I don’t know how I missed this, but Prodos has started a competition to win a weekly cash prize of five dollars! All you need to do is start a free Thinker To Thinker blog (unless you “hate capitalism”, in which case you can “bugger off”) and use some of Prodos’ favourite quotes in your posts.

Over the next week write 3 posts on your TTT blog – each of which includes at least one quote from any of these “Big Seven” Thinkers:

* Aristotle
* John Locke
* Adam Smith
* Thomas Jefferson
* Frederic Bastiat
* Ludwig von Mises
* Ayn Rand

But it’s only $5, I hear you say. Prodos reckons $5 can buy you heaps.

Q: What can I buy with five dollars?
A: Glory

Glory. I has it.

Once upon a time there was a farmer named Robert Maddock. He was a very rich farmer, and with good reason: Robert had inherited a lot of land from his daddy, Sir Kiefer Maddock, and Robert himself became quite skilled in the farming business. The key to farming, thought Robert, was to (i) own all the grain stores and (ii) therefore control distribution of the grain. When you controlled grain, Robert discovered, people tended to believe what you told them. Especially if you used lots of short words. And pictures of semi-naked women. And stories of dickhead footballers.

Anyway, Robert controlled most of the grain dissemination in his own country so he decided to branch out on a global scale. Before long he was peddling grain all around the world: in England and the U.S. especially. Robert owned so many foreign grain stores that he even had to change his citizenship! But no problem, since Robert’s only loyalty was to his grain-dependent public. Soon, Robert owned 100+ grain outlets and was, like, worth BILLIONS! Robert was so cooool. He celebrated by getting himself a new wife.

But there was one place where Robert’s entrepeneurial skillz had never managed to penetrate: a massive Asian land ruled by evil overlords who were very, very rich but controlled all the grain themselves. Robert decided that this Asian land would be his next goal. If Robert could spread his grain to the people in this land, the evil overlords would be thwarted and there would be democracy and justice for all. But to get a foothold in the Asian land, Robert first had to negotiate with the overlords themselves. Oh brave Robert!

After much negotiating the evil overlords did indeed let Robert sell his grain in the Asian land. But soon, a small problem emerged. One of Robert’s grain stores was run by bad, bad people called “leftists” who were selling bad grain that infected the people’s minds and made the overlords look bad! This grain made people have wild visions and ideas. “Enough!” cried the overlords, and threatened to close down Robert’s operations in the Asian land. Robert came up with a compromise: he would remove the store selling the bad grain, and the people would again be calmed. Peace again reigned: the overlords were happy, the people were compliant and Robert was making squillions.

Years later, things were going so swimmingly in the Asian land that they were given the opportunity to hold a grand festival of sportz. People from all over the world came to participate, to watch and observe. Some of them were called “journalists” and they found, once inside the Asian land, that the evil overlords were not letting them have access to all types of grain. They complained about this - and rightly so. One “journalist” was named Adrian Blot and he complained in a very loud voice indeed. Adrian called those who allowed the Asian land to host these games and restrict grain-flow ”a pack of weasels”, saying that they were “wallowing in [the Asian land's] cash” and “sponsoring tyrants”. Adrian was quite right about all this, which was not all that common for him; he felt good that evening as he relaxed on his leather sofa, sipping Victory Gin and listening to Puccini.

But do you know what the strange thing is? Adrian-of-the-strong-condemnation actually worked for Robert Maddock … and he had absent-mindedly forgotten to mention Robert’s very similar connections with the Asian land and its masters! So Adrian had actually criticised the sportz peoples for letting the evil Asian overlords regulate and restrict the availability of grain, when his own boss helped them do the same thing years back! Oh silly, silly Adrian. In time he will spot his error and explain that Robert actually belongs to the “pack of weasels” he so nobly slams. I’m sure he will. 

THE END

Ain’t wage rises funny? In January my own salary went up by 4 per cent. Nurses last year won a base increase of 3.25 per cent. Victorian teachers want 10 per cent but although they’re poking John Brumby in the arse with a sharp stick, it doesn’t look like they’ll get more than 3.5-4 per cent. Meanwhile, those on the minimum wage must’ve danced in the street last July: they scored between 1 and 1.9 per cent, or $5-10 a week. And the goose who came up with that last figure?

Fair Pay Commissioner Ian Harper – who works for the Federal Government advising on pay standards in addition to private business interests - got a $38,000 pay rise while he considered the plight of the nation’s minimum wage workers last year and decided to award them just $10 extra a week.

Prof Harper’s own pay packet for his part-time job advising the Federal Government on fair wages has jumped 47 per cent from $81,445 to $119,830 a year after the Commonwealth Remuneration Tribunal awarded him a rise. (Source)

Someone call Prodos – his ‘trickle-down capitalism’ seems to have a fricken big blockage.

The Indian Premier League (IPL) is a new six-week cricket competition scheduled for April. Not sure of the details but there’s eight teams, all based in Indian cities but containing a mix of foreign and local players. Each team is owned by a corporation or consortium which has purchased a franchise; the eight franchises total in excess of $US720 million. A ten-year deal to broadcast the IPL has cost two media outlet an astonishing $US1.026 billion. Players are ’auctioned’ and purchased by the team franchises for extraordinary amounts, e.g. Mahendra Singh Dhoni $US1.5 million, Andrew Symonds, $US1.35 million, Sachin Tendulkar $US1.12 million.

Meanwhile, the World Food Programme reports:

Nearly 50 percent of the world’s hungry live in India, a low-income, food-deficit country. Around 35 percent of India’s population – 350 million – are considered food-insecure, consuming less than 80 percent of minimum energy requirements. Nutritional and health indicators are extremely low. Nearly nine out of 10 pregnant women aged between 15 and 49 years suffer from malnutrition and anaemia. Anaemia in pregnant women causes 20 percent of infant mortality. More than half of the children under five are moderately or severely malnourished, or suffer from stunting. 

At least all those anaemic, stunted and malnourished Indians will be able to watch some good cricket as they wither away.

In 2006 Catch The Fire Ministry’s Pastor Danny Nalliah was awarded the “Annual International Capitalism Award for Melbourne” by Prodos‘ Celebrate Capitalism project for supposedly standing up for free speech in the face of a religious vilification charge (that was later dropped). How slagging off Islam is standing up for capitalism I’ll never work out. But Prodos was so enamoured with Nalliah that he immortalised him in his alarming anti-Islam tune Under Sharia Law.

Today The Age revealed that Pastor Nalliah addressed a meeting of the extreme right-wing and proudly anti-Jewish League Of Rights in 2005, despite being warned about their racist views. Prodos, proudly pro-Israel (just this morning he posted a piece on his blog that ended with the line “May Israel Prevail”), must be spitting chips that he has publicly supported somebody who has been dumping on the wrong religion. Will Prodos now retract the Capitalism Award? We wait with our collective breath held.

This shall be the final PRODOS post I will ever write.

In response to the insidious “I HATE PRODOS” shirts that PRODOS himself is selling, I am more than happy to offer my own unofficial PRODOS shirts at my new CafePress store.

Choose from two snazzy designs, which are sure to liven up any wedding, party, funeral, parole hearing or Independence Day celebration.

Ladies, why not show your indifference to the accidentally endorsed ex-Liberal party candidate with this fashionable top, complete with the latest in MS-PAINT™ computer-to-shirt technology. Perfect for the apathetic teenage girl in your house.

The male shirt asks the question that so few have even bothered to ask. I make absolutely no profit off these shirts, so don’t be afraid to buy one for your whole family.

Prodos has been very active in a comment thread of this website over the past week, defending his viewpoints without ever resorting to childish insults. Besides from utterly destroying the arguments of people like John Surname and Bridgit Gread by telling them to think (you see, Prodos truly believes that he is the only person on earth who thinks, and that everyone else is unable, too lazy or too stupid to do the same), Prodos used a sound effect (.wav) of a toilet flushing (called “flush_the_editor_down_the_loo”) to conclude his argument that I am a poo. It’s this intellect of titanic proportions that makes all of us here at GrodsCorp tremble.

Over the years Prodos has left a vast spiderweb of footprints all over the internet and I have a long list of URLs pointing to Prodos bizareness. Going through this list this morning I rediscovered an interview that Prodos did with a New Zealand website called Free Radical in 2001. The interview is worth quoting from extensively because it’s brilliant in the extreme. The title of this post is a direct quote of Prodos talking about himself.

Perhaps the most interesting question and answer in the interview is this:

Free Radical: In Australia you face the imminent prospect of a Labour (sic) Government. Could it be much worse than the weasel-worded appeasement of John Howard’s Liberals?

Prodos: Personally, I don’t get that excited about politics or politicians. I don’t think they’re that relevant. At least not to the work that I do.

And yet, five years later Prodos is shouting “John Howard Forever!”, is a Liberal Party member, and is desperately running for election in any federal or State seat that presents itself.

The next thing that jumps out of the interview is instant hypocrisy. Near the beginning Prodos says, “I’m not the proselytising type… It just isn’t my cup of tea.” yet by the end he is explaining his efforts to convert the (unthinking?) masses to the cause of capitalism through his Walk For Capitalism campaign. Prodos’ conversion mindset is revealed when he says, “It’s a tough battle ahead, but with Ayn Rand at our side, I am hopeful that victory will be ours.”

However, the strongest theme in Prodos’ interview is humility. Talking about his “radio show” (actually just audio files downloadable from a website) Prodos says this:

I am the greatest. I am the best. No other show even comes close. Many thousands of listeners log on to PRODOS.COM every day.

It’s impossible to keep up with my fan mail from all over the world: India, Norway, France, Japan, the UK, Israel, lots from the USA, everywhere, everybody loves PRODOS!

Those shows must be pretty awesome. They’re still online at prodos.com (scroll waaaaay down the page to find them) so go have a listen to find out for yourself. Two of my personal favourites include How to find love and romance and What exactly is Coca Cola?. You simply must listen to the Coca Cola show for the bit where Prodos opens a can of Cola and analyses the fizzing sound.

And finally, Prodos talks the talk of capitalism but does he walk the walk?

I’m actually terrible at making or saving money.

No.