and may lead some people to hold the stereotype to be true and begin to think racist thoughts. It would be easy to understand how an outsider could negatively interpret the pack mentality on display in response to Trujillo’s accusation of racism.

It’s just a simple fact that there are not now, and will never be, any uniform guidelines about what is offensive and what isn’t — offense is determined by the unique set of beliefs and standards held by each individual person. There are certainly broad community standards that hold true, such as those about the acceptability or otherwise of the sheep shagging and petrol sniffing examples above, but even those broad standards are dynamic and volatile.

Maybe everyone does need to do what Peter Costello suggested and chill out a bit, but at the same time be mindful and respectful about a wide variety of different opinions. Perhaps those making racial stereotype jokes should be aware that some people may be offended and respect those people’s feelings, and perhaps those on the receiving end of racial stereotype jokes should be open to the possibility that they are being made in good humour and be a little less cavalier with the racist tag.

Discuss.

Update: Darryl Mason gives us a small smattering of examples from Bolt’s blog:

What is it with the Left and violence?

What is it with the Left and vomitously vindictive snobbery?

What is it with the left and not being normal????

What is it with the left and censorship?

What is it with the Left and their purely derivative style?

What is it with the Left and Jew-hating, full stop?

What is it with the left and sticking their noses in other peoples lives?

What is it with the left and a complete failure to be witty?

What is it with the left and zero comprehension skills?

What is it with the left and denying undeniable fact?

What is it with the left and excuses?

What is it with the Left and crazies?

What indeed?

• Just days after the devastating Victorian bushfires, Tuckey places political blame for the causes of the bushfires. Sensitive guy.

• ‘Tuckey has yelled “Look at moi” across the chamber at Ms Gillard every day this week… Mr Tuckey, who was thrown out of Question Time yesterday over an unrelated matter, vowed to keep up the interjections. “If you want Kath to run the Government, you should vote for her,” the West Australian backbencher said.’

• ‘Dr Nelson was… forced to defend Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey, who walked out of Parliament before today’s apology to indigenous Australians.The West Australian MP was in the house for the opening prayer, but left the chamber when Mr Rudd rose to his feet to deliver the apology….Mr Tuckey had earlier suggested saying sorry would do nothing for solving indigenous problems.’
• And just generally, he’s arguably an overall idiot.

Today, there was a “regrettable incident” in the Liberal party room, “when NSW Liberal backbencher Alby Schultz became angry and shirt-fronted Victorian MP Chris Pearce”, giving Labor an opportunity for a few barbs directed at the Opposition during Question Time. Anthony Albanese, for example, said: “The Member for Hume thought it was the first of June and he’d give the member for Aston a pinch and a punch for the first of the month.”

Lame stuff, but lamer was yet to come.

Enter Wilson Tuckey:

But not everyone thought the verbal stoush was funny.

West Australian Liberal Wilson Tuckey implored Mr Rudd to ease off, especially towards one of the participants “for reasons he would understand”.

“Using his sharp and nasty wit is very unfair … just lay off,” the backbencher said.

That’s rich!

Sure, Tuckey, sure. The day you stop insulting and degrading your peers, opponents and colleagues, maybe?

UPDATE: Paul Keating was, of course, the master of insults and I imagine people would try to compare Keating with Tuckey. There is no comparison between the two. Tuckey is just nasty and would attack people for, say, their appearances, such as the “fat so-and-so” jibe at Kim Beazley.

Additional:

• …you post your post then see several mistakes and keep updating repeatedly?

It’s supposed to be order in the House, but last week it was chaos in the House.

Why, because an inarticulate Prime Minister resorted to signs, pictures and placards to try and get his point across.

Because the opposition would never resort to using props to get its point across.

Kardboard Kevin looks more lifelike than True Tony

And Bronwyn would never resort to using prop hair.

Surely there’s a standing order against that

Citizens Electoral Council of Australia
Media Release 29th of May 2009

How much money will cash-strapped Tasmania save by legalising euthanasia?

The cash-strapped Tasmanian Parliament has raised the legalised euthanasia option, as it seeks ways to fix its state budget black hole.

Is the issue of the budget crisis related to the euthanasia debate? You be the judge.

[...]

… Hitler had told his Secretary of Health and State Secretary that through euthanasia, “a certain saving in hospitals, doctors, and nursing personnel could be brought about.”

[...]

Now, the Greens, who introduced the euthanasia bill into the Tasmanian parliament, yet again are pushing one of their typically anti-human issues—derived from their philosophy that the world is overpopulated and that therefore most humans are “unworthy of life”—as a front for an evil cost-cutting agenda, which will save money on health care, that can be used to prop up the banks.

Painting those who support voluntary euthanasia as “anti-human” is despicable, as those supporters are filled with compassion for humans who are suffering and wish to put an end to that suffering. Simple as that. Open and closed. It’s intellectually dishonest for anyone to argue against voluntary euthanasia by attempting to link it to non-voluntary euthanasia.

The slippery slope argument is bullshit, the Nazi analogy is bullshit, and the euthanasia-to-save-money argument is offensive.

I call Godwin’s on the CEC and fart in their general direction.

CHAIR—Thank you. Are there any further questions on this topic before we go to Senator Fielding for
another issue?

Senator FIELDING—I would like to tap onto that one issue if I can, thank you.

CHAIR—Yes, certainly.

The Chair should’ve said no. You’re not allowed to “tap onto” anything without first giving it a star rating.

Anyway, at a different hearing on the same day Our Steve proposed (PDF) giving crack Federal Police squads the power to raid milk bars that sell pornography.

Senator FIELDING— … Given the seriousness of the breach, have you or the department recommended anywhere that we should have a federal law so that we are not beholden to the states in cracking down on pornography being so readily available in corner shops and milk bars and so that we can get on with it and use the AFP? We can send the federal police into the Northern Territory but we cannot send them in to deal with pornography being sold in milk bars, corner shops and petrol stations. I find that absurd.

Apparently “families” are concerned.

Senator FIELDING— … You are clearly being played here. You are a soft touch and you are saying that the parliament of Australia is soft on this issue. Putting up with the states on this issue is not fair to Australian families, who are clearly concerned about this issue.

Bullshit. The Pentecostal Church is.

But the best bit in that hearing was when the Classification and Review Board dude being questioned gave Fielding a lesson on legislation.

Senator FIELDING—Wrappers are another issue. Who stipulated that wrappers should be placed on these materials?

Mr McDonald—It is in the legislation.

Senator FIELDING—Federal legislation?

Mr McDonald—Yes.

Give it up, Steve.

However, pretty as it may be, the Wordle didn’t really help me understand the thrust of Turnbull’s speech. So I went looking through the text for easy-to-understand metaphors and I found one.

We don’t want to get into a sort of Betamax/VHS debate here, you know where Kevin Rudd says I’ve got the best scheme and the rest of the world say, ‘yeah that’s very interesting Kevin, it’s very interesting but we’re not interested in adopting it because it’s from our point of view not practical’.

So I set this out graphically, for ease of translation.

Here’s Kevin Rudd’s technically-superior, yet unpopular ETS scheme:

And here’s the massively popular, yet inferior scheme favoured by the rest of the world:

And here’s the format offered by Malcolm Turnbull in the place of the government’s proposed scheme:

Laserdisc: experience the future of technology NOW

The Politics Of Envy

Most Australians enjoy a good kick at their elected representatives, but the recent outbreak of pollie-bashing over expenses is unfair and completely misses the point, argues Scott

Read the whole article at newmatilda.com.

If you ask me (and my brother has) it’s the Richmond board he need to be sacked and not Terry. I remember when David Parkin walked out at 3/4 time when Carlton (the Blues) were beating us (the bombers) and I yelled GET THE GUN at Parkins direction.

I didn’t really mean to get a gun to shoot him dead like the Herald said about Terry and I didn’t mean it the way Mark “Brandon” Chopper Read did when he was going to shoot Warrick Capper in the thigh for a bet one day at Victoria Park (which was detailed in Choppers biography). My brother Wayne is a mad Magpies fan and that’s why I was at the game.

This would have been the number one viewed article because the Wallace sacking (and not sacking) was a big story last week in the news.

Trevor hails from the imaginatively titled My Blog where you’ll find stream-of-consciousness rants about football, recipes for “Trevor’s chicken soup minus the chicken”, and stunning gems of cutting edge commentary such as this:

I would like to weigh into the debate about West Coast and Hawthorn (former) coach Ken Judge’s use of a joke about Hitlers gas bill. He said some bloke was bigger than it. What people who are offended by the joke need to realise is that Hitler didn’t use LPG or natural gas and the type of gas he used on the Jewish nation couldn’t be billed in the same sense that we get a gas bill. Hitler used pellets which gave off a rather nasty smell and most probably bought the pellets at wholesale prices and he wouldn’t have paid for the pellets out of his own pocket.

This is where peoples offence get confused.

You simply must check it out.

Problem is, a few people have pointed at it while browsing the library and issued a “please explain”. I try to tell the story, that it’s not really mine, and that I haven’t read it, but the damage is done. Here is Malcolm Turnbull trying similarly to distance himself from Ayn Rand in the wake of Young Liberals declaring their fondness for the author:

INTERVIEWER: Is there any Ayn Rand on the shelves of the Turnbull study?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: There is an old tattered copy of Atlas Shrugged. I haven’t read if for a long time.

Statements like that make baby Prodos cry.

UPDATE: After notching up a grand FAIL with the title of Hubbard’s book (I originally typed “Battlestar Eath” instead of “Battlefield Earth”), I realise how Iucky I am that I wasn’t trying to type the name of the book’s companion soundtrack: Space Jazz. Imagine the typo opportunities there.

What have I done to deserve this?

Ladies and gentlemen, Da Funk by Daft Punk.

Carn git me, Prodos!

UPDATE: In case the Prodos link isn’t clear enough, here’s the header of his blog.

Federal MPs are exploiting a loophole to employ wives and other family members on taxpayer-funded salaries.

[...]

Even Family First leader Steve Fielding is keeping it all in the family, hiring his wife – Susan Head – as an adviser.

Family First Senator Steve Fielding defends putting his family first.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking … but no, I don’t mean politically. I might be a pernicious Leftist, but I’m not that pernicious — he’ll need to be at least two years old before I read him The Communist Manifesto, and I’ll wait until he’s mastered Twinkle Twinkle Little Star before bothering with The Internationale.

Instead, I’ve started him on an area second only in importance to politics — sport. Lesson no.1 was football codes, and I’m delighted to say he passed with flying colours:

Download audio file (indoctrination.mp3)

(Transcript here if you can’t understand babytalk)

Next week, I think I’ll introduce him to Club Wah’s superb Ashes for the Ignorant series.

Dude, I know it’s early for you but I’m getting pissed with Tim Berners-Lee in Madrid.

Show off.

The second was an email this afternoon from Shanghai:

Scotty,

You will be pleased to know the Great Firewall of China blocks youtube.com but not grods.com.

This has been a public service announcement.

We’re big in China.

UPDATE (6.00pm): An email from my friend, currently drinking one dollar Tsingtao beers collected from from vending machines.

Ok. Now Grods is blocked thanks to me and (I am assuming) your post – that didn’t take long!

We’re not so big in China no more.

The Liberal party’s cave in on the alcopops tax shows that under pressure Turnbull will fold every time, Family First Leader, Senator Steve Fielding said today.

[...]

“The Coalition’s capitulation will be seen by the Government as a green light to ram bad policy through the Senate because it knows the opposition will do anything it can to avoid an early election.”

Unfortunately for Fielding, his continued intention to block the alcopops tax is clearly seen by everyone else as an attempt to force an early election, given that the reduced Senate quota of 7.7% is the bottle-suited one’s only hope (slim as it may be) of re-election.

“Family First has always opposed the alcopops tax because it turns a $15.3 billion binge drinking epidemic into a tax issue and fails to grasp the seriousness of the problem.”

Bullshit.

GrodsCorp can confirm that the coach of the Richmond Tigers AFL club, Terry Wallace, is safe and unhurt. GrodsCorp can also confirm that seven out of ten Herald Sun readers still can’t find Sri Lanka on a map.

(Thanks to reader Dam Buster of Preston.)

I LOVE the net, like the blogs, and tolerate even Facebook for the teenagers. But Twitter is for the birds – and the birdbrained.

[...]

But it’s now clear that “twit” was a noun just looking for a verb.

The beautiful irony? 18 out of the 25 paragraphs — a whopping 72% — in Sally’s “article” (the word “article” implies journalism so I put it in inverted commas) are under the 140 character limit for tweets, making Sally Australia’s best Twitter journalist. 140 character bursts of vapidity with no greater meaning or purpose, connected by not a single coherent idea. Perhaps it’s time to compile some more Sally stanzas.

Posts: 2,481
Comments: 32,100 (on this version of the blog software)
Authors: 18
Dumb video series episodes: 40
Funny video series episodes: 4
Fictional characters embedded in reality TV series: 0
Podcast episodes broadcast: 31
Podcast episodes not broadcast: 1
Most comments on a thread: 667
Commenters banned due to supersized threads: 1
Total banned commenters: 3
Stalkers: 1
Posts about Prodos: 48
Bottles of scotch extracted from Iain Hall: 0.5
Number of broken promises to stop talking about Iain Hall: 6
Legal threats: 1

But the only number that matters:

Years in operation: 5

Happy fucken birthday to us; here’s to another five years of larfs, groupthink and misbehaviour. Thanks to all of our readers, commenters and lurkers who make this whole thing worth the effort.

Feel free to share some of your favourite GrodsCorp moments in comments.

Many people are genuinely intrigued and confused by Twitter, and continue to be intrigued and confused when they fail to extract a suitable explanation for its appeal from devoted users. What is it about such a seemingly simple tool that has so many people hooked? Is a 140 character brain fart into the ether the pinnacle of 30 years of internet development?

The mainstream media, in its inimitable way, has perfected the mindless (in many senses) representation of all online social media. Newspapers breathlessly report anything that happens on Facebook (probably because their journalists spend most of their time on it) as if it were news, at the same time having a crack at users of social media tools for bringing disgrace to the art of communication. Twitter has, by-and-large, befuddled journalists because it requires a bit of effort to explain, and it certainly can’t be summed up in one or two pithy lines.

The Age‘s Tony Wright says Twitter begins and ends with a “sad question: ‘What are you doing now?’” The resulting interaction is “banal communication almost beneath description”. Wright reckons that the “social networking” label slapped on Twitter, Facebook etc. is heresy because social networking can only happen around a restaurant table or over a coffee. The SMH’s Richard Glover can’t understand why anyone would sign up to read others’ tweets: “It’s like living with a three-year-old who wants to inform you every time she does a poo.”

Thing is, if Twitter was in reality the simplistic and pointless service as painted by Wright, Glover and co. they might actually have a point. Unfortunately for them there is so much more to Twitter than is obvious from a cursory, outside glance. You’ve got to jump in and get your keyboard dirty to really understand the power of Twitter.

Like all Web 2.0 social networking tools that force us to redefine the way we interact, Twitter is difficult to summarise and explain with precision. And the very nature of Web 2.0 requires us to study the way that people use tools, rather than the basic functionality of those tools, to determine their worth. It’s disingenuous to equate the quality of the message with the characters it takes to communicate. Everything must be viewed in the context of the greater interaction taking place.

At its core, Twitter is a way for users to fire a 140 character message out into the intertubes, but it is wrong to think of Twitter as nothing more than simplistic and unidirectional communication. The vast majority of “tweets” sent by regular users are replies to others’ tweets, similar to a reply sent by email. Through this constant and time-efficient interaction users build thoughts, threads, ideas and shared understandings 140 characters at a time. Users share in other users’ thinking, meet new users, and challenge each other to explain their thinking. They swap links, make jokes, ask for feedback, give feedback. The Twittersphere is a dynamic network of interacting users, like an infinitely overlapping Venn diagram.

Of course, there are users who do use Twitter as nothing more than a way to notify friends that they’ve eaten a bowl of cornflakes or watched CSI: Miami, but this has got nothing to do with Twitter itself; mundane communication is not unique to any mode or format.

Besides from letting people talk to each other, Twitter has, in its relatively short lifespan, served many uses that were unlikely to have been envisioned by its creators. Communities of Twitterers all discussing the same event have participated in a type of shared reporting, breaking firsthand news from the frontline of world events, tweeted on-the-spot by eyewitnesses using mobile phones. Twitter has provided a forum for people from across the globe to analyse and comment on live events in real time, a recent example being the Logies broadcast. Twitter let thousands of Australians from all corners of the nation discuss the event as if they were in the same lounge room. Hardly the mundane and brainless sort of thing dismissed by Twitter’s detractors.

Could it be that journalists wedded to their unique brand of interaction-free writing are nervous about this new world of omni-directional communication? It’s easy to knock something you don’t understand. It’s a bit like The Age film writer Jim Schembri who mercilessly slagged off bloggers as vacuous and meaningless a mere twelve months before starting his own blog (no doubt at the insistence of his employer.) Despite sarcastically signing off each of his posts with the line “your valued thoughts are hereby sought,” Schembri now reads his readers’ comments and responds to them; interacts with them. Perhaps blogging isn’t quite as bad as he thought after all?

But in the end, who really cares if Richard Glover and Tony Wright don’t get it? Who cares if their focus on the lowest-common-denominator use of Twitter ignores the amazing and exciting potential of the service if used creatively? They can take their telephone calls and boozy lunches and leave the 21st century to the rest of us. At least we know how to use it.

(Receive notification every time I do a poo by subscribing to my Twitter feed.)

Alarmism obviously isn’t this:

When I grow up I want to be a principal or a caterpillar!

Nothing alarmist about that.

Steve Fielding: If that poncy little turd pulls a double dissolution I’ll wring his fucking neck.